Short Circuit is an experimental documentary—a semi-autobiographical rant that challenges the obsolescence of human labor at the vortex of the machine and digital ages. Through a flow of images, text, and sound, the mechanical and the electronic clash in the thought processes of our protagonist. Is the global revolt of the machines at hand?
In February 1970, the Freex visit the garage of the Hells Angels to informally discuss American politics and motorcycle maintenance. In this video, David Cort leads an extensive interview with the group’s president, Sandy Alexander.
Long still frames, text, language, and sound are weaved together to unfold the narrative of an anonymous group who fill their time by measuring distance. Innocent measurements transition into political ones, examining how image and sound communicate history. We Began by Measuring Distance explores an ultimate disenchantment with facts when the visual fails to communicate the tragic.
Produced by The Sharjah Biennial Production Programme.
John Tagg is a writer, educator, and a leading contributor to the development of art-historical and photographic theory, focusing on political analysis of institutionalized culture and interventions within it. He is a professor of art history at State University of New York-Binghamton and author of Grounds of Dispute: Art History, Cultural Politics and the Discursive Field (1992) and The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (1988). Interview by James Hugunin.
A historical interview originally recorded in 1988.
The 2024 installment in Muntadas and Reese's series documenting the selling of the American presidency features political ads from the 1950s to ads from the 2024 campaigns, and highlights the development of the political strategy and marketing techniques of the TV campaign process.
Anthony Ramos' astute deconstruction of television news focuses on his part in the media coverage of President Jimmy Carter's 1977 declaration of amnesty for Vietnam draft evaders. Ramos, who had served an 18-month prison sentence for draft evasion, was interviewed by news reporter Gabe Pressman, whose film crew meets Ramos' video crew in a confrontation between technologies and sensibilities. At the time, some broadcast television news crews still used 16mm film, although the expensive transition to ENG (electronic news gathering) systems had begun in 1974.
Best known for her drawings and prints, Nancy Spero (1926-2009) worked as an oil painter on both paper and canvas and with installations. As both artist and activist, Nancy Spero's career spanned fifty years. Spero was active in many radical groups including WAR (Women Artists and Revolution) and AIR (Artists in Residence), the first women’s cooperative gallery in New York. She was renowned for her continuous engagement with contemporary political, social, and cultur
Taped on Prince Street in Soho, New York City, Skip Blumberg creates a one-word performance. Shouting the word "money" over and over, he attracts the attention of New York's finest. The video crew attempt to explain to the policemen that there is no public disorder as the streets were empty when they began to tape.
The video is an unwitting early example of the reaction of the state to the use of video cameras on the streets.
a/k/a Mrs. George Gilbert extends Coco Fusco’s in-depth examination of racialized imagery. Fusco combines fictional and documentary source materials to reflect on the use of electronic surveillance against Black intellectuals and activists in the 1960s and 1970s as part of covert FBI operations. These actions bear a striking resemblance to contemporary Patriot Act-inspired activities of American law enforcement.
"Gregg Bordowitz’s 2017 performance lecture Only Idiots Smile features the artist on a stool in the New Museum’s top-floor sky room, riffing on the formation of his identity. At one point, he explains his 'Jewish identity is the template thru which I understand all my other identities… how to appear to others, how we’d like to seem to others,' how others might frame themselves to be seen by us.
Sections 1-30 of an incomplete extended poem describing the artist's connection to the radical black tradition. The completed poem will be formed of 180 sections.
"Lessons are all about constraints; they are thirty seconds, must feature a black figure, and I have rules about where to make cuts, how to edit sound, etc."
— Martine Syms in conversation with Aram Moshayedi, Mousse Magazine
In Takeover of the Empire State Building, Brenda and Glennda visit the top of the Empire State Building as it is lit up in lavender for Gay Pride. They interview both tourists visiting the building, and activists who have come to see the lights. Ultimately, they question whether this gesture is adequate, or if there is still a way to go until equality is achieved.
Irreverent yet poignant, The Eternal Frame is a re-enactment of the assassination of John F. Kennedy as seen in the famous Zapruder film. This home movie was immediately confiscated by the FBI, yet found its way into the visual subconscious of the nation. The Eternal Frame concentrates on this event as a crucial site of fascination and repression in the American mindset.
"The intent of this work was to examine and demystify the notion of the presidency, particularly Kennedy, as image archetype...."
— Doug Hall, 1984
E42 is a cinematic exploration of the area in Rome knows as the EUR, a modernist landscape that was originally designated by Mussolini as the the site of the World Fair of 1942 and as a celebration of the 20 year anniversary of Fascism. Originally designed as a monumental space for public performance and collective acts of solidarity to the Fascist regime, this landscape was in fact never inaugurated.
A woman recounts her story of the mass exodus of Palestinians from Jerusalem. Beginning with the arrival and ending with the departure, the tale moves backwards in time and through various landscapes. The events are neither undone nor is the story untold; instead, Farther than the eye can see traces a decaying experience to a place that no longer exists.
The latest in Muntadas and Reese's series documenting the selling of the American presidency features political ads from the 1950s to ads from the 2004 campaigns, and highlights the development of the political strategy and marketing techniques of the TV campaign process.
Edited without commentary, the artists show an endless stream of candidates, from Eisenhower to Kerry, who are marketed like commercial products. As Muntadas and Reese trace the development of the campaign TV spot, what becomes apparent is a consistent sameness of political issues amid complex, changing visuals.
This two-part video Gender Cruise on the Circle Line involves Brenda and Glennda leading a group of drag queens, drag kings, and other gender nonconforming people on a three-hour ride on the Circle Line boat around Manhattan.
A provocative half-hour of guerrilla artists caught in the act on videotape, Undeniable Evidence is a public art extravaganza assembled by Igor Vamos and anonymous culture jammers.
Ephemeral pieces documented include Grupo Baja Mar/The Low Tide Group. An artists' group uses the unique geologic and architectural features of Spain's San Sebastian's beaches to create a giant public billboard that wipes itself clean each day with the incoming tide. In English and Spanish.
"Four days spent in a studio working on a centerfold photo for Playboy magazine provided the subject matter for my film. The magazine itself deals with culture, cars, a certain lifestyle. Maybe all those trappings are only there to cover up the naked woman. Maybe it's like with a paper-doll. The naked woman in the middle is a sun around which a system revolves: of culture, of business, of living!
A meditation on maritime trade routes, SEA – SHIPPING – SUN is a short film directed by Tiffany Sia (b. Hong Kong) and Yuri Pattison (b. Dublin) shot over the span of two years to render a simulated duration of a day, beginning at twilight and closing at sunset. The film is set against shipping forecasts from archival BBC Radio 4 broadcasts. The sun emerges and disappears, again and again.
Subtitled A Rebellion against the Commodity, this engaged reading of the urban black riots of the 1960s references Guy Debord’s Situationist text, “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy,” Internationale Situationniste #10 (March 1966). Along with additional commentary adapted from Barbara Kruger and musicians Morrissey and Skinny Puppy, the text posits rioting as a refusal to participate in the logic of capital and an attempt to de-fetishize the commodity through theft and gift.
On May 11 2004, Steve Kurtz phoned 911 to report Hope, his wife of 20 years, was unresponsive. When paramedics came to his house, one of them noticed that Kurtz had laboratory equipment, which he used in his art exhibits. The paramedics reported this to police and the FBI sealed off his house.
Authorities later said that Kurtz's wife had died of "heart failure," but he wasn't allowed to return to his home for two days while the FBI confiscated his equipment, and biological samples. They also carted off his books, personal papers and computer.
"I, Soldier is the first part of a video series in which I am dealing with the state-controlled ceremonies for the national days of the Turkish Republic. The nationalistic attributes attached to these large-scale ceremonies are underlined in a non-descriptive and almost voyeuristic point of view. I, Soldier was shot at the National Day for Youth and Sports; the day that marks the start of the independence war of the Turkish public under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, against the Allied Forces back in 1919.
You will never be a woman. You must live the rest of your days entirely as a man and you will only grow more masculine with every passing year. There is no way out.
As a foulness shall ye know Them. Their hand is at your throats, yet ye see Them not; and Their habitation is even one with your guarded threshold. The wind gibbers with Their voices, and the earth mutters with Their consciousness. They bend the forest and crush the city, yet may not forest or city behold the hand that smites. The ice desert of the South and the sunken isles of Ocean hold stones whereon Their seal is engraven. They walk unseen. They Live.
