The EAI Collection: Works

Feature

 

A Model Family in a Model Home

Zoe Beloff

2015, 21:40 min, color, sound, 16 mm film on HD video

Fleeing from the Nazis, Bertolt Brecht arrived in Los Angeles in 1941. This film is inspired by notes for movie that he based on an article in Life Magazine called "A Model Family in a Model Home".

 

Nine Years Later (“Bigmouth Strikes Again”)

Robert Beck 

1995, 11 min, color, sound

In the three-part series Nine Years Later, Beck revisits video performances he created nearly a decade earlier to music by the British pop band The Smiths. Beck betrays the apparent effortlessness of the original clips by editing them alongside the numerous rehearsals, variously self-conscious...

 

Nine Years Later (“Girlfriend In A Coma”)

Robert Beck 

1998, 12:00 min, color, sound

In the three-part series Nine Years Later, Beck revisits video performances he created nearly a decade earlier to music by the British pop band The Smiths. Beck betrays the apparent effortlessness of the original clips by editing them alongside the numerous rehearsals, variously self-conscious...

 

Nine Years Later (“Panic”)—Remix

Robert Beck 

2001, 11:00 min, color, sound

Panic is one in a three-part series in which Beck revisits footage of video performances he created nearly a decade earlier. Inspired by the music of the British pop band The Smiths, and interspersed with inter-titles and voice-over quoting from technical manuals, Beck channels the malice implicit in Morrissey’s lyrics – and correlates his visceral body-oriented performances with the video equipment he used to record and edit them.

 

Song Poem (Trips Visits)

Robert Beck 

2001, 6:00 min, color, stereo sound

"Song Poem (Trips Visits) is a single-channel work I created using videotapes I found in second-hand stores, from home movies to hunting how-to tapes. It was created for a show titled Song Poems, which took as its departure a popular 1960-70s mail-order phenomenon, advertised in the back of magazines, offering to set poems to music in an array of styles and return them as 'singles.' The exhibition brought together musicians and video artists to set original poems by a variety of artists and writers to music and images. I created a video for an original poem by the show’s curator, Steven Hull, with music composed by The Pony Express, an alternative New York rock band." -- Robert Beck

 

The Feeling of Power

Robert Beck 

1990, 9 min, color, sound

The Feeling of Power documents a 1989 ACT-UP protest at Trump Tower, offering a self-reflexive manifesto of video activism that brings the ‘70s "guerrilla television" movement into the age of the camcorder.

 

Untitled (Dec. 29, 1993)

Robert Beck 

1999, 3:30 min, b&w, sound

Untitled haphazardly records two lessons: one a father’s instruction to son on the proper handling of a firearm, the other a son’s instruction to father on how to use home-video equipment. The firearm instruction is recorded with the lens-cap accidentally left on, replacing the image with a cryptic bulls-eye symbol of pulsing shadow and light, shifting with the camera’s auto-focus.

 

Madame Bovary's Revenge (The Lovers)

Ellen Cantor

1995, 14:27 min, b&w and color, silent and sound

In her very first moving image work, Cantor already displays the masterly use of appropriated footage for which she would become known, inserting explicit scenes from the classic porn film Behind the Green Door (1972) into key scenes of lovemaking from Louis Malle's 1959 succès de scandale The Lovers.

 

Pinochet Porn

Ellen Cantor

2008-16, 123 min, b&w and color, sound, Super 8mm film on HD video, English and Spanish with English subtitles

An epic experimental film, Pinochet Porn, embodies – though a dizzying array of stories and narrative methods – the multifaceted work of artist Ellen Cantor. Using her 2004 series of eighty-two drawings, Circus Lives from Hell, as an unconventional “script,” Cantor worked on Pinochet Porn, her most ambitious project, for the last five years of her life. The feature-length, episodic narrative, about the intertwined lives of five children and their maturation into adulthood, would be completed posthumously by her close collaborators – including her cast and crew – according to her directives.

 

Within Heaven and Hell

Ellen Cantor

1996, 15:52 min, color, sound

Swinging between pleasure and torment, Cantor narrates an autobiographical story of a doomed love affair over scenes from The Sound of Music (Robert Wise, 1965) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974).

 

Pulling Up Roots

Cecelia Condit

2015, 7:37 min, color, sound, HD video

Pulling Up Roots is the emotional journey of a woman who is navigating the tenuous strain between the past and the future.

 

Fukuoka Boyfriend

Andrew Lampert

2016, 4:51 min, sound, HD video

A drama of relations between strangers. Vantage point is everything.

 

Lineage for a Multiple-Monitor Workstation: Number One

Sondra Perry

2015, 25:24 min, color, sound, Two Channels

 

For how we perceived a life (Take 3)

Wu Tsang

2012, 9:33 min, color, sound, HD video

For how we perceived a life (Take 3) debuted at the New Museum in 2012, emerging out of Wu Tsang’s “full body quotation” practice, a series of choreographed performances in which collaborators are fed pre-existing lines from an ear piece. In this edition, the performers begin huddled together ...

 

WILDNESS

Wu Tsang

2012, 74 min, color, sound, HD video, Spanish and English with dual subtitles

WILDNESS is a resonant portrait of a Latino Los Angeles LGBT bar, the Silver Platter. WILDNESS integrates elements of fiction and documentary structures to vividly portray Tsang’s multi-layered relationship with the bar, one that explores her role as an artist and activist, and a member of a younger generation introducing itself into a gay scene that started before the Stonewall riots – the Silver Platter’s birth year is 1963. The impact of gentrification and a changing city on the bar’s working class, Hispanic and immigrant patrons is something Tsang implicates herself in when the weekly Wildness party brings art world crowds and attention.

 

Simonland

Tommy Turner

1984, 11:30 min, color, sound, Super 8mm film on video

In the unsettling, absurdist Simonland, made with Richard Kern, a grotesque, televangelist-style demagogue leads his studio audience and isolated viewers through a psychotic game of Simon Says, with twisted results. Regarded as one of the greatest films of the Cinema of Transgression, Simonland wa...

 
 
 

New Works

 

Coast Zone

Charles Atlas, Merce Cunningham

1983, 27:07 min, color, sound, 16 mm film on HD video

This video-dance collaboration between Merce Cunningham and Charles Atlas, was shot in the vaulted Synod House of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. Exemplifying Cunningham's idea that dancers operate autonomously, Coast Zone's choreography is mirrored in the fragmentary nature of its filmic technique. Soloists move within and are traversed by ensembles of two or three dancers that break off from one another and then reassemble, bringing to mind shifting sands or the ebb and flow of a coastline that the title of the dance and its music evoke.

 

CRWDSPCR

Charles Atlas, Merce Cunningham

2008, 29:37 min, color, sound

Atlas records a late-2000's revival performance of the 1993 dance CRWDSPCR, which Merce Cunningham choreographed using the choreographic software program LifeForms. In program notes to a performance of the dance, Cunningham suggested that the vowel-less title referred to the way in which technology both crowded space and quickened the pace of daily life. The project merges Cunninham's vision of a decentered organization of the stage with Atlas' use of the computer as a conceptual extension of chance-generated decision-making.

 

Fractions I

Charles Atlas, Merce Cunningham

1978, 32:59 min, color and b&w, sound

In Fractions I, four video monitors share the screen space with the dancers. Throughout the performance, these monitors show close-ups of the performers in the dance space, as well as images of those moving outside of the space.The performance suggests tension between what is seen and what is left unseen, and in turn, between different parts and their whole.

 

Locale

Charles Atlas, Merce Cunningham

1978, 29:54 min, color, sound, 16 mm film on HD video

In Locale, Atlas' camera movements map precisely onto Cunningham's choreography. Three kinds of cameras are used: Steadicam, a Movieola crab dolly and an Elemac dolly with a crane arm. Locale is structured in four parts, based upon the use of specific cameras, dancers and time sequences. Atlas also designed the costumes, playing thematically with television and video technology by incorporating the hues of color television adjustment bars and the grayscale tones used to adjust black-and-white monitors. The bright leotards of the dancers are imprinted against the studio windows and the city backdrop.

 

Squaregame Video

Charles Atlas, Merce Cunningham

1976, 25:46 min, b&w, sound

Squaregame Video is a video-dance collaboration between Merce Cunningham and Charles Atlas, recorded in the choreographer's Westbeth studio. As a video-dance (that is, a dance choreographed specifically for the camera), Squaregame represents a dynamic integration of mediums. True to its title, Squaregame's choreography fits in a square area within the larger rectangular space of the Westbeth studio stage.

 

Suite for Five

Charles Atlas, Merce Cunningham

2008, 25:29 min, color, sound

This 2008 film by Charles Atlas documents a performance of Merce Cunningham's Suite for Five, which was first performed on May 18, 1956 at the University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana. Originally titled Suite for Five in Space and Time, the piece was made by adding a trio, a duet and a quintet to Cunningham's earlier Solo Suite in Space and Time. A program note from the premier performance read, "The events and sounds of this ballet revolve around a quiet center, which, though silent and unmoving, is the source from which they happen."

 

The Days of the Commune

Zoe Beloff

2012, 154:59 min, color, sound

In The Days of the Commune, Beloff reimagines Bertolt Brecht's 1949 play on the rise and fall of the 1871 Paris Commune as a response to the Occupy Wall Street movement, which began in the fall of 2011 in New York City's Zuccotti Park.

 

Two Marxists in Hollywood

Zoe Beloff

2015, 26:11 min, color, sound, HD video

In 1930, Russian avant-garde filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein spent six months in Los Angeles under contract with Paramount. A decade later, German playwright and theater director Bertolt Brecht, a refugee from Nazi Germany, lived there from 1941 to 1947. Both set out to make films in Hollywood on their own terms.

 

Bambi's Beastly Buddies

Ellen Cantor

2004, 14:50 min, color, sound

"In Bambi's Beastly Buddies, Bambi and skunk embody innocence, vulnerability and love. I lit Bambi on fire to a refrain from Beethoven's Ode to Joy, on the morning of May 11, 2004, when I read that Nick Berg, an American telecommunications contractor, was beheaded by Islamic militants on live video. I felt Bambi's incineration symbolized the times we live in." — Ellen Cantor

 

Cage/Cunningham

Elliot Caplan, Merce Cunningham

1991, 95:55 min, color and b&w, sound

This feature film traces the history of the 50-year-long collaboration between choreographer Merce Cunningham and composer John Cage. Award-winning filmmaker and Cunningham collaborator Elliot Caplan brings together rare footage from the Cunningham and Cage archives, interviews with principal figures involved in the collaboration, and candid documents of their art and lives. The result is a revealing portrait of the two men and their spirit of adventure and iconoclastic thinking.

 

CRWDSPCR (Documentary)

Elliot Caplan, Merce Cunningham

1996, 52:12 min, color, sound

Elliot Caplan's 1996 CRWDSPCR documents the rehearsal and production of Merce Cunningham's dance of the same title, which was commissioned for the stage by the American Dance Festival and first performed in Durham, North Carolina, on July 15, 1993. In addition to documenting daily activity at...

 

B1

Seoungho Cho

2014, 8:31 min, color, sound, HD video

Seoungho Cho writes: "I received permission to videotape an unknown sannyasi having a siesta as if he were in a deep meditation. Usually we believe that body is the vehicle of soul. I would not know what kind of soul this old, tired and unconsciously open body might suggest. I came to think that what I am searching for is not his soul but mine, which is still as of yet unknown to myself."

 

Blue Desert

Seoungho Cho

2011, 11:59 min, color, sound and silent, HD video

Seoungho Cho transforms a sublime natural landscape into a stunning abstraction through precise electronic manipulation. Writes Cho: "Blue Desert is one in a series of ongoing visual struggles with Death Valley, a specific desert landscape which I have worked with since 1992. It is also not the last piece, as I have every intention to continue producing works about Death Valley. Death Valley has been quite simply my favorite place on the earth since my first visit in 1992."

 

Buoy

Seoungho Cho

2008, 7:11 min, color, sound, HD video

The golden, barren landscape of Death Valley, recorded by Cho from a moving car, provides the luminous and mysterious texture of Buoy. Cho reflects on the polar extremes of this desert, once the floor of a vast sea and now traversed by tourists. In contrast to the horizontal landscape, which floats ceaselessly past Cho's camera, vertical "strata" pattern the imagery, creating an axis between natural landscape and Cho's composition.

 

Listed

Seoungho Cho

2014, 10:18 min, color, sound, HD video

Seoungho Cho writes: "When I noticed some moments from my studio window in its prosaic reality, I started to make a 'List' of these accumulated moments of lights and colors in time suggesting a flow of unconsciousness. Ironically, throughout the seasons with endless changes of light and shadows, I became to numb to time. I have been in the midst of a meditation, which extended both through my visual and psychological plane."

 

Red Desert

Seoungho Cho

2011, 10:30 min, color, sound and silent, HD video

Seoungho Cho employs complex visual editing and rich sound to explore the landscape of Death Valley. He writes that he has "...refined a theme that has obsessed and haunted me, that I have struggled with, and which I owe many of my most important artistic achievements—the desert."

 

Shifted Horizon

Seoungho Cho

2009, 6:09 min, color, sound, HD video

A moody landscape of mountainous islands, recorded from a wave-tossed boat, is infused with the bobbing motions of the camera. In an effort to override the ever-shifting horizon, Cho splits the image into bands, each showing different vantages on the scene: the bluish outline of the islands, interspersed with views of the water's surface, golden in sunlight. The flickering of the bands, especially those of the water's choppy surface, is suggestive of digital static, a sense matched by Stephen Vitiello's evocative soundtrack.

 

Silenced

Seoungho Cho

2013, 18:16 min, color, sound, HD video

Silenced is a poetic tableau of village life surrounding the Morning Calm Monastery in Luang Prabang, Laos. Cho manipulates time within fixed frames, creating stunning time-lapse landscape shots and evocative slow-motion images. The monks' vibrant robes are seen in relation to the everyday life...

 

Stoned

Seoungho Cho

2012, 11:40 min, color, sound, HD video

Stoned begins in silence. An image of a Buddhist monastery—a long stone corridor lined with receding columns—appears to jerk forward and slightly recede, or move tremulously back and forth. The single high notes of a piano begin to sound in a halting counterpoint to the agitated image, which...

 

Unconcerned

Seoungho Cho

2014, 19:28 min, color, sound, HD video

Seoungho Cho writes: "This work is based on an attempt to psychologically document my routine but unconscious line of questioning as to if I were a nonbeliever. At one of the holiest places in the world, the birthplace of the Buddha, Rumbini in Nepal, I find apathy in the tension between my perception of the religion and culturally ingrained responses to my psychological state. I became aware of the ephemeralness. While they were doing what they have to do, I only gazed them. I only can see what I known. I only can see this much at this time. In the eyes of dog, he only can see another dog. Maybe I was a dog."

 

498, 3rd Ave.

Merce Cunningham

1967, 81 min, b&w, sound, 16 mm film on video

"A documentary that details the early days of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, the film tells the story of the making of the dance Scramble, showing the daily routine of the dancers involved, and other aspects of producing new work. Includes performance footage at the Philip Johnson Glass...

 

Variations V

Merce Cunningham

1966, 49:05, b&w, sound, 16 mm film on video

First composed and performed in 1965, Variations V is a true testament to 1960's experiments with "intermedia"—a coexistence and cutting across of artistic genres that profoundly informed Cunningham's choreographic practice. Video is materially integrated into the performance, with projections by...

 

The Collaborators: Cage, Cunningham & Rauschenberg

Merce Cunningham, KETC Public Television

1987, 56:04 min, color, sound

This documentary is in two parts, with the second part, Coast Zone, available separately. The first part of the program features a revealing and informal discussion between Cunningham and his longtime collaborators, composer and musician John Cage and artist Robert Rauschenberg. Their lively interchange is intercut with archival footage from their collaborative works, Travelogue, Minutiae, and Antic Meet. They discuss designing and composing for dance, aesthetic philosophies, and the adventures encountered when touring and performing together.

 

The Live! Show (February 18, 1983)

Jaime Davidovich

1983, 29 min, color, sound

Davidovich produced The Live! Show on Manhattan Cable Television's leased access Channel J from 1979 to 1984. The program featured performances by and interviews with art world personalities, live phone-ins and home-shopping segments. In this episode, aired February 18, 1983, Davidovich's character Dr. Videovich's expounds on Spanish accents on American television. The episode includes an excerpt from a Tony Oursler video, a performance by Tim Maul, and a Fluxus Festival promo tape.

 

The Live! Show (January 21, 1983)

Jaime Davidovich

1983, 22:27 min, color, sound

Davidovich produced The Live! Show on Manhattan Cable Television's leased access Channel J from 1979 to 1984. The program featured performances by and interviews with art world personalities, live phone-ins and home shopping. In this episode, cablecast on January 21, 1983, Davidovich's character "Dr. Videovich" proposes a theory of cable access as "generic" or "off-brand" television. Herbert Wentscher delivers an absurdist lecture on "The History of Video" and Paul McMahon performs as the "Rock & Roll Psychiatrist," offering on-the-spot advice to viewers who phone in with their troubles.

 

The Live! Show (January 28, 1983)

Jaime Davidovich

1983, 29:07 min, color, sound

Davidovich produced The Live! Show on Manhattan Cable Television's leased access Channel J from 1979 to 1984. The program featured performances by and interviews with art world personalities, live phone-ins and a home-shopping segment. This episode, cablecast January 28, 1983, features performances by Linda Montano as "Sister Jacques Bernadette" and Ann Magnuson as "Alice Tully Hall with the Hall Family." In addition, Davidovich presents footage of a press conference in which the art critic Les Brown speaks about future possibilities for artists and television.

 

Canopy

Ken Jacobs

2014, 4:41 min, color, silent, HD video

 

Day and Night

Ken Jacobs

2011, 3:35 min, color, silent

In Day and Night, Jacobs teases out and toys with the ability of digital video to be infinitely and seamlessly manipulated, as well as its capacity for keeping reality just beyond the viewer's grasp. Here he uses images of nature as his source material, applying exacting technical effects to create a stunning fusion of the organic and the digital.

 

As Da Art World Might Turn (the series) (Season 1) Episodes 1-6

Kalup Linzy

2013, 29:04 min, color, sound

Writing on his Huffington Post blog about the new episodes of his artworld soap opera series As Da Art World Might Turn, Linzy states, "The new version continues to center around Katonya, Big Feet Freddy, and Sholeva Sure's melodramatic journey through 'their' contemporary art world, but also...

 

Restless Leg Saga

Shana Moulton

2012, 7:14 min, color, sound, HD video

In this edition of Moulton's narrative series, the artist's character Cynthia suffers from Restless Leg Syndrome, and seeks relief in pharmaceutical ads on TV and in health magazines. In a domestic world enlivened with animated dance and mystic poetry (written and read by poet John Coletti), Cynthia finds relief in the healing mineral AION A, discovered by Swiss artist Emma Kunz.

 

ALLoT (A Long List of Things)

John Sanborn

2014, 90:00 min, color, sound

High school is where life starts to get serious. You are becoming the person you were meant to be, and you dream about what you will do. Forty years later -- almost a lifetime -- what happened? Did things work out the way you imagined? Are you where you want to be? And after all that time -- who are you? How are you doing in the performance of your life? Filmmaker John Sanborn made discoveries by attending his 40th high school reunion with a film crew to interview former classmates, find answers to those questions, and gain a measure of closure. The result is a highly personal video memoir that blends interviews with contemplations and meditations on the unpredictable challenges and life-altering transformations fifteen graduates from Walt Whitman High School faced in the years before they all met again. And to show us, ultimately, that life is a long list of things.

 

Fire Over Water

Cecilia Vicuña

2014, 6:49 min, color, sound, HD video

In this "video poem," Vicuña responds to Gasland 2, a 2013 documentary by Josh Fox examining the devastating environmental impact of hydraulic fracturing in the United States. The audio recording of the poem Vicuña reads is from a July 18, 2013 performance at Poets House in New York City.

 

Rumstick Road

The Wooster Group

2013, 71:37 min, color, sound

"The Wooster Group's 1977 production RUMSTICK ROAD has been recognized by critics and scholars as a landmark work that helped usher in a new era of experimental performance. Composed by Spalding Gray and Elizabeth LeCompte in response to the suicide of Gray's mother, RUMSTICK ROAD combines Gray's personal recorded conversations, family letters, the writings of Mary Baker Eddy, 35mm slides, music, and dance.

 

Baby Birds

C. Spencer Yeh

2009, 1:26 min, color, sound

Described by Justin Patrick for Brainwashed as a "music video," Baby Birds provides an intimate look at Yeh's body and the physiological production of sound. Five views of the artist's throat appear on screen, the camera looking down each one in illuminated close-up. The mouths open and close,...