Alix Pearlstein

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EAI is pleased to present an evening highlighting the use of choreographic strategies in video art. While choreography as a method of sequencing movement for storytelling or affect is typically invoked in relation to dance, the application here broadens to consider a wide range of video art strategies, including the site gag, televisual editing techniques, and the associative organization of text and image. The program includes works by Burt Barr, Harry Dodge & Stanya Kahn, Alex Hubbard, Cynthia Maughan, Alix Pearlstein, Jacolby Satterwhite, and Stuart Sherman—a vibrant group of artists whose practices encompass dance, performance, sculpture, and digital animation.

Using their video cameras and editing techniques, the artists in this screening determine the structure of their work according to the recording apparatus itself, complicating the conventions of straightforward performance documentation. Viewed together, the works in this program represent the choreography of movement, character, and the framed scene as facilitated by video and digital technology, compiling the gestures of everyday life into a catalogue of kinetic experimentation.
Maughan’s Calcium Pills (1978) is a direct performance for the artist’s U-Matic camera whose framing reflects her dual role as camera operator and subject. In Barr’s The Elevator (1985), the fictive musings of two women, choreographers Trisha Brown and Wendy Perron, are moulded into a fragmented narrative through the repetitive use of a snap zoom timed with the open and close of elevator doors. Sherman’s Video Walk (1987) animates a pair of sneakers appearing to walk across shifting landscapes on a CRT screen to make a visual pun of the transportive qualities of broadcast television, while Pearlstein’s Pet, Fluffy, Cheezy, Bunny… (1993) strings together a dreamlike selection of public domain images, videos, and sound to reflect the artist’s associative thought patterns. Dodge and Kahn’s Whacker (2005) uses cleverly-timed cuts to comedically portray the durational feat of a woman mowing a tall hill of dead grass in a sundress and high heels, and in Cinepolis (2007), Hubbard composes a dynamic scene as he eviscerates five Mylar balloons atop a projector screen-turned-canvas—reminiscent of Modernist experiments in kinetic sculpture making use of household and found objects. A rich digital animation created in collaboration with the artist’s mother, Satterwhite’s Reifying Desire 3: The Immaculate Conception of Doubting Thomas (2012) concludes the program with an explicit depiction of dance in which the use of on-screen text and computer-generated performers and environment expand the “subject” of choreography beyond the biological human body.
This event is programmed by Charlotte Strange, EAI's Public Engagement and Development Associate, as a part of an invitation to EAI staff to organize public screenings drawn from the collection. An open Q&A will follow the screening.

Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)’s venue is located at 264 Canal Street, 3W, near several Canal Street subway stations. Our floor is accessible by elevator (63" × 60" car, 31" door) and stairway. Due to the age and other characteristics of the building, our bathrooms are not ADA-accessible, though several such bathrooms are located nearby. If you have questions about access, please contact cstrange@eai.org in advance of the event.

If you are feeling sick or experiencing symptoms that could be related to COVID-19, we ask that you please stay home.

April 27: "Edited at EAI": 1972-77
June 16: "Edited at EAI": Artist to Artist
June 22: "Edited at EAI": Videos by Tom Rubnitz
July 27: "Edited at EAI": Restless Generation
Aug 16: "Edited at EAI": Video Interference
Sept 22: "Edited at EAI": Dara Birnbaum

As part of EAI's ongoing 45th anniversary celebrations, we launched a series of screenings that highlight a less well-known but historically important and creatively fertile area of our programs: EAI's Editing Facility for artists. Established in 1972 with early 1/2" open reel editing equipment, EAI's facility was one of the first such post-production workspaces for artists in the U.S. Over five decades, an extraordinary group of artists has used EAI's facility to create some of the most significant works in media art's diverse histories. Many of these artists and works will be featured in screenings throughout our 45th anniversary year.

The first screening on April 27, "Edited at EAI": 1972-77 featured an eclectic selection of works from the 1970s, charted the alternative artistic, political, and cultural expressions of artists experimenting with emergent video editing technologies and strategies. The program included early works from the 1970s by Ant Farm, Juan Downey, Jean Dupuy, Shigeko Kubota, Mary Lucier, Raindance, Anthony Ramos, Ira Schneider, and Hannah Wilke, among others.

On June 16 Artist to Artist featured the rich collaborative process and the creative relationships between artists and the artists/editors with whom they worked, through the lens of EAI's editing facility. Video works by Cheryl Donegan, Ursula Hodel, Nam June Paik, Carolee Schneemann, and Michael Smith—all edited at EAI—were shown together with works by Robert Beck, Seth Price and Trevor Shimizu, three internationally recognized artists who spent formative years as EAI editors. Artists Robert Buck and Cheryl Donegan were in conversation following the screening.

On June 22 EAI celebrated the video work of Tom Rubnitz (1956-1992), whose deliriously camp genre parodies and music videos capture the anarchic spirit and talents of the 1980s East Village scene of Club 57 and the Pyramid Club. The rich body of work that Rubnitz edited at EAI includes TV spoofs, music videos, and the musical parody Psykho III The Musical (1985). Artist John Kelly participated in a conversation following the screening.

On July 27 Restless Generation focused on a group of conceptually driven performance videos by women artists who reenergized and redefined the genre in the 1990s, as seen through the lens of EAI's editing facility. These lo-fi performances staged for the camera­—by artists such as Vanessa Beecroft, Alix Lambert, Kirsten Mosher, Alix Pearlstein, and Beverly Semmes, among others—evoke the strategies of the first generation of artists working with video in the early 1970s, even as their bold stylizations, ironic sensibility, and explicit nods to consumer culture announced a fresh approach to representations of female identity and the body that spoke emphatically to its time.

On August 16 the series continued with an evening of activist video work from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s. Shot largely on low-end consumer equipment and edited, often off-hours, at EAI, these works use video as an activist tool, confronting urgent issues around the AIDS crisis, race, gender, and sexuality. Videos by ACT UP affinity groups DIVA TV (Damned Interfering Video Activist Television) and House of Color, as well as art collective X-PRZ, were screened along with work by artists Robert Beck and Tom Kalin. Although rooted in the specific political and cultural contexts of that moment, these powerful activist voices

EAI's "Edited at EAI" series continues with a focus on a group of conceptually driven performance videos by women artists who reenergized and redefined the genre in the 1990s, as seen through the lens of EAI's editing facility. These lo-fi performances staged for the camera­—by artists such as Vanessa Beecroft, Alix Lambert, Kirsten Mosher, Alix Pearlstein, and Beverly Semmes, among others—evoke the strategies of the first generation of artists working with video in the early 1970s, even as their bold stylizations, ironic sensibility, and explicit nods to consumer culture announced a fresh approach to representations of female identity and the body that spoke emphatically to its time.

Organized in conjunction with EAI's 45th anniversary, the "Edited at EAI" series highlights a historically significant but less well-known area of EAI's programs: EAI's Editing Facility for artists, one of the first such creative workspaces for video in the United States.

EAI presented 45 Years of Performance Video from EAI, a survey of four decades of artists' engagement with video and performance. This project is presented in conjunction with 100 Years, an exhibition on the history of performance art organized by P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center and Performa 09.

During the PERFORMA07 performance biennial, EFA Gallery was transformed into a video lounge to host Electronic Arts Intermix's Viewing Room, a program that provides free public access to one of the foremost collections of video art in the world. Visitors to EFA Gallery were able to choose from a curated selection of major performance-based video works by over 30 artists from the EAI Collection. Viewers were able to watch these seminal performances and contemporary classics at their own pace in a comfortable viewing environment. During the opening reception on Friday, November 2nd, programs featuring selected works were installed throughout the gallery.

Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Corporal Identity - Body Language at the Museum of Arts & Design, this public program featured works by fourteen artists who employ the moving image to explore physical and intellectual aspects of identity. Artists included Carolee Schneemann, Bruce Nauman, Kristin Lucas, Steina, Torsten Zenas Burns and Darrin Martin, Tony Oursler, Ursula Hodel, and Alix Pearlstein.

The Autumn 2000 edition of this ongoing program of EAI works for the Dia rooftop Video Salon and Cafe featured works by artists including Tom Kalin, Alix Pearlstein and Hannah Wilke.

Mediated Presence: Three Decades of Artists' Video from Electronic Arts Intermix is a three-part survey, spanning the years 1967 to 1997, that explores the rich and diverse modes by which artists use video to investigate self. Tracing how artists have articulated a mediated relationship with the viewer and technology, this program re-visits notions of performance and gesture within the framework of three decades of artists' video, and provides a historical context for recent works.

Young and Restless featured 21 recent performance-based works by 17 women artists. These energetic, often ironic pieces, made between 1993 and 1997, showcased artists who engage in dynamic explorations of female identity. Organized into 4 programs, each between 45 minutes and one hour in length, the exhibition was curated by Stephen Vitiello, co-organized by Barbara London and Sally Berger, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and distributed by EAI.