Stuart Sherman

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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.

Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) celebrated its 40th anniversary with a special project for Times Square. In partnership with the Times Square Alliance and MTV, EAI brought artists' visions to the MTV 44½ LED Screen. Marking EAI's 40 years of support for moving image art, EAI in Times Square celebrated video art's rich history of creative intervention in one of the world's most dynamic media landscapes.

From April 13 to 19, EAI highlighted the remarkable creative media interventions of artists on a spectacular scale. Works by Vito Acconci, Dan Asher, Phyllis Baldino, Dara Birnbaum, Gary Hill, Shigeko Kubota, Takeshi Murata, Nam June Paik, Martha Rosler, Stuart Sherman and William Wegman were seen daily on MTV 44½'s large-format LED screen.

EAI participated in The NY Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1, organized by Printed Matter. EAI's project space, installed in MoMA PS1's basement vault, featured STAGED DIRECTIONS, a special ongoing program of early and recent videos by artists, including rarely seen works drawn from EAI's extensive archive. STAGED DIRECTIONS featured conceptual videos that involve rules, instructions, or tasks, incorporating the script or the instruction manual into the action and placing the artist's directions on stage and in front of the camera. The screening program included works by Vito Acconci, Cory Arcangel, John Baldessari, Lynda Benglis, Dara Birnbaum, VALIE EXPORT, Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, Joan Jonas, Mike Kelley, Kristin Lucas, Kalup Linzy, Shana Moulton, Bruce Nauman, Dennis Oppenheim, Seth Price, Anthony Ramos, Martha Rosler, Carolee Schneemann, Stuart Sherman and Lawrence Weiner, among others.

EAI celebrated the art of short-form video and film with a summer screening of works that clock in at two minutes or less. Between Yoko Ono's fifteen second Eye Blink (1966) and Leslie Thornton's two minute Let Me Count the Ways: Minus 6 (2006), the forty-five works in this forty-five minute screening demonstrated why a concise statement is so powerful. Ranging from analog video abstraction to quick visual comedy, conceptual exercises to formal experiments with duration, commissioned public service announcements to critiques of the quintessential short-form structure, the TV commercial, the works in this screening demonstrated the enormous possibilities that artists have found in less than one hundred and twenty seconds.

The screening included works by Dan Asher, Beth B, Phyllis Baldino, Michael Bell-Smith, Dara Birnbaum, Cheryl Donegan, VALIE EXPORT, Forcefield, Matthew Geller, Gran Fury, Gary Hill, Ken Jacobs, Tom Kalin, Kalup Linzy, George Maciunas, Charlotte Moorman, Shana Moulton, Yoko Ono, Dennis Oppenheim, Nam June Paik, Martha Rosler, Paul Sharits, Stuart Sherman, Shelly Silver, Michael Smith, Leslie Thornton, Steina and Woody Vasulka, Lawrence Weiner and Bruce and Norman Yonemoto.

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.

EAI presented a special evening devoted to the work of Stuart Sherman, featuring a conversation between playwright and director Richard Foreman and artist Paul Chan, moderated by Jay Sanders. The discussion was preceded by a short screening program surveying Sherman's work in film, video, audio, and performance, introduced by Andrew Lampert of Anthology Film Archives.

Playtime celebrates the sight gag and the visual pun. Engaging the medium, these works employ a purely visual mode of communication, one that depends on comic timing as well as space. The artists look not only to silent comedies for influence, but to the external storytelling of Jacques Tati, the surreal anthropomorphizations of Ernie Kovacks and the tradition of trick photography tracing back to the Lumiere Brothers. Aided by props and animals, the artists appear alone with their cameras, concocting vignettes of wit and expressiveness, without the use of dialogue. Playtime salutes the absurd, the wayward and the out of place. Included in the program are works by Stuart Sherman, VALIE EXPORT, Phyllis Baldino, George Kuchar, John Baldessari, William Wegman, Cynthia Maughan and James Byrne, among others.

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.