All the Parts from Simon and Garfunkel's 1984 Central Park Performance Where Garfunkel Sings With His Hands in His Pockets

Cory Arcangel

2004, 6:33, color, sound

Arcangel brings a willfully lo-fi aesthetic to bear in manipulating a consumer video document of a twenty-year-old Simon and Garfunkel concert; his concerns lie as much with the event's reproduction and dissemination as with any of its supposedly original qualities. Investigating the social production of celebrity and its representations, Arcangel touches on issues of bootlegging, amateurism, and a culture in which participation can border on obsession.

Body Collage

Carolee Schneemann

1967, 4:12 min, b&w, silent, 16 mm film on video

This is a newly restored version of a visceral "movement-event" from 1967, in which Schneemann paints her body with wallpaper paste and molasses, and then runs, leaps, falls into and rolls through shreds of white printer's paper, creating a physicalized corporal collage.

Broken Off

Lawrence Weiner

1971, 1:30 min, b&w, sound

"In this video the artist states that it is a public freehold work which demonstrates what could be art within his responsibility. Like Beached it was also shot in a marshy area near the sea and in sequences that are separated by dissolves. One sees five different actions that are related to...

Feeling Free with 3D Magic Eye Poster Remix

Shana Moulton

2004, 8:13 min, color, sound

Appropriating a dated exercise video hosted by actress Angela Lansbury, Feeling Free presents a woman, played by Moulton, who attempts to follow the televised workout in her living room even as elements of her home décor begin to appear onscreen. Moulton subjects the footage to eccentric visual and audio displacements, culminating in a psychedelic dance sequence set to a remix of the program's insipid theme song.

Folk Music & Documentary

Seth Price

2004, 6 min, color, sound

A corollary to Price's written piece "Sports," Folk Music and Documentary takes on questions of political speech and political image in a time when terms like "globalization" or even "politics" itself are so emptied out as to be meaningless in everyday usage. The 1990s were years of newfound engagement and activism among the young, if we are to believe the international press and its invocation of a new class of anarchist, "anti-globalization" youth. Price gives voice and image to this cliché in what is at once a screen-test, an audition, and a proposition with no clear intent or message.

Good Night Good Morning

Joan Jonas

1976, 11:38 min, b&w, sound

In Good Night Good Morning, Jonas uses video as a diaristic construct to chart the passing of personal time through quotidian ritual. Over three different periods in New York and Nova Scotia, she videotaped herself every day, briefly addressing the camera upon waking in the morning and before...

KK Queens Survey

Kalup Linzy

2005, 7:20 min, color, sound

In KK Queens Survey, Linzy appears as a New York artist/diva who submits to an outrageous telephone survey on her artistic and personal practices. Debra Singer writes in Artforum, "Linzy's blistering lampoon of art world power dynamics typifies Linzy's trademark mixture of raunchy humor, campy theatricality, sexual intrigue and poignant social commentary."

Newsbreak

Stuart Sherman

1994, 3:47 min, color, sound

"All the news that's fit to eat." — Stuart Sherman

Now

Lynda Benglis 

1973, 12 min, color, sound

Now takes on video's claims to immediacy and authenticity, as Benglis juxtaposes live performance with her own prerecorded image. The soundtrack features phrases such as "now!" and "start recording," commands that usually ground us in the present, but here serve to deepen the confusion between live signals and mediation. Repeated takes and acidic color processing heighten this challenge to video's power of "liveness."

Playing A Note on the Violin While I Walk Around the Studio

Bruce Nauman

1967-68, 10 min, b&w, sound, 16 mm film on video

In this film record of a studio activity, Nauman set himself the task of walking while playing "two notes [on a violin] very close together so that you could hear the beats in the harmonics." The camera is set centrally in the studio in a stationary position so that when he walks outside of the...

Practice Makes Perfect

John Baldessari 

1973, 5:10 min, b&w, silent

Baldessari writes the phrase "Practice Makes Perfect" twelve times on a piece of lined paper. The result is both absurdist and pointed in its critique of the repetitive gestures of minimal and conceptual art.

Semiotics of the Kitchen

Martha Rosler

1975, 6:33 min, b&w, sound

Semiotics of the Kitchen adopts the form of a parodic cooking demonstration in which, Rosler states, "An anti-Julia Child replaces the domesticated 'meaning' of tools with a lexicon of rage and frustration." In this performance-based work, a static camera is focused on a woman in a kitchen. On a...

Superman Recites Selections from 'The Bell Jar' and Other Works by Sylvia Plath

Mike Kelley

1999, 7:19 min, color, sound

Kelley writes: "In a dark no-place evocative of Superman's own psychic 'Fortress of Solitude' the alienated Man of Steel recites those sections of Plath's writings that utilize the image of the bell jar. Superman directs these lines to Kandor, the bell jar city that represents his own traumatic past, for he is the only surviving member of a planet that has been destroyed."

Swamp

Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson

1971, 6 min, color, sound, 16 mm film on video

Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson collaborated on this seminal film, which viscerally confronts issues of perception and process. The action of the film is direct: Holt walks through the tall grasses of a swamp while filming with her Bolex camera, guided only by what she can see through the camera lens and by Smithson's verbal instructions. The viewer experiences the walk from Holt's point of view, seeing through her camera lens and hearing Smithson's spoken directions. Vision is obstructed and perception distorted as they stumble through the swamp grasses.

Three Frame Studies

Vito Acconci 

1969-1970, 10:58 min, b&w and color, silent, Super 8mm film on video

In one of his earliest films, Acconci performs a series of actions — running in a circle, jumping, pushing another man — in which the physical limits of the action refer to the boundaries of the film frame itself.

Touch Cinema

VALIE EXPORT

1968, 1:08 min, b&w, sound

Touch Cinema is a document of VALIE EXPORT's famous street performance, in which the public was invited to touch her inside a curtained box attached to the artist's upper torso. The work is a witty and confrontational comment on the objectification of women's bodies.