PERFORMANCE ON DEMAND
EAI Viewing Room at EFA Gallery
PERFORMANCE ON DEMAND
EAI Viewing Room at EFA Gallery
323 West 39th Street, 2nd Floor, New York City
PERFORMANCE ON DEMAND
EAI Viewing Room at EFA Gallery
323 West 39th Street, 2nd Floor, New York City
PERFORMANCE ON DEMAND
EAI Viewing Room at EFA Gallery
323 West 39th Street, 2nd Floor, New York City
Works
Writes Lucas: "This video carries the tension of an audition or screen test. I am called onstage for a test drive around a virtual race course, a metaphor for the information superhighway. My intention for this video is to investigate the term 'action' as it applies to the contemporary lifestyle."
Asemie or the Inability of Expressing Oneself Through Facial Expressions
VALIE EXPORT
1973, 7:10 min, b&w, sound
This work documents a ritualistic performance concerned with "Ansemia," or the inability to either express or understand gesture. Using symbolic materials — hot wax, a knife, a dead bird — as well as text, Export investigates human expression, and how communication can fail.
In an ironic intersection of two systems — arcane theoretical discourse and popular music — Baldessari sings a tract by Minimalist artist Sol LeWitt. Introducing this performance by noting that "these sentences have been hidden too long in exhibition catalogues," Baldessari sings Lewitt's...
"The soundtrack begins with the artist stating the conditions: 'An artist may construct a work and/or a work may be fabricated and/or a work need not be built. I elected five possibilities for videotape.' One sees the artist come over the horizon at a rocky beach and throw a piece of wood. The...
Writes Kelley: "BLIND COUNTRY is a collaboration between myself and filmmaker Ericka Beckman. It was inspired by the H.G. Wells short story The Country of the Blind, which was a favorite of mine as an adolescent. I was both fascinated and repulsed by this tale of a man having to give up his eyes...
Documenta 6 Satellite Telecast
Joseph Beuys, Douglas Davis, and Nam June Paik
1977, 30 min, color, sound
Documenta, held every five years in Kassel,Germany, is one of the largest and most important contemporary art surveys. In 1977, Documenta 6 featured the first live international satellite telecast by artists. Performances by Nam June Paik, German conceptual artist Joseph Beuys, and Douglas...
Chris Burden's provocative, often shocking conceptual performance pieces of the early 1970s retain their raw and confrontational force in these dramatic visual records, shot on Super-8, 16mm film, and half-inch video. Guided by the artist's candid, explanatory comments on both the works and the...
Writes McCarthy: "I was given access to a community television studio for two days of shooting and one day of editing. I had been given the grant based on a proposal to do a video tape on child abuse. I taped for one day alone and one day with Mike Kelley. I asked Mike Kelley to be the son and I...
Hannah Wilke Through the Large Glass documents one of Wilke's most effective and well-known performances, in which she performs a deadpan striptease behind Duchamp's The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (also known as The Large Glass) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Dressed in a...
I am the Light explodes with an intensity of focused aggression. Alone before the camera, his face distorted by grimaces and expressionistic lighting, Bozanich hurls insults, obscenities and pleas in a dramatic confrontation with the viewer.
Writes Pearlstein: "A white cat, the Playboy party jokes girl, an artist/florist, and the Energizer bunny are among the disparate characters who inhabit Interiors, a loop of six scenes based on a series of drawings. Like animated pictures, each depicts an interior landscape which transforms...
In this live performance for Paper Tiger Television's public-access cable program in New York, Rosler deconstructs the messages in Vogue and its advertising. Rosler looks at the institutional slants of the magazine industry and the fashion industry's reliance on sweatshops.
Hodel, costumed in haute couture, enters a barn with purpose. Balanced on a milking stool, she desperately massages a cow's udder; her unpracticed hands finding the task difficult. When the cow's tail whips into Hodel's eyes, she weeps. The surreal disjunction of Hodel's extravagant pink bolero...
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."
This documentation of a 1972 performance, in which Jonas performs as "Organic Honey," includes many of her signature devices: mirrors, masks, and the use of video for spatial, temporal, and psychological layering. In this prescient work, Jonas relates the theatrical space of her live performance...
Recorded at Video Free America in San Francisco, this work is a phenomenological inquiry into the audience/performer relationship and the notion of subjectivity/objectivity. Graham stands in front of a mirrored wall facing a seated audience; he describes the audience's movements and what they...
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...
To the accompaniment of the only extant recording of James Joyce reading from his own work, Donegan uses a clear cellophane hood and a pane of glass to create another of her "face paintings." The performance is intercut with the artist painting over her own image as it appears on a video monitor,...
In his performances, Palestine often uses teddy bears and toy pandas as what he terms "symbols of identification, like another reality of myself." In Running Outburst, these symbolic objects, placed at specific points in his loft, serve as surrogates for Palestine, who remains invisible behind...
Another regular evening at Mike's house turns into a comic nightmare. Finding himself a stranger in his own apartment, a "world totally fashioned from the effluvia of TV and pop music," Mike is plagued by a mysterious drop ceiling, his dry cleaning, and a host of ghostly visitors. This postmodern...
Son of Oil is a cautionary tale about the decline of Western civilization, as only Oursler could envision it. Oil is the central metaphor around which he constructs a burlesque critique of the cults of money and power that fuel economic and sexual systems, social pathology and cultural...
These selections of later video works by Stuart Sherman, produced in the 1980s and '90s, continue Sherman's idiomatic manipulations of everyday objects and situations. Throughout his artistic career, Sherman never limited himself to any one art form, and these works show his agility in adapting his practice to the unique syntax of video. Though he makes use of direct camera addresses and basic video editing, the conceptual witticism of his minimalist Spectacles performances is evident, as it is in his own poetic encapsulations of each work.
In these witty performance pieces, Baldino constructs, deconstructs or reconstructs objects to subvert their meaning and function. The objects simultaneously are and are not the objects indicated by their name, incapable of fulfilling the function they are designed to perform.
Part I: The artist, in the role of a nurse, fantasizes on romantic themes, using a set of foot-high, hand-painted paper dolls as actors. A fantasy within a fantasy. The "Nurse Eleanor" paper doll performs as a surrogate self for Nurse Eleanor Antin and is the much put-upon but brave heroine of a...
This newly assembled work is a rare document of a 1976 Matta-Clark performance in Berlin. The piece begins with the following statement: "In 1976, as part of the Akademie der Kunst and Berliner Festwochen exhibition 'Soho in Berlin,' Gordon Matta-Clark went to Germany with the intention of blowing up a section of the Berlin Wall. Dissuaded by friends from such a suicidal action, the result was the following performance." The film records Matta-Clark as he stencils 'Made in America' on the Wall, affixes commercial advertisements over graffiti, and has a run-in with the police.
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.
Water Light/Water Needle (Lake Mah Wah, NJ)
Carolee Schneemann
1966, 11:13 min, color, sound, 16 mm film on HD video
Schneemann's classic 1966 aerial "Kinetic Theatre" work was first staged at St. Mark's Church in the Bowery, with eight performers moving to a score of randomized encounter on layers of rigged ropes and pulleys. One of two video documents of this early and influential performance, this version is...
"While searching for comfort in her self-help books and soothing knick-knacks, the cold and depressed Cynthia is transported to an electric temple that springs up from the pattern in her electric blanket. There she has a cathartic experience with a pipe organ, faces her demons and discovers the spiritual dimensions of household electricity." - Shana Moulton
This compilation of works, selected by Wegman himself, has become a classic in its own right. Composed of many of Wegman's best-known comic pieces, this selection provides a hilarious retrospective of his video work of the 1970s. These short episodes demonstrate Wegman's brilliant application of...
