Documentation of Selected Works 1971-74

Chris Burden

1971-75, 34:38 min, color and b&w, sound

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...

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.

Lost in the Pictures

Max Almy 

1985, 4:06 min, color, sound

In this contemporary "day in the life" of an average computer programmer, Almy depicts the dissolution of social dichotomies—public/private, labor/leisure, reality/fantasy—through TV's reception in a culture spellbound by its images. Almy builds a picture of delirium in a dazzling scene in which her protagonist daydreams as he watches TV, and, like Alice through the looking glass, gets "lost in the pictures" of a multi-dimensional televisual space.

Mr. Dead & Mrs. Free

Squat Theatre

1982, 83 min, b&w and color, sound

Squat Theatre described this piece, which was presented both as a film and as a live show, as "an open journey through situations, styles and moods; an 'Arabian Nights' with heroes and legends written on the New York wind whistling the melody of 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow.'" The 83-minute video...

MTV: Artbreak

Dara Birnbaum 

1987, 30 sec, color, sound

Produced for an Artbreak segment on MTV Network, this dynamic "thirty-second spot" presents an abbreviated history of animation according to the representation of women, from the cell imagery of Max Fleischer's Out of the Inkwell series to the contemporary digital effects of television.

Neo Geo: An American Purchase

Peter Callas

1989, 9:17 min, color, sound

Produced during a year-long residency in New York, Neo Geo is a vivid portrayal of the contemporary American cultural landscape. Constructed as a fragmented and dislocated terrain embedded with emblematic imagery, Callas' dark vision of cultural memory is inscribed with symbols of violence,...

Post-Video

Douglas Davis

1981, 29:06 min, b&w and color, sound

Post-Video is an anthology of the video, film, and performance works produced by Davis from 1976 to 1980, with commentary by John Hanhardt, who at the time was Curator of Film and Video at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. In Hanhardt's analysis, this work centers on "the...