FIRST DECADE: VIDEO FROM THE EAI ARCHIVES
FIRST DECADE: VIDEO FROM THE EAI ARCHIVES
New York City
FIRST DECADE: VIDEO FROM THE EAI ARCHIVES
New York City
FIRST DECADE: VIDEO FROM THE EAI ARCHIVES
New York City
Works
In A Budding Gourmet, Rosler explores the ideological processes through which food preparation comes to be seen as "cuisine," a product of national culture. Accompanied by the strains of a violin concerto, Rosler's deadpan narrator explains her reasons for wanting to become a gourmet....
Ramos' astute deconstruction of television news focuses on the media coverage of President Jimmy Carter's 1977 declaration of amnesty for Vietnam War draft resisters, and his personal involvement with the issue. Ramos, who had served an eighteen-month prison sentence for draft resistence, was...
This elegant study in abstraction and landscape from an aerial perspective takes its title from the Montgolfiers, the 18th-century French scientists who popularized balloon travel. Documenting an exhilarating ride in a hot-air balloon over Minnesota farmlands and cityscapes, Gigliotti's study of...
Ancient of Days is a remarkable series of "canons and fugues for video" that comprises Viola's most sophisticated structural and metaphorical explorations of time. Mathematical notations of precise time-code editing were applied to construct illustrations of temporal symmetry, duality and transposition — time-based equivalents of musical compositional principles such as counterpoint and serialism.
With its sinister and grotesque imagery, Bands is the most powerful and brutal of these early works. Starkly lit and isolated before the camera, Bozanich straps rubber bands across his face, distorting and slicing his flesh until it bleeds. The artist's self-mutilation becomes an emblematic howl of pain and despair.
This stylized narrative is the first in the Yonemotos' Soap Opera Series,in which they employ the traditional syntax and codes of melodrama to explore how mass media formulas manipulate desire and sexuality, fantasy and reality. Played out with the self-conscious acting and dialogue of a soap...
Between the Lines examines the "invisible mechanisms" that control and contextualize media information. Analyzing a news report to demonstrate how facts are mediated by television's limits, Muntadas focuses on the role and responsibility of the reporter — the person between the facts and the...
In this evocative formalist exercise, Lucier explores light in relation to the material properties of video. Aiming a laser directly at the camera's eye, she burned the vidicon tube. Changing the focal length of the lens and moving the laser, she records the optical effect of the camera's light perception and absorption. The resulting configurations, set to Alvin Lucier's electronic score Bird and Person Dyning, become an abstract calligraphy of light. Lucier's technology-based, visual records of refraction and reticulation refer to the Impressionists' empirical observations of changes in light over a measured period of time.
Children's Tapes is a classic early video work, a seminal investigation that translates the aesthetics of minimalism, performance, perception and real time into the vernacular of the everyday. With ingenuity and wit, Fox constructs phenomenological dramas from the science of the quotidian....
Chinatown: Immigrants in America
Jon Alpert, Yoko Maruyama, and Keiko Tsuno.
1976, 57:55 min, color, sound
Produced in response to what DCTV felt were inaccurate media portrayals of New York City's Chinatown, this award-winning, often startling portrait of an immigrant community probes beneath the tourist's-eye-view to uncover the complexity of an inner-city subculture plagued by poverty and...
In the first episode of the misadventures of his alter-ego "Mike," Smith introduces his deadpan anti-hero in a day-in-the-life story that is saturated with references to the junk-television culture of the '50s, '60s and '70s. A puzzled innocent who throws a party to which no one comes, Mike...
Baldessari has commented that he is "less interested in the form art takes than the meaning an image evokes." In Ed Henderson Suggests Sound Tracks for Photographs, he explores the relation between what is heard and what is seen, appropriating deliberately cliched imagery and generic film music...
The landmark documentary Four More Years is an iconoclastic view of the American electoral process, captured through TVTV's irreverent, candid coverage of Richard Nixon's 1972 presidential campaign and the Republican Convention in Miami. Using lightweight 1/2-inch portable video equipment, the...
These formal yet visceral exercises explore subjective point of view and motion as psychological metaphors. Shot with a hand-held camera at Coney Island, these studies are experienced by the viewer through Palestine's eyes and with his movement. He writes, "The perceiver is in as much danger, as...
Writes Acconci: "I walk in a circle around the camera: sometimes I'm on screen, sometimes I'm off, sometimes I change direction, leaving the screen on one side and coming back on the same side. Every five minutes or so, the location changes: my circle is continuous while the background shifts: bare walls—a corner with a window on one wall—outside, on a roof, with sky as the ground—outside, on a terrace, with other buildings and windows as the ground—inside, in a living room, bookcase and couch in the background. I'm silent; there's a voice-over, it's my voice: on screen, I'm talking about circling you, wrapping myself around you, as I did around 'her,' a person from my past: a kind of trap."
Global Groove is a seminal work in the history of video art. Paik's radical manifesto on global communications in a media-saturated world is rendered as an electronic collage, a sound and image pastiche that subverts the very language of television. With surreal visual wit and an antic neo-Dada sensibility, Paik brings together a cross-cultural melange of artworld figures and Pop iconography.
Hello Boys documents a performance at the Gallery Gerald Piltzer in Paris. Seen through the glass of a large fish tank, Wilke, nude, performs a repertoire of studied erotic gestures to the accompaniment of rock music. Entrapped in her fish bowl, on display behind glass, she is both subject and...
Through eloquent portrayals of four different life experiences — birth, aging, marriage and the death of a parent — Home addresses how the dissolution of the nuclear family and the increasing control of daily life by institutions have affected the individual. The subjects of this verité...
Birnbaum manipulates off-air imagery from the TV game show Hollywood Squares in Kiss The Girls: Make Them Cry, a bold deconstruction of the gestures of sexual representation in pop cultural imagery and music. Minor celebrities (who Birnbaum terms "iconic women and receding men") confined in a...
In this early work, Jonas translates her performance strategies to video, applying the inherent properties of the medium to her investigations of the self and the body. Jonas performs in a direct, one-on-one confrontation with the viewer, using the immediacy and intimacy of video as conceptual...
Newly restored from its original elements, Life of Phillis is one of Oursler's earliest video narratives. In this psychosexual, low-tech epic, Oursler creates an outrageous theatrical world, fashioning characters from unlikely found objects. Willfully primitive, often grotesque, and crafted with an ingenious visual shorthand, Life of Phillis inhabits an ironic landscape fabricated from the detritus of pop culture.
In this classic video verité documentary, Cort records a demonstration against the Vietnam War in Washington D.C. on May Day, 1971. Describing the event as "a day filled with moments of expectation and violence," he focuses on the dynamics of the demonstration and the police response. Armed with...
In Measures of Volatility, Gorewitz abstracts footage of highway traffic, gradually transforming the ordinary into a multi-layered world of shifting colors and sounds.
Originally presented as an installation, My Bubi, My Zada is Cohen's affectionate tribute to her grandparents. Cohen taped them at home in their apartment, which is filled with old photos and memorabilia. Playing off her relationship with her grandmother (Bubi) and grandfather (Zada), Cohen...
"Father, why did you die?" With this deeply intimate statement of grief, Kubota mourns the death of her father. Video and television are central to her ritual of mourning, and allow her father to assume a presence after death. Kubota and her father, who was dying of cancer in Japan, are seen...
Pervaded with references to Max Ophuls' classic film Letter From an Unknown Woman, Nostos I uses video to explore obsession, the imaginary and memory, relating the cinematic apparatus and the psychical apparatus. Kuntzel describes this work: "Three people, or rather three silhouettes of rare...
Silent or with minimal sound, Hill's early formalist works explore the manipulation of electronic color and image density through the camera obscura and image processing devices. Of these works, Hill has written that "much of the subject matter and the expressionistic method of working underline...
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...
In his early work, vom Bruch undertakes a compelling inquiry into contemporary German identity in relation to history and collective memory. Here he exercises his signature formal strategy of switching rapidly between two tape sources, one recorded and one live, to achieve a powerful visual...
Sich selbst bei Laune halten (To Stay in a Good Mood)
Marcel Odenbach
1977-78, 12:51 min, color, sound
In this early, performance-oriented tape, Odenbach draws analogies between childhood games and the "games" of contemporary politics, media and culture. To the sound of a ticking metronome, Odenbach, seen only as a fragmented figure, plays with a series of dimestore toys — puzzles, a yo-yo. He...
For this work, Nauman pounds out rhythms with his feet that increase in complexity as he paces his studio, beginning with a steady one-two beat and advancing to a syncopated ten-beat phrase. As he stamps back and forth across the studio, he moves diagonally and in spirals. The camera is upside...
Strobe Ode is an exercise in video feedback and analog imaging, in which a circular image-field is modified and abstracted by strobe flashes.
Sunstone is a landmark tape. Symbolic and poetic, it is a pivotal work in the development of an electronic language to articulate three-dimensional space. The opening image is an iconic face, which appears to be electronically "carved" from stone. A mystical third eye, brilliantly crafted from a...
Explosive bursts of fire open Technology/Transformation, an incendiary deconstruction of the ideology embedded in television form and pop cultural iconography. Appropriating imagery from the 1970s TV series Wonder Woman, Birnbaum isolates and repeats the moment of the "real" woman's symbolic...
The Eternal Frame
T.R. Uthco and Ant Farm: Doug Hall, Chip Lord, Doug Michels, Jody Procter
1975, 23:50 min, b&w and color, sound
The Eternal Frame is an examination of the role that the media plays in the creation of (post)modern historical myths. For T.R. Uthco and Ant Farm, the iconic event that signified the ultimate collusion of historical spectacle and media image was the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. Using a few frames of the event as their starting point, T.R. Uthco and Ant Farm construct a multilevelled event that is simultaneously a live performance spectacle, a taped re-enactment of the assassination, a mock documentary, and a simulation of the Zapruder film itself.
Writes Antin: "Applying hair to her face, the artist moves through a variety of bearded faces seeking the identity most appropriate to her facial structure and satisfying to her aspirations." Antin transforms herself into a man and adopts one of her recurring performance personae, "The King."
Merging the subjective and the objective, the autobiographical and the anthropological, The Laughing Alligator is a highly personal observation of an indigenous South American culture. Recorded while he and his family were living among the Yanomami of Venezuela, this compelling work distills...
The Rays
Raindance (Frank Gillette, Paul Ryan and Michael Shamberg) with Allen Rucker and John French.
1970, 23:08 min, b&w, sound
Spontaneous and free-form, The Rays documents the philosophical musings of Raindance members Michael Shamberg, Paul Ryan and Frank Gillette on the beach at Point Reyes, California. Passing the camera around "like a joint," they theorize on the nature of television and alternative communications...
The Space Between the Teeth is based on the structure of acoustic phenomena and the psychological dynamics of a man screaming at the end of a long dark corridor.
This video journal is an informal time capsule of the downtown cultural and artistic milieu in New York. In Part 1, Clarke is an active voice behind the camera as she documents a party given by John Lennon and Yoko Ono, with guests that include Andy Warhol and Jack Nicholson. In Parts 2 & 3, Arthur C. Clarke performs a celestial experiment with a video camera on the roof of the Chelsea Hotel, while influential theologian Alan Watts creates "an exercise in Zen."
In Theme Song, Acconci uses video as close-up to establish a perversely intimate relation with the viewer, creating a personal space in which to talk directly to (and manipulate) the spectator. The film, with its ironic mixture of openness and manipulation, is one of Acconci's most effective works.
Again, Myers negotiates her relationship to the frame of the camera as it gradually realigns itself — this time in a clock-wise movement that turns the room sideways. Myers adjusts her position, bracing herself with increasing difficulty against the wall, in an attempt to remain upright even as the camera does not.
Defining TULE: The Cuna Indians of San Blas as an "impressionistic, personal documentary," Velez chronicles the everyday life of the Cuna, who live on the Panamanian archipelago off the Atlantic coast. Recording the Cuna over a period of several months, he finds beauty and meaning in the rhythm...
Vertical Roll is a seminal work. In a startling collusion of form and content, Jonas constructs a theater of female identity by deconstructing representations of the female body and the technology of video. Using an interrupted electronic signal — or "vertical roll" — as a dynamic formal device,...
Video Tape Study No. 3
Nam June Paik and Jud Yalkut
1967-69, 1992, 4:01 min, b&w, sound, 16 mm film on video
Part of a collection of restored early works by Nam June Paik and Jud Yalkut, this piece is historically significant as well as remarkably prescient. Video Tape Study No.3 is a direct media intervention, in which Paik distorts and manipulates footage from news conferences by U.S. President Lyndon...
Steina terms this procedural work "a demo tape on how to play video on the violin." Her background as a violinist and her evolution from musician to visual artist is referenced through an analogy of video camera to musical instrument. Steina is first seen in footage from the early 1970s, playing...
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...
