RECENT AND HISTORICAL ARTISTS' VIDEOTAPES FROM THE EAI COLLECTION
RECENT AND HISTORICAL ARTISTS' VIDEOTAPES FROM THE EAI COLLECTION
535 W 22nd Street, New York City
RECENT AND HISTORICAL ARTISTS' VIDEOTAPES FROM THE EAI COLLECTION
535 W 22nd Street, New York City
RECENT AND HISTORICAL ARTISTS' VIDEOTAPES FROM THE EAI COLLECTION
535 W 22nd Street, New York City
Works
Focusing on the discourse surrounding the music industry, Cokes continues his investigation of pop culture, setting black words on a white screen against the music of his band SWIPE. The resulting quasi-music video addresses the music of each decade since the 1960s with slogans and barbed statements.
This is the first in Cokes' non-consecutively produced series of "promotional tapes" for his conceptual band SWIPE. 3#, subtitled Manifesto A Track #1, introduces Cokes' concern with the ideological apparatus that undergirds the music industry. The video takes up a song by Seth Price, which is itself the systematic recreation of an early electronic pop song by Kraftwerk.
The second in Cokes' series of pop "manifestos," 6^ employs two simultaneous strategies to examine questions of originality and authenticity. While layers of densely theoretical text float across a blue ground, the soundtrack, a song by the band Appendix, features a singer addressing similar questions, albiet in the more familiar context of "rock lyrics."
73 Suspect Words is a deceptively simple and ultimately chilling meditation on the power of text. Ahwesh succinctly delves into one person's obsessive irrationality, and his expressions of fear and anger. Based on a spell-check of the Unabomber's manifesto, the work evokes the violence underlying the key words presented.
Hill's investigations into sign system—particularly as enunciated in the form of spoken language—join with his early concerns with montage and the idea of the cut, to produce a concise performance on the nature of television.
Jumps is the last in a triptych of performances in which Myers attempts to escape the space of closed-circuit monitoring through physical exertion. As the frame widens, Myers jumps out of view — defying the camera's gaze until gravity defies her and the frame widens again.
In Lieder, Donegan sets up a series of charged relationships -- between artist and model, art object and artistic "gesture," performer and viewer. Donegan is rendered anonymous in an absurdist mask, her head wrapped in plastic bottles and duct-tape, her pregnant body swathed in a black garbage bag.
Participation represents the Vasulka's experience of the New York downtown scene in the late 1960s and early '70s. In this fascinating portrait of wildly creative people, places and times, the artists use the early Portapak video system to document, among others, Don Cherry performing in Washington Square, Warhol Superstars on stage, and Jimi Hendrix in concert. This pioneering video document is a free-form time capsule of an era.
Re-editing footage collected from months of playing Tomb Raider, Ahwesh transforms the video game into a reflection on identity and mortality. Trading the rules of gaming for art making, she brings Tomb Raider's cinematic aesthetics to the foreground, and shirks the pre-programmed "mission" of its heroine, Lara Croft. Moving beyond her implicit feminist critique, she enlarges the dilemma of Croft's entrapment to that of the individual in an increasingly artificial world.
In this newly restored performance tape, Myers constricts her body position to "fit" into the shrinking frame of a gradual camera zoom. In her reflexive use of video and closed-circuit monitoring, Myers explores the interface of real-time technology and human gesture.
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."
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.
