|
||||||
| [ Two Video Art Programmes from The Kitchen, NY ][ Speech given by Anney Bonney ] | ||||||
| Tape #1( approximate
RT: 80 minutes) "Introduction to the Kitchen and the early works in New York State Video" " Kitchen Highlights Compilation" (circa 1974-1975) , B & W, 5 minutes Artists include: Shigeko Kubota Jackson MacLow Robert Kushner Trisha Brown Beryl Korot Steve Paxton (he does the contact improvisational dance, he's not introduced) Ronald D. Clark Jean Du Puy Richard Landry John Cage (He's just smiling..not announced) William Wegman (You see his dogs only) Vito Acconci (He's facing the audience smoking on the floor) Laurie Anderson (She's playing a violin) Philip Glass (He's playing a synthesizer) Meredith Monk (She's singing with two other girls) Steve Reich (He's playing drums with 3 other drummers) Steina Vasulka (She's playing the violin) PROCESS TAPES From the Experimental Television Center, Owego, New York Curated by Shalom Gorewitz ( 1981): From the early Digital Days: Peer Bode: "Ladder", (1981), B&W, 2 min. & "Lightbulb"(1981),B&W, 3:40 min (Abstracted objects become unreal experiments in "morphing".) Hocking/Miller: "Walk/Run" (1981),color, 6 min. (Is this one of the first Scratch Videos?) Coleman/Powell: "Hot Pink",(1981), color, 3:38 min & "Weightless"(1981), color, 3 min. (Examines the place of body in synthesized non- virtuality). ____________________________________ Steina Vasulka: Excerpts from WNED-TV, Buffalo, New York (1978), color,7 min. (One of the Kitchen's founders and most influential Video Artists shares her discoveries) ________________________________ Gary Hill: "Elements" (1978), B &W, 2 min. (Compare this to Steina's work, whereas her's reads as sculpture, Gary's suggests the inner life of Video photons as landscape) "Happenstance" (1982-3), B &W, 6 min. (One of the most perfect video poems revealing its' self endlessly in an electric zen koan) _________________________________ The Poool:(Benton Bainbridge, Nancy Meli Walker, Angie Eng, Hoppy Kamiyama, Naval Cassidy): (The Poool is a free- floating group of live performance video/sound makers who are seen alot in New York. Garbage, their preferred subject matter, transforms into pseudo- theatrical presence. This work is edited from their live shows). "Package for Matilda", (1997), color, approx 5 min. __________________________________ Nam June Paik & John Godfrey: "Global Groove" (1974), color, excerpt 8 min. produced by WNET-TV Lab, New York City (The classic analogue masterpiece from the man who said, "Television has no gravity". Feedback as fun, goes into my time capsule. Includes Allen Ginsberg chanting, Jud Yalkut, Charlotte Moorman on TV cello, Alan Schulman on traditional Cello, Soundtracks from Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels, Bill Halley and the Comet's). ___________________________________ INTERMISSION? (52 min of material hasd gone by) ____________________________________ Van McElwee: "Luxor". (1998), color, 18 min. (One man's pyramid is another man's mall..or what's really sacred to a society? See Van answer or pose this question with his usual mesmerizing/ penetrating multilayered gaze) ______________________________________ Live Performances Excerpts from the Kitchen: "Splayed Mind Out" (December,1998) color, 3 min. Choreographer, Meg Stuart, and her Belgian troupe, Damaged Goods, with Artist, Gary Hill create a complex, inverse, perverse, reversed entropic field of gestures against language in this provocative dance/video /performance collaboration. Video and Text written and performed by Gary Hill. _______________________________________________ Troika Ranch: Mark Coniglio and Dawn Stoppiello artistically co-direct these dances that combine sensors and remote control units to trigger synched video/ audio accompaniments. Tightly choreographed dense interactivity. {Presented as part of Techno Passion month @ the Kitchen) (March, 1998), color, 3 min. _________________________________ Maya Ciacorri defies figure/ground relationships as she dances through video snow by David Linton as part of the "Dance in Progress" series curated by Neil Greenberg. (March 1998), color, 3 min. _____________________________________ Burn Manhattan: Spontaneous Theatre from New York's most innovative, techno-savvy improvisers perform ".001" , their paranoid probing piece presented for two nights @ the Kitchen. ( January, 1999). color, 3 min. ______________________________________ TAPE 2 (about 20 min) "ON POSSIBLE FUTURES OF VIDEO ART " (RENUNCIATION? RECLAMATION? RESURRECTION?) ______________________________________ AN ASIDE: ______________________________________ "This is a strange time for Video as an art medium. We've all heard the pronouncements about its 'death'. I heard it myself from David Ross, the former Director of the Whitney Museum in NYC and the First Ever Video Curator at the Everson Museum in Syracuse, N.Y. He made no apologies as he signed the metaphoric death certificate at a conference last fall on the History of Video. But I have to say: Photography didn't kill Painting, and Video didn't kill Film, and the Internet won't kill Video, but each advance effects the other, the latter assimilates the former, developments in technology mutate artists' means of expression. What is the Internet streaming, anyway, if not video? New religions always build on the sites of the old temples....so here is a sampling of works (and excerpts) by 5 young Video Artists (&/or Groups) who carry on the tradition just outside the tradition by approaching the medium itself and the subject of action/reaction/body/machine/self in their own very particular reflections. TAPE #2 Kristin Lucas: is a Brooklyn based artist who works with video, installation and performance investigating the complex relationship between automation and the psychological effects of rapidly changing technology. "Watch Out For Invisible Ghosts" (1996), color, 5 min. "Equipped with helmet, goggles, and a basic understanding of early video game strategies, the artist morphs into an adventureland training camp where she meets with media icons on common ground". _________________ "Host" (1997), color, 7:36 min. An on line therapy session initiated from a public phone satirizes the links between man and computer and their shared conditions. (aging/obsolescence, implants/upgrades, amnesia/memory loss). _____________________________________________ Torsten Z. Burns: "Gesturecorp" (1997), color, 3 min. Creator of Industrial Strength Videos and half of Half-Lifers ,Torsten Z. Burns wins the impulsive/ convulsive good house keeping award in his unusual documentation of Olympic style vacuuming, "Gesturecorp". This is just one from his series, "Gesture Incorporated," described by Steve Seid as, "crisis-re-enactment with lo-res alienation." Uh,huh. _____________________________________________ Enie Macy and the 10 Step Program Promo Tape (1998), color, 2 min. Kristin Lemberg, Rajendra Serber, Bulk Foodveyor, Cheryl Leonard and Tracey Vogel mutually combust to form Enie Macy and the 10 Step Program. In this promotional tape you meet them all. Enie Macy (Kristin) , fresh from West Hollywood, experiences neurotic epiphanies along with animatic pets and psychokitsch pals cohabitating her projected videostage life. (Pee Wee Herman where are you?) Includes Characters: Future Boy, Tarnsby, The Placid Couple, and the 'Gold-Noses'. Coming this Fall to perform @ the Kitchen and Downtown Arts Festival. ______________________________________________ Miranda July: "The Amateurist" (1998), color, 3 min. Miranda July, video/performing/recording artist founded her own alternative distribution system for women's videos, "Miss Movieola" in 1995 in Portland. She's currently presenting her one woman show, "Love Diamond". The irrepressible, Miss July, wrote, directed and stars in this bizarre, slightly distorted two- way mirror world of numbers and suggested sexual submission. Where she is voyeur and voyeuse; the screen is a new kind of skin to crave your touch. ______________________________________________ |
||||||
| Good Evening, I'm Anney
Bonney, the Performance/Video Curator from the Kitchen in New York City, and I'm coming to you via Krassi to present an overview of the Kitchen, America's oldest premiere venue for "avant garde time-based art". The Kitchen was started in 1971 by two Video Artists: Steina and Woody Vasulka. It is fitting then, that we celebrate a brief portion of our history with you through this medium. To help get us in the proper mood, I want to recreate that first night of exhibitions in the old Mercer Arts Center, where Steina and Woody delivered this text for the opening on June 15th. These were their words: " This place was selected by Media God to perform an experiment on you, to challenge your brain and its perception. We will present sounds and images to you which we call Electronic Image and Sound Compositions. They can ressemble something you remember from dreams or pieces of organic nature, but they were never real objects. They have all been made artificially from various frequencies, from sounds, from inaudible pitches and their beats. Accordingly, most of the sounds you will hear are products of images, processed through sound synthesizers. Furthermore, there is time, time to sit down and just surrender. There is no reason to entertain minds anymore, because that has been done and did not help. It just doesn't help and there is no help anyway. There is just surrender, the way you surrender to the Atlantic Ocean, the way you listen to the wind, or the way you watch the sunset. And that is the time you don't regret that you had nothing else to do." I hope you can follow that advice and just relax, have nothing else to do tonight. Enjoy the Video sunset without the expectation of entertainment. I'm bringing you some early works from not only the Kitchen but also from the larger region of Upstate NewYork because the initail Video Art Movement was a unique statewide event. No one is sure why it happened there precisely. Some have suggested the water supply, but it's a fact that most of the significant American Video Art in its nascence came from New York State. Artist- initiated electronic communities like The Experimental Television Center founded by Sherry Miller and Ralph Hocking in Owego and the Kitchen in New York allowed this new art medium to flourish. Look for the works of their founders in tonight's presentation. I'm concentrating then on the local phenomenon of Video Art as realized through Processed Images and Performance and the special juncture where the two meet. Remember what Steina and Woody said about video and audio cross-overs and 'nature as process/ process as nature'. Film separated sound and picture. Video was the first medium to enable simultaneous real time recording. (Thanks to iron oxide). This was radical at the time. Consider the dates on these pieces and how oddly futuristic some of them are. Be patient if the technology is sometimes primitive or the image quality poor, the editing rudimentary. Hopefully, you will understand the need for Video Preservation that some of us are promoting. Magnetic Media is transient at best. In some ways the show may speak to art technology as archeology. The imprints of what is to come are left for us to observe in these pioneering works. We open with a 5 minute compilation of historical Kitchen moments, circa 1974-5 , followed by 47 minutes of selected early process tapes,.....(Krassi, I recommend an intermission after this, then have them come back for the more recent work... but obviously, it's up to you) then an 18 minute tape from Van McElwee, "Luxor", that explores processed cultural appropriation and the realm of the sacred; and finally some excerpts from recent live performances presented at the Kitchen which combine prerecorded and live video mixed into dance and improvisational works. We hope you come away with just a little of the feelings we have for these artists and their contributions to our sense of perceptual and aesthetic reality electronically mediated......" I'd like to close the brief segment on new works with some statements by Kristin Lucas about Video's current position and meaning in the culture as seen through her eyes: "Because of digital and video media, I find it limiting to define a space by perimeters of time and location alone. I suggest a change in variables. Lately I have taken notice of the many fields that I pass through in a day, the many interferences and transmissions that effect my stream of consciousness. How much am I effected by these signals, subliminally, curiously physically?..... I wonder what the odds are for a cell phone or a fax to share the same frequency as a neurotransmitter within my brain. A pager goes off and I raise a brow. Someone sets their microwave to thaw frozen peas and I wind up exiting the subway two stops too soon. I'm a giant radio-controllable baffoon.... I play video poker with the same intensity and concentration that I make art. Man-machine interface...... These conditions, generated by the collision of waveforms, and forces, are commonly mistaken for the actions of the paranormal or a warp in the time space continuum of a parallel universe. Maybe cell phones are capable of effecting the psychic and paranormal..... .... I am used to operating within fields and behind layers. How does this relate to video? Video is field friendly. Our reality has more depth than ever due to digital technology..... I make video as if I were conditioning myself for something major. Like nuclear fallout. I want to arm myself, defend myself in the best way possible, tell the poisonous berries from the tasty harmless ones. Video is the medium within which I simulate possible relationships/maneouvers.... Because video is so compatible with other tools, and so malleable at the same time, it is a tool that many are fascinated with. It has the ability to capture the qualities of layers of light and sound. This is stunning to me still. When contemplating our image in video, we witness an emptiness, a hollowness. Our instinct is to reach for the refresh button. As video and computer animation become more prevalent, and we see our own images reproduced more often, we venture into the illusion that the reproduction is the truer self and become increasingly more fascinated with self-improvement and super-human qualities." Kristin Lucas Thank all of you in the audience for coming. We brought you these works to stimulate conversation and thoughts. Some material may have been disturbing or soothing or confounding, perhaps you had all these reactions. I did. Now I'd like to thank Krassi again for including us. Please come visit us @ the Kitchen in New York. I'm Anney Bonney . Goodnight. |
||||||