VIDEOS
AVAILABLE FOR RENTAL:
Click on image to watch 3-minute sample of video.
The Mythic
Being (1973; 00:08:00):
an excerpted segment from a film, Other Than Art's Sake by the
Australian artist Peter Kennedy, this is a hilarious documentation and
interview by Peter on my Mythic Being street performances. It shows me
getting into and out of drag, rehearsing my mantra, and roaming the streets
muttering it, followed by crowds of curious onlookers who are attracted
by Peter's film equipment and technicians.
Other Than Art's Sake also includes work by and interviews
with Ian Breakwell, Judy Chicago and Arlene Raven, Hans Haacke, David
Medalla, Charles Simonds, and Stephen Willats. For more information, contact
Peter Kennedy/ 14 Stanley St., Richmond/ Melbourne, Victoria 3121/ Australia;
telephone (61-3)429-4747, fax (61-3)428-6048 from 7:30 AM to 11 PM Australian
Eastern Standard Time.
Funk Lessons (1983; 00:15:17):
a videotape piece based on an audience-interactive performance of Funk
Lessons at the University of California, Berkeley that goes considerably
beyond the performance. Both performance and tape address the ambiguous
status of African-American working class music and dance as serious contributors
to American art and culture. In the performance I teach my audience how
to listen to this music and how to dance to it. There's a lot of audience
response in this tape, which is humorous and also moving. Edited and directed
by Sam Samore, produced by Tom Oden. For a more recent, international
approach to the same material, I highly recommend the stately but endearing
Finnish/German/ Russian treatment at
http://folk.uio.no/tsandvik/fun/learn_disco.mpg
My Calling (Card) #1 Meta-Performance (1987-88; 00:58:00):
documentary footage edited together from two audience-participatory meta-performances,
the first with an all-white audience, the second with a mixed but predominantly
black audience. I call them meta-performances because in them I
invite a larger audience into self-reflective participatory critique of
a one-on-one interpersonal performance for which I present documentation.
In this case, the one-on-one performance was of My Calling (Card) #1.
The first meta-performance, at the Randolph Street Gallery in Chicago
in 1987, took that performance as the object of critique. The second meta-performance,
at the Studio Museum in Harlem, took the Randolph Street Gallery meta-performance
as the object of critique. In that performance I suggest that whoever
watches the tape edited from these two meta-performances will be participating
in a third level of self-conscious meta-performance, taking the combined
tape itself as the object of critique. The level of audience engagement
in both venues was very high and the discussion quite heated. Interesting
dynamics developed between black and white participants in the Studio
Museum venue.
Funk Lessons Meta-Performance (1987; 00:42:00):
a re-edited documentary of a meta-performance at the Randolph Street Gallery
in Chicago that discusses the motivational, cultural and situational origins
of Funk Lessons, and analyzes the structure of the performance. Dialogue
with the all-white audience is extensive, very intense and occasionally
humorous.
I am deeply indebted to Peter Kennedy, Sam Samore, Tom Oden, The Randolph Street Gallery, and The Studio Museum in Harlem for capturing some of my early performance work on videotape at a time when I did not have the resources to do so myself.
Merge (1988, LED Billboard; 00:0:56, endless loop):
a short animation on the Times Square lightboard, a meditation on miscegenation,
procreation and self-transcendence using PacMan cartoon imagery.
Please, God (1990; 00:61:00 endless loop):
a durational, three-part endless loop videotape combining footage of a
group of eight- or nine-year-old black girls joyfully dancing for the
camera in front of a window, a repeating text that moves slowly across
the top of the screen and expresses apprehension about the treatment they
will encounter as adults, and a music soundtrack consisting in three repeating
Billie Holiday songs, "God Bless the Child," "Stormy Blues,"
and "Strange Fruit."
Art Talk: Xenophobia and the Indexical Present (1993;
01:22:00):
a talk about my art work from 1968 to 1988 at Seminole Community College in Florida. I
try to show, through discussion of my own work, how art
can function in resisting or transforming the xenophobic
response that is cognitively inherent in everyone. This
talk ends rather suddenly, but contains a lot of jokes.
It may be of interest to institutions in the United
States at which I have had to decline invitations to
speak, because of my status as a Suspicious Traveler on
the U. S. Transportation Security Administration’s Watch List.
You/Stop/Watch: A Shiva Japam (August 2002; 00:42:26):
A real-time endurance piece about endurance. Formally referencing the
CNN talking head + multiple texts video format, this work is structured
by the yogic practice of japam, the continued repetition of a mantra that
restructures the neurological pathways of the brain in preparation for
the experience of death. This japam is dedicated to Shiva, the outsider,
the dancer, the yogic ascetic, the destroyer of illusion and so finally
the messenger of truth. The soundtrack is Raga Malkaus, played
by Prof. Roy Choudhury (Nataraj Music, Düsseldorf).
Shiva Dances with the Art Institute of Chicago
(October 2004; 01:43:18): Structured by a Fall 2003 lecture at the Art Institute
of Chicago that transformed into a spontaneous and moving group performance,
I situate Funk Lessons first in the evolving tradition of recent
mainstream films that highlight the teaching of popular dance as a medium
of self-transcendence and cross-cultural contact; and second within the
broader philosophical context of The Color Wheel Series, which
this video completes.
Unite
(2005; 00:39:00. Part I of the PacMan Trilogy. Video animation by Colin Holgate of Funnygarbage):
This anti-pack-mentality deprogrammer, schematizes my
extensive empirical experience with packs – white packs,
black packs, gray packs, male packs, female packs, straight
packs, gay packs, ethnic packs, religious packs, art packs,
philosophy packs, professional packs, social packs,
institutional packs, outsider packs – over the last five
decades. It models the idealized, limiting case in which the
number of originating members of the pack is finite and
stipulated, and therefore can diminish progressively to zero.
In reality, new recruits to the pack are continually being
procreated (see Merge, 1988), programmed and inducted, as
unsuitable members are rooted out; thus continually
replenishing pack membership in an unlimited series that
extends indefinitely into both past and future.
The Spurious Life-Death Distinction
(2006; 00:45:00. Part II of the PacMan Trilogy. Video animation by Colin Holgate of Funnygarbage):
The life-death distinction depends on outdated assumptions
about the nature of consciousness as equivalent to sentience.
This is implausible. Speculative theoretical physics and
Vedanta concur in equating consciousness with energy. Since
energy obeys the law of the conservation of energy,
consciousness is conserved throughout the cycle of growth and
decay, expansion and contraction, order and entropy, life and
“death”. Consciousness does not die; it merely undergoes
transformation of form. Only the ego dies, if you’re lucky,
and a good thing, too.
Philosophy Talk: Intellectual Intuition in Kant’s first Critique and Samkhya Philosophy
(2007; 01:20:33. Kunstverein Hildesheim):
Why does Kant think intellectual intuition is impossible for
human beings, and why are the philosophies of Samkhya, Yoga
and Vedanta so sure that it is? The answer lies in the
contrasting conceptions of the self, objectivity, and methods
of rational inquiry which each of these two perspectives
ultimately presuppose. The Samkhyan conception recognizes our
capacity for intellectual intuition, and so offers an account
of the creative process involved in Conceptual art. Main
lecture in English; short introduction and 20-minute
discussion in German.