Course News

For-Educational-Use-Only 7

WEDNESDAY, October 24th:
/Performing For The Camera/

As always, A&D 229, 7pm

Alex Bag
Untitled Fall '95
1995, 57:00, color, sound
In Untitled Fall '95, Bag, at the time an art student, "plays" Bag the art student. In a series of deadpan performances, Bag gathers fragments of pop detritus, fashioning a thoroughly mediated document that is at once a celebration and a record of loss. With the narrative inevitability of a TV serial, the eight diaristic segments trace a woman's struggle to make sense of her experience at art school. As each installment marks the start of a new semester, Bag's character addresses the camera with her latest observations and frustrations.

Peter Campus
Third Tape
1976, 5:06, color, sound
Of Third Tape, Campus writes, "This man tries to abstract himself using age-old methods reminiscent of German Expressionism, Cubism and Surrealism. Art issues of line and plane are dredged up. Perhaps to be subtitled: the war between man and man-made objects." Recasting these modernist art historical antecedents, Campus presents a disjunctive sense of identity and self by focusing on the effect of a single action on a close-up of the face.

Paul McCarthy
Sauce
1974, 18:00, color, sound
McCarthy gained recognition for his intense performance and video-based work on taboo subjects such as the body, sexuality, and initiation rituals. In his performative video piece, Sauce, McCarthy covers his entire body in sauce.

Pipilotti Rist

I'm Not The Girl Who Misses Much
1986, 7:46, color, sound
Rist's classic video takes on rock music with its own tools, pushing pop's repetitive strategies and representations of women to absurd lengths. Footage of the artist chanting the piece's title (a line adapted from The Beatles' song Happiness is a Warm Gun) is replayed at high and low speeds, with obscuring video effects, blurring into an almost painterly procession of images. Rist's manipulation renders her voice into a parody of female hysteria and her body into a grotesquely dancing doll.

Sip My Ocean
1996, 5:00, color, sound
Her video depicts a world of sensual pleasure with its elegant shots of underwater landscapes, submerging and re-emerging figures and everyday household objects slowly drifting to the ocean floor. Once again Rist appropriates a male singer's song; her whispery version of Chris Isaak’s pop song, "Wicked Game," soothes with its haunting melody, though the song's lyrics speak of the fact that sometimes paradise, love and desire may not be all that they promise.

Ever Is Over All
1997, 4:30, color, sound
Inteded as a double video projection, Ever Is Over All contrasts flowers in a field with a woman in sparkling ruby slippers promenading down a car-lined street. The fluidity of both scenes is disrupted when the woman violently smashes a row of car windshields with the long-stemmed flower she carries.

posted by ryan griffis at 5:21 PM Tuesday, October 23, 2007

0 Comments:

Course News

For-Educational-Use-Only 7

Previous Posts