Body

Tuned In, Turned On! Videofreex Tape the World

Formed in 1969 at the legendary Woodstock Music Festival by David Cort and Parry Teasdale, who met while taping the events with the newly available Portapak video equipment, the Videofreex (also known as "the Freex") were one of the very first video collectives. After working together to pitch a program to the major broadcasting station CBS, they toured the country interviewing counter-cultural figures of the day, including Fred Hampton, a leader of the Black Panther party, and Abbie Hoffman, so called leader of the Yippies.

Videofreex

Sybil

Nancy Cain interviews an upside down chin face about Women's Liberation, asking "Where do you stand on the subject?" The chin face professes to be happy with her lot, and says she enjoys living alone with her cat.

This video was shot in the Prince Street loft/studio used by the Videofreex.

Videofreex

Circo dell'Arte (Circus Arts)

A troupe of male and female jugglers and musicians perform for a growing crowd in Central Park, New York. The sun is shining, and the troupe are skilful, playful, and flirtatious. The crowd of children, parents, and office workers enjoy the show, and at the end happily throw money into the hat.

Doug Ischar

Alone With You

At the heart of Alone With You is the notion of impassioned avarice, i.e. the kind of motivated acquisitiveness that drives both erotic desire and obsessive collecting.

Miller & Shellabarger

In/Out

Miller & Shellabarger, their breath made visible by the cold of a refrigerated room, exchange breath with each other.

This title is only available as an excerpt on Suitable Video, Volume 1.

Kirsten Stoltmann

I Spill My Guts Everyday for Nothing

Kirsten Stoltmann's video, I Spill My Guts Everyday for Nothing, is exactly that, a portrait of the artist spilling her Guts with a blank expression on her face. Again, Kirsten emerges as an empathetic anti-hero, who, in her own need for confessional exposure, must be regarded as equal parts comic and tragic. The work has unexpected power in its simplicity and humor.

-- James Rondeau

This title is only available as a 3x loop on Suitable Video, Volume 1.

A.K. Burns, A.L. Steiner

Community Action Center

Community Action Center is a 69-minute sociosexual video by A.K. Burns and A.L. Steiner which incorporates the erotics of a community where the personal is not only political, but sexual. This project was heavily inspired by porn-romance-liberation films, such as works by Fred Halsted, Jack Smith, James Bidgood, Joe Gage and Wakefield Poole, which served as distinct portraits of the urban inhabitants, landscapes and the body politic of a particular time and place.

Mike Kuchar

Tickled Pink

He is mute flesh that the stroking of fingers can bring to sing.

-- Mike Kuchar

Mike Kuchar

Litany of the Seven Kisses

OverRiped words from the lips of an OverExposed boy decorates this litany in pink with purple bruises.

-- Mike Kuchar

Mike Kuchar

Midnight Carnival

Revelers at a masquerade ball enter an UnderWorld of guilt, vice, pain, chaos and redemption.

-- Mike Kuchar

Birthday Suit with scars and defects, Lisa Steele

Radical Closure, Program 5: The Trace That Remains

How useful is personal testimony to History? The most abstract of all the works that focus on personal narrative in this program is certainly Lisa Steele’s Birthday Suit with scars and defects, in which the artist gently caresses every scar on her body, names it, dates it, and describes the circumstances in which the scar was inscribed. These are traces that defy memory, and that indeed become an alternative memory. Steele’s video presents us with an abstraction of oneself, almost a schema of the body as it becomes a register of violence.

Radical Closure, Program 4: Intensive Care

Named after Hatice Güleryüz’s haunting short film, with its disturbing yet iconic images, this program presents unsettling situations narrated with both considerable emotional investment and critical distance. In her work Intensive Care, Güleryüz films a boy’s circumcision, then tilt’s up to the boy’s silent, angelic face. In another work, The First Ones, she films a group of school children singing the national anthem; a take on nationalism made with so much love.

Radical Closure, Program 3: At the Border

Border situations have inspired writers, artists and filmmakers, particularly within the context of divisions and border control within the Middle East. Who draws the borders? What are the effects of imposing them, of imposing checkpoints? This program looks at border situations. In the works presented here, we take a close look at the lines of demarcation, observing what happens on borders in divided Lefkosia (Nicosia), the occupied territories in Palestine, and at the excavation of the site of a former border in Lebanon which no longer exists.

HalfLifers

HalfLifers: The Complete History, 1992 - 2010

HalfLifers is an ongoing collaborative project created by longtime friends and fellow media artists Torsten Zenas Burns and Anthony M. Discenza. Embracing a gestural improvisation-based performance style and championing a rigorously low-fi aesthetic, HalfLifers engages a shifting region of speculative fictions, from play therapy and improvised crisis re-stagings to zombie architectural systems and psychic sandwich surgery.

Kevin Jerome Everson

Ring

Ring attempts to exhibit the “sweet science” of boxing in an elegant way.

This title is only available on Broad Daylight and Other Times: Selected Works of Kevin Jerome Everson.

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