Video Art

  • Gerry Schum – Land Art (1969)

    1961-1970ExperimentalGermanyGerry SchumVideo Art
    Land Art (1969)
    Land Art (1969)

    Synopsis:
    The Fernsehgalerie (television gallery) is a modification of the conventional art gallery. The objects presented were created especially for the program at various locations in Europe, the United States and Canada. Under the theme of “Land Art”, the artists incorporate the natural landscape they have chosen as an essential component of their artworks.Read More »

  • Derek Jarman – Imagining October (1984)

    Derek Jarman1981-1990ExperimentalUnited KingdomVideo Art
    Imagining October (1984)
    Imagining October (1984)

    Produced for the 1984 London Film Festival, Derek Jarman’s Imagining October is a dreamlike meditation on art and politics in the final years of the Cold War. In this film Jarman explores art and politics in the final years of the Cold War, drawing connections between pre-Perestroika Russia and Thatcherite Britain. The title refers to the 1917 Bolshevik revolution and Sergei Eisenstein’s propaganda film October: Ten Days That Shook the World 1928.Read More »

  • Sara Cwynar – Glass Life (2021)

    2021-2030DocumentarySara CwynarUSAVideo Art
    Glass Life (2021)
    Glass Life (2021)

    A dynamic configuration of images and videos overlaid with musings on human existence.

    Quote:
    “Glass Life” is a dynamic configuration of images and video accumulated over the years on the artist’s hard drives. From her studio, the artist uses her computer and various studio set ups to make sense of her visual archive—and the world outside. Luscious pictures of food, political figures, screen idols, sportswomen, Instagram models, grand artworks, cartoon characters, emojis, and self-portraits, among many other images, vie for our attention. This montage is overlaid by a broad range of references, including from Euripides, Plato, and Shakespeare; through Albert Camus, John Maynard Keynes, and Virginia Woolf; to Frantz Fanon, Luce Irigaray, Kobena Mercer, and the artist herself.Read More »

  • Eija-Liisa Ahtila – Rakkaus on aarre AKA Love is a treasure (2002)

    2001-2010Eija-Liisa AhtilaExperimentalFinlandVideo Art
    Rakkaus on aarre (2002)
    Rakkaus on aarre (2002)

    This is quite a rare stuff from Eija-Liisa Ahtila, a Finnish videoartist and photographer.
    The film tells five different stories about women who have developed psychoses.
    It consists of five episodes each telling the story of one woman. In the first a woman prefers to stay underneath her bed because of the imaginary killers hunting around her. In the second a teenage girl becomes the assistant of UFOs controlling sounds heard on earth. In the third episode a woman crawls over a bridge because things have become unstable due to the emergence of past events. The fourth part depicts how anger takes the form of a wind in a woman’s apartment. In the last episode a woman starts to hear the sounds of other places, and shuts out all images by covering the windows of her house so as to be able to be in the space where the sounds are.
    The script links the episodes together by using various spaces and surroundings, and through the treatment of images.Read More »

  • James Fotopoulos – Christabel (2001)

    James Fotopoulos2001-2010ExperimentalUSAVideo Art
    Christabel (2001)
    Christabel (2001)

    Prolific underground filmmaker Fotopoulos’ enigmatic setting of the Coleridge poem, using both 16mm and digital film to create a shifting, layered visual accompaniment. From the linked review:

    “Those unfamiliar with the source material needn’t be intimidated. Reacting to another artist’s work, Fotopoulos creates something intrinsically his own. Christabel might be interpreted as the account of a young woman’s dream-thoughts as she nears adulthood, and the four sections of the film (structured to accompany each fragment of Coleridge’s poem) guide her to different levels of introspection. Each layer is charged with specificity, forging connections on multiple levels: corporeal, familial, religious, daemonic, and sexual. The young woman, Christabel, struggles through the blending worlds of waking life and soul-possessed visions….Christabel exists in vibrant, painterly counterpoint to the purposefully bleak, stark minimalism of Fotopoulos’ narratives, Back Against the Wall and Migrating Forms.”Read More »

  • Shuntarô Tanikawa & Shûji Terayama – Video Letter (1983)

    1981-1990JapanPhilosophyShuji TerayamaShuntarô TanikawaVideo Art

    Quote:
    This remarkable compilation follows an exchange of video letters that took place between Shuji Terayama and Shuntaro Tanikawa in the months immediately preceding Terayama’s death. It can be thought of as a home video produced by two preeminent poets and inter-laid with highly abstract philosophizing, slightly aberrant behavior and occasionally flamboyant visuals.Read More »

  • Tom Bowes – The Kitchen Presents Two Moon July (1986)

    1981-1990ExperimentalTom BowesUSAVideo Art

    Quote:
    This video is an ensemble piece that contains a collection of experimental performance art pieces by various performers. The entire video takes place in The Kitchen, an enormous artist’s loft in the midst of New York City. All the performance pieces are what could be considered Avant-garde in nature, though that term has fallen out of use today in order to make way for the more pedestrian and commonplace whitewash term of alternative; however, when this video was created, the style and feel of each of these pieces was more intentionally risk-filled and groundbreaking than what we see today as is the nature with the ideals of the avant-garde–I don’t think the term alternative had been coined and/or abused as yet, people were still saying New Wave or Punk or using terms even more inaccurate and less flattering. Don’t get me wrong, these differing pieces are new and experimental concepts in art but all are carefully rehearsed and well scripted, there is some, but very little improvisation on the whole. Read More »

  • Paquito Bolino – Les kauchemars d’Oskar (2004)

    2001-2010ExperimentalFrancePaquito BolinoVideo Art

    Photo to Film. Horrors of the childhood.Read More »

  • Hamlet Hovsepian – Kos AKA Itch (1975)

    Hamlet Hovsepian1971-1980ArmeniaExperimentalVideo Art

    Quote:
    Statement by Hamlet Hovsepian regarding the films:
    “”What have been presented are totally unrelated events (material) at the outset. The relation between them portrays neither pleasant nor unpleasant feelings. To find interest in a place outside man’s attention.”Read More »

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