Cornered (1988)

Adrian Piper produces disturbingly intimate psychological theater aimed at the racial anxieties of an art-world audience more or less tacitly taken to be white and liberal.
Combining Minimalism, Conceptualism and Performance Art, she has worked since about 1970 to force viewers into an unbearable awareness of their personal complicity in what she views as a pervasively racist, xenophobic and unjust system.



In Cornered consists of a video located in the corner of a room. In front of the monitor is a long table resting on its side. With its legs pointing out from the corner, it functions as a barrier.
Piper herself sits demurely at a desk backed into a corner and explains with unflappable, schoolmarmish composure that most Americans are, like her, genetically black, even if their physical appearance seems to say otherwise. The artist’s monologue, delivered in an intimate, personal style presents the viewer with a master lesson in logic.



She also provocatively suggests that such attitudes and behavior actually create race as a perceptual category and that that category, however illusory, reinforces hierarchies of socioeconomic power and exclusion.

Non - Specific Treat (2004)

Our desire to recognize and scrutinize the face of evil is framed by our experience of how different governments and the media have historically represented and continue to define the terrorist. Such attempts to locate and understand a threat or an enemy necessitate the creation of a character who is beyond reason, outside of civilized society and who becomes known to us as a fusion of real and fictional figures.
The figure is a young man with a shaved head wearing a black open-neck shirt, denim jacket, and silver chain around his neck. He is presented as a "non-specific threat," a gangster in a very lonely, someone who would seem or might be perceived to have no scruples about clearing the way for himself.



Willie Doherty moves the camera in a circular tracking shot around a tough looking baldheaded man with a gold chain around his neck and a denim jacket. As the camera tracks slowly around this threatening presence a male voiceover, disembodied from the central figure, makes a series of cryptic statements punctuated by pregnant pauses and he expresses explicit and veiled threats and attempts to describe the nature of his relationship to the viewer.
A group of large-scale photographs depict a young man in a variety of nondescript urban settings by day and by night. He emerges from dark alleyways and stands defiantly at street corners. The camera circles around the figure in a continuous pan so that we see every aspect of his head and shoulders front to back, back to front, and the background changes.

Jimmy the C (1977)

A claymation President Jimmy Carter, backed by a chorus line of leggy Mr. Peanuts, is the visual of Ray Charles' voice singing Georgia on My Mind.
The song by itself is wonderful just as straight audio. But the fun with using Jimmy Carter as a foil doesn't take anything from that. It's the gut punch of juxtaposition that makes it work so well.



Jimmy Picker has uploaded more of his animation to his YouTube channel at jimmypicker.

It Wasn't Love (1992)

This is a fractured tale of a love affair that is both heartfelt and tongue in cheek funny. Sadie Benning herself poses as various types of stereotypical masculinity and femininity: the rebel, the vamp, the biker, the bimbo. She also reveals the frustration of her position as a teenage lesbian growing up in Middle America.




This video ends on a far more positive note than many of her other films especially in terms of gaining access to an inner sense of power and autonomy rather than continuing to rely on media images and her imagination. Benning plays wonderfully with shadows and music.
Love is associated with danger and rebellion, opening up possibilities of adventure and self-discovery while reversing the ending of the traditional heterosexual romance that concludes with the submersion of the heroine's identity beneath the all-encompassing categories of wife and mother.



All the video centers on the narrator's construction of a series of imaginative roles and scenarios that enable her to act out her rebellion and defiance while reflecting her desire for autonomy, respect, and power. There is an imaginative envisioning of what it is like to have individual power and autonomy, a power that commands respect and awe in the onlooker.

Head (1993)

Cheryl Donegan ushered in a new era of brash, low-tech performance video. Here she confronts sex, fantasy, and voyeurism in an autoerotic work out performed to pop music, and provides a perfectly choreographed simulation of desire.
The piece is incredibly direct. A woman approaches a green plastic bottle with a plugged spout sticking out from one side. She pulls the plug free, and a white milkish fluid begins to stream through the hole. So she starts to suck at the hole, lick around it. Lick the bottle up and down.



In this image of sexual pleasure and fantasy, Donegan is both subject and object, directing the action and performing for the camera without acknowledging its presence. The role she plays mimics that of a sex industry worker, whose choreographed purr and bounce fake you into believing that what she does feels good.
Donegan studies what pleasure looks like and with Head she delineates just how scripted sex may have become, and how far many of us have traveled from real taste and touch. Head is what pleasure looks like when it turns into illusion.
She also forces us to confront the essential ruse of pornographic imagery: all those women we saw live on celluloid exhibiting insatiable hunger and receptiveness. And they always loved it, always asked for more.

Inseln

By Goran Gnaudschun.

The Reflecting Pool (1977)

All movement and change in an otherwise still scene is confined to the reflections on the surface of a pool in the woods. The camera angle of this film never moves. The camera is positioned in the same place for the entirety of the piece, starting from the woods and ending in the woods. Suspended in time, a man hovers in a frozen, midair leap over the water, as subtle techniques of still-framing and multiple keying join disparate layers of time into a single coherent image.



All Bill Viola's pieces concern the emergence of the individual into the natural world like a sort of of baptism. The water is a symbol of life and at the same time an important element in almost all his works. His unbroken reference water also stems from the fact that for decades now, he has drawn inspiration from Taoism, Buddhism and from Greek philosophers.
According to Viola, we cannot grasp our material world with our eyes, because no clear distinction can be made between reality and illusion. Our true identity, as Viola believes, is only visible when it is reflected.
Birth and death, our perception of time and its dissolution, consciousness, conscience and memory.

Fimage

Larry Vogel has been involved in photography since 1976 and in recent years has become a multi-talented artist using several mediums to pursue and express his creative explorations, including, photography, ceramics, painting and sculpture.

Private Hungary 1 (1988)

Private Hungary comprises more than 300 hours of home movies and an additional forty hours of interviews with the relatives of the amateur filmmakers who shot the footage.
Peter Forgacs places the original footage in context with images connoting great history and its universally recognizable political and public events. This montage interconnects great and small histories, often based on contrast or on parallel. He uses these devices in order to show both sides of a historical period, or at times simply only the down side, at the same time making the viewer more sensitive to the given period.
For most of the films, Forgacs collaborated with Hungarian minimalist composer Tibor Szemzõ.
His work with music, as well as the archive footage itself lends the footage a sense of urgency it lacked at the time it was filmed.



The first episode of the Private Hungary series tells the Bartos family Saga: a talented amateur filmmaker Zoltán Bartos, a chanson composer and lumber businessman made more than five hours of 9,5m amateur film from the late twenties until the mid sixties. In 1944 the Hungarian “Quisling government” plundered the half Jewish Bartos family. Following the Nazi period, surviving the war in a Forced Jewish Labor unite, Zoltán divorced and remarry. Later the Communists rage the Hungarian citizen's life; in 1949 his plant was nationalized and lost everything again, except his humor.

Awesome Storm Justice 41

You can continue to read it.

Writing: Stephen Offenheim (Ugga Bugga)
Pencils: Todd Diamond (PencilPunx)
Inks: Norman Hardy (Popninja)
Colors: Jorge Rodrigo (KaRzA)
Letters: Amadarwin

Cover pencils and inks: OJH
Cover colors: Garry Henderson ( Mudcat)

Editors: Stephen Offenheim (Ugga Bugga), Dawnsknight and Amadarwin

Three Transitions (1973)

Peter Campus' early work engaged his interest in the psychology and the physiology of perception, and was informed by the Minimalist aesthetic of the late sixties and early seventies. Especially, his video art is concerned with exploring the subtle balance between remote but penetrating and formal, but unsettling, elements.
One of his most important single-channel works is Three Transitions in which he uses chromakey processors and video mixers to create videos in the studio. This video engages this new method of perceiving oneself, Campus is watching himself live as he goes through the motions for the camera.



In three short exercises, Campus uses basic techniques of video technology and his own image to create succinct, almost philosophical metaphors for the psychology of the self. In these concise performances, he presents three introspective self-portraits that incorporate his dry humor. As Three Transitions moves between deadpan humor and seeming self–destruction, Campus explores the limits of visual perception as a measure of reality.
In each episode, Campus displaces an image of himself and eventually eradicates it. Three Transitions deals with duality in an ironic way, also with the video space made with this technological tool. The question of self is important, as the performer tries to expose the illusions the artist has set up.
Campus employs video's inherent properties as a metaphorical vehicle for articulating transformations of internal and external selves, illusion and reality. The tape's precise formalism and simplicity of execution advance the psychological wit and symbolic content.

Extrinsic

By Rebekah Bogard.

Shoot (1971)

Chris Burden's reputation as a performance artist started to grow in the early 1970s after he made a series of controversial performances in which the idea of personal danger as artistic expression was central. Burden subjected himself to danger, thereby creating a double bind, for viewers, between the citizenly injunction to intervene in crises and the institutional taboo against touching art works.



His most well-known act is the performance piece Shoot, in which he was shot in his left arm by an assistant from a distance of about five meters.
Many interpretations have been made regarding this piece. Many saw it as a statement about both the war in Vietnam and the American right to bear arms. Films like Full Metal Jacket or Bultets over Broadway exerted a significant influence on the daring of Burden's experimental piece.

Yabilarki

By Clive Barker.