Videoscape: An Exhibition of Video Art

Marty Dunn, Peggy Gale, Gary Neill Kennedy

Videoscape: An Exhibition of Video Art

Toronto, Canada: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1974

[74] pp, 26 x 22 cm., spiral-bound

Edition size unknown

Exhibition catalogue for an early presentation of Artists’ Video works at the AGO in Toronto, from November 20th, 1974 to April 1st, 1975. 

The artists include David Askevold, Dana W. Atchley, Jill Bellos, Charles Binamé, Jean-Pierre Boyer, Eric Cameron, Colin Campbell, Doug Carbert, Barbara Cochrane, Stephen Cruise, Don Druick, Marty Dunn, Ed Fitzgerald, General Idea, Gerry Gilbert, Carole Itter, Goddamatch (Max M. Anderson, Bob Wilcox, Bruce Green, Gordon Reed, Robert Montgomery), Michael Goldberg, Timothy A. Hanson, Noel Harding, Michael Hayden, Les Levine, Douglas MacLean, Richard Martin, Anne McMillan, Winston G. McNamee, Graham Metson, Robert Morris, Ian Murray, Bruce Parsons, John Pope, Al Razutis, Alex Salter, Richard Serra, Jeffrey Spalding, Lisa Steele, David Tipe, Brad Townsend, Visus Foundation, Vortex Intermedia, Doug Waterman, John Watt, William Wegman, Walter Wright, and John Young. 

The volume includes brief biographical notes on the participating artists, some of whom provide statements of their own. Marty Dunn’s text describes the conceptual, performance, synaesthetic and experiential elements of video, while Peggy Gale highlights the differences between television and video, traditional art forms and video and various centres for video production within Canada. Gary Neill Kennedy defines cybernetic, synaesthetic and synergistic aspects of video artworks. 

Show (&) Tell: The Films & Videos of Lawrence Weiner.

Bartomeu Mari

Show (&) Tell/ The Films & Videos of Lawrence Weiner. A catalogue raisonné

Gent, Belgium: Imschoot Uitgevers, 1992 

148 pp., 21 x 28,5 cm., hardcover

Edition size unknown

A catalogue raisonné of the films and videos by Lawrence Weiner, edited by Bartomeu Mari and Alice Weiner, with a preface by R.H. Fuchs. The book is designed by Lum Derycke with Lawrence Weiner.

Cosey Fanni Tutti | A Study In Scarlet

Cosey Fanni Tutti

A Study In Scarlet

Conspiracy International, 1987

14 x 22 cm., 56 min

Edition of 160 numbered copies

A VHS cassette containing four live commissioned ‘actions’ by the artist, between the years 1983 and 1986. 

DIORAMA 

21st August 1983, London

A ritual of transformation and awakening within the walls of the only existing original 'diorama' building in London.

SUCH IS LIFE 

27th & 29th September 1984, Bloomsbury Theatre, London

A celebration of the body and mind. The admission of sexual awakening and freedom. A tribute to the works of Georges Bataille. This performance was part of the 'Violent Silence' festival which included readings, films, music and performance from people who work with the same freedom of thought.

OPINIONS 

15th August 1985, Zap Club, Brighton

As always the actions are improvised and feed off the energy and attitude absorbed prior to the event.

The video was shot through cling film and a live mix was projected above the stage onto a 6' screen.

PUSSY GOT THE CREAM 

6th March 1986, Zap Club, Brighton

A video piece specially commissioned for the 'taboo' festival.

Pipilotti Rist | I’m not the Girl Who Misses Much

Pipilotti Rist

I’m not the Girl Who Misses Much

Stuttgart, Germany: Oktagon Verlag, 1998

27.7 x 21.7 x 4.2 cm.

Edition of 300 signed and numbered copies

Pipilotti Rist's I’m not the Girl Who Misses Much - produced when she was still a student at the School of Design in Basel, Switzerland - remains one the artist's best known works, perhaps only bested by Ever Is Over All.1

The seven and a half minute single-channel video depicts the artist in a low cut black dress, dancing frenetically in an empty white room, singing the title phrase over and over again, like a meaningless mantra. 

The repeated line is a slight variation from the opening lyric of the Beatles' song Happiness Is A Warm Gun2, from the eponymously titled double "White Album". The song was written by John Lennon, partly about Yoko Ono (and inspired by a headline in a National Rifle magazine)3. 

"In my village in Switzerland," Rist recalled to Hans Ulrich Obrist, "I had a small window into the art world through the mass media; through John Lennon and Yoko Ono I moved from pop music to contemporary art. In return, I will always be grateful to popular culture". Ono's video and sculptural work was an early influence on the artist, alongside Laurie Anderson and Nam June Paik. 

Rist told The New Yorker in 2020 “Lennon sings, ‘She’s not a girl who misses much,’ and I used to walk on the street singing that like a mantra, like a self-fulfilling prophecy.” 

In the video she repurposes the line into a first-person anthem, modulating her voice from that of a little girl, to that of a confident woman. This is further exaggerated in post-production, where the sped up and slowed down footage changes the line into both a high-pitched cartoonish squeal, and the low moan of a funeral dirge. The video is also manipulated, through vertical and horizontal freeze frames and the type of sumptuous saturated colour balance treatment that she would become known and celebrated for. 

 

In the glitchy short work, Rist performs for the camera, her maniacal dancing causes her breasts to fall out of her dress, repeatedly, as if she simply cannot be contained. 

The work was considered a feminist response to the sexist tropes populating MTV music videos at the time, but Rist said that she was not overly familiar with channel prior to making the work. She viewed it as more of a "personal exorcism". 

Rist submitted the video to the Solothurn Film Festival, in Switzerland, where it was accepted, and well received. By the time it had appeared in a few German group shows, three New York City gallerists had approached her, all offering representation. She signed with Luhring Augustine, joining a roster that included Christopher Wool, Rachel Whiteread, and Albert Oehlen.4 

This packaged version of the work was produced to coincide with exhibition of the same name at the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz and at the Kunstverein in Hamburg. 

In addition to I’m not the Girl Who Misses Much, the yellow VHS tape also includes You called me Jacky, Pickelporno and Pipilottis Fehler, as well as seven extracts from recordings for installations. It is accompanied by an envelope containing colour postcards, an artist book and a wooden-bead necklace. The work is housed in a cardboard box, sealed with a blue plastic ribbon. The work is signed and numbered in red felt pen on the box. 

I’m not the Girl Who Misses Much is now valued at approximately $2000 US. 

1. Rist's 1997 video installation Ever Is Over All inspired the car window smashing sequence in Beyoncé's music video for the song Hold Up. In Rist's video, she uses a flower to smash the windows of the parked cars. "I would have preferred that Beyoncé did it with a flower and not a baseball bat, because it changes the meaning. But, no, I was very flattered,” Rist later remarked. 

2. The best interpretation of this song (possibly any) comes from the odious Albert Goldman, the hit-job biographer of Lennon, Elvis Presley and Bruce Lee. The Joycean gibberish from the first stanza:

The man in the crowd 

with the multicoloured mirrors

On his hobnail boots

Lying with his eyes 

while his hands are busy

Working overtime

A soap impression of his wife 

which he ate

And donated 

to the National Trust

is interpreted to be about a man using mirrors on his boots to look up the skirts of women in a crowd. He puts on a deceptively straight face while masturbating, and the soap impression of his wife is his ejaculate, which he releases into a toilet (The "National Trust"). The only worthwhile page out of seven hundred and twenty, in Goldman's The Lives of John Lennon book. 

3. A May 1968 issue of American Rifleman, the magazine of the National Rifle Association (a copy belonging to  producer George Martin) contained the title of the song as a headline. "I just thought it was a fantastic, insane thing to say. A warm gun means you just shot something," Lennon later noted. 

 4. Rist later signed with blue chip behemoth Hauser & Wirth, with both venues now representing her work. 

Nuit Blanche Edmonton: Sasha Krieger | Soliloquy

Kelly Mark's 108 Leyton Ave (previous post) features the artist arguing with herself. Sasha Krieger's Soliloquy appropriates footage from feature films where characters have found themselves lost and isolated from the rest of the world. The work dates from 2011, but the artist has created a new, expanded version for Edmonton's Nuit Blanche. The piece will be projected on the exterior east wall of the World Trade Centre, 9990 Jasper Ave, across from the Hotel MacDonald.



"In cinema, the lone traveller, lost in the wilderness, will invariably come across an open space and call out, hearing nothing back but their own echo. This gesture, enacted in the hopes of making contact or just the satisfaction of hearing the reflection of one’s own voice, plays out dozens of times in Soliloquy, the trope collected and arranged as an endless monologue. Projected onto the side of a downtown building, Krieger’s collaged film inhabits the great outdoors, allowing the character’s voices to echo throughout the city.

Sasha Krieger is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores issues surrounding originality and process in acts of creative production. She received her Bachelors degree in Fine Arts in Photography from Emily Carr University in 2005 and her Masters degree in Fine Arts from California College of the Arts in 2010. She has exhibited her work locally and internationally at venues such as, University of British Columbia’s AHVA Gallery, Vancouver, MacArthur B Arthur in Oakland, Sight School in Oakland, RVCA in San Francisco in and For-Site Foundation in Nevada City, California."

Bruce Naumann | Walk with Contrapposto

Bruce Naumann
Walk with Contrapposto
Berlin, Germany: Edition Deutsche Guggenheim, 2003
15 x 15 x 2 cm
Edition of 20 of signed and numbered copies

In this sixty-minute video from 1968, Nauman attempts to maintain the contrapposto pose (counterpose) associated with classical sculpture, while walking down a long, narrow corridor of his own making. In the position, the figure stands with most of its weight on one foot so that its shoulders and arms twist off-axis from the hips and legs.

The video was issued on DVD for the first time by the Deutsche Guggenheim to coincide with their exhibition Bruce Nauman: Theaters of Experience in 2003. It was housed between two pieces of embossed wood and priced at € 540.