Online through April 26, 2016
www.vdb.org/tv
Curated by Nelson Henricks
As part of our ongoing commitment to the presentation of groundbreaking moving image art, VDB TV presents this free online program of performance-oriented videos from the late 1990s, which map a trajectory between consumer society and psychoanalytic confession. Curator Nelson Henricks, reflects, “These interventions—distillations of music videos, commercials and infomercials sampled from a reservoir of neglected or useless images—offer moments of resistance.”
Emphatically low-tech and subtly comedic, the works use mass-produced phenomena as a springboard for social critique. HalfLifers (Torsten Z. Burns and Anthony Discenza) act out panicked rescue missions using everyday objects. Emily Breer and Joe Gibbons’ “The Phony Trilogy,” and Gibbons’ solo “Barbie” series, target pop culture icons through delusional monologues. Anne McGuire mimics popular television genres, interrupting the comfortable flow of power within them. Animal Charm (Rich Bott and Jim Fetterley) use found footage derived from a wide variety of sources to scramble media codes, creating a kind of tic-ridden, convulsive babble. The work of these artists can be set into orbit around three points: performance, television and madness.
Accompanying the program is an eponymous essay by curator Nelson Henricks, a Montréal-based musician, writer and artist.
About VDB TV
VDB TV is a rotating series of groundbreaking programs presenting essential video art, streaming free for the first time to the general public on the Video Data Bank website. From early media pioneers, to sensational contemporary artists, VDB TV provides unprecedented access to the culturally significant VDB archive of over 6,000 video art titles. VDB TV is curated by prominent programmers and moving image art specialists from around the world. To advance accessibility of the collection, all programs included within VDB TV are close captioned for the hearing impaired. VDB TV is supported in part by a Media Arts award from the National Endowment for the Arts. To find out more about how NEA grants impact individuals and communities, visit www.arts.gov.
About Video Data Bank
Founded at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 1976 at the inception of the media arts movement, the Video Data Bank (VDB) is a leading resource in the United States for video by and about contemporary artists. The VDB collection includes the work of more than 550 artists and 6,000 video art titles. The VDB makes its collection available to museums, galleries, educational institutions, libraries, cultural institutions and other exhibitors through a national and international distribution service. VDB works to foster a deeper understanding of video art, and to broaden access and exposure to media art histories through its programs and activities. These include preservation of historically important works of video art, the perpetuation of analog and digital archives, publishing of curated programs and artists’ monographs, the commissioning of essays and texts that contextualize artists’ work, and an extensive range of public programs.
