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Video Data Bank Newsletter

July 2021
I Wanna Be Well:

Gregg Bordowitz 
on VDB TV

For the past three decades, Gregg Bordowitz has brought awareness to the ongoing AIDS epidemic through his overlapping roles as an artist, activist, writer, and teacher. In conjunction with I Wanna Be Well, a retrospective of Bordowitz’s work currently on view at MoMA PS1 (traveling from the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, where it originated in 2018, and the Art Institute of Chicago where it was on view in 2019), VDB TV presents two video works featured in the exhibition for online streaming: Fast Trip Long Drop (1993) and Only Idiots Smile (2017).

The beginning of Bordowitz’s career as an artist in the mid-1980s dovetailed with his burgeoning activism as a PWA (“person with AIDS''). Exploring the political power of media—oftentimes in connection to his work with ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) and other activist groups—Bordowitz became a prolific maker of videos, many of which countered negative stereotypes of people living with AIDS by offering empathetic and empowering depictions of his community of friends and fellow activists. Produced in a moment of despair, Fast Trip Long Drop marked a tidal shift in Bordowitz’s practice: literally sick and tired, he explored anger and hopelessness, inviting autobiography and a caustic, existential humor into his work. He writes of this moment: “I was tired of pretending for the sake of others that I would survive. I became preoccupied with the burdens that sick people bear on behalf of those around them who are well. I wanted to get a handle on despair and put it out there as a political problem to be recognized and discussed.” Made fourteen years later, Only Idiots Smile—a real-time recording of a lecture-performance that occurred as part of the New Museum’s Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon—further explores questions around illness, humor, and the complexity of the artist’s intertwined identities as a queer, Jewish, American man living with HIV in the twenty-first century.

Watch VDB TV
Year End Discount
Receive 15% off with the purchase of any single title or compilation for educational purchase, valid through August 30th, 2021
 
Save on groundbreaking experimental work for your media collection! Now through August 30th, VDB is excited to offer a 15% discount with any purchase. Order one of our Box Sets, Curated CompilationsSingle Artist Compilations, and Single Titles, and provide students, faculty, and researchers with direct access to critically important video art of historical and contemporary significance. Use coupon code EDU1521 at checkout. Some exceptions apply. Contact us at info@vdb.org with any questions.  

Additionally, Kevin Jerome Everson's box set Broad Daylight and Other Times will be available at a new reduced price of $375. 
New Releases
The Dress
Ken Kobland & EJay Sims
2021 | 00:14:00 | United States | English/Hungarian/Yiddish | Color | Stereo | 16:9 | HD video  

THE DRESS: is a projection prop created for a performance piece at the Art Institute in 1984. It was installed in March 2021, suspended in front of a building on the Bowery as both a memorial to my grandmother, a Hungarian immigrant and master seamstress, and to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, of 1911, which occurred a few blocks north of this site.

Future From Inside
Dani Leventhal ReStack & Sheilah ReStack
2021 | 00:24:00 | Canada/United States | English | Color | Stereo | 16:9 | HD video 

Future From Inside is the last in the trilogy begun in 2016, by Dani and Sheilah ReStack (also including Strangely Ordinary This Devotion and Come Coyote.) The work traces the ReStack collaboration, as it manifests in life and in work. The porous line between real and fantasy is further elaborated in this video -- FFI utilizes body doubles, a continuing journey for answers and oracles, animal synthesis, queer desire, children and radical community to weave a fragmented future.

Driving Men
Susan Mogul
2008 | 01:08:00 | United States | English | Color | Stereo | 4:3 | DV video    

Sassy, iconoclastic, and never-married, Los Angeles filmmaker Susan Mogul rides shotgun with ex-lovers, almost lovers, and her Dad, in a road movie turned inside out. Conversations with each driving man - pornographer, tuba player, TV critic, long haul truck driver, and more - are catalysts to reflect upon the past and comment about the present.
 
Live in San Diego
Susan Mogul
1977 | 00:18:00 | United States | English | B&W | Mono | 4:3 | 3/4" U-matic video    
Live in San Diego is my first live performance. David Antin, my mentor when I was a graduate student at the University of California at San Diego, encouraged me to perform in front of an audience. Why? Since my videos directly addressed the camera- why not take the next step and address a live audience?  
The City is a Stage
Paweł Wojtasik

2021 | 00:17:44 | India / United States | Color | Stereo | 16:9 | HD video

Gautam Chatterjee uses the streets, parks, and temple grounds of the city of Varanasi, India, to teach his students a 2000-year old method of acting. Based on Natya Shastra, a treatise written by a quasi-mythical monk Bharat Muni, the instructions aim to intimately connect the actor with the real world. Through deep engagement with the surroundings, people, animals, plants, and phenomena such as waves on the water or patches of sunlight on the ground, the actors work towards creating a truthful representation of the world.  
Explore More Titles

VDB is excited to have recently taken on the work of artist Nazli Dinçel, whose hand-made films reflect on experiences of disruption and capture the body in context with arousal, immigration, dislocation and desire with the film object: its texture, color and the tractable emulsion of the 16mm material.

Through our interview series, VDB Asks, we’re pleased to introduce you to her and her practice explained through her own words.

Read Interview Here
Artist News

VDB artist Martine Syms Aphrodite's Beasts exhibition runs from July 3rd – January 9th at Fridericianum in Kassel, Germany.  The exhibition addresses the representation and reception of US-American identities and cultures, the theories and realities of feminism, conditions of interpersonal communication, and the impact of digital media on everyday life. 

Fixed in Fleeting: Performative Objects and Tape Journals ROSA BARBA is on exhibition at Esther Schipper in Berlin, Germany July 3 – August 28, 2021.
 

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