Exploration of Presence, Performance and Audience

1. Performer/Audience/Mirror
Dan Graham | 22 min | 1975
"In Performer/Audience/Mirror, Graham uses video to document an investigation into perception and real time informational "feedback." The performance is doubly reflected back to the audience by the artist's lecturing, and the architectural device of a mirrored wall. Graham has written extensively on how video, which can deliver information in real time, functions semiotically as a mirror. Using the mirror at the back of the stage as a monitor, Graham voices his unrehearsed observations, activating the various feedback cycles taking place within himself as performer, between the performer and audience, and among audience members.

2. Selected Works
William Wegman | 8 min | 1972
Wegman uses the area framed by the camera as his performance space, employing a single, fixed camera to record the scenes as he and Man Ray, his Weimaraner, act them out. It has been suggested that Wegman's performances with Man Ray are uncanny invocations of broadcast television's manipulations of its viewers.These tapes are a selection from the hours of short performances Wegman recorded in his studio from 1970-1978. Selected Works includes Two Dogs And Ball (silent), Used Car Salesman, Dog Biscuit In Glass Jar.

3.Baldessari sings Sol Lewitt’s statements
John Baldessari | excerpt 3 min | 1972
Baldessari's witty performance in which he sings Sol Lewitt's statements on conceptual art to popular tunes. Seated and holding a sheaf of papers, he proceeds to sing each of Sol LeWitt's 35 conceptual statements to a different pop tune. What initially presents itself as humorous gradually becomes a struggle to convey Lewitt's statements through this arbitrary means.

4. Undertone
Vito Acconci | 37 min | 1972
In this now infamous tape, exemplary of his early transgressive performance style, Acconci sits and relates a masturbatory fantasy about a girl rubbing his legs under the table. Carrying on a rambling dialogue that shifts back and forth between the camera/spectator and himself, Acconci sexualizes the implicit contract between performer and viewer—the viewer serving as a voyeur who makes the performance possible by watching and completing the scene, believing the fantasy.

5. Vertical Roll
Joan Jonas | 19 min | 1972
In this well-known early tape, Jonas manipulates the grammar of the camera to create the sense of a grossly disturbed physical space. The space functions as a metaphor for the unstable identity of the costumed and masked female figure roaming the screen, negotiating the rolling barrier of the screen's bottom edge.

6. My fater
Shigeko Kubota | 14 min | 1975
In this classic personal elegy, Kubota mourns her father's death and recounts the last days of his life. Reflecting on Kubota's use of the video medium, the television emerges as the link between Kubota and her father, with the melodramatic crooning of Japanese pop singers providing a backdrop for Kubota's real-life tragedy.

7. Exchange
Robert Morris | 36 min | 1973 In 1972, Robert Morris and Lynda Benglis agreed to exchange videos in order to develop a dialogue between each other's work. Morris's tape, Exchange, is a part of that process a response to Benglis's Mumble. Morris's speculations about work, travel, and relationships are juxtaposed with frozen images of race cars, Benglis herself, images from Benglis's tape, and Manet's Olympia. An asymmetry of elements forms as the tape moves from the professional towards the personal a shift that gives the work humanity and, concerning the development of early conceptual video, its unique historical importance.

moderated by: Tomáš Pospiszyl