This Must Be the Space: A Video Conversation on Artist-Run and Artist-Inhabited Spaces
Programmed by Emily Eddy | 1971 - 2016 | TRT 01:30:50
Artist-run spaces are an integral part of a vibrant art community. From microcinemas to warehouse spaces to apartment galleries, no healthy art ecosystem can exist without some forms of independent and DIY organizations. With this thought in mind, we are pleased to present the VDB TV program, This Must Be the Space: A Video Conversation on Artist-Run and Artist-Inhabited Spaces, programmed by Emily Eddy, the director of Chicago’s Nightingale Cinema which recently closed their physical space of 14 years.
Emily has also written a delightful and insightful accompanying essay that chronicles some of the Nightingale’s history and ties it into several ideas explored in the works featured in the program by Videofreex, Nazli Dinçel, Glenn Belverio, George Kuchar, Anne McGuire, and Tom Rubnitz. The works range in dates from 1971-2016, consist of disparate styles, and focus on a variety of scenes, but they all illustrate aspects of why the experimentation of the artist-run space is vital in our communities.
FEATURED TITLES
A wonderful and humorous example of early image processing, Parry Teasdale and Carol Vontobel perform to camera as their faces are morphed together, forming an image of one person.
A wonderful and humorous example of early image processing, Parry Teasdale and Carol Vontobel perform to camera as their faces are morphed together, forming an image of one person.
"An eye-opening piece of guerilla counter-surveillance, Untitled documents Dinçel’s time working as a tech assistant at a film festival where they managed to record the headset chatter between themselves and the two male projectionists working the event. Over the course of 12 short minutes, we hear the men continually berate Dinçel, ignoring their specific knowledge of film and dismissing them when they correctly diagnose technical problems."
- Michael Sicinski (from Cleo a Journal of Film and Feminism)
“Trolling for news we call it,” says Bart Friedman a minute into this video, as he pushes down a road the Lanesville TV News Buggy – a baby carriage filled with video equipment, spilling over with wires. The buggy allows for easy transportation of equipment as the Videofreex make their way throughout Lanesville, interviewing residents on their daily activity. Although fairly ordinary – a visit to the lake, a small bit about a neighbor’s new electric golf cart, and an introduction to a newborn baby – the footage has an air of genuineness and all of the interactions are amicable.
In Bad Grrrls, Glennda and Fonda LaBruce attend a Riot Grrrl conference on New York’s Lower East Side. At the conference, they conduct interviews with punk women, performers and artists, including Penny Arcade and Sadie Benning. In doing so, Glennda and Fonda navigate a range of perspectives on feminism, punk, and underground activism. Furthermore, they engage with questions of drag’s relationship with feminism, and how one would reconcile the problems of punk with Riot Grrrl’s desire for women’s liberation.
Alienation in academia beneath the chandeliered opulence of a political correctional facility that caters to clashing cultures with chicken fajitas and carefully worded alphabet soup. Features George at the Flaherty Seminar and the Chicago Underground Film Festival.
McGuire constructs a murky black and white soap-opera world of endless, timeless, and placeless limbo, where the characters talk to each other entirely in clichés, bad poetry, and other contrite forms of speech — a short TV show in which nothing is resolved. The video culminates in an absolutely stunning monologue performance by legendary underground film and videomaker George Kuchar.
FROM THE FILES OF THE PYRAMID COCKTAIL LOUNGE
From The Files of the Pyramid Cocktail Lounge is a series of video clips taken at the Pyramid Club, a seminal location for the East Village drag scene in the midst of the club's most influential years. While rummaging through a file cabinet full of event fliers from the Pyramid Club, an office worker in drag guides the viewer through video documentation of past performances at the club.