Continuing Oursler’s broader exploration of the moving image, Absentia is one of three micro-scale installations that incorporate small objects and tiny video projections within a miniature active proscenium. Mounted on platforms suspended in space on metal stands, the video sculpture contemplates human relationships, expressed here by shouts and murmurs, the strange and the familiar.
Commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and riffing on the “I Want You” army recruitment campaigns of the 1930s and 1940s, Labat asked Bay Area residents to interpret the slogan and make their own demands of the public in a series of live performance auditions. Given one minute to seize the voice of authority, contestants were asked to be the finger-pointing Uncle Sam, and their performances—as on the TV program American Idol —were voted on by a live audience. Five winners were chosen and their image and slogans appeared on posters throughout San Francisco to coincide with the presidential elections.
Tony Cokes’s long-form, multi-channel work Some Munich Moments 1937–1972 forms a layered montage of historical and contemporary source material exploring different periods of Munich’s history. Incorporating footage and speeches from the infamous 1937 exhibitions, Degenerate Art and First Great German Art Exhibition , views of the city’s destruction from June 1945, and texts on Otl Aicher’s graphic identity for the 20th Olympic Games in Munich in 1972, the film weaves together an open-ended narrative. This visual and textual material is set to music including techno playlists, contemporary EDM tracks, and Donna Summer’s disco classic, I Feel Love (1977), which the American singer recorded in Munich’s legendary Musicland studio.
Since the early 1980s, Cuban-born Tony Labat has been an important participant in the California performance and video scene...
Since the 1990s, Tony Cokes’s video works generate complex layers of meaning through the juxtaposition of basic elements such as language and sound...
Commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and riffing on the “I Want You” army recruitment campaigns of the 1930s and 1940s, Labat asked Bay Area residents to interpret the slogan and make their own demands of the public in a series of live performance auditions...
Continuing Oursler’s broader exploration of the moving image, Absentia is one of three micro-scale installations that incorporate small objects and tiny video projections within a miniature active proscenium...
Tony Cokes’s long-form, multi-channel work Some Munich Moments 1937–1972 forms a layered montage of historical and contemporary source material exploring different periods of Munich’s history...