Simulated/Desire: A SIMULATION (1984)
A SIMULATION was made during a two week video performance workshop instructed by American artist Linda Montano at The Banff Centre for the Arts in Alberta, Canada. It is a psycho-trailer of the daily fetishization of the male gaze and self that hits an Sig Alert of high anxiety panic attack via Hitchcock.
Simulated/Desire: I WANNA BE IN YOUR WORLD (1984)
The videotape’s title is that of the same name of a pop song by Donny & Marie Osmond. I WANNA BE IN YOUR WORLD appropriates the music video format in the same year MTV and MUCH MUSIC TV began music video programming in the United States and Canada. Throughout the tape one hear’s nothing less but a chaotic grotesquely ugly lyrical rendition that choreographs homoerotic moves by a white male dressed in Levi's 501 jeans and white muscle tank top. Casted as both anti-performer and anti-consumer of underlying homoerotic desire.
Crossing the 49th. (1985)
"Crossing the 49th." reasons that since there are 25 million homosexuals in the United States and 23 million people in Canada the two populations should change places, forming the world's first nation organized around sexual preference. The ridiculousness of this fantasy cuts both ways. Employing black humor, it points up the need for some kind of guarantee or protection against the abuse our society heaps upon anyone not toeing the line of paternal domination. Secondly, it offers a utopian image of wholeness but under the quise of a perverse patriotism. The bitter irony of this call to all "honchos and dykes" to "cross the 49th" raises the issue of the place of fantasy in any political struggle.
Dan Walworth, Other Versions (Perversions), catalogue, Artists Space, New York, NY, 1988
KILLING TIME (1985)
Mark Verabioff's "Killing Time" alludes to sexual opportunity in a brief visual account of a male's journey that focuses on the act of making a choice and accepting the outcome, symbolized here by the game of coin tossing. This poetic tape glimpses at the truths of daily existance without resorting to steaming, figurative and emotive language, having replaced it instead with frames of solid reverberating color, scenes of suggestive activity punctuated by the occasional image of the words "a-c-t-io-n" and a gyrating audio track of industrial sounds. These alternate elements produce a similar symbolic effect and as a totality, this work makes its inscription as a simple, elegant mark.
Daina Augaitis, Poetic Signals, brochure, Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff, Canada, 1986
STICKSHAKER (1987)
Stickshaker is aviation terminology for a warning device on commercial aircraft that literally shakes the control column (stick) in the pilot's hands to warn of the approach of the tool's air stall speed. STICKSHAKER exposes the underlying sexual dynamics in global honcho technology today, be it economic, social/sexual disease, political disarray, etc. Visual clauses in the forms of both text and selected image produce this poetic narratlvity of concern that either gender cannot escape. The advocate (which is the voice over) trys via poetic language to sell this concern to the mass public.
FURBURGER (1991)
Furburger intentionally exploits the video medium’s intrinsic capacity to create semiotic complexity - image, sound and text are layered so as to create a rich network of connotative meaning. Close ups of a man’s anal area serves as the tape’s visual and conceptual focal point. In a narrative voiceover, Verabioff intellectually broods over the implications of creating yet another work of art. Near the tape’s end, Verabioff announces his decision not to engender a new work of art, thereby necessitating “abortion of the art fetus.” We hear about the “art fetus” AND we see it “being aborted.”
Kevin Cook, Parachute #69, 1993
LASHOUT (1992)
LASHOUT creates an atmosphere of "conceptual snuff" using image, sound design, text and vocals that propel participatory spectacle into a tortuous hearing "in this museum, in this gallery" and horrific witness of the rhetoric of critically judgment "too out to be a token too out to be a token" as the snuffing out of a gay male? or a character of the oppress? or is it the oppressor of the doctrine? We never find out whose cultural identity has been snuffed out. Perhaps clues as to whom this might be are suggested at the beginning of this videotape with the scrolling dump of the names of a selected squad of 'characters of the oppressor.'