Ant Farm

As part of EAI's ongoing 45th anniversary celebrations, we launched a series of screenings that highlight an under-recognized but historically important and creatively fertile area of our programs: EAI's Editing Facility for artists. Established in 1972 with early 1/2" open reel editing equipment, EAI's facility was one of the first such post-production workspaces for artists in the U.S. Over five decades, an extraordinary group of artists has used EAI's facility to create some of the most significant works in media art's diverse histories. The first screening, which featured an eclectic selection of works from the 1970s, charted the alternative artistic, political, and cultural expressions of artists experimenting with emergent video editing technologies and strategies.

Please join EAI for Participation, a special three-hour video program that will be screened continuously from noon-6pm on Friday, May 10th and Saturday, May 11th. Featuring works by Steina and Woody Vasulka, Ant Farm, Charlotte Moorman and Jud Yalkut, Carolee Schneemann, and Jean Dupuy, Participation looks to a period during the late 1960s and early 1970s that saw a profusion of artist-initiated projects, collaborative experimentation, and an inclusive, improvisational ethos. The screening features rare footage of performances and happenings, pioneering video documents, and experimental participatory works, capturing a community of young artists responding to the countercultural sensibility and social transformations of that era. Using newly available portable video technology as well as 16mm film, these artists created extraordinary documents that allow viewers in 2013 to experience something of the multi-disciplinary, interactive and process-based spirit that defined the alternative artistic and cultural scenes of that time.

ESSAY
CHECKLIST
EXHIBITION BROCHURE
INSTALLATION VIEWS
CONVERSATIONS AT DIA:BEACON: Nancy Holt, Joan Jonas, Anthony Ramos, and Paul Ryan with Lori Zippay
PRESS: New York Times, Frieze Magazine, Bullett
PHOTOS: Circa 1971 Gallery Talk with Lori Zippay, February 2012

Dia Art Foundation presented Circa 1971: Early Video & Film from the EAI Archive at Dia:Beacon, Riggio Galleries. Circa 1971 brought together 20 moving image works from EAI's collection of over 3,500 media artworks. Celebrating EAI's 40th anniversary, the exhibition was organized by guest curator Lori Zippay, Executive Director of EAI.

Circa 1971 included pieces by Vito Acconci, Eleanor Antin, Ant Farm, John Baldessari, Lynda Benglis, Shirley Clarke, Dan Graham, Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, Joan Jonas, Gordon Matta-Clark, Nam June Paik, Raindance, Anthony Ramos, Carolee Schneemann, TVTV, Steina and Woody Vasulka, and others.

Taking the year of EAI's founding as its point of departure, the exhibition set in dialogue a series of diverse works created in and around 1971, which are linked by alternative artistic and activist impulses. Circa 1971 exposed the generative encounters among these artists and influences and initiates unexpected correspondences between seemingly disparate works.

EAI presented 45 Years of Performance Video from EAI, a survey of four decades of artists' engagement with video and performance. This project is presented in conjunction with 100 Years, an exhibition on the history of performance art organized by P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center and Performa 09.

On the rooftop at X, EAI presented a program that focused on artists who use video to bring the interview into their art. Included in the program were Tony Oursler's interview with Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon; a 1982 video "magazine edition" by MICA-TV and Richard Prince; Chris Burden's video confessional, Big Wrench; footage of art collective Ant Farm's 1976 appearances on Australian talk shows; and Russell Connor's fascinating, rare 1964 interview with Marcel Duchamp, in which the legendary Dadaist looks back on his life and the art of the 20th century.

Four classic works of media intervention and countercultural spectacle by Ant Farm.

EAI and Ocularis screened a program of works commemorating direct television interventions, in the spirit of Ant Farm's Media Burn. This classic performative work saw two members of the seminal collective drive a converted 1959 El Dorado through a burning pyramid of TV sets on the 4th of July, 1975. Other works shown included VALIE EXPORT's Facing a Family, Chris Burden's Big Wrench and videos by Michael Shamberg and TVTV.

EAI and Independent Media Arts Preservation (IMAP) co-hosted the New York premiere of PLAYBACK: Preserving Analog Video. Produced by the Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC) - a leader in the field of media preservation - PLAYBACK: Preserving Analog Video is an interactive DVD that invites users to view the technical practices of video preservation and experience the complex decision-making process that artists, conservators, and engineers engage in when reconstruction of video artwork occurs. Based on the documented preservation of The Eternal Frame, the classic 1975 video work by Ant Farm and T.R. Uthco, PLAYBACK is an invaluable resource to media artists, curators, conservators and archivists alike. Joanna Goldfarb of the Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC) introduced and demonstrated the DVD. A screening of the 2003 restored version of The Eternal Frame followed.

As the keystone of EAI's 30th anniversary events, Museum of Modern Art presented First Decade: Video from the EAI Archives, a major retrospective that looked at the early days of video through EAI's historical collection. Featuring 60 works, the twelve-part program explored themes and issues ranging from performance and the body; narrative; cultural essays; activism, and poetics.