Jaime Davidovich

Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is pleased to present an evening of video and television works celebrating the publication launch of Broadcasting: EAI at ICA. This free screening features selections from the 2018 exhibition of the same name, and reflects on artist responses to themes of media saturation, commercialization, duration, and public engagement. Copies of the catalog will be for sale.

Free to attend. RSVP here.

Following the mass adoption of cable TV and home video recording technology in the early ‘80s, many artists had access to a new arsenal of strategies for intervening directly with televised media. Public broadcast carved out a space for experimentation, a sensibility showcased in such series as Jaime Davidovich’s The Live! Show (1979-84) and Robert Beck’s The Space Program (1985-86), both aired on the Manhattan Cable Network. The advent of specialized networks also presented new opportunities to mingle artists’ media with “normal” televised content: MTV, with their hip youth audience in mind, invited a number of artists to create culture-jamming interstitials in between music videos including video art pioneer Dara Birnbaum, and initiatives such as TRANS-VOICES commissioned artists including Birnbaum, Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, Philip Mallory Jones, and Tom Kalin to produce 60-second spots for American and French broadcast. As the choices on the TV remote became more vast, so too did an overwhelming sense of content glut and advertising onslaught. New consumer video formats like VHS and Betamax gave a new generation of artists the license to remix and deconstruct these images, a practice exemplified by works such as Cable Xcess (1996), a faux-infomercial by Kristin Lucas that warns of the long-term consequences of exposure to electromagnetic fields, and No Sell Out... or i wnt 2 b th ultimate commodity/ machine (Malcolm X Pt. 2) (1995), a stunning MTV-style indictment of consumerism and racial capitalism by “art-band” X-PRZ.

Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)’s venue is located at 264 Canal Street, 3W, near several Canal Street subway stations. Our floor is accessible by elevator (63" × 60" car, 31" door) and stairway. Due to the age and other characteristics of the building, our bathrooms are not ADA-accessible, though several such bathrooms are located nearby. If you have questions about access, please contact cstrange@eai.org in advance of the event.

Masks are strongly encouraged. If you are experiencing a fever, cough, shortness of breath, loss of taste or smell, or other symptoms that could be related to COVID-19, we ask that you please stay home.

On the occasion of the organization's 50th anniversary, Frieze has invited Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) to program a series of videos from its collection of over 4,000 titles. This selection offers a dynamic overview of the strategies and concerns of an intergenerational array of artists whose work experiments with communications technology, ranging from television to social media. Videos from the EAI collection will appear throughout the fair, on large-scale monitors at its entrance and in lobbies on two floors. EAI's participation is part of a program spotlighting New York non-profits organizations that have celebrated significant anniversaries in the past year, alongside peers Artists Space, A.I.R., and Printed Matter Inc. Works featured include:

Program #1 (4th floor, CRT monitor):
Anthony Ramos, Balloon Nose Blow-Up, 1972, 11:18 min
Kristin Lucas, Cable Xcess, 1996, 4:48 min
Jaime Davidovich, The Live! Show Promo, 1982, 5:32 min
Joan Jonas, Duet, 1972, 4:23 min
Ulysses Jenkins, Inconsequential Doggereal, 1981, 15:13 min
Robert Beck, The Feeling of Power, 1990, 9 min
Cecelia Condit, Possibly in Michigan, 1983, 11:40 min
Ellen Cantor, Evokation of My Demon Sister, 2002, 4:38 min

Program #2 (6th floor, HD monitor): 
Ulysses Jenkins, Notions of Freedom, 2007, 15:47 min
Trevor Shimizu, Lonely Loser Trilogy (Skate Videos), 2013, 14 min
Shana Moulton, Restless Leg Saga, 2012, 7:14 min
Peggy Ahwesh, The Falling Sky, 2017, 9:30 min
Tony Cokes, B4 and After the Studio, Part 1, 2019, 11:02 min
Maggie Lee, WINGS1 + WINGS2, 2013, 1:59 min
Maggie Lee, Department Store, 2021, 7:50 min

Mezzanine monitors: 
Peggy Ahwesh, The Falling Sky, 2017, 9:30 min
Trevor Shimizu, Lonely Loser Trilogy (Skate Videos), 2013, 14 min

Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is pleased to partner with Metrograph to present a series of programs highlighting our catalogue and its essential role in the history of artists’ moving image work. This program coincides with our ongoing celebration of EAI's 50th anniversary.

Continuing this November, EAI presents a slate of works for both Metrograph's theater as well as its At Home online platform. The second installment of this program will focus on artists who have embraced the radical potential of mass media, and iterative possibilities of videotape and broadcast. Throughout the month, we will screen theatrical engagements of Robert Beck/Buck’s Cruising (Back to Front), a scene-by-scene reversal of William Friedkin’s notorious thriller; Zoe Beloff’s trilogy of works exploring unrealized Hollywood films by radical artists (Sergei Eisenstein, Bretolt Brecht, and James Agee, respectively); and Ulysses Jenkins and Video Venice News’ Remnants of the Watts Festival, documenting the annual summer music festival in the southeast Los Angeles neighborhood. On Metrograph’s streaming platform, we present a showcase of Robert Beck/Buck’s short video works, and two programs pairing artists Jaime Davidovich and Kristin Lucas, and Shana Moulton and Trevor Shimizu.

In theaters:

Cruising (Back to Front)
Robert Beck/Buck, 1998
Monday, November 15th, 8:30 pm
With introduction by Robert Beck/Buck

Fragments for a Future: Brecht, Agee, and Eisensten
Three Works by Zoe Beloff
Zoe Beloff, 2015-2019, 104 min
Monday, November 22th, 8:30 pm
With introduction by Zoe Beloff

Remnants of the Watts Festival
Ulysses Jenkins, 1972-73, 60 min
Monday, November 29th, 8:30 pm

At home:

Shorts works by Robert Beck/Buck
Available November 16th to 21th
With introduction and conversation by Robert Beck/Buck

Short works by Jaime Davidovich and Kristin Lucas
Available November 23th to 28th

Short works by Shana Moulton and Trevor Shimizu
Available November 30th to December 5th

EAI is pleased to partner with BRIC on the exhibition Public Access/Open Networks, on view from March 23, 2017 through May 7, 2017. Curated by: Jenny Gerow, Assistant Curator at BRIC, in collaboration with freelance curators Reya Sehgal and Lakshmi Padmanabhan

Public Access/Open Networks showcases both historic and contemporary art works inspired by and produced for Public Access television. The exhibition features over twenty artists and collectives that have worked in the Public Access arena, as well as contemporary artists experimenting with the democratic potential of new media platforms on the Internet. As part of the exhibition, BRIC’s own Public Access television channels will also air continuously in the gallery space, and a stage in the center of the gallery will act as a set for the production of new programming by BRIC’s community producers.

In conjunction with the exhibition, EAI and BRIC will co-present the symposium Utopian Potentials and Media(ted) Realities on April 22, 2017 from 12-4pm.

EAI pays tribute to Jaime Davidovich (1936-2016) with a daylong screening of video works by the pioneering conceptual artist. Working with video, installation, and local cable television programming, Davidovich was a major and influential figure in the vanguard of individuals and groups exploring art in the context of mass media. The screening will include a selection of key works, including episodes of the cable access program The Live! Show (1979-1984), which Davidovich hosted in the guise of his buoyant TV alter-ego, Dr. Videovich.

Multiple works will be scheduled throughout the day, with a short break at 3:00pm. A special toast will take place at 6:00pm, followed by a screening of Adventures of the Avant-Garde (1981) and Outreach: The Changing Role of the Art Museum (1977), a collaboration with art critic Gregory Battcock, at 6:30pm.

For Armory Week, EAI presented a screening program at Artprojx Cinema featuring some of the newest additions to its extensive collection of artists' video. The hour-long program featured works newly added to the EAI archive by a multi-generational group of artists including Jaime Davidovich, Andrew Lampert, Kristin Lucas, Cynthia Maughan, Takeshi Murata and Martha Rosler.

Artprojx Cinema, a new collaborative venture with The Armory Show and VOLTA NY, presented a screening program of over 80 artists' films and videos from over 40 galleries participating at the fairs and leading international public arts organizations and curators.

ALL CIRCUITS ON, a screening series co-produced by Anthology Film Archives and Electronic Arts Intermix, celebrated Jaime Davidovich's unique approach to art and television with Adventures of the Avant-Garde, an eye-popping art-historical tour through the golden days of television and radical art in the 20th century. Bridging the divide between asceticism and philistinism, parody and homage, Adventures presented an exuberant career-spanning vision summing up Davidovich's iconoclastic view of video art, characterized by a statement by Marcel Duchamp: "I've been in it the whole time and I sill want to get rid of it."

Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is pleased to participate in The 2008 New York Art Book Fair. EAI will present a special program of videos that considers issues of access, circulation and obsolescence. The program explores "out of print" art and media, in the form of limited edition videos, site-specific installations, Internet searches, one-off broadcasts, and ephemeral actions and performances that exist only as documents or artifacts.

Dr. Videovich, also known as Jaime Davidovich, got in on the video scene in the early 1970s. His television apotheosis was as Dr. Videovich, host of the weekly variety program THE LIVE! SHOW, which featured interviews, opinions and performances with real and invented personalities from the art world, along with live call-ins, art lessons, and the Video Shop, which sold television-related kitsch. Davidovich will be live, screening a specially prepared collection of rare grooves.

Organized by Rebecca Cleman (EAI) & Andrew Lampert (Anthology), ALL CIRCUITS ON is a collaborative series of Anthology Film Archives and EAI. It is funded by Experimental Television Center's Presentation Funds, which is supported by public funds from the Electronic Media and Film Program of the New York State Council on the Arts. Special thanks to Sherry Miller Hocking.