Artists
Artists
From The Kitchen Archives
EAI collaborates with The Kitchen to introduce a selection of rare early video documents from The Kitchen's extraordinary historical archives. Restored through The Kitchen Archive Project, these works include video recordings of important experimental music, dance, installation, and performance art from the early 1970s to the mid-1980s. This selection includes seminal works of artists central to the downtown art and music scene, including Laurie Anderson, Bill T. Jones, Rhys Chatham, Jean Dupuy, Joan Jonas, and Lawrence Weiner, among many others. With this collaboration, EAI and The Kitchen celebrate their shared histories and their commitment to providing access to the vital legacy of experimental art.
Titles
This work is a single-channel version of the 1971 five-monitor piece Apple Eaters, in which poet and composer Anne Tardos asked artists and other friends to "pose" for her while eating an apple. The result is a portrait of Tardos and her environment in the downtown New York art scene of the early 1970s. Among the "apple eaters" seen here are artists Charles Atlas, Gianfranco Mantegna, and Juan Downey.
Award-winning choreographer/dancer Bill T. Jones' "new wave" choreography of the 1980s often featured video, text, and autobiographical references, with costumes and sets by noted downtown artists. This 1982 program features four powerful performances by Jones at The Kitchen. This document, which includes artist Keith Haring creating his iconic drawings as part of the performance, represents a snapshot of the early 1980s dance scene in New York.
Conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner employs minimalist props and scenarios to stage an oblique drama. The performers enact a series of choreographed exercises; their physical interactions with one another, and with the distinctively colored and shaped objects in the space, evolve in shifting relationships that become a kind of language. A multi-layered soundtrack suggests linguistic, rhetorical and philosophical puzzles. This performance translates themes and strategies seen in Weiner's conceptual artworks into the realm of theater.
In 1979, The Kitchen hosted a concert of reconstructed historical Fluxus performances. Over forty short pieces by thirty artists and composers were performed. Among the works featured were those by renown Fluxus artists Yoko Ono, Ben Vautier, La Monte Young and George Maciunus. Performers included Simone Forti, Dick Higgins, Yoshi Wada and Geoff Hendricks. The program includes One for Violin Solo, first performed by Nam June Paik in 1962, and Incidental Music part 2, written by George Brecht in 1961.
The Lunar Rambles series documents five unannounced performances by Fox in five outdoor locations in New York, which took place over the course of a week. In each of the downtown sites, which ranged from the Brooklyn Bridge to the Fulton Fish Market and Greenwich Street, Fox would play a large metal bowl and a parabolic steel plow disc with a rosined violin bow. The resulting tapes were then screened each day as part of a larger installation at The Kitchen. In each piece, Fox's ritualistic performance is observed by a distracted camera, which also scans the surrounding urban landscape and passersby. The near-ambient, droning sound, together with Fox's minimalist performances within the mid-1970's New York environment, result in oddly mesmerizing studies of time and place.
This series documents five unannounced performances by Fox in five outdoor locations in downtown New York over the course of a week. In each site, which included the Brooklyn Bridge and the Fulton Fish Market, Fox played a large metal bowl and a parabolic steel plow disc with a rosined violin bow. The resulting tapes were then screened each day as part of an installation at The Kitchen. Fox's ritualistic performances are observed by a distracted camera that scans the surrounding urban landscape, resulting in minimalist studies of time and place.
The Lunar Rambles series documents five unannounced performances by Fox in five outdoor locations in New York, which took place over the course of a week. In each of the downtown sites, which ranged from the Brooklyn Bridge to the Fulton Fish Market and Greenwich Street, Fox would play a large metal bowl and a parabolic steel plow disc with a rosined violin bow. The resulting tapes were then screened each day as part of a larger installation at The Kitchen. In each piece, Fox's ritualistic performance is observed by a distracted camera, which also scans the surrounding urban landscape and passersby. The near-ambient, droning sound, together with Fox's minimalist performances within the mid-1970's New York environment, result in oddly mesmerizing studies of time and place.
The Lunar Rambles series documents five unannounced performances by Fox in five outdoor locations in New York, which took place over the course of a week. In each of the downtown sites, which ranged from the Brooklyn Bridge to the Fulton Fish Market and Greenwich Street, Fox would play a large metal bowl and a parabolic steel plow disc with a rosined violin bow. The resulting tapes were then screened each day as part of a larger installation at The Kitchen. In each piece, Fox's ritualistic performance is observed by a distracted camera, which also scans the surrounding urban landscape and passersby. The near-ambient, droning sound, together with Fox's minimalist performances within the mid-1970's New York environment, result in oddly mesmerizing studies of time and place.
The Lunar Rambles series documents five unannounced performances by Fox in five outdoor locations in New York, which took place over the course of a week. In each of the downtown sites, which ranged from the Brooklyn Bridge to the Fulton Fish Market and Greenwich Street, Fox would play a large metal bowl and a parabolic steel plow disc with a rosined violin bow. The resulting tapes were then screened each day as part of a larger installation at The Kitchen. In each piece, Fox's ritualistic performance is observed by a distracted camera, which also scans the surrounding urban landscape and passersby. The near-ambient, droning sound, together with Fox's minimalist performances within the mid-1970's New York environment, result in oddly mesmerizing studies of time and place.
Produced at the seminal video art studio Art/Tapes/22 in Florence, Merlo is an early piece in which Jonas performs alone in several dramatic outdoor locations: a rocky gorge, a wind-tossed river, a balcony looking out over a valley. Cloaked in a dark, hooded robe, Jonas employs a long paper cone as a megaphone, singing melodies and keening, animal-like, into the landscape. The cone figure and the specific melodies that Jonas uses are recurring motifs in her performance vocabulary.
Rhys Chatham was an influential figure in the downtown New York music scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s. An art music composer who embraced the vocabulary of rock, he merged punk and avant-garde sensibilities, moving between art music and rock contexts. Here Chatham and his ensemble perform a series of compositions for guitars, electric bass and drums at The Kitchen in 1981. This document captures the driving minimalism, propulsive energy and conceptual sophistication of Chatham's pioneering compositions.
This marathon performance soiree was organized by multimedia artist Jean Dupuy at the Kitchen in 1974. Dupuy invited over 30 downtown artists, musicians, and filmmakers to each give a two-minute performance. The audience was served a home-made dinner of soup, apple tarts and wine, followed by the performance "menu." Performers included Charles Atlas, Joan Jonas, Hannah Wilke, Gordon Matta-Clark, Richard Serra, Philip Glass and Yvonne Rainer. This rare time capsule captures the SoHo art and music scene of the early 1970s.
This compilation was produced in 1975 by The Kitchen to present examples of its video, music, dance and performance art programs. The resulting compendium of multidisciplinary art works offers a window onto the downtown art and performance scene of the 1970s. Among the artists and works featured are Shigeko Kubota's 12-monitor video installation Video Poem; Trisha Brown's solo dance piece Primary Accumulation; Beryl Korot's 4-monitor video installation Dachau; Robert Kushner's performance The Persian Line; and a "word event" by Jackson Mac Low.
Constance DeJong's writing is closely connected to performance. Here DeJong reads The Lucy Amarillo Stories, while a musician performs a Philip Glass composition on the harmonica. The two performers interact attentively, the musician emphasizing passages in DeJong's text with the intensity of Glass's score. The reading develops as an atmospheric telling of the story of a young woman who leads a lonely life in New York, truly living only when she dreams.
The television production Two Moon July was a multidisciplinary event that featured experimental video, film, visual art, performance and music in a theatrical framework. More than thirty artists participated in the program, which reads like a "who's who" of 1980s downtown art icons. The event includes performances by Laurie Anderson, David Byrne, Arto Lindsay, Bill T. Jones; music by Brian Eno and Philip Glass; art by Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo, and video by Vito Acconci, Dara Birnbaum and Bill Viola, among many others.
