Washington (METRO)

Peter d'Agostino

1979, 8:08 min, color, sound

In Washington (METRO), originally designed as a video installation for L'Enfant Plaza station, d'Agostino contrasts surveillance footage from the closed-circuit cameras that monitor the system with the original Pierre L'Enfant utopian plan for the city, while a bland travelogue is heard on the soundtrack.

Wassa

Philip Mallory Jones

1989, 3 min, color, sound

Shot in Burkina Faso, Wassa is a transcultural music video that unfolds with lush imagery and the evocative music of Houstapha Thiohbiano. Jones creates a dreamlike vision, capturing the vibrancy and sensuality of the everyday. This rhythmically textured work is part of his exploration of African...

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Vito Acconci 

1971, 9 min, b&w, silent, Super 8mm film on video

Acconci's face is seen in close-up. His eyes trace, in real time, the movement of the hands of an off-screen clock.

Watching the Press/Reading Television

Muntadas

1981, 11:20 min, color, sound

Writes Muntadas of this work, "It's about fragmentation. How media — in this case, magazines (People, Money, U.S. News & World Report) and television — reduces information." Continuing his investigation into the process of reading/viewing information, he contrasts blurred television images with...

Water In Milk Exists

Lawrence Weiner 

2008, 22:52 min, color, sound, HD video

Writes Lawrence Weiner: "SITUATED WITHIN A LANDSCAPE OF HUMAN INTERACTION THOSE ACTIVITIES THAT LEAD TO THE CONSTRUCTION OF STRUCTURES NECESSARY TO DEAL WITH OR CO-EXIST WITH THE FORCES OF NATURE, WATER IN MILK EXISTS ATTEMPTS TO PRESENT VARIOUS CHARACTERS AT A POINT OF DISJUNCTIVE BUT SIMULTANEOUS REALITIES.... THE ACTIVITIES OF THE PLAYERS FIT WITHIN THE GENRE OF ADULT FILMS. IN FACT, THE PLAYERS ARE ADULTS."

Watermelon Heaven

Anthony Ramos

1972, 32:44 min, b&w, sound

The duration of this early black-and-white performance work follows Ramos eating the entirety of a watermelon, slice by slice. The artist sits outdoors at a small dining table with a white table cloth, positioned directly in front of the camera as he makes his way through the fruit and a full bottle of wine. In the background, a radio surfs through Christian programming celebrating Easter Sunday. Ramos prods at and riffs on the racist, anti-Black tropes around watermelon, magnifying the gluttony of his consumption against the fervor of Easter day radio messaging.

Waterways: 4 Saliva Studies

Vito Acconci 

1971, 22:27 min, b&w, sound

Waterways comprises four minimalist exercises in which Acconci explores the formal, visual and dynamic properties of a body fluid in a controlled performance situation. Using extreme close-ups and amplified sound to force the viewer into the space of his body, he experiments with his mouth as a container for saliva, holding it in as long as possible, trying to catch it in his hands. By using a bodily fluid as art-making material, Acconci pushes the anti-aesthetic of body art to its radical extreme.

We Are Alive

Yau Ching

2010, 101:05 min, color, sound, Cantonese and Japanese with English subtitles

We Are Alive documents an experimental process of conducting media workshops in juvenile detention centers in Hong Kong, Macau, and Sapporo, Japan. A kind of collaborative project between Ching and the incarcerated teens, the subjects of the film use amateur video and sound-recording equipment to...

We Hold Where Study

Wu Tsang 

2017, 19 min, color, sound, HD video

We Were Hardly More Than Children

Cecelia Condit

2019, 8:51 min, color, sound, HD video

Condit writes: "We Were Hardly More Than Children tells an epic tale of bloodshed as lived by two women on a perilous journey through a world that has little concern for their survival."