Radical L@TE:Super-Gigantic HalfLifers DVD Mega-Release Party

Radical L@TE: 

Super-Gigantic HalfLifers DVD Mega-Release Party

February 18, 2011; 7:30 p.m.; Gallery B - (Doors 5 p.m., DJ 6:30 p.m.)

Programmed by Steve Seid and Kathy Geritz

Join us for a launch party for the compilation DVD, HalfLifers: The Complete History, the definitive pixel packet of legendary activation artists Torsten Zenas Burns and Anthony Discenza. For one night only, the HalfLifers will repurpose Thomas Faulders’s BAMscapeas an omnidirectional, construction-colored exploration vehicle, navigating a 360-degree journey into the interior reaches of HalfLifers’s “videonic” backlog of afterlife relationships, rescue rituals, and psychic manifestations. This spatio-temporal hub will sync up with other portable pictographic projections by longtime friends and collaborators of the HalfLifers, including Anne McGuire, Darrin Martin, Jordan Biren, Ursula Brookbank, Christian Burns, and Animal Charm. The celebration will be consummated with an anthro-engineered dough object—by which we mean a sugar-frosted biomemory conduit activated by physical ingestion.
Special thanks to: Julie Chang (Zombie cake-maker)

Post-Conceptual Performance: Video, 1977 to 1997 @ LACE (LOS ANGELES, CA) & PFA (BERKELEY,CA)

Radical Light: 

Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area

Post-Conceptual Performance: Video, 1977 to 1997
(PFA - Berkeley, CA)
Sunday, January 23, 2011- 5:30 p.m - Total running time: c. 80 mins
Jordan Biren, Tony Labat, Anne McGuire and HalfLifers in Person
( LACE - Los Angeles)
Thursday, January 20, 2011- 9:00 p.m - Total running time: c. 80 mins

By the mid-seventies, the concept of the artist’s body as medium had evolved from arid performance to effusive provocation. Tony Labat emerged in 1977 with the remarkable series Solo Flight in which the artist’s identity is given sudden form through subtle ethnic gestures. With pithy performances like Laurie Sings Iggy and the Madonna Series, Leslie Singer took on the celebrity industry with an economy of parodic impersonation and food flinging. In These Are the Rules, Doug Hall enacted an authoritarian pose to deflate the power vested in political symbols. Where Cecilia Dougherty dismisses the patrimony of past mentors with her remake of Howard Fried’s Fuck You, Purdue, Jordan Biren reinstates The Body as a nervous engine of desire. Finally, Anne McGuire’s tortured evocation of psychic disarray, I Am Crazy and You’re Not Wrong, gives way to the frantic activation of domestic space in the HalfLifers’s highly caloric Actions in Action.Solo Flight (Tony Labat, 1977, excerpts, 20 mins, B&W, Video, PFA Collection). Laurie Sings Iggy (Leslie Singer, 1987, 4 mins, Color, Video, PFA Collection). Fuck You, Purdue (Cecilia Dougherty, 1987, 12 mins, B&W, Video, PFA Collection). These Are the Rules (Doug Hall, 1983, 4:39 mins, Color, Video, From EAI). My Life as a Godard Film by Whitney Houston (Leslie Singer, 1988, 4 mins, Color, Video, PFA Collection). The Body (Jordan Biren, 1990, 15 mins, B&W, Video, PFA Collection). The Madonna Series: 1-5 (Leslie Singer, 1987, 4 mins, Color, Video, PFA Collection). I Am Crazy and You’re Not Wrong (Anne McGuire, 1997, 11 mins, B&W, Video, From the artist). Actions in Action (HalfLifers, 1997, 10 mins, Color, Video, From the artist).—Steve Seid