[Nettime-bold] SELZER PANTS | Film and Video Program

Selzer Pants is the first of weekly changing programs of Art cinema and video art. Screenings from Tuesday through Sunday at 22.00 hours

SELZER PANTS | Is everything a performance? Do we perform our identities? Is
the construction of subjectivity a performance? Old questions, I know, but
here are some newer ones: Does every performance end in applause? Who,
exactly, is applauding? And why, and for whom? I'm writing these notes, a
little bit drunk, in the back of a paperback edition of Saul Bellow's
"Ravelstein." The front of the book, first paragraph, page one:

Odd that mankind's benefactors should be amusing people. In America at least
this is often the case. Anyone who wants to govern the country has to
entertain it. During the Civil War people complained about Lincoln's funny
stories. Perhaps he sensed that strict seriousness was far more dangerous
than any joke. But his critics said that he was frivolous and his own
Secretary of War referred to him as an ape.

The videos in this program are mostly by young American and quasi-American
(Canadian) artists. The most cutting thing that is said about contemporary
art, particularly video, is that it is often a hollow pastiche of 70's
conceptualism. A re-performance of performances that once meant something,
or mean something now but only in hind-sight, in historical context. As if
we were all the bastard children of Valie Export and Vito Acconci, doomed to
our nostalgic, mocking imitations.

But there is no reason to accept these easy dismissals. Here is one reason
not: This work has a complex and profound conception of audience, of
reception. If it is a truism that in this postmodern, postcolonial world we
cannot rely on a hegemonic Dear Reader, cannot be sure that our audience is
one of us, one of them, or one of anything - it still remains to establish a
rhetoric for a heterogeneous, shifting, unfathomable audience. Implied
audiences are constructed around bodies of shared knowledge and values. One
strategy that many of these tapes employ is to construct multiple specific
implied audiences from which the artists' - both as performers and implied
authors - maintain a sceptical distance. Artist as performer as clown as
ape. Not really a circus, but a vaudeville stage: the implied audience may
be urban, Jewish, entrepreneurial, Catskill-vacationing, but the schtick
works just as well with the hicks in Spokane. So: A little song, a little
dance, a little seltzer down your pants.

Kevin Brosnan and Joseph Cassan, Spring Succeeds, 2001, 4 min
Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby, Being Fucked Up, 2001, 10 min
Kwabena P. Slaughter, 5 is Transformation, 2001, 1 min
Sarah Conaway, Maroon Mission, 2000, 7 min
Jeremy Drummond, Stallworks Act I, 1999, 1 min
Eddo Stern, Sheik Attack, 1999, 16 min
Sarah Conaway, Siblings, 2001, 1 min
Jeremy Drummond, Stallworks Act III, 1999, 3 min
Sarah Conaway, Two Dogs and a Ball, 2001, 3 min
Jeremy Drummond, Spit, 2000, 3 min
Kwabena P. Slaughter, Yo Tengo Un Suena Hoy, 2000, 4 min
Jeremy Drummond, Untitled, 2001, 5 min
Sarah Conaway, Riddle, 2001, 1 min
Miranda July, Nest of Tens, 1999, 27 min

Selzer Pants is sponsored by: Gemeente Amsterdam, Mondriaan Stichting,
Mentrum, Brand Bier, Beam Systems

SMART Project Space | www.smartprojectspace.net
Exhibition Space: 1e Constantijn Huygensstraat 20
Office: Keizersgracht 720, NL-1017 EW Amsterdam
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