PAULINA POBOCHA: One of the things that was really important to us in this room was to foreground the moving image—to make the presence of this relatively new medium palpable. And what was particularly important to us was that we address the broad range of practices that this medium could absorb.
Of all the film and video artists in this room, Kenneth Anger is really coming out of a Hollywood context. He's based in Los Angeles and I think subtly commenting and playing with Hollywood conventions. The video itself is called Kustom Kar Kommandos, and what we're looking at are hunky guys dressed in tight jeans waxing a hot rod. The work addresses homosexual desire but does so very playfully and largely through innuendo.
ANA JANEVSKI: So the body at the time become, really, an important subject. The body is the place where the revolution happens—whether it's a gender revolution, it's a race revolution, the body is the site of many social markers.
PAULINA POBOCHA: As a point of contrast is Nam June Paik’s work called Electronic Fables. He's really dealing with the formal manipulations of video and film. And we really wanted to show the different ways that film and video were used to address different aspects of artmaking and create completely different types of works.
One of the more traditional works is the triptych by Jo Baer called _Primary Light Group: Red, Green and Blue_—a painting made of oil and acrylic on canvas. This is work that she actually referred to as TV Screens.
ANA JANEVSKI: So it's really showing how video, TV, and also experimental film were instrumental in artists' thinking and in artists' practices.
