Creative Artists Public Service Program (CAPS). Annual Report 1980-81

The Creative Artists Public Service Program (CAPS) serves  both artists and the public by assisting individual artists in the  creation of new works, and by bringing them and their work to the attention of a broader audience.

1980-81

Awards for Video

Artists’ Bios:

Deans Keppel – Me and Mom: An Autobiography (1979, 23 min., color)
Me and Mom: An Autobiography centers on certain aspects of the mother-daughter relationship during the dinner hour.  I am exploring the composite self, my self as experienced by the different people I have been, have been influenced by and will be.  It is interesting to me that as we grow and change according to our different influences, we retain certain selves.  These selves and the voices from these selves continue to exert influence on our growth and behavior.  This paradox, of changing but retaining an. essential self, is explored through my acting out personalities at various stages of my development and through projecting voices of future selves (Mom and Gran),  A separate self is formed which reflects both itself and these voices.  This is a piece which I wrote, taped, directed and produced, and in which I acted all the parts."  Deans Keppel's work explores the many concepts concerned with the self. Me (1977) discussed aspects of her personality; Me and I (1978) had Keppel on two separate TV monitors, talking to herself.  She further pursues this concept in Soap (in progress), which documents the breakup of an affair through soap-opera dialogue.  Keppel initiated two CETA video presentations in 1978 and 1979, and has exhibited her work at Media Study/Buffalo; The Kitchen, New York; Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester; and the Westchester Film Workshop.  She is currently an instructor at the State University of New York at Purchase.

Rita Myers – The Points of a Star: Chapter 1: Separations (1978, 45 min., color) 
The Points of a Star is a video narrative which, when completed, will have five chapters.  According to the artist, the general thematic framework "... is based on two primary elements; the articulation of various disjunctive landscapes and the consequent operations of these on one main character," a young girl who appears in the first episode.  Mysterious and evocative images--the shadow of hands cutting out paper dolls, a room filled with drifting mist, pebbles, an object floating beneath the surface of green water--provide the counterpoint to a series of poetic meditations on innocence, self-definition, and separation. Currently on the faculty of the Hartford Art School, University of Hartford, Rita Myers has been an artist-in-residence at Synapse Cable Network, Syracuse, N.Y., in 1974 and 1977, and at the University of Colorado, Boulder, in 1976.  This is her second CAPS Fellowship, and she has also received two NBA fellowships and an Artists Cable Project Grant from the Center for Non-Broadcast Television.One-person exhibitions of Myers' work have been seen at some of the country's leading institutions, including the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, The Kitchen, New York, the University of California Art Museum, Berkeley, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Ron Clark – Doubt (1975, 22 min., b/w)
In Doubt, Ron dark attempts to "see how little it takes to signify a whole discourse of meaning."  One mode of address is maintained throughout the tape: each of five characters speaks directly to the camera.  Their monologues intersect, and sometimes still photographs of one person are accompanied by voice-over narrative by another, so that they seem at times to be part of one another’s recollections.  There is no explicit connection between any of the narratives, but the political content of the second speaker's discourse is so emotionally charged that it pervades both the images and the other texts, providing a context which may or may not be spurious. The speakers remind us of members of SDS or the Symbionese Liberation Army.  They are in fact all New York artists.  Their stories might be different aspects of the same situation or they might be completely unrelated.  The tape is a study both of cinematographic technique and of the role of assumptions, visual clues, and context in formulating understanding.  Since 1974 Ron dark's videotapes have been presented extensively in North America and Europe.  Exhibitions including his work have appeared in such cities as New York, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Los Angeles and Houston, as well as in Switzerland, Germany and Canada.  In addition, dark has screened and lectured on his work at Rutgers University, the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, the School of Design at Basel, Switzerland, various campuses of the State University of New York, and Yale University.  He has been, since 1967, an instructor in the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

PEER BODE--Selections from PROCESS TAPES: VIDEO LOCOMOTION (MAN PERFORMING FORWARD HAND LEAP), (1980,5 min., b/w) KEYING DISTORTIONS (1980, 3 min., b/w) MUSIC ON TRIGGERING SURFACES (1980, 3 min., b/w) VIBRATORY SWEEP (1980, 2.5 min., b/w)
video is a place with a view
video is good clean fun
like having a volcano without the ash
video is seeing the seeing
Peer Bode's tapes use the structure and process of video to reveal the subjectivity of perception. He offers the following technical clues to the reading of the tapes: Altering the time relativity or time base of the camera signal results in vertical and/or horizontal drifting images; keying cut-outs or spacing plane separations are a result of light intensity comparing and switching; light intensity values are sampled at a dot so that the image is scanned as a score for a simple musical structure; a rhythmic magnetic deflection of the raster or grid results in bending and undulating.
Peer Bode has worked as both a maker of video art, and an authority on it. In the capacity of authority, he has curated, instructed and judged, and has done camera work, editing, lighting, and producing as an artist himself. In addition, Bode has participated in performances involving video, dance and audio. His work has been presented at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Manhattan Cable Channel D; Cornell University, Ithaca; Media Study/Buffalo, and the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, among others.

Shalom Gorewitz – Selections from Travels: Measures of Volatility (1979, 6 min., color) Excavations (1979, 5 min., color)  
In Measures of Volatility, a Quantel computer was used to rhythmically grab and release frames to capture gestures and object details.  Images recorded in Chicago and Houston were mixed in slow, abstract color shifts caused by voltage controlled chroma transitions emphasizing the landscape textures.  Selected images from the Village were sequenced in fast camera cuts and keyed over the city blends in multi-layered collage.  Excavations was recorded in Israel during the Spring of 1979.  The first section was taped in Beer Sheva at an Arab marketplace and mixed with a layering of signal distortions and warm colors.  This is followed by an exploration of ruins and vegetation around a deserted village isolated in the mountains above Jerusalem.  Light variations were sequenced to describe the dry heat and pounding sun.  The third section is a rapid sequence of cuts between a tractor pulling irrigation lines moving toward the camera and images recorded outside the processing studio.In the final sections there is a synthesis of previous elements within distinct spaces of floating bands of high frequency oscillations.  The tractor remains constant underneath the colorized flow.  By visually harmonizing the extreme natures of explosive situations with the act of irrigation, I hoped to make a statement about Israel.  Excavations is at once the exploration of the past and a cultivation for the future. Shalom Gorewitz's tapes have been presented in a variety of situations, from a 1976 Video/Poetry Series (with work by Gorewitz, John Cage, John Giorno, and Richard Kostelanetz); to RASTER, Gorewitz' own weekly screening of new work on Manhattan's Cable C Network; to exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York; to screenings in New York City's most noted New-Wave nightclubs.  Twice the recipient of both National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and New York State Council on the Arts Production Grants, Gorewitz is currently Adjunct Professor of Television at Hofstra University.

David Rose – Song Cycle (1980, 26.5 min., color)
According to the artist, "Song Cycle portrays the elusive quality of events in everyday life.  The tape moves through a cycle, from bright daytime images through darkened images and back again.  These images are connected by rhythmic water sounds and by the styles in which they were shot.  The tape attempts to underscore the similarities in color, movement, and form in all of these images.  The effects on the tape were all camera generated.  No image processing devices were used. Water becomes a metaphor for the camera lens, which filters, shapes, and integrates visual experience, and for the sensibility which gives that experience meaning. His videotapes, which include Available Light (1978), Still Life (1979), Portraits (1979), Song Cycle (1980), and Celebrate Rochester (1980), have been screened at the Atlanta (Ga.) Video Festival; the Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester; The Kitchen, New York; The 1980 New York State Fair in Syracuse, and several New York State galleries. His work has also been broadcast over several cable television networks, including those in Rochester, Syracuse, Manhattan, and York, Pennsylvania as well as WXXI-TV, where Rose has also been an artist-in-residence.  In addition to his 1980-81 CAPS fellowship, Rose has received production and post-production grants from WXXI-TV and from Portable Channel in Rochester.

Julie Harrison and Neil Zusman – Boundary (1980, 18 min., color)  Boundary combines a rich vocabulary of personal, historical, and electronically processed abstract images to describe the mythical journey of a female protagonist.  According to Neil Zusman it is "an experiment in story telling ranging from an abstract psychological attack upon a woman, a mythic death and rebirth, a personal dialectic with history, a world view embracing violence as villainy personified, a journey through the worlds of power and innocence, and a return to the transcendence of the individual over the boundaries of this historical mind-set. Pattern matrices, cross-referencing and formal matching relationships contribute as much as do highly charged symbolic images to the emotive vision expressed in the tape.  Machine processing is used to exploit the emotional possibilities inherent in both images and dramatic structure, so that the density and rapid sequencing of visual impressions suggest the multi-layered complexity of contemporary experience. Julie Harrison has long been associated with the interrelation of video and the other arts.  She has taped artists' performances for broadcast over Manhattan Cable Network and Teleprompter, acted as video director for New York University's Dance Education Department, taught video techniques at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Planning in New York and is currently Executive Director of the 168 Mercer Street Studio in New York.  Her work has been presented at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque; Franklin Furnace, New York; and the Experimental Television Center in Binghamton, among others. Neil Zusman has been involved with video projects for the World Trade Center Olympic Relations Committee, Soviet News Agency TASS, the Great Gorge Playboy Club, the American Dance Society in Binghamton, and the Capitol Theatre in New Jersey, among others.  In addition, he has acted as a film reviewer for the National Council on American-Soviet Friendship and been an artist-in-residence at the Experimental Television Center in Binghamton.

Antonio Muntadas – Between the Lines (1979, 25 min., color)
For the past ten years, Antonio Muntadas has explored in video and other mass media the way that information is presented and manipulated, the nature of subjective audience response and the myth of "objectivity." In Between the Lines, he follows a television reporter as she attends a meeting and edits her report.  The disparity between what appears on the news and the 'raw material' we have seen (which was itself implicitly selected and edited) focuses attention on the hidden decisions and opportunities for interpretation in the most apparently factual treatment of information, and calls into question the relationship between documentation and reality. Born in Barcelona, Spain, Antonio Muntadas' video career has commanded one-person exhibitions in Mexico, Belgium, Canada, and Spain as well as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Everson Museum of Art, Rochester; The Kitchen, New York; and Mori's Form in Los Angeles.  His work has been included in group exhibitions in Eastern and Western Europe, the Middle East nations, South America and Central America as well as the United States.  Muntadas has also authored two publications: On Subjectivity (1978) and Yesterday/Today/Tomorrow (1979). According to Muntadas, his work is related to the concepts of "media landscape and critical subjectivity."

Joseph Steinmetz – Unemployed in Buffalo: The Blue Collar Worker (1980, 30 min., b/w)  
Joseph Steinmetz' carefully structured, even-handed exposition of the complex unemployment problems in Buffalo's heavy industries maintains a scrupulously neutral point of view.  Avoiding polemics and oversimplification, the straightforward black and white photography, low-keyed questions, and brief interjections of background information discover no villains.  Instead, there are only well-meant solutions which fail to address the right problem, and the inevitable misunderstandings of people who either think in abstractions or cannot transcend their own immediate experience.  Steinmetz provides a far denser and more modulated view of his subject than is usually seen on commercial TV.  He shows us dignified but fallible human beings manipulated by dehumanized institutions, revealing their tacit complicity in their fate and the total intractability of their tragedy. Joseph Steinmetz has been working with video since 1975 when he first began studying with Ernest Gusella.  Utilizing Electronic News Gathering techniques (ENG), Steinmetz’ work has been concerned with social and economic issues in the western New York region. Since his first videotape, Dogs (1978), Steinmetz has been documenting the disparity between the individual and the larger, all-powerful forces of society and technology. His work has been broadcast over WNED-TV and screened at Media Study/Buffalo. Steinmetz is currently working on two documentaries: on the plights of the Love Canal residents and another on Buffalo's unemployed youth.  The latter is a collaborative effort with the Ellicott Youth Training Program, a federally funded program where Steinmetz is Communications Director and Instructor in ENG techniques.

Skip Blumberg – Earle Murphy’s Winter Olympics (1980, 30 min., color)
Earle Murphy's Winter Olympics fuses the familiar genre of sports programming with a character study of Murphy, a skiing enthusiast, patriot, eccentric representative of America's finest values; an outstanding example of the extraordinary qualities possessed by ordinary people. We see Lake Placid through Murphy's eyes, and this, combined with exceptionally skillful camera work, gives the tape a kind of personal freshness not usually present in sports footage, and much closer to the felt experience of attending an athletic event. Murphy's attitude contrasts sharply with the chauvinist competitiveness displayed in most media coverage of the Olympics.  At the same time, through interviews with athletes and townspeople, Blumberg discreetly reveals the distorting role of TV in shaping public perception of the event.  Skip Blumberg has been producing and directing video works since 1969, the year in which he co-founded Videofreex, an early video production group.  Later he went on to co-found Lanesville TV, an artists' station in upstate New York. Blumberg has been an artist-in-residence at the 1980 Winter Olympics and at WNET-TV, New York.  With pioneer nonfiction station TVTV, he covered the 1972 Presidential conventions, the rise of 13-year-old Maharaji Ji, and a Superbowl; all were broadcast nationally. Blumberg has had one-person exhibitions of his tapes at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.  In addition, Skip Blumberg in Dazzling Black and White was broadcast on WNET-TV, New York, in 1979.   Blumberg also received a 1976 CAPS Fellowship, and has received numerous grants and awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1980-81), and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1977).

Verity Lund and Henry Moore – By No Means Conquered People (1979, 30 min., b/w)
Verity Lund and Henry Moore have chosen to document the Long March, a demonstration by Native Americans in the summer of 1979.  There is a poignant tension between the Indians' desire for publicity about their grievances, expressed in a sophisticated yet banal political rhetoric which seems characteristic of mainstream America, and their clear sense of oppression and ethnic isolation.  At times this seems like a gathering of any group of contemporary working-class Americans, but the faces and bodies in the ordinary cheap clothes are the familiar figures of the ‘noble savage’ of a mythic past.  This tension is echoed in the contrast between the standard broadcast documentary format of the tape, with its alternation of interviews, voice-over narration, head shots and long shots, and the informality and unpretentiousness of the half-inch portapack images.  The tape is valuable above all as a record of the forlorn courage and spiritual seriousness of the marchers, and as a witness of their inevitable, sad corruption by the dominant culture. For eight years Henry Moore has produced videotapes for more than 40 social service and creative arts programs in his post as Director of Media for the Henry Street Settlement, a pioneering arts group in New York.  He has also acted as Video Coordinator for the Hazen Foundation and as Media Director for the World Education Foundation, and has trained students in both positions. With WPIX-TV, New York, Verity Lund produced, wrote, and hosted A Nation in View:  “The Urban Indian," and co-produced and wrote Education: "From Dreams to Reality."  She has also acted as producer, host, and camera operator for the Henry Street Settlement, where she also worked with audio and lighting. By No Means Conquered People is Henry Moore and Verity Lund's first video collaboration.  They received post-production grants for this project from the Synapse Video Center in Rochester and the Lucius and Eva Eastman Foundation.

Panelists:

Consultant:  Juan Downey