Events
Events
Past Events
The Last Time I Saw Ron: A Tribute to Ron Vawter
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)
264 Canal Street #3W
New York, NY 10013
April 16th, 2024
7:00 pm ET
RSVP here. Seating is first come, first serve. RSVP does not guarantee entry, but helps us track interest and send event updates and reminders.
Electronic Arts Intermix is pleased to present an evening honoring the legacy of Ron Vawter, a leading presence in downtown theater, as well as film and video, from the mid-1970s until his premature death from AIDS-related causes in 1994.
Held on the 30th anniversary of his passing, the program will highlight Vawter’s collaborations with artists in video, featuring works by Joan Jonas, Ken Kobland, Leslie Thornton, and The Wooster Group. Although devoted to theater, Vawter collaborated with many of the leading film- and video-makers of the 1980s and 90s throughout his career and this program highlights some of his most indelible performances in the realm of video. In Ken Kobland’s Flaubert Dreams of Travel But The Illness of His Mother Prevents It (1986), Vawter can be seen alongside his frequent collaborators in The Wooster Group, including Willem Dafoe and Kate Valk. In her hauntingly beautiful video, Volcano Saga (1989), Joan Jonas superimposes images of Vawter and Tilda Swinton over a mythic Icelandic landscape as Vawter interprets the dreams told to him by Swinton. With The Last Time I Saw Ron (1994), made shortly after Vawter’s death, collaborator and friend Leslie Thornton creates a moving elegy to his memory, employing footage taken of him in his final months. In addition, Ken Kobland’s End Credits (1994) for Jill Godmilow’s film version of Vawter’s legendary one-person show Roy Cohn/Jack Smith (1992-94), provide fascinating glimpses of Vawter backstage as he prepares for his celebrated dual performances. Together, these videos convey Vawter’s distinctive talent and charisma in its many facets, seen during a pivotal moment of experimentation in video and performance, as well as AIDS activism, all strands of Vawter’s prodigious legacy.
Following the program, there will be a discussion with Ken Kobland and Leslie Thornton. An online, closed-captioned version of this program will be accessible for a limited time in May.
This screening accompanies a weekend tribute to Vawter at Anthology Film Archives from April 19-21, dedicated to the stage and screen versions of the artist’s masterwork, Roy Cohn/Jack Smith, and Free Fall (1994), a documentary portrait of Vawter shot behind-the-scenes during a live performance. From April 19-26, Le Cinéma Club will stream Bruce and Norman Yonemoto’s Made in Hollywood (1989), in which Vawter stars opposite Patricia Arquette.
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)’s venue is located at 264 Canal Street, 3W, near several Canal Street subway stations. Our floor is accessible by elevator (63" × 60" car, 31" door) and stairway. Due to the age and other characteristics of the building, our bathrooms are not ADA-accessible, though several such bathrooms are located nearby. If you have questions about access, please contact cstrange@eai.org in advance of the event.
Messages From the Avant-Garde: EAI x Collaborative Cataloging Japan
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)
264 Canal Street #3W
New York, NY 10013
April 4th, 2024
7:00 pm ET
EAI and Collaborative Cataloging Japan (CCJ) are thrilled to present a selection of video and film highlighting the exchange of avant-garde experimentation in New York and Japan during the 1960s and 70s. The screening is organized in anticipation of the forthcoming exhibition Community of Images: Japanese Moving Image Artists in the US, 1960s-1970s, on view at Philadelphia Art Alliance of the University of the Arts June 14-August 9. The program will be introduced by Ann Adachi-Tasch, Executive Director of Collaborative Cataloging Japan. RSVP here.
Jud Yalkut’s moving image account of the 4th Annual New York Avant Garde Festival, held in Central Park in 1966, accompanies works by Japanese artists Masanori Ōe and Akiko Iimura, underscoring shared engagement with intermedia innovation, psychedelia, and ongoing political upheaval occurring simultaneously in the United States and Japan. Both Yalkut’s film-video and Ōe’s Head Game (1967) use their own experimental practices to document countercultural events in Central Park, framing the realignment of humanity’s relationship with nature and the senses as fundamental to forming a new, harmonious social order. In Yalkut’s piece, shot on film and edited on video, artists and their families take over the park with performance and installation, and in Head Game, participants stage “The Great Be-In” in protest of the Vietnam war. Engagement with then-burgeoning media technology, generating vivid new sounds and images, serves a double purpose in resisting war, social conformism, governmental authoritarianism, and the top-down media practices in mainstream journalism reifying these realities.
Akiko Imura, an active participant in the New York underground scene, and the partner of Takahiko Iimura, also layers experimental imagery over a natural setting in Mon Petit Album (1974), folding sprawling, overlapped film footage of a pastoral scene under an original soundtrack by Jacques Bekaert combining flute and violin phrasings atop subtly processed sounds. Iimura herself drifts in and out of the frame, making direct eye contact with the camera while embedded in the landscape—a powerful act asserting autonomy over her own image as a woman. Iimura, Ōe, and Yalkut’s technological, visual, and aural experimentation opens sideways realities at once distinctly subjective and grounded in the universe outside the image.
Through engagement with their respective avant-garde scenes in Japan and New York, Iimura, Ōe, and Yalkut share many points of contact—artists like Shigeko Kubota, Nam June Paik, and Alvin and Mary Lucier, and collectives like USCO (Us Company or the Company of Us), Newsreel, and Third World Studios. These artists, their peers, and the interplay between their aesthetic and political inquiries paint a picture of an international avant-garde far more vast than Western art history’s commentary on the U.S. and Europe, with invaluable exchange between New York and Japan.
Collaborative Cataloging Japan is an international non-profit organization dedicated to preserving the legacy of Japanese experimental moving image produced from the 1950s through 1980s, including fine art on film and video, documentations of performance, independently produced documentaries, experimental animation and experimental television. The mission of CCJ is to preserve, document and disseminate these works, and enable their appreciation by a wider audience.
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)’s venue is located at 264 Canal Street, 3W, near several Canal Street subway stations. Our floor is accessible by elevator (63" × 60" car, 31" door) and stairway. Due to the age and other characteristics of the building, our bathrooms are not ADA-accessible, though several such bathrooms are located nearby. If you have questions about access, please contact cstrange@eai.org in advance of the event.
If you are experiencing a fever, cough, shortness of breath, loss of taste or smell, or other symptoms that could be related to COVID-19, we ask that you please stay home.
Making Your Life a Little Easier: Recent Works in Distribution
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)
264 Canal Street #3W
New York, NY 10013
February 29th, 2024
7:00 pm ET
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is pleased to present a selection of works recently added to our distribution catalogue. The evening takes its title from one of Cory Arcangel’s Runners series videos: a screen recording of a live bot performance on Walmart’s Instagram feed, in which the bot systematically “likes” every post, undermining the genuineness of Walmart’s slogan, and the supposed engagement with its customers. Videos in this screening share an emphasis on human care, curiosity, and idiosyncrasy as artists utilize evolving tools and platforms to witness the multidirectional links between technology, labor, and interpersonal relationships.
In this array of short videos, artists contend with the larger topics of AI, “essential” work, labor economies, and the false naturalization of technological progress. Two videos from Zoe Beloff and Eric Muzzy’s @ Work series (2022), now installed as a mural at the Electrical Industry Training Center in Long Island City, will bookend the evening. Following an expanded definition of “essential worker,” Beloff and Muzzy conducted interviews throughout New York City reflecting on cultural economies of labor and the diverse, often overlooked, skillsets involved in her interviewee’s vocations. Sondra Perry’s phantom. menace. (2023) uses AI DALL-E animation software to play out a speculative interaction based on a version of Perry’s Newark studio, formerly a barbershop. Kit Fitzgerald’s Romance (1986) comprises vibrant, computer-generated video paintings live-edited and set to original music by Peter Gordon. Cory Arcangel’s Transitions (2007), A Couple Thousand Short Films about Glenn Gould (2007), and Making Your Life a Little Easier (2020) make use of popular digital-age forms such as the stock video transition, social media feed, and self-directed YouTube performances to contextualize the relationships between these tools, their users and audiences, and technological development at large. Finally, Kristin Lucas’ Inforeceptor (1994), shot on Hi-8 and Super-8, provides a playful yet ominous anticipation of the then-cresting World Wide Web.
Following the program, there will be an informal chat with artists Kit Fitzgerald, Zoe Beloff, and Michael Britto. An online, closed-captioned version of this program will be accessible for a limited time in March.
Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)’s venue is located at 264 Canal Street, 3W, near several Canal Street subway stations. Our floor is accessible by elevator (63" × 60" car, 31" door) and stairway. Due to the age and other characteristics of the building, our bathrooms are not ADA-accessible, though several such bathrooms are located nearby. If you have questions about access, please contact cstrange@eai.org in advance of the event.
If you are experiencing a fever, cough, shortness of breath, loss of taste or smell, or other symptoms that could be related to COVID-19, we ask that you please stay home.
Image: Sondra Perry, phantom. menace. (2023). A warped, AI-generated closeup of two Black men shaking hands, shrouded in green light against an abstract blue background.
