Lux: A Decade of Artists’ Film and Video (2000)



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Lux. A Decade of Artists’ Film and Video
Edited by Steve Reinke and Tom Taylor
2000, 376 pages SOLD OUT

Published by Pleasure Dome & YYZ Books

“The patient task of documenting discursive flows within the tumultuous lives of small, urban cinemas is frequently left to individuals whose intimacy with the subject enhances their understanding. In Lux: A Decade of Artists’ Film and Video_, Steve Reinke and Tom Taylor compile essays, drawings, and stories relating to the exhibitions at Toronto’s Pleasure Dome, a community-based venue for experimental, underground, avant-garde, and activist cinema. The book studies interactions occurring at the center and on the periphery of the venue as it relates to the larger issues of 90s art. Reinke and Taylor’s pastiche blurs the borders between the personal and the political, and the academic and the playful. Using the Pleasure Dome to focus on the broader conditions of film and video art in the past decade is a smart way of avoiding the pitfalls of trying to encompass the entire history of artists’ film and video art.” (Kyle Harris, Salon Journal)

“Set up as a curatorial collective in 1989, Pleasure Dome has sponsored annual New Toronto Works Shows and Open Screenings Under the Stars of very off-beat films and tapes. It has organized window installations, performance art pieces and evenings of experimental animation. Local hero Mike Hoolboom, collagist Larry Jordan, pixel-vision practitioner Sadie Benning and sexologist Annie Sprinkle are just some of the artists who have been given one-person shows by Pleasure Dome… So when Pleasure Dome decided to commemorate its first decade of guerrilla warfare with the media and society by creating a book, expectations were high. Lux: A Decade of Artists’ Video and Film, the anthology that has resulted, is a mixture of artists’ texts, documents, interviews, semi-fictional pieces and critiques culled from the ranks of the cognoscenti who have attended or participated in Pleasure Dome screenings during that time. Steve Reinke, a well-known video artist, and Tom Taylor, Pleasure Dome’s administrator, have taken on the task of being Lux’s editors.” (Take One)

Table of Contents
Ephemera, Tom Taylor
Ten Years of Dreams About Art, Laura U. Marks
Drawings, Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby
In My Room: A Recreational Masturbation Video, Jubal Brown
Flaming Creatures: New Tendencies in Canadian Video, Gary Kibbins
Alphaghetti, Monique Moumblow
The Ghost of an Exquisite Corpse, David Clark
Performative Impulses, Andrew James Paterson
Rendez-Vous, Colin Campbell
Autoethnography: Journeys of the Self, Catherine Russell
Tape Descriptions, George Kuchar
American Psycho(Drama): Sigmund Freud vs. Henry Ford, Nelson Henricks
All Smiles and Sadness, Anne McGuire
Women, Nature and Chemistry: Hand-Processing Films from
the Independent Imaging Workshop, Janine Marchessault
Passing Through: The Film Cycle of Philip Hoffman, Mike Hoolboom
And…, Barabara Sternberg
The Entwined Fates of Bruce LaBruce and Pleasure Dome, John McCullough
Every Faggot Loves a Fascist, Scott Treleaven
Interview with Bruce LaBruce and J.B. Jones, Cameron Bailey
Being a Witness: A Poetic Meditation on B/side, Abigail Child
Trashing Shulie: Remnants from Some Abandoned
Feminist History, Elisabeth Subrin
Blow-up: The Catherine Films, John Porter
An Introduction to The Catherine Films, Jonathan Pollard
Menace and Jeopardy: Five Safety Films from the
Prelinger Archive, Rick Prelinger
The Shape of a Particular Death: Matthias Muller’s Vacancy, Scott McLeod
Lux, Robert Lee
Storyboards, Wrik Mead
Mike Hoolboom Interview, Cameron Bailey
Kika Thorne: Bodies and Desire, Mike Hoolboom
Action, Kika Thorne
She, Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak
Mourning Pictures, Mike Hoolboom
Beyond the Absurd, Beyond Cruelty: Donigan Cumming’s Staged Realities in Non-fiction Theater, Sally Berger
James Benning Interview, Barbara Goslawski
Warhol’s Grave, Lia Gangiatano
Nocturne, Peggy Ahwesh
Two Pieces, Yudi Sewraj
Why do I keep repeating myself?, Kristin Lucas
4/14/99, Paula Levine and Jan Peacock
Move This, Jan Peacock
Appendix: Pleasure Dome Events 1989 — 1999
Contributors’ Notes
Acknowledgements