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« Out to See Video »: EZTV’s Queer Microcinema in West Hollywood [anglais]

Julia Bryan-Wilson, 2014

1
Douglas Davis, “Filmgoing/Videogoing: Making Distinctions,” in Artculture: Essays on the Post-Modern (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 80.

2
Davis, “Filmgoing/Videogoing,” 84.

3
A note of disambiguation: a bit-torrent distribution group founded in 2005, also called EZTV, is unrelated to the EZTV founded in West Hollywood in 1979.

4
David E. James, The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 16.

5
See the Los Angeles–heavy account in Harry M. Benshoff and Sean Griffin, eds., Queer Images: A History of Gay and Lesbian Film in America (Oxford, UK: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006).

6
For a range of perspectives on queer video, see the anthology Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video, ed. Martha Gever, John Greyson, and Pratibha Parmar (London: Routledge, 1993).

7
Microcinema is here defined as a small screening site specially created to view videos, rather than a multipurpose space that only intermittently serves this function.

8
I am grateful to Michael Masucci and Kate Johnson for generously allow- ing me access to Dorr’s notebooks, drawings, and screenplay drafts, as well as to EZTV tapes and news clippings.

9
A comprehensive look at film and video installation is found in Mattias Michalka, ed., X-Screen: Film Installations and Actions in the 1960s and 1970s (Cologne: Walter König, 2004).

10
Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: EP Dutton, 1970). For more on the phenomenological ramifications of video projection in the gallery, see Liz Kotz, “Video Projection: The Space Between Screens,” in Theory in Contemporary Art since 1985, ed. Zoya Kocur and Simon Leung (London: Blackwell, 2004), 101–115. Kate Mondloch has provided a historical look at installation spaces in her Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).

11
See Gloria Sutton, “Stan VanDerBeek’s Movie-Drome: Networking the Subject,” in Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film, ed. Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003); and Branden W. Joseph, “‘My Mind Split Open’: Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” Grey Room 8 (Summer 2002): 80–107.

12
Corinna Kirsch discusses “sadistic” lack of benches in video-viewing galleries in her overview of early video exhibitions. Corinna Kirsch, “The Single-Channel Fallacy and Other Myths about Curating Video Art,” Artwrit 7 (Summer 2011), http://www.artwrit.com/article/the-single-channel-fallacy/.

13
Christine Tamblyn, “Qualifying the Quotidian: Artist’s Video and the Production of Social Space,” in Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices, ed. Michael Renov and Erika Suderburg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 14.

14
Nancy Buchanan and Catherine Taft, “Mobile Indeed: The Marketing of Video Art and Video Art as Marketing,” in Resolutions 3: Global Networks of Video, ed. Erika Suderburg and Ming-Yuen S. Ma (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 18–35.

15
For a powerful critique of the masculinist canonization of Paik, see Martha Rosler, “Video: Shedding the Utopian Moment” (1986), in Martha Rosler, Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings 1975–2001 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), esp. 72–74. This masculinism, for some, has been viewed as an extension of the Portapak’s rhetorical construction as “a macho heterosexual apparatus.” B. Ruby Rich, email to the author, February 2012.

16
For more on alternative California video collectives, see Deanne Pytlinski, “San Francisco Video Collectives and the Counterculture,” in West of Center: Art and the Countercultural Experiment in America, 1965–1977, ed. Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 56–73.

17
For instance, the cover headline of a local periodical about EZTV read, “An EZier Time for Video Artists,” Focus on Our Town, 13 April 1984.

18
Lewis MacAdams, “EZTV,” California Magazine, 1984; and Tom Girard, “EZTV Video Gallery Showcasing Indie Productions,” Variety, 12 December 1983, 6.

19
Dorr, quoted on the EZTV Timeline created by Nina Rota, http://ninarota.com/eztv_timeline/eztv.html.

20
Steven Mikulan, “Film/Video,” L.A. Style 5, no. 12 (May 1990).

21
Michael Masucci, email to the author, 20 June 2009.

22
Masucci, email.

23
David Ross was the influential curator of video art at the Long Beach Museum of Art, which became a laboratory for video exhibition. The early history of their video program is outlined in Exchange and Evolution: Worldwide Video Long Beach 1974–1999, ed. Kathy Rae Huffman and Nancy Buchanan (Long Beach, CA: Long Beach Museum of Art, 2011).

24
Mitch Tuchman, “John Dorr’s EZTV, or Movies While You Wait,” Los Angeles Reader, 23 April 1982, 16. See also Mitch Tuchman, “An Interview with John Dorr,” LAICA Journal, Summer 1981, 66.

25
Chrissie Iles, “Between the Still and Moving Image,” in Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art, 1964–77, exh. cat. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2001), 33.

26
Jerry Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (New York: Quill, 1978), 133.

27
Thor Johnson, “First Came EZTV . . . Then Adam and Company,” Thor Johnson’s World [blog], 25 March 2010, http://thorjohnsonsworld.blogspot.com/ 2010/03/first-came-eztvthen-adam-company.html.

28
See Phil Zarecki, EZTV: A Definition, a half-hour documentary shown in 1992 on the West Hollywood cable access channel.

29
See, for instance, Mitch Tuchman, “Easy Viewing,” American Film: Magazine of the Film and Television Arts 8, no. 10 (September 1983).

30
Dara Birnbaum’s oeuvre offers but one example with its appropriations, fragmentations, and intentional, feminist frustration of narrative resolution.

31
Filmmakers Forum, Rick Pamplin, host, Group W-TV, Los Angeles, 1984, http://vimeo.com/61926304.

32
For a brilliant exploration of the queer-theoretical and copyright impli- cations of video as tape given its easy reproducibility, see Lucas Hilderbrand, Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).

33
Rosler, “Video.”