Online beginning May 10, 2016
Curated by George William Price
As part of Video Data Bank’s ongoing commitment to the presentation of groundbreaking moving image art, VDB TV presents this free online program of curated video works spanning 1981–2005 that explore insanity and temporal dissonance. Ship of Fools features works by Max Almy, Mike Kuchar, Tony Oursler, Tom Rubnitz, Sterling Ruby, Hester Scheurwater, and Jennet Thomas.
In his seminal text Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, philosopher Michel Foucault writes lyrically on Plato’s allegory of the ship of fools taken from Book VI of his Republic. Foucault fictitiously wrote of great ships that would transport society’s madmen, in their leaking bows, from port city to port city around the coast of mainland Europe. Sometimes these barges of the damned would come crashing ashore and release their human cargo out onto the jagged rocks below like a burst artery. It is this spillage of “likeminded” insanity and temporal dissonance that is explored throughout Ship of Fools. From the viscerally disturbed performance of Hester Scheurwater in her video Mama to the camp irony of Tom Rubnitz’s Pyskho III The Musical, each title wrestles with the subjects of family and addiction, death and dying, and social or physical movement.
A short essay, written by curator George William Price, accompanies the program, and can be read here.
About VDB TV
VDB TV is a rotating series of groundbreaking programs presenting essential video art, streaming free for the first time to the general public on the Video Data Bank website. From early media pioneers, to sensational contemporary artists, VDB TV provides unprecedented access to the culturally significant VDB archive of over 6,000 video art titles. VDB TV is curated by prominent programmers and moving image art specialists from around the world. To advance accessibility of the collection, all programs included within VDB TV are close captioned for the hearing impaired. VDB TV is supported in part by a Media Arts award from the National Endowment for the Arts. To find out more about how NEA grants impact individuals and communities, visit www.arts.gov.
About Video Data Bank
Founded at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 1976 at the inception of the media arts movement, the Video Data Bank (VDB) is a leading resource in the United States for video by and about contemporary artists. The VDB collection includes the work of more than 600 artists and 6,000 video art titles.
The VDB makes its collection available to museums, galleries, educational institutions, libraries, cultural institutions and other exhibitors through a national and international distribution service. VDB works to foster a deeper understanding of video art, and to broaden access and exposure to media art histories through its programs and activities. These include preservation of historically important works of video art, the perpetuation of analog and digital archives, publishing of curated programs and artists’ monographs, the commissioning of essays and texts that contextualize artists’ work, and an extensive range of public programs.
