A+description+of+the+MWF+Video+Club+collection.

MWF Video Club 1986-2003
A long-term effort to distribute artists' and independents' video and film on video works in VHS format at consumer prices. A project of Collaborative Projects, Inc.

general description of the collection
The MWF Video collection includes primarily video materials relevant to the task of distribution. That is, masters and submasters of titles in distribution, multiple screening and sale copies. (This gives us some protection from deterioration, since many copies of numerous titles are in the collection.) However, given the particular nature of the distribution project, that is, its slow evolution into a catalogue sales operation, there is much material that was given in to be viewed and considered but did not end up in distribution. In addition, MWF Video held numerous exhibitions, and the collection includes many unique “show reels” of unreleased material sent by artists to those exhibitions which were not returned.

A database of most of the collection was prepared by project directors Alan Moore and Michael Carter.

The MWF Video Club has operated as a distribution project since 1986, distributing artists’ and independent filmmakers’ work in consumer-priced VHS editions. It was started by video and film artists in the artists’ group Collaborative Projects (aka Colab, established 1978), The catalogue lists work in four categories – 1) narrative/feature film, 2) art film/video art, 3) documentary, and 4) artists’ television. The MWF collection of artists’ videotapes is the largest component of Collaborative Projects’ archival holdings.

1. The Narrative and Feature Film section includes the “movie”' movies, precursors to the late-century surge of U.S. independent film. Many are from from the New York New Cinema movement of the late '70s, the self-consciously hip group that immediately succeeded the punks, sometimes styled "No Wave.'' New Cinema screening room entrepreneur Eric Mitchell's first feature is the Kidnapped (1978), straight-up, uncut Super-8 reels peering at a bickering gang of nightclub terrorists, junkies and intellectuals who kidnap the owner of the Mudd Club. Mitchell's second, Red Italy (1979), is a more accessible romance, styled after Bertolucci. Mitchell also appears as a general in English abstract painter James Nares' low-budget costume epic Rome ‘78 (1978), the most elaborate New Cinema feature. Nares' film stars David McDermott as the emperor Caligula, and a young Lydia Lunch as his treacherous wife. These Romans swear, smoke lots of cigarettes, and wander around New York's neoclassical buildings. Other filmmakers affiliated with this group that MWF distributes include Tina L'hotsky, onetime “queen of the Mudd Club,” Michael Oblowitz, Betsy Sussler, and Michael McClard.

The collection includes work by other filmmakers of the period outside the New Cinema group, like the early work of Amos Poe, Blank Generation (1976), Unmade Beds (1976) and The Foreigner (1978). Some filmmakers were members of Colab. The prolific "Bs,'' Scott and Beth, cranked out serials and shorts screened at Max's Kansas City rock club (in collection, not in distribution). Charlie Ahearn, known for the pioneer hip hop feature Wild Style (1982), produced two earlier features: Twins (1980) with Michael Smith in a double role, and The Deadly Art of Survival (1979). Liza Bear, who made the “foreign movie” Oeud Nefifik (1982), was also in Colab.

MWF picked up feature films made around the time of the project’s beginning, like Jacob Burckhardt’s features It Don’t Pay to Be an Honest Citizen (1985), and Landlord Blues (1988). Other East Village based filmmakers include Larry Fessenden, Mark Kehoe, Uzi Parnes, Jack Waters, Alyce Wittenstein, and Rachel Amedeo, During the later 1980s, MWF was most involved with Nick Zedd, an artist who fused a shock and schlock “B-movie” picture making style with an abstraction and indirection he derived from Jack Smith. The collection includes a full range of his films from the 1970s and ‘80s and a number of promotional interviews and reels of Zedd’s short works and documentaries assembled for exhibitions. Zedd promoted a group called the Cinema of Transgression, including Richard Kern, Cassandra Stark and Tommy Turner. (All of these artists’ work is in the collection; nearly all of the artists discussed in Jack Sargent’s book Deathtripping are in MWF’s collection.)

2. The mainstay founders of the MWF Video Club were video artists, and the list was strong in these artists. Many of them studied in upstate New York and worked at the Experimental Television Center with video synthesizers. Among these, Sara Hornbacher’s eye-bending abstractions dating from the '70s were produced on these experimental electronic devices, as were works by Hank Linhart, Terry Mohre, Neil Zusman, and Matthew Schlanger. Most of these artists built their own video processing devices, and many have moved on to work with computer imaging and online systems.

Other artists depended primarily on editing, combined with "found'' imagery, techniques that cuts across both film and video. In “Playboy” Tessa Hughes-Freeland cuts up an old porn film. In the “Erotic Psyche” series, Bradley Eros, working first with Aline Mayer and then with Jean Liotta, splices biology film clips with live action body shots in fast-paced streams of visual invocation of sex and ritual magic. Mitch Corber's early work, like “Juan in New York” melds his home movies with TV soaps and news shows to create an evocative mood portrait of the day, while Jayce Salloum strings found imagery in pursuit of grander themes. The Florida-based Critical Art Ensemble use found footage and editing style to make just that: formal meditations on media and the figures it constructs (1987-88).

We also have undistributed work by Kembra Pfahler. This artist and singer has been the shock-rock band Karen Black, and building a reputation as an underground cult queen. The films she made with her husband (and Karen Black cohort) Samoa in the mid- and late-'80s are alternately hysterical, gruesome and serenely esthetic. Pfahler was then part of the Naked Eye Cinema group, led by Jack Waters. MWF distributes Waters’ short “Brains by Revlon,” produced in the backyard of ABC No Rio made over as a café by Peter Cramer. Other undistributed works by the Naked Eye group are in the collection.

The poetic and imagistic styles of art film- and video-making fed into the commercial genre of the music video, and a number of those are in this category of the collection. One of the best of these is Marie Martine and Philippe Bounos' music video “11th and B.” With music by Suicide and scenes from the East Village “summer of love,” this tape is a tour de force of rapid editing, cut by the artist Irit Batsry. (“11th and B” is included in the documentary category because of its topical imagery.)

Some of the MWF artists work directly with venerable modes of the art film, like that which evolves out of cartooning. Direct Art (aka Michael Wolfe) animates dolls in little sets and uses clay. His G.I. Joes snorting up and romancing Barbies in “Heterosexual Love” (1984) is a classic spoof of rock 'n' roll cliches. Lisa Barnstone constructs doll and claymation works that are more free form and divorced from narrative intention.

Another variety of film and video art is tied to performance ideas. David Blair mixes documentary and commercial styles in his record of Mike Bidlo's P.S. 1 installation and performance “Not Andy Warhol’s Factory,” which is on a reel of Blair’s art work from that moment. The lavishly produced dance video by Frank Moore, and the art work of dance videographer Penny Ward work in the zone where performance and the video as art genre meld. In his largely static videos Joseph Nechvatal “performs” his visual art works over music for the camera. We also have David Leslie’s spectacular stunt performance work in the late ‘80s, the Impact Addict” videos, “The Rocket Movie,'' and Stunt: A Musical Motion Picture” produced at P.S. 122.

3. MWF Video had a special commitment to distribute work in the category it called Artists Television. This is mostly work by artists and independent producers made for New York City public access channels on cable TV. This demi-world of amateur television production swarmed with bizarre and intriguing productions. MWF distributed several of these produced by artists.

Much of the artists television MWF distributes was produced by Colab and its members. Even before that group was formed, All Color News was produced by a group of artists who would play a leading role in Colab (1978). They roamed Manhattan with Super-8 cameras to produce a news feature show about some darker aspects of urban life. Once Colab formed, it funded an ongoing program called Potato Wolf. This shifting group of video artists and painters worked together for five years. Much of what they did was live, as in “Raptures of the Deep” (1981), a program made up of sketches before simple sets, spoofing Jacques Cousteau's undersea TV specials. This was live TV with all the seams showing, as the actors stumbled over each other and the scenery collided. “Cave Girls” (1982), a collective venture initiated by Kiki Smith and Ellen Cooper, was the most acclaimed Potato Wolf production. The show begins with an archeological fantasy of a past culture of women (portrayed in lush Super-8), then examines the attempts of their present-day sisters to understand them. The collection includes club director Alan Moore’s ambitious and unpolished melodramatic series “Party Noise” (1978-79) and “Strife” (made for Potato Wolf in 1981-82), and documents of his collaborative work with Terry Mohre as Studio Melee (1985). The series feature well-known artists from the downtown scene playing roles.

Peter Fend, the visionary biocrat artist whose mapworks redraw the world's boundaries along the lines of riverine ecosystems, produced shows for Potato Wolf. His “Italy Wins World War III: 1990 Summit” (1983) contains most of the ideas he has subsequently worked out, including his notion of ``television government'' based on public access to satellite data from space. The collection includes numerous lectures and exhibition appearances by Fend and his team, several produced by MWF Video. Another important Colab video artist Mitch Corber has produced for cable continuously, making category-defying productions combining performance, documentary, video art, music and poetry.

Other cable productions included live variety shows like Glenn O’Brien’s “TV Party” (1980-82), produced by the Interview writer in emulation of Andy Warhol's TV series. O'Brien hosted Punk and No Wave music stars like Blondie and David Byrne in a noisy, drug-ridden studio environment. These were pros without contracts having a good time in the public eye. More production money went into the Manhattan Cable-produced Willoughby Sharp’s “Downtown New York” (1986). This variety show was produced at the height of the East Village gallery and nightclub explosion, and passionately hip sampler reels and promotional spots now exude period fashion flavor.

Artists have continued to work on public access cable subsequently, and the MWF collection includes much of this recent work. The idiosyncratic tradition of the personal show is exemplified by Rik Little’s “Church of Shooting Yourself.”

4. Much of the documentary work in the collection is specific to downtown Manhattan. Since the MWF Video Club was first located near the Lower East Side, then for a year in the East Village, most of the artists who visited and put work into the collection came from there. Their work documents the ascension of graffiti-oriented art and hip hop culture, the advent of alternative networks such as Colab and ABC No Rio, and the populist artistic explosion of the '80s when thousands flocked to newly sprung galleries and performance clubs in the East Village. It also reveals the extremist performance modes and life styles affected by the hard-living bohemians of the late 20th century.

MWF distributed work by Mitch Corber, a member of Colab. With his ½” Sony Portapak he documented the Real Estate Show and the Times Square Show in 1980, and the early days of the Lower East Side art space ABC No Rio. The collection contains sundry other documents of Colab and other art exhibitions, mostly unedited camera reels. Colab was primarily a visual artists’ group. Among other documentary holdings relevant to visual arts are mid-1970s documents by Avalanche magazine publisher Willoughby Sharp, like his Videoview series with Chris Burden and Joseph Beuys, art historian Ross Skoggard’s interview with Roy Lichtenstein, and some titles from Paul Tschinkel’s ART/New York series in the early 1980s. MWF has a camera reel of Jack Smith’s commercials for the Times Square Show, as well as a reel of his own tapes he showed at a salon evening.

MWF has a strong sampling of videotapes connected with the renegade squatter art movement called the Rivington School, such as Ray Kelly and Ed Higgins at the 99 Nights of Performance in 1984, poet Michael Carter’s appearance as Vindaloo, Fusion Art’s document of an AIDS memorial performance at the sculpture garden with noise band Demo Moe, and Neoist performance artist Monty Cantsin’s document of the destruction of the sculpture garden. A Japanese television documentary shows the subcultural scene in its context. Rik Little’s award-winning documentary on the Rivington School is certainly the best record of this overlooked group of artists.

Other documentaries deal with the violent police suppression of the East Village squatter movement, including Franck Goldberg’s 1990 How to Squash a Squat, and Rik Little’s Home Invasion. Goldberg earlier had covered the 1985 ``Lynch: The Murder of Michael Stewart.'' These works are part of a significant sprinkling of political documents in the collection.

Outlaw videographer Clayton Patterson is represented by MWF, with documentaries on geek performance artist and painter Joe Coleman, and transgressive filmmaker Nick Zedd. Zedd’s reel of a Boston performance by the suicidal ex-con G.G. Allin is in the collection, as is Hated, the Film Threat documentary on Allin. (MWF acquired other companies’ work regularly, so the collection includes, for example, out-of-release videotapes by San Francisco’s Survival Research Laboratories.)

Poets are extensively represented in the collection through early works from Mitch Corber’s Radio Thin Air series of poetry documentaries. These include his first, the hour long ``John Cage: Man & Myth'' (1990), and readings by Gregory Corso and James Schuyler. We also have Jim Cornwell’s documentary footage of the East Village art scene, including a reading by Miguel Pinero, and retrospective interviews he made in 2000. Pinero also appears in documentary work by Rick Van Valkenburg, who ran the Neither/Nor bookstore, a hive of poetry and jazz in the late ‘80s. Music is a constant in this work, of course, and significant pieces relating to the music scene include Virge Piersol’s document of an evening at Jeffrey Lohn’s loft in 1978 with a gaggle of art musicians like Barbara Ess, Glenn Branca, and Laurie Anderson. We distribute the documentary Arleen Schloss produced of Branca’s 1984 European tour.

A newly acquired component of the collection is the archive of the Downtown Tonight cable television show, some 80 tapes of this late 1980s East Village show, documenting artists, poets, performers and musicians. (This group has not been inventoried at this writing.)

MWF Video project continues to be involved in documentary work. In summer of 2003, we produced “Story Café” as part of the Federation of East Village Artists’ Howl! Festival. In roundtable interviews poets, artists and performers discussed their lives in the district.

Monday Wednesday Friday Video Club Alan W. Moore, project director contact: awm13579 [at] yahoo.com with subject line "MWF Video Club" storage: 123 Scribner Avenue, Staten Island, NY 10301

//This description of the collection was prepared in 2003 in an attempt to interest a New York City archive in helping to preserve the MWF Video Club collection. No progress has yet been made on that effort. Inquiries are invited -- awm13579 [at] gmail.com. Anyone who transfers it to digital media can have the collection.//