Dirty Looks
Tea Room, William E. Jones
Dirty Looks, a "month of queer interventions in NYC spaces," continues through the end of July. A series of one-night art installations, performances, and film and videos screenings, in a variety of gay bars and other venues, some of them shown in a truck parked outside former infamous gay spaces.
Here are some of the events through the end of the month.
Please note I have copy-and-pasted the descriptions from the Dirty Looks program, I am not responsible for the overuse of artspeak. You can view the full list here: http://onlocation.dirtylooksnyc.org/, which also has background information on the artists, and annotations on the selected gay spaces.
Wednesday, July 18
Cock Gobblin'
Peter Cramer & Jack Waters
cellphone movie projections, plastic, canvas, glitter, paint, wood, cardboard, bodily fluids
The Cock
29 2nd Avenue | 11PM - 4AM
Cock Gobblin' is a mash up of decor, installation and film made especially for The Cock that encapsulates darkroom debauchery. It flaunts the warning signs of "No Sexual Activity Allowed" plastered on the bar's walls. In 2006, invited by Linda Simpson to do decor and performance for SLURP (her then weekly party at The Cock) we created an event titled "Satyricum 1 & 2" that included a wine pissing human fountain, spaghetti wrestling in the basement, orgiastic performances upstairs on the stage and a screening of Fellini's Satyricon. Written up by Michael Musto, uncredited photos of this bacchanal ended up in Slava Mogutin book NYC Go-Go.
Sunday, July 22
Splatter Movie
Mike Kuchar
video
Nowhere
322 East 14th Street | 4PM - 4AM, continuous loop
"Sex, sleaze, drugs, blood, and much, much more!" This is how Mike Kuchar describes his Splatter Movie. Kuchar queers horror movie tropes in this over-the-top, lurid melodrama, set in a dungeon and featuring assorted S/M and mock-Satanic rituals among a cast of good-looking boys and girls. Expect pentagrams, the Number of the Beast, ritual bloodletting, sex acts both ludicrous and depraved, and amputation by chainsaw.
Monday, July 23
Tearoom
William E. Jones
1962/2007, 16mm transferred to video
Julius'
159 West 10th Street | 4PM - 4AM, continuous loop
Tearoom consists of footage shot by the police in the course of a crackdown on public sex in the American Midwest. In the summer of 1962, the Mansfield, Ohio Police Department photographed men in a restroom under the main square of the city. The cameramen hid in a closet and watched the clandestine activities through a two-way mirror. The film was used as court evidence against the defendants, all of whom were found guilty of sodomy, which at that time carried a mandatory minimum sentence of one year. The original surveillance footage shot by the police came into the possession of director William E. Jones while he was researching this case for a documentary project. The unedited scenes of ordinary men of various races and classes meeting to have sex were so powerful that the director decided to present the footage with a minimum of intervention. Tearoom is a radical example of film presented "as found" for the purpose of circulating historical images that have otherwise been suppressed.
Friday, July 27
Loads
Curt McDowell
1980, 16mm film on digital video
Adonis Theatre
8th Avenue and 43rd Street | 10:45AM - 12AM
Please email to reserve a tomeslot for this unique screening event. Viewers will be admitted one at a time.
Curt McDowell's Loads documents the filmmaker's infamous penchant for seducing straight men. A confessional of the most intimate caliber, Loads documents half a dozen such seductions and the eventual product of these casual encounters. It is also the masterwork of McDowell's short-form film career, which included 15+ works (with such salacious titles as Wieners and Buns Musical, Peed Into the Wind and Pornografollies). Far more explicit than the hysterical films of his mentor and lover, George Kuchar, McDowell's film has a similar sense of humor and curt style that is perhaps prescient of the intimate video diary format that Kuchar would later turn to, when he embraced the Hi-8 video medium in the mid-1980s. McDowell's engagement with San Francisco's Mission District street culture writes the film as a veritable documentary of the 1980 cruising scene and the film lingers as a pre-AIDS swansong of casual sex and a lusty laissez-faire attitude that would quickly vanish, shortly thereafter.
Monday, July 30
Sex Garage, LA Plays Itself, A Night At Halsted's, El Paso Wrecking Corp. (actor) Three Day Pass (actor), Pieces of Eight (actor)
Fred Halsted
1972 - 1982, 16mm on video and video.
Eastern Bloc
505 East 6th Street #1 | 10PM - 4AM
Fred Halsted's film works offer a dark alternative to the pastoral scenes of Halsted's contemporary, Wakefield Poole. Like Poole, whose Boys In The Sand was an art house crossover hit, Halsted's LA Plays Itself was a sensation, hitting screens in a fleeting moment of genuine interest in pornography (an interest mimicked by hetero smashes Behind the Green Door and Deep Throat). Halsted's world reflects his engagement with S&M culture, and his films depict such scenes with a neorealistic flair. As akin to the works of Jack Smith and Kenneth Anger as he was to any pornographic film forms, Halsted's oeuvre is a dark, ominous and enthralling one, as fascinating for its now-documentary depictions of 1970s hustler street culture as it is erotic and titillating.
Tuesday, July 31
Youtube XXXtrava-GANZA
Various Artists
2012, Youtube
Heather's
506 East 13h Street |10PM
A YouTube slam. Dueling teams try to outdo each other as they scour YouTube in search of the "gayest" videos they can find, covering such YouTube genres as: gay music videos, obliquely gay videos, and funniest gay home videos. These artists were carefully hand-selected by virtue of their cultural acumen and the amount of time they spend trolling YouTube videos.