This club was started by video artists, and we've maintained a strong list of titles in this little-understood category. The art film is the watering hole of cinematic form, a place where esthetic concerns meet the fractured narrative. As a category, "Video Art & Art Film'' is very fluid, so much so that it shows up the arbitrary nature of categorizing artists' film and video production at all.

The earliest, and some would say the "purest'' video art in this group is produced by the artists who studied in upstate New York and worked at the Experimental TV Center with video synthesizers designed with Nam June Paik. Some of Sara Hornbacher's eye-bending abstractions dating from the '70s were produced on these experimental analog electronic devices, as were works by Hank Linhart, Terry Mohre, Neil Zusman and Matthew Schlanger. Nearly all of these artists built their own video processing devices, and many of them have been quick to seize upon the possibilities of the latest computer imaging.

Other artists depending primarily on rapid editing, using pre-existing or "found'' imagery, a technique that cuts across both film and video. In Playboy Tessa Hughes-Freeland cuts up an old porn film. Bradley Eros and Jean Liotta splice biological clips with their own live action body shots in a fast-paced stream of visual manipulation. 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. Marie Martine and Philippe Bounos' music video cum documentary 11th & B (which is included in the documentary category because of its topical imagery) is a tour de force of rapid editing, cut by the artist Irit Batsry.

Some of our artists work directly with the most venerable and clear-cut style of the art film, that which evolves out of the methods of cartooning. Direct Art (aka Michael Wolfe) animates dolls in little sets, and, like Paul Richmond, has done work in "claymation.'' His G.I. Joes snorting up in Heterosexual Love are classic rock 'n' roll cliches. Lisa Barnstone too 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, just as was the notorious "boring'' video art of the '70s. In this mode, David Blair mixes documentary and commercial styles in his record of Mike Bidlo's P.S. 1 performance/installation Not Andy Warhol's Factory. Eros and Liotta also video their performances and perform for their videos, working the powerful image-mine of sex and ritual magic. 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.

Poetic and imagistic film- and video-making has a separate artistic tradition as old as the media themselves, a tradition which begins with the Surrealists and Maya Deren and is exemplified by the abstract opuses of Stan Brakhage, Michael Snow and others. This work has historically been attended only by a cognescenti (including many successful commercial directors), and it requires different habits of attention than narrative film. Recently, however, the art film has given birth to the music video, and we have included a number of those here, reflecting various approaches toward the moving images.

Monday Wednesday Friday Video Club 718-447-1347

123 Scribner Avenue, Staten Island, NY 10301