Description
How to use your video camera to change the world… or create your own.
Queer and alternative artists and performers using moving images to talk back to the mainstream, reach out to fellow freaks and explore stranger regions of fantasy.
The video revolution of the 1970s offered unprecedented access to the moving image for artists and performers. This Is Not a Dream explores the legacies of this revolution and its continued impact on contemporary art and performance.
Charting a path across four decades of avant-garde experiment and radical escapism, This Is Not a Dream traces the influences of Andy Warhol, John Waters and Jack Smith to the perverted frontiers of YouTube and Chatroulette, taking in subverted talk shows and soap operas, streetwalker fashions and glittery magic penises along the way.
Featuring Dickie Beau, Dara Birnbaum, Nao Bustamante, Vaginal Davis, Cole escola, Vincent Fremont, Alp Haydar, Holestar, David Hoyle, Kalup Linzy, Glenn O’Brien and Scottee.
Contains booklet with film notes and an essay by Gavin Butt and Ben Walters.
Commissioned by Performance Matters, in association with BURN.
Watch the trailer below.
“BRILLIANT” – The Guardian
“I LOVE THIS FILM. The best of the best performers in the western world keeping watch at their post on the vanguard. This isn’t pop culture b.s. THIS IS FUCKING ART!” – Justin Vivian Bond
Performance Matters, 2013, DVD-PAL, 119 minutes.
ISBN: 978-0957014985
Directed by Gavin Butt and Ben Walters
Edited by Tom Frederic
Music by Morgan Quaintance
Original performances by Dickie Beau.
Part of the Crossovers series of artists’ films, documentaries and dialogues reflecting the potential of marginal artforms and intense ideas within popular media. A set of the five current CrossoversDVDs can be purchased at a special price of only £50 here.
Trade orders: Central Books. Find the details on Unbound Trade Orders and Distribution Information page.
