Video Free America » Skip Sweeney

LIVE VIDEO FEEDBACK

Skip — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 22:44:03 +0000

Streamed live from a set of digital video machines in VFA’s studio… this video feedback is an artificial living flow of electronic light rays… It cannot be controlled… It’s more like surfing waves of light trying to find delicate balance points within the flow… left alone it changes and can wipe out… settings will be modified to allow new and different looks everyday.

Philo T. Farnsworth

Skip — Fri, 01 May 2009 22:42:16 +0000

“Video is a fugitive medium,” said Getty Research Institute’s Glenn R. Phillips, and he should know. As curator for “California Video,” running at the Getty through June 8, he enjoyed the luxury of a massive archive produced during the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. The challenge: Most of the tapes, recorded in obsolete formats, were crusted with oxidized crud that made the work unwatchable and threatened to ruin any playback deck hardy enough to play them.
Jonathan Furmanski, an assistant conservator at the institute, describes one particularly unruly video installation. “The Philo T. Farnsworth Video Obelisk” (by Skip Sweeney and Video Free America) was recorded on “a phenomenally obscure 1-inch tape that plays only on a specific type of Sony deck. I needed to locate and repair such a deck in order to extract the signal from the tape. The signal itself was loaded with its own problems because the artists created a montage from a variety of sources that caused the video signal to fluctuate dramatically from scene to scene. Artists are not engineers and like to push tools like video equipment until they do something unexpected. And that unexpected thing is often the ‘art.’ “

Illuminating Sweeney

admin — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 09:13:31 +0000

“When I was very young I discovered that my mother’s mirrored wardrobe doors could be positioned to reflect back into each other. I placed my head between the mirrors and was amazed to see the chorus line of heads repeating to infinity in each direction. I reveled in the illusion.”

My Father Sold Studebakers

admin — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 06:07:59 +0000

Described by the New York Times as “an extraordinarily personal essay that struggles to explain and understand what went wrong in [the director's] relationship with his father, Ray, a car dealer,” My Father Sold Studebakers is an auto-biographical work in which the artist reveals a wealth of familial relationships and problems. The tape is comprised of old home movies, family photographs, and candid interviews with the Sweeney family.

My Mother Married Wilbur Stump

admin — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 07:46:40 +0000

My Mother Married Wilbur Stump is a video family album compiled by Skip Sweeney, a founder of San Francisco’s Video Free America, an alternative media facility.

Mr. Sweeney seems to have spent the greater part of his life recording the equivalent of home movies starring his parents and assorted siblings. One result is ”My Father Sold Studebakers,” covering the life and death of his car-salesman dad. It will be repeated on public television this June as a Father’s Day special. In 1972, a year after his father died, Mr. Sweeney’s rather proper mother, Bernardine, startled her family by suddenly eloping with Wilbur Stump, a piano-bar performer who had been through, among other things, seven divorces and four hospitalizations for alcoholism.

Completed last year, the film begins as a straightforward interview with Mrs. Stump. Wilbur Stump, 15 years her senior, died in 1982. They had had 10 happy years of marriage. Now, Mrs. Stump recalls how she met ”this old geezer” performing at the local bar near the family’s summer-vacation home. Mr. Stump was quite bald and missing two front teeth, she says, but was wearing a kind of dapper outfit. ”Can you play ‘You’re Blase’?” she asked. ”Lady, you’ve got class,” responded Mr. Stump. She later found out that it was one of his standard lines with customers. ”It was unthinkable that I’d fall in love with him,” she says, ”but I did.”

As Mrs. Stump tells her story, several of her children – including Skip Sweeney, who remains off camera -ask her questions and add their own details. There were problems. Mrs. Stump is a practicing Roman Catholic and her marriage to a divorced man was not taken lightly. But, after more than two years of petitioning Rome, she managed to get Mr. Stump’s former marriages officially annulled. More complicated, the couple had to contend with what they perceived as the disapproving attitudes of some of her children. Even now, she is compelled to observe that ”Wilbur was a lot smarter than you guys thought.”

What finally emerges is not just the unusual story of Bernardine and Wilbur Stump but the portrait of an entire family, crammed with tensions and laughs, estrangements and reconciliations. As one daughter laughingly observes, ”The guilt trips never end.” But neither does the love that clearly binds together all of these very different individuals. Commenting on the success of Mrs. Stump’s marriage, a friend explains that ”your mother let Wilbur Stump be Wilbur Stump.” Meanwhile, on a record album, Mr. Stump can be heard singing: ”And I’ll follow where she takes me/Though it leads to God-knows-where/As long as she loves me/What the hell do I care.” Mr. Sweeney has skillfully captured the special humor and poignancy of our ordinary lives.

By JOHN J. O’CONNOR
The New York Times
Sunday Arts Section
Published: May 9, 1986