Summary
[James Duesing], who teaches electronic and time-based art at Carnegie Mellon University, has exhibited his films internationally. The PCA program begins with the most recent, 2003's "Tender Bodies," and then runs from 1983's "Impetigo" onward to work of the '90s. Peculiar elements recur. Duesing often favors one or more bird-like creatures as major characters, and human beings coexist and converse with humanoid mutants and real or invented talking animals. Cars are casually used as assault weapons, and acts of extreme violence, including chemical fires, surgical lacerations and attacks by giant house cats, are perpetrated and responded to with indifference.
Not that it's all cannibalism and conflagration. Except in the mostly wordless "Tender Bodies," Duesing's colorful casts spend a great deal of time ruminating, reflecting, or otherwise interacting, in the skewed dialogue of banal small talk or hyped-up consumer jibberish. In "Impetigo," as two hybridized bipeds take a stroll, one squawks to the other, "At first the relationship seemed tawdry, but now it seems so elegant!" The sighing, partial sequitur response is, "How much stupidity can one person squeeze into a lifetime?"See the full content of this document
Extract
Love and Death in the Unconscious
A SKILLED ARTIST can conjure up connections with contempo- raries and predecessors from many practices while remaining very much his own. In five animated shorts on view at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Ja...
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