Though they were surveilled by the FBI as possible subversives, the Videofreex gradually endeared themselves to their puzzled Lanesville neighbors, making news stories about local non-events by toting video equipment around in a converted baby carriage dubbed the Newsbuggy and casting local kids in programs like The Buckaroo Bart Show. Each Saturday night they broadcast the shows to the inhabitants of their little cleft in the Catskills. But by 1978 the group was breaking up: Parry Teasdale and Carol Vontobel had started a family and left the commune. They eventually ended up in Columbia County, with Teasdale pursuing a career editing newspapers – including, for several years, our Woodstock Times.
Other Videofreex drifted off into individual art projects, and Bart Friedman and Nancy Cain reestablished Media Bus, the group’s mobile not-for-profit educational entity, as a production facility in Woodstock. “I’m still involved with community video in Saugerties,” says Friedman. “I’m on the board of the town’s cable access channel.” His company Reelizations Productions produces and distributes counseling videos in the field of behavioral health, addressing such topics as addiction recovery, anger management and domestic abuse.
Fired by the notion that television could be an active tool of democratic discourse for the masses, rather than something that people needed to be passively spoon-fed by corporate giants, the Videofreex were pioneers blazing a path that led to the participatory media like YouTube that we take for granted today. “We knew this exhibit could not just be a historical presentation; we had to show how the activities of the Videofreex in the ’60s and ’70s still are with us,” says Dorsky Museum curator Daniel Belasco. “Today’s social media were predicted by what the Videofreex were up to 45 years ago. Even then, they envisioned regular people sharing information through networks.”
“My father was always an early adopter of technology,” says second-generation honorary Videofreex member Rhea Kennedy, daughter of the collective’s engineering genius, the late Chuck Kennedy, and writer Marji Yablon. “He introduced me to e-mail in the ’90s and was one of the first people I knew with a digital camera.” The New Paltz native says that she incorporates video production into the courses that she teaches at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC. “Though the students are using iPhones about 1/100th the weight and size of a Portapak, there’s that same spirit of democratized video.” Today Rhea maintains the Videofreex website, saying, “It’s an honor to work with them to preserve the group’s pioneering, creative and mischievous legacy.”
On view through July 12, the exhibition surveys the history and mythology of the Videofreex with 22 newly restored videotapes, more than 90 photographs and slides and nearly 80 other objects including drawings, prints, ephemera (including letters signed by Eldridge Cleaver and Charlotte Moorman), publications and historic audiovisual equipment. Related events will include a screening of videos featured in the exhibition and excerpts from the new documentary Here Come the Videofreex at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, February 12 at the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, followed by a discussion with filmmaker Jon Nealon, curator Andrew Ingall and Videofreex Cain and Blumberg. And at 2 p.m. on Sunday, March 8, a panel discussion including Blumberg and Teasdale titled “Videofreex: A Foundation for Participatory Art and Social Engagement” will be held in the Student Union Building at SUNY-New Paltz.
The exhibition’s opening party on February 7 will also officially inaugurate “Geometries of Difference,” guest-curated by Murtaza Vali, and “Grace Hartigan: Myths and Malls” and “The Maverick Festival at 100,” both curated by Belasco. Woodstockers should especially enjoy the Maverick materials, which include plenty of photographs less familiar than the usual shots of arts celebrities, like Isamu Noguchi posing with Grace Greenwood. Highlights include a circa-1920 panoramic shot of festivalgoers in full regalia, a 1931 oil painting by Eugene Ludins of the kitchen at the Maverick and a papier-mâché sculpture by Russell Wright made as a prop for the Maverick Theater’s 1923 Cubist Circus.
“Grace Hartigan: Myths and Malls” is the first museum show since 2001 of paintings by one of the last Abstract Impressionists, collected by the late sculptor and art dealer, Beatrice Perry of Germantown. Characterized by large scale and vivid color combinations, Hartigan’s little-seen works include a series of tributes to Marilyn Monroe following her death, images evoking suburban shopping malls of the 1960s and three terrific paintings inspired by poems by Barbara Guest.
“Geometries of Difference” examines the work of seven artists, four of them from southern Asia and the Middle East, who take the next step beyond abstraction by juxtaposing non-representational geometry and fractal patterns with ethnic ornamental motifs from a variety of the world’s cultures. Especially striking in this show is Kanisha Raja’s 1+1 (Fuck Yeah), an assemblage of nine panels with linear patterns rendered in paint, embroidery, hand-woven cotton and digital printing, which together suggest something like a batik bedspread. Seher Shah makes collages from photos of façades in the Brutalist style of architecture, vertiginously tilting the images until they suggest an Escher print of improbable staircases. Another collage artist, Kamrooz Aram, meshes images of sublime 7,000-year-old Persian art treasures with blunt Modernist geometric forms in stark black-and-white.
All four of these exhibitions can be perused in an afternoon in the Dorsky’s economical space layout. Regular museum hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday. The Dorsky Museum is closed on Mondays, Tuesdays, holidays and during college intersessions. Admission is free. For more information, visit www.newpaltz.edu/museum or call (845) 257-3844.
