Alex Bag

Reference monograph

Since the mid 1990s, Alex Bag (*1969, lives and works in New York) has been one of the most interesting protagonists of video performance, and she is regarded as a vital reference point by an entire generation of younger artists such as Cory Arcangel and Shana Moulton. She became known for her technically simple video performances, in which she humorously took on and exploited TV culture and its most varied formats, as well as the art system and its romantic (artist) conceptions. With convincing precision, Bag cultivated a profound critique of the market system and society, and often appeared herself, as an extraordinarily agile and transformable actor taking on a multitude of roles. In the video that brought her to attention, “Untitled Fall ’95” (1995), she played an art student who, as though in a video diary, depicted her desires and hopes as an artist and in her everyday schooling. In other videos she has frequently investigated the advertising structures in network TV (as in “Coven Services,” 2004), or diverse TV genres and formats (as in “Fancy Pantz,” 1997, and “Gladia Daters,” 2005). Elements from advertising, film, and music videos, documentary and reality TV flow into her artistic work, which persistently generate a major critique of today’s neoliberal societal structures.

This publication is the first monograph about Alex Bag’s influential work, and includes texts by Raphael Gygax, Bruce Hainley, and Glenn Phillips, and a glossary of Alex Bag’s answers from interviews; a complete videography with transcripts, scripts, and stills, as well as ephemera, reference material, photographs, and Alex Bag’s “typewriter prose.”

Published with the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich.