Steve Fagin is an artist whose videos incorporate, challenge, and cross over into the realm of literary and cultural studies. Talkin' with Your Mouth Full includes not only scripts of Fagin's works but critical responses to-and meditations on-a variety of his influential videos by a distinguished, if intriguingly disparate, group of artists and scholars.
Combining elements of criticism with various modes of artistic expression, these responses take the form of reviews, letters, interviews, and in one case an imaginary TV programming schedule. Interspersed with-and sometimes literally interrupting-the video scripts, these contributions interact with one another on multiple levels and complement Fagin's scripts. Historical, political, and theoretical issues dovetail, ricochet, and interplay in this book, revealing a multiplicity of voices, concerns, and cultural revelations.
Unique in its structure and intellectual approach, Talkin' with Your Mouth Full will appeal equally to those who have seen Fagin's videos and those who have not. Students of art history and cultural critique, and anyone interested in the ongoing dialogue between artists and theorists, will find particular value in this book.

Contributors. Gregg Bordowitz, Constance DeJong, Leslie Dick, Steve Fagin, Barry Gifford, Victoria Gill, Bill Horrigan, Bertha Jottar, Ivone Margulies, Patricia Mellencamp, Margaret Morse, Constance Penley, Vicente L. Rafael, Mark Rappaport, Andrew Ross, Vivian Sobchack, Trinh T. Minh-ha, John Welchman, Peter Wollen

About the Author

Steve Fagin, a recipient of several NEA grants, is Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California at San Diego. His videos include The Machine That Killed Bad People, Zero Degrees Latitude, Virtual Play, Memorial Day (Observed), and The Amazing Voyage of Gustave Flaubert and Raymond Roussel. Fagin's work has been featured at a Museum of Modern Art retrospective and at a one-person show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. A recently completed, feature-length video, TropiCola, focuses on contemporary Cuba.

Reviews
"Masterful and humorous enough to be spellbinding. . . . Seemingly unrelated images are held together by the Krazy Glue of Fagin's brilliant script."-Mary Beth Crain, L.A. Weekly (January 1988)
"The video work of Steve Fagin . . . is masterful and humorous enough to be spellbinding. . . . Seemingly unrelated images are held together by the Krazy Glue of Fagin's brilliant script, which expertly uses language to convey the common themes of conflict between an original slice of life and a copy, a lie and an illusion, a fictitious voyage and one that becomes absolutely real because the video maker has made it so."-Mary Beth Crain, L.A. Weekly (from a review of The Amazing Voyage of Gustave Flaubert and Raymond Roussel)
Praise for Steve Fagin:
"The retrospective of work by Steve Fagin at the Museum of Modern Art focuses the attention on one of the more accomplished video makers, whose works encompass many of the genre's possibilities, from documentary to fiction to self-conscious commentary on the medium itself."-Caryn James, New York Times
rom the Foreword:
"Treat this book like a cocktail party where you have the good luck to be invisible. No one cares what you are wearing, and you can eavesdrop on whomever you wish for as long as you want. . . . You will make a note to look up some of the guests later, while other guests may make you wonder who was crazy enough to invite them. You will know Steve Fagin-he's the one talkin' with his mouth full." -Victoria Gill



Book Information
ISBN 9780822320555
Author Steve Fagin
Format Hardback
Page Count 416
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press