Liner Notes:

This was the first video I made when I started my MFA in Syracuse. At the time I was in dialog with my prof/adviser Tom Sherman, a well known early video and performance artist here in Canada. He told me he once did a video where he starred at the camera for 24 hours or something crazy, and of course it was common in early works for a video to run as long as the tape it was recorded on or for a period of time necessary to complete some endurance action. I had also recently read Rosalind Krauss’ Aesthetics of Narcissism and overall I was feeling pretty miserable about being a white man with nothing to complain about and an seemingly unacceptable sense of entitlement. Standard postmodern ennui you might say. Anyway, long story short, I decided that I had no other option for any future work but to destroy myself and everyone that had come before me. I would use parody to disparage the white male ego. This was the first tape I ever made that tried to do this.

The resulting video is very simple, I’m basically watching myself in the camera viewfinder (in reference to the self reflection of early performance video works), but to do so I need to hold my arm out, which of course becomes increasingly difficult do to my pathetically weak arm muscles. You’ve got the added comedy in there of not knowing how big the camera I’m holding is, and the wonderful similarity between masturbation and physical exertion, the final length of the video being somewhere near the average man’s ability to contain himself.

Overall I was really pleased with the outcome, and utterly surprised by how popular this video became, especially online. At the time Youtube didn’t exist, but I posted the video on my website. One day I got a message from my host saying they had noticed a significant spike in my internet traffic and had incurred some ridiculous amount of debt as a result. The video was getting posted heavily to geek blogs and sex sites, at it’s peak it was getting something like 100,000 views a day, it was insane. I had to put the file up on the school servers to avoid bankruptcy. It was really strange for the next little while, I had random people asking me if I was “that guy from the strongest man video”. I’ve never been able to repeat the popularity of this video, but it helped convince me that more art belongs online.

Some fun anecdotes:

- I later found out that someone actually did this performance in the 80s with some ridiculously large heavy camera.

- The video takes place in my then girlfriend’s bedroom.

Filmmaker Biography:

A native of Toronto Canada, Funny Man Jeremy Bailey is a visual artist working primarily in electronic media. He has been described by Filmmaker magazine as “a one-man revolution on the way we use video, computers and our bodies to create art.” His work has been featured in numerous exhibitions and festivals internationally. He is also co-founder and participating artist in 640 480, an award winning collective of sculpture and video artists. Jeremy received his MFA in art video from Syracuse University in 2006.
For more information please visit www.jeremybailey.net.