Dancing Death Monsters (1981) by Dale Hoyt

PLEASE NOTE: Due to circumstances surrounding the flooding, the Redstone Building has been declared an environmental hazard and we are not allowed into The Lab for the foreseeable future. We will be refunding tickets. San Francisco Cinematheque will be finding a new date and venue for the event, likely sometime in February. Stay tuned via their website: https://www.sfcinematheque.org/

Thursday, January 12, 2023
7pm doors/ 7:30pm screening
Tickets $15 (discounted or free for members of The Lab and San Francisco Cinematheque)

Presented by San Francisco Cinematheque
Program Curated by Steve Seid
Dale Hoyt (1961–2022)

Dale is Dead. Dale Hoyt who at age 19 was already showing his irascible works to perplexed audiences. Dale who five years in made a remarkable, sui generis video, The Complete Anne Frank, that still holds its own. Dale who, it was rumored, slept on the roof of the SFAI when his money got thin. Dale whose uncompromising ways never found welcome from grants panels of his supposed peers. Dale who left briefly to run the video program at New York’s The Kitchen, but faithfully returned. Dale who in later years haunted the Tenderloin like a sage and wily guy. Dale who left behind a chill absence where his vital life had once warmly sounded.

Dale Hoyt’s body of videowork that streamed forth for a decade, then vanished for a time, only to return in his waning years. Dale came-of-rage in a fruitful moment, the late-70s/early-80s. From the scrap heap of punk culture, he snatched an aesthetic that was low-rent, appropriative and bratty. Video art had moved on from the performative documentation of the ‘70s to cut-and-paste storytelling from the likes of Tony Labat, the Yonemotos, Ilene Segalove, Tony Oursler and others. Dale deployed shreds of narrative, shrewd iconoclasm, and cut-and-paste tech, then coerced his artist-pals into enacting their own angst. The never-faltering early works drilled into the frontal lobe of juvenile yearning, marshaling pop icons, cascading pills, viscous props and grotesque wallowing as the stuff of post-pubescent misery. Atop this heap, Dale added a miasma of sound bites, pop song lifts, and plaintive dialogue to amass an unnerving swamp of sonorities. 

This memorial screening of Hoyt’s works includes Your World Dies Screaming (1981); Dancing Death Monsters (1981); Ringo Zappruder (1981/82); Over My Dead Body (1983); The Complete Anne Frank (1985); Braille (1986); Transgenic Hairshirt (2001); Don’t Be Cruel (2004); Because (2006).

Full screening details, including extended curatorial essay by Steve Seid, details of related online screening and more can be found here.