VIDEO ART








          Stills  from  "Please Superimpose, Please?"





"Please Superimpose, Please?" was shown in "A Special Videotape Show" at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971 in one of the first major museum exhibitions of Video Art. Below are excerpts from The New York Times and Village Voice reviews of that exhibition:


The New York Times, December 4, 1971 
Film: Videotape Show, 10 Experimental Shorts in Whitney Program by Roger Greenspun

...I especially liked "Please Superimpose, Please?," in which John Randolph Carter places a graceful young girl in one room and a graceful young man in another and then,by means of split screen and superimposition, monitors them as they become acquainted and begin to make ghostly love by television proxy. The sequence is funny and genuinely erotic and ultimately rather moving in its adjustments between the human couple and the freedoms and restrictions of the medium.


the village Voice, December 2, 1971
Movie Journal by Jonas Mekas 

...The most original piece, however, is John Randolph Carter's very unpretentious "Please Superimpose, Please?," made at the Annenberg School of Communication. Here is an explanatory note from Carter: "Ronald and Lydia, are students from the Philadelphia College of Art and the University of Pennsylvania who had just met for the first time that morning, were making out and clowning sexually....We brought them into the studio and put them each in front of a studio camera with a partition separating them from each other's view. Though they could hear their voices, they could only see each other on a monitor located midway between the two cameras. I and Paul Haley who worked with me in these experiments were in the control room with the curtain drawn. We could see Ronald and Lydia on the two monitors which carried the two camera images and could combine them in the studio. I chose not to have sound communication with them and did not give them any directions or instructions before or during the session. I set up different configurations which facilitated their interaction with each other and only changed the configurations when it seemed appropriate, when they seemed to want it, or when I thought it might lead them somewhere. This is a 16-minute segment of an hour-long session."
   Ronald and Lydia engage in embraces, caresses, and friendly contacts by way of their images as they both watch them. It becomes singularly erotic, for the two students and for the viewer. This gentle and ephemeral relationship through the images produces a unique situation and unique experience, and one that videotapes are capable of producing.