Works by Lawrence Andrews, Dara Birnbaum, Stuart Marshall, Andy Fabo and Michael Balser, Catherine Saalfield and Zoe Leonard. Each of the works in tonight's program employs fanciful, elegant and sometimes seductive formal methods to deliver its urgent message. Responding to legislation forbidding the "promotion" of homosexuality in schools, Stuart Marshall's Pedagogue (1988, 11 mins) parodies the benign influence of instructors over their students. Lampooning the interview process, a promiscuous camera reads the topography of the pedagogue's faded jeans. In Lawrence Andrews' Strategies for the development of/Redefining the purpose Served/Art in the age of...A.K.A. the making of the Towering Inferno (1989, 23 mins), art as a social agent is framed within community institutions, the museum, and the artist's commitment to intervention. Using disruptive shifts of style, Andrews places art practice inside a larger matrix of "systems of support." Dara Birnbaum's Canon: Taking to the Streets (1990, 14 mins), a chronicle of recent student activism, addresses the predicament of the individual voice in a monolithic society. Known for highly elegant works, Birnbaum opts for the ornamental over the urgent. The protagonist of Andy Fabo and Michael Balser's Blood Risk (1989, 22 mins) questions, "Activism? What about pleasure?" The answer is pursued, using Cocteau's The Blood of the Poet as a model: in a surreal hotel, the artist witnesses a battle over mind and body. Dissatisfied with the available erotic images, artists Zoe Leonard and Catherine Saalfield decided to make some of their own. But Keep Your Laws Off My Body (1989, 13 mins) is realistic, as well as romantic. This quest for self-determined imagery is interrupted by the pressing issues of the street. --Steve Seid