Marilyn Minter, Green Pink Caviar, video, 8:00, 2009, courtesy of Ramis Barquet Gallery

If you find yourself trekking under the hot sun and making the gallery rounds in Chelsea on a 98°F day in the middle of July, then you are surely a glutton for punishment. However, thanks to the cool respite of air conditioning in Ramis Barquet Gallery, one can comfortably experience another sort of “Glutton for Punishment,” as this annual group video exhibition is aptly titled. Rather than a traditional video screening with a seated, theater arrangement, curator Nicholas Kilner presents each of the five videos separately,  realizing a unique exhibition format and creating an immersive video experience. As the press release perfectly describes, “each of the works included uses video as a platform to explore the body in all its physicality and its subjectivity to innocent and aggressive desire.”

In Janosch Parker’s Primordial Ooze Ensemble Act series, the artist harnesses himself by the ankles, hung upside-down,  and is sent through an aggressive carwash-like ensemble, bombarded with various foods and liquids (anything but water). While watching,  Primordial Ooze Ensemble Act VII (Assembly Line) (2011), one can be thankful that they are fresh and clean (unless they were a victim of Myla Dalbesio’s performance last Thursday, Young Money, in which participants were symbolically anointed with bronzer and cheap champagne). Although Matthew Weinstein’s, Cruising 1980 (2010), is presented as an enormous projection, directly onto the gallery’s wall, it is the only video whose soundtrack must be heard privately, from a pair of headphones set at the opposite side of the gallery. The animation depicts two ships, one with a sail made of diamonds and another with an ornamental aquarium, passing each other in a calm sea at a painfully slow pace. There seems to be a tension, or attraction, between the two ships as they inch past each other, but never quite make contact.

Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung, The Fast Supper, video, 3:10, 2010, courtesy of Ramis Barquet Gallery

Kate Gilmore’s video work exists somewhere between comedy and tragedy, as she often risks her own physical safety in slapstick attempts to achieve menial tasks, often rendering herself as a ridiculous caricature of a woman and as an artist. In Cake Walk, (2005), the artist makes multiple, unabashed attempts to climb to the top of a chocolate syrup covered ramp in a pair of clownish roller skates. She proves that you can have your cake, but eating it comes at a humiliating cost. Marilyn Minter’s Green Pink Caviar (2009), a video sumptuous, explosion of color, elicits either disgust or fascination, as a pair of lips and a squirmish tongue lick, suck, and spit at (and out) gooey confections.

Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung’s The Fast Supper (2011) is perhaps the most congruous with the exhibition’s title. Diners at Leonardo’s version of the “Last Supper” gorge upon fast food until they explode, reminding me of Marco Ferreri’s 1973 film, La Grande Bouffe. Tin-Kin Hung’s tongue-in-cheek animation questions how far can one delve into the nasty delights of culinary pleasure before ultimately paying an awful price.

Glutton For Punish is on view at Ramis Barquet Gallery, 532 West 24th Street, Monday-Friday 11am-6pm, through August 19.