Programme notes
Pickle Surprise (60fps)
Summary
A short video piece from 1989 by Tom Rubnitz, running barely a minute: a manically cheerful mock cookery segment in which drag performers assemble a dish out of pickles. The cast includes RuPaul, several years before mainstream fame, and Lady Bunny.\n\nRubnitz worked in the downtown New York video scene of the eighties, making short, brightly-coloured tapes that parodied television formats — commercials, cooking shows, variety segments — using the club and drag performers around him. The aesthetic is deliberately cheap: flat video, saturated colour, aggressive editing, jingle-like repetition.\n\nIt was made for cable access and club screenings rather than broadcast, and it is under two minutes for the reason most of his work is: it is a joke told at the pace of an advertisement.
Why it matters
It is a document of a specific New York moment — the intersection of video art, club culture and drag in the late eighties, before any of it was commercially legible. Rubnitz's tapes are among the better records of that scene, and they preserve performers at a stage of their careers that no other footage covers.\n\nThe piece has had a strange second life as an early internet meme, circulating as a video file long before streaming, which is how most people encountered it. That gives it an unusual position: a piece of gallery-adjacent video art that became widely known through file-sharing rather than exhibition.\n\nIt also illustrates a form that television never had a slot for — the parody so short and so specific that it only makes sense as a loop. Much of what social platforms later industrialised looks like this.