Introduction to Video Art

Video arrived in the mid 20th century and film was suddenly not the only means of creating moving images.

In 1965 Sony Corporation introduced the Portapak, a handheld video camera and portable video recorder — 1/2in. tape as opposed to 2in. tape used for broadcast TV — brought ease, mobility, and affordability to video production — by 1968 exhibitions of video art internationally.

Video is a new medium (only 45 years as opposed to thousands of years of drawing, painting, sculpture) — Difficult to categorize since there are no official schools of video, like the Impressionists or the Abstract Expressionists, just themes.

Video is an 'Art of time' used to extend, repeat, fast forward, and slow down time — new way of telling a story, non-linear video loops.

Early video pioneers in the 60s and 70s used video as another material (like paint and canvas, or marble) to execute an idea — artists used whatever material they were interested in.

General Categories of Video Art:
-Recording "mixed media" performances: Video emerged at a time when sculpture, painting, and dance were merging — Robert Rauchenberg/Merce Cunningham/John Cage — used to record public performances Carolee Schneeman Meat Joy (1964) Interior Scroll (1975)

-Extension of the body: used to record private performances Vito Acconci Digging Piece (1970) futile attempt to bury himself / Joan Jonas Good Night Good Morning (1976) set on side, mirror display

-Technological advances: Nam June Paik / Steina and Woody Vasulka deconstruction of video signal

-Interactivity: Gary Hill Tall Ships (1992) immersion / Doug Aitken electric earth (1999) labyrinth of screens

-Surveillance: Bruce Nauman Performance Corridor (1968-70), claustrophobic enclosure of 2 floor-to-ceiling parallel walls that form a tunnel, at end 2 stacked video monitors, confronted with your own image taped from a surveillance camera / Julia Sher Security by Julia installations (80's-present) turns surveillance industry on its head by exaggerating it, manipulating it, and aestheticizing it, greeted at gallery/museum door by guard wearing pink "Security by Julia" uniform seated in front of bank of monitors, can print out image of yourself or others, watch yourself and others, voyeurism and paranoia

-Critique of commercial television or film: Nam June Paik Global Groove (1973) barrages of images, hallucinatory, media saturation / Ant Farm (with T.R. Uthco) The Eternal Frame (1975) Mock documentary that reenacts Zapruder film of 1963 Kennedy assassination in Dallas, questioning the veracity of the memory of the tragic event and media spectacle it became / Vito Acconci Theme Song (1973), lying on floor smoking and listening to music imploring viewer "Come closer to me…come on… I'm all alone…" his blatant manipulations expose the covert enticements of advertising / Dara Birnbaum Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978-79) and Kiss the Girls: Make Them Cry (1978-79) trying to counter the banal and sensational images of women in popular TV shows, used actual footage from TV to subvert intended meanings of programs / Daniel Pflumm Question and Answers, CNN (1999)

-Time-based ("moving") painting or drawing: William Kentridge's hand-drawn animations about apartheid; Eve Sussman's 89 seconds at Alcazar, an elaborate video reenactment of the Velasquez painting, Las Meninas; Stan Brakhage's Garden of Earthly Delights (film but an important precursor)

Screening:
Surveying the First Decade: Video Art and Alternative Media in the US

Program 1, Explorations of Presence, Performance and Audience
The artists included here moved into video from performance, sculpture, photography, writing and dance. They used the video camera as a mirror, a tool to investigate perception, presenting performative strategies within the paradoxically intimate and distanced theater of the video monitor. In most pieces the performer constructs an active relationship with the audience, and the viewer's awareness is specifically acknowledged.

“Two Dogs and a Ball,” William Wegman, 1972

“Used Car Salesman,” William Wegman, 1972

"Baldessari Sings Lewitt," John Baldessari, 1972
One of Baldessari's most ambitious and risky efforts. Seated and holding a sheaf of papers, he proceeds to sing each of Sol LeWitt's 35 conceptual statements to a different pop tune, after the model of Ella Fitzgerald Sings Cole Porter. What initially presents itself as humorous gradually becomes a struggle to convey Lewitt's statements through this arbitrary means.

“Undertone,” Vito Acconci, 1973
One of Acconci's most compelling and controversial works, Undertone is a confrontational and coercive attempt to engage the viewer in an intimate, ultimately perverse relation with the artist as he expounds a masturbatory fantasy with the viewer as voyeur.

“Vertical Roll,” Joan Jonas, 1972
Using the technique of a continuous vertical roll, Jonas constructs a theater of female identity by deconstructing representations of the female body. Using her own body as performance object and video as a theatrical construct, Jonas unveils a disjunctive self-portrait. As she performs in front of the camera-- masked, wearing a feathered headdress, or costumed as a belly-dancer--her feet, torso, arms and legs, subjected to the violence of the vertical roll, appear as disembodied fragments.