sign in sign up
<<
Home , Cildo Meireles, Eleanor Antin, Joan Jonas, Robert Whitman

FROM VIDEO TO INTERMEDIA: A PERSONAL HISTORY / BARBARA LONDON

During the late 1960s, in the spirit of counterculture and and artists and revolution, artists took up the new portable video camera, with the mandate of establishing with its grainy black-and-white images and crudest of better relationships among interdisciplinary artists with editing systems. The medium had previously been the a scientific bent, to help select contemporary works. domain of commercial television, with hefty cameras EAT arranged a competition, and out of two hundred locked onto enormous tripods in broadcast studios, submissions Hultén selected nine computer experiments, but now flocked to this wide-open field, including a kinetic by Lillian Schwartz, a com- attracted to its clean slate and lack of old-boys network. puter artist who also made short experimental films and Merging a strong sense of independence with this recently videos. Proxima Centauri (1968), Schwartz’s collaboration accessible medium, they experimented with time-based with Bell Laboratories engineer Per Biorn, was a highly (and therefore intangible and difficult to collect) art, in polished black box that opened to reveal a translucent a seat-of-the-pants style well suited to the artist-run, glass dome emitting an astrophysical glow, activated by rough-and-ready venues sprouting up everywhere. viewers standing on pressure-sensitive pads installed Viewers became participants, engaging in a more under a carpet. active relationship with image and sound. Video offered Video gained a forum in 1971, when the Museum a more immediate form of expression, with inexpensive launched its Projects series in order to adapt to the ex- distribution possibilities that echoed the “spreading the panding practice of site-specific installations. One of the word” also essential to feminism’s forward momentum. first, ’s mail-art narrative100 Boots (1971– With these new tools, women artists investigated their 73) chronicled an army of galoshes marching across the identities, defying the romantic notions of beauty dis- , storming , and finally invading seminated by advertising and the consort roles offered the Projects galleries.2 by movies and soap operas, in interdisciplinary projects, My own work with video and intermedia—a concept characterized by vitality and candor, that formed alterna- developed in the mid-1960s by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins tives to and a critique of male-dominated modes of art and Hans Breder to describe the often confusing activities production. As the categories of Miss and Mrs. were torn that occur between genres—began in the early 1970s, apart, so were those of traditional art practice, reception, when as a young curator in the Department of Prints and circulation. and Illustrated Books I became absorbed in how artists The first exhibition at The Museum of to stretched and manipulated time, that most elusive of feature the era’s new electronic mediums was The Machine materials.3 In 1971, for example, to inaugurate Ileana as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age in 1968, organized Sonnabend’s SoHo gallery, the living Gilbert by Pontus Hultén.1 The show opened with drawings of & George—dressed in tweed suits, their skin covered Leonardo da Vinci’s flying machines and included works with gold powder—stood for weeks on a table and sang up through the present. Hultén invited the group Exper- “Underneath the Arches,” in a nonstop looped action iments in Art and Technology (EAT), which had been that managed to emulate both robotic mechanization

1. (American, launched the previous year by engineers Billy Klüver and and over-the-top grandeur. born 1947). O Superman. 1983. Video (color, sound), 8 min. The , New York. Gift of Warner Bros. 352 Records 353 My interests settled on cutting-edge mediums, and film’s in the more established film theory exemplified by was the norm, she carried out her project with extreme masculine”—an aesthetic, social, and political act.6 She on how artists harnessed new technology in a world where such journals as Cahiers du cinéma, founded in 1951. The precision, standing motionless in an empty gallery, reso- began her experiments with film in 1969, mixing different that technology was perpetually shifting. I sought out fundamentals of expanded cinema (an expedient generic lutely facing four video cameras set at different distances. colored liquids on a mirror and projecting the reflections independent voices, looking for work that expanded term for radical experimentation with the moving image) The live images were cycled onto an adjacent monitor as abstract swirls. These erratic, “live” projected shapes, boundaries. In nosing around makeshift venues (such as included intermedia techniques, participation from the using carefully scripted switching and split-screen effects, rather than recorded (and thus mediated) celluloid images, the Kitchen and 112 Greene Street) and talking with artists audience, and the destruction and abstraction of imagery all synchronized with audio composed from four synthe- formed her reality. In the early 1970s she carried out a (such as Antin, Beryl Korot, and Hermine Freed), I discov- and film projection, all used toward decoding reality as it sizer tones, so that her impassive body made a sharp series of hard-hitting performances that tested her physical ered a dynamic counterculture, the offspring of the Beats was manipulated in commercial film and toward breaking contrast with her aggressively in-motion, on-screen self. limits and questioned physical and mental identity in a and Woodstock, flourishing in ’s desolate SoHo out of film’s two-dimensionality by transporting the Space Seeing—Space Hearing, with its paradox of feminist critique that she called Media Aktionism, as neighborhood and in rural communes in upstate New York cinematographic apparatus into an installation of time physical stasis and electronically generated motion, can be in Hyperbulie (1973, no. 3), in which she navigated, nude (such as Lanesville TV, in Lanesville, and Experimental and space. This, it was thought, would lead to the opening seen as part of EXPORT’s uncompromising investigation for the most part and often crawling on her hands and Television Center, in Owego), operating on the fringes of of our usual patterns of perception and representation; into the social position and physical being of women— knees, the narrow passage of an electrified metal fence, the art world, with its prevailing modes of Conceptual and otherwise we were limited in our ability to tell the differ- like her pseudonym, adopted in 1967 in light of receiving a formidable jolt every time she inadvertently Minimal art. With other like-minded souls I climbed dank ence between natural and artificial images, as well as in her refusal to cater to a “system that is defined by the brushed against the edge. One of her goals in performance staircases and congregated in dusty lofts for impromptu our conception of truth and reality.5 screenings of black-and-white videos and for interdisci- These fundamentals were manifest in the work of the plinary performative experiments that stretched into the audaciously spirited Clarke, a modern dancer long before night. Process took precedence over saleable product, and she became passionate about video, which she felt shared information from the hardcore reached out-of-the-way the spontaneity of dance; her early videos explored the pro- artists through publications such as Radical Software cess of their own making, and were about instantaneous (founded by Korot, Phyllis Gershuny, Ira Schneider, and image and live, two-way communication among partici- Frank Gillette), a theory and grassroots how-to magazine; pants. In 1974 I visited the Video Teepee, her rooftop and Avalanche (founded by Liza Bear and Willoughby studio at the Hotel Chelsea, where she taught workshops, Sharp), an in-depth interview magazine that captured the setting up multiple cameras and monitors on the roof grit of downtown New York. and in stairwells, and where other Hotel Chelsea dwellers, At MoMA’s Open Circuits conference in 1974, I including Viva and Agnès Varda, would drift by. I met observed practitioners of expanded cinema from around Clarke’s lively followers, including a socially engaged the world argue about the distinctions between video and collective, the Videofreeks, who explored public-access film, with the former represented by such upstarts as cable, using live phone-ins to create two-way, interactive , , and Woody and Steina cablecasting and transmit whatever was on their minds Vasulka, and the latter including the veterans Shirley Clarke at the time. and Jonas Mekas, who had bucked the Hollywood system Several months later I made my first curatorial in the 1950s, along with Maya Deren and John Cassavetes. research trip abroad. At Projekt ’74, an exhibition of video Clarke went on to found the Filmmakers Cooperative with installations organized by the Kölnischer Kunstverein, I Mekas in 1962, joined by Stan VanDerBeek, Robert Breer, witnessed , who had been the only woman 4 2. VALIE EXPORT (Austrian, Michael Snow, and others. These moving image practi- to participate in the visceral events staged by the Vienna born 1940). Space Seeing— tioners spoke different languages: video’s nascent critical Actionists, create a new work, Space Seeing—Space Hearing Space Hearing. 1973–74. Video discourse was rooted in the , with essays in (1973–74, no. 2), on the eve of the opening. Although she (black and white, sound), 6:19 min. The Museum of Modern Studio International and Arts Magazine, and experimental worked very much in the make-it-on-the-spot spirit that Art, New York. Purchase

354 FROM VIDEO TO INTERMEDIA LONDON 355 was to separate the female body from eroticism: “I felt it By then playback equipment had become relatively that moved very stiffly, like a puppet or a figure in with digital TV sets); and video’s live, simultaneous was important to use the female body to create art. I knew simple to use; three-quarter-inch cassettes were easy to a medieval painting. I didn’t exist as , image. In the video version, the vertically rolling close- that if I did it naked, I would really change how the (most- distribute; and in due course portable video cameras, as an individual “I,” only as a presence, part of the ups of Jonas’s face and sensual satin dress move in ly male) audience would look at me. There would be no although still hefty, were able to record in color. Emerging picture. I moved rather mechanically. In the mirror counterpoint to the brash clang of a spoon hitting wood, pornographic or erotic/sexual desire involved—so there video artists, wanting their work to reach the widest pos- costumes in Wind [her first film, of 1968] and creating a feeling of discontinuity that remains a key would be a contradiction.”7 EXPORT directed video docu- sible audience, sold their tapes to universities, libraries, Oad Lau [her first “action”], we walked very softly preoccupation in her work to this day. ments of her early actions, which were performed live and museums in unlimited editions at modest prices. with our arms at our sides as in a ritual. We moved In her next performance, Twilight (1975), Jonas several times for an audience and then never again. The MoMA began acquiring artists’ videos in 1975, after seri- across the space, in the background, from side to gradually and impassively removed her clothes and, videos captured the durational aspects of her actions more ously considering the responsibilities entailed in video side. When I was in other “Mirror Pieces” a little holding a small mirror, slowly scrutinized her body— accurately than photography could. preservation.8 Our original video advisory committee later, I just lay on the floor and I was carried around a boldly transgressive act. At the work’s first performance, In 1974 I helped launch MoMA’s ongoing video- members included the innately inquisitive and supportive like a piece of glass.9 at the , Jonas varied her use of exhibition program under the umbrella of the Projects trustee Blanchette Rockefeller; I remember her at a recep- the theater’s projection screen, rhythmically playing it series, and among the first works I featured were several tion, sitting on a bench next to , thoughtfully Jonas was greatly influenced by Jack Smith’s midnight the way percussionists play drums: as a conventional early black-and-white videos documenting actions by asking him to please explain his video work, which he events in his SoHo loft, at which he would mill around, screen, depicting images of erupting volcanoes; as a scrim, , Friederike Pezold, and Gilbert & George. eloquently did. Video was the first new medium to be pass out joints, and assemble a costume from heaps of with shadows cast from the action behind it; as an opaque These early exhibitions shared a gallery with an old tech- added to MoMA’s collection program in more than forty clothes piled up on the floor, vamping in different personas. wall, bathed in white light; as a vertical, rather than nological favorite, Thomas Wilfred’s Lumia Suite, Opus 158 years; among the first works acquired wereNow (1973), No one could quite distinguish, during those protracted horizontal, field. (1963)—with one work showing in the morning and the by , and Vertical Roll (1973), by Joan Jonas. evenings, between his life and art, where one ended and Twilight evolved into Mirage (1976/2003, no. 5), the other in the afternoon. Together with MoMA’s projection- Originally associated with Minimalist artists, Jonas the other began; the time-based works by Smith, and by last in a series of performances that deal with simultaneity, ists, I learned how to open playback decks and unstick began by making sculpture before moving on to dance others, were excruciatingly long, and it was not uncommon featuring multiples of the artist—the real version, on jammed cassettes. and video. What attracted her to performance was the for viewers to doze off, or go out for a short walk and stage; the live video version, shown on one monitor; and possibility of mixing sound, movement, and then return. This elongated sense of time reinforced an different prerecorded actions, shown on another monitor image into a complex composition; she felt impression that Noh theater had made on Jonas on a and also projected on the screen. One prerecorded video, she wasn’t good at making a single, simple trip to Japan in 1970, and she subsequently developed for made as a kind of diary, showed a sleepy and disheveled statement, like a sculpture: her own performances an alter ego called Organic Honey Jonas facing a camera to say “good night” and “good (from a label in her kitchen), whom she imagined as an morning” every day for a year; onstage the artist quickly I brought to performance my experience electronic sorceress, a conjuror of images (no. 4). drew sketches of the sun and moon, depicting a constant of looking at the illusionistic space of These images began as reflections in mirrors, with flow of night into morning into night.Mirage later became painting and of walking around sculptures Jonas studying her own face or parts of her body in a a fixed installation in MoMA’s collection; viewers walk and architectural spaces. I was barely in detached manner. When she added video to the perfor- around the gallery, discovering connections between six my early performance pieces; I was in mance, a live camera linked to monitors provided greater videos and a series of props (a Mexican mask, ten-foot- them like a piece of material or an object control and revealed hidden details, with a continuous long aluminum cones), which are dramatically lit and series of shots explicitly choreographed for the camera placed to evoke the original stage. and close-up details of the live action fed to monitors In 1975 I met , who arrived from arrayed on stage. Vertical Roll was a performance that later with a series of new etchings and videos. 3. VALIE EXPORT (Austrian, born 1940). Hyperbulie. 1973. became a single-channel videotape, but both versions take Geiger belonged to the postwar generation that came Video (black and white, sound), advantage of early video’s specific qualities: the granular of age as exploded with political and economic 6:31 min. The Museum of black-and-white image; the flat, shallow depth of field; ambitions. She was barely twenty at the time of the first Modern Art, New York. Purchase the moving bar of the vertical roll (a flaw that vanished São Paulo Bienal, concurrent with the founding of Rio

356 FROM VIDEO TO INTERMEDIA LONDON 357 5. Joan Jonas (American, born 1936). Mirage. 1976/2003. Six videos (black and white, sound and silent), props, stages, photographs, duration variable. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Richard J. Massey, Clarissa Alcock Bronfman, Agnes Gund, and Committee on Media Funds

4. Joan Jonas (American, born 1936). Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy. 1972. Video (black and white, sound), 23 min. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of The Florsheim Foundation, Joanne Stern and Barbara Pine

358 FROM VIDEO TO INTERMEDIA LONDON 359 de Janeiro’s Museu de Arte Moderna in 1954, and as the deck and two monitors in the video gallery and drag the which depicts seven successive sunrises across New 1950s advanced, so did the bold enterprises of a small equipment upstairs, where we would set up seats. Each York’s East River. With each sunrise the light exceeded group of Brazilian artists and intellectuals. Critic Mário artist had his or her way of arranging the room, from a her camera’s maximum allowed intensity, and each day a Pedrosa spotted Geiger, along with and Hélio basic setup for the straightforward display of tapes and new scar was added to the previous ones. In 1980 Kubota Oiticica, who were laying out new ideas about art.10 They slides to the re-creation of an installation. We were aware joined us at Video Viewpoints to discuss her sculptural all endured considerable hardship, in particular after the that we were inventing a new tradition, and every effort practice. Surrounded by images of her video sculptures, military coup in 1964, which sharpened their resistance to was made to be catholic in our selection of artists. Artists, including Duchampiana: Nude Descending a Staircase conventional forms in what Paulo Herkenhoff has called for their part, were conscious of now being inside the (1976), with its brash electronic color on monitor screens a language of “refined politicization.”11 Between 1970 and institution, and took their presentations seriously. embedded in its plywood risers, she talked about the 1973, together with the critic Frederico Morais, she taught Steina Vasulka—an artist, musician, programmer, harmonious coexistence of the natural and the synthetic. a series of classes at the Museu de Arte Moderna, and it and technical innovator—was our first Video Viewpoints In 1984 Laurie Anderson came to speak about how was in this environment that Cildo Meireles and other speaker.14 For her MoMA presentation we lugged battered her art practice unfolded in tandem with technology. A artists of his generation began their work with intermedia. sculpture pedestals up to the Founders Room and set extra classically trained violinist, she developed a series of MoMA exhibited and acquired two of Geiger’s videos, monitors around to re-create the anarchic spirit of the performance films in which she played the violin at the Passagens #1 (Passages #1) (1974) and Mapas elementares 3 Art tourism around this time 6. Anna Bella Geiger (Brazilian, original Kitchen, the late-1960s video hub in the basement beginning and end of each screening.15 By the mid-1970s (Elementary maps 3) (1976, no. 6). Passagens #1 shows a was flourishing, with video-art born 1933). Mapas elementares of the Mercer Art Center. The program attracted a hands- her media-enhanced performance had become more 3 (Elementary maps 3) 1976. woman’s legs, with her skirt’s hem swishing above high festivals springing up all over Video (black and white, sound), on, technical art crowd, who eagerly gathered around polished, incorporating slides, film, violin-playing, and heels, as she slowly and despondently climbs a series of the world, in Los Angeles, Tokyo, 12 min. The Museum of Modern Vasulka and a pile of monitors showing how she experi- prerecorded and live stories. Art, New York. Purchase staircases. She begins indoors in a three-story Art Deco– Locarno, Montbéliard, and even- mented with the camera as an style building, gradually ascending, her tired steps moving tually São Paulo. I made regular autonomous imaging instrument, in real time. Next she climbs a crumbling outdoor stair- stops at these lively video festivals, and looking back I layering multiple real-time images case on a building in Rio close to the small house where realize that these were early hints of the globalization of of herself bowing a violin (no. 7). the artist’s parents lived after they arrived from Poland contemporary art. Other artists in the series in the 1920s. The woman’s tense and labored moves bear Toward the end of the 1970s early video’s revolution- discussed their different ways of the heaviness of life during the 1960s and ’70s.12 In Mapas ary newness was petering out, and the equipment and using the same tools. Mary Lucier elementares 3, to the accompaniment of a version of the technology were changing. Graininess gave way to clarity, had worked with lasers, aiming Argentinean bolero La virgen negra (The black virgin) that and editing became more precise. At MoMA we were her camera at the intense light, Geiger found in a junk shop, a woman quickly draws four trying to document the medium’s early steps, and to do deliberately burning thin lines maps and writes a word or phrase beneath each: amuleto so we needed the direct participation of the artists. A into her camera’s light-sensitive (amulet or good luck charm), a mulata (mulatto or biracial grant from the facilitated the picture tube. At MoMA in 1979 woman), a muleta (crutch), and America Latina. The four launch in 1978 of Video Viewpoints, a forum for artists she re-created her seven-monitor maps are anamorphic impressions of the phonetically to talk about and show their work. It quickly became a installation Dawn Burn (1975), similar words, as well as allusions to Latin American regular Monday-evening forum with an audience of about 13 stereotypes of race, class, and culture. Geiger’s warily fifty, including artists, MoMA members, and other inter- 7. Steina Vasulka (Icelandic, incriminating videos parallel the suppressed ferocity ested souls. born 1940). Violin Power. 1970–78. Video (black and in the work of Chilean artists such as Lotty Rosenfeld, It was initially held in the Founders Room, the trustees’ white, sound), 10:04 min. the CAZA group, and Catalina Parra, all of whom made cathedrallike meeting space on the Museum’s sixth floor. The Museum of Modern Art, performative video work later shown at and collected Working without the aesthetics of abundance, we would New York. Acquired through the generosity of Barbara by MoMA. unplug our unwieldy three-quarter-inch cassette playback Sahlman

360 FROM VIDEO TO INTERMEDIA LONDON 361 Anderson made use of readily available and modifiable attitude of public-access television and hosted late-night technology to facilitate the process of storytelling and programs—until the arrival of MTV in 1981. The genera- activate different levels of creativity. Her Self-Playing tion of artists that came of age in that decade considered Violin (1974, no. 8), for example, with a tiny speaker television one of the roots of , and some put concealed inside, makes its own autonomous sounds. broadcast programs under the microscope for formal In the late 1970s she used the Harmonizer, a device that analysis. In Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman lowers or raises the pitch of the voice, to create characters (1978–79, no. 9), Dara Birnbaum pointed her camera for her stories, including an authoritarian male and a at the television and deconstructed the popular show two-hundred-pound baby. In 1978 I organized a Projects Wonder Woman, revealing it as a male invention, with a exhibition with Anderson, which contained Handphone businesslike heroine becoming a scantily clad superhero Table (1978), an ordinary-looking plywood table and pair as a chorus sings, “Shake thy wonder maker.” Birnbaum of stools accompanied by a blurred photograph of two designed her 1981 Video Viewpoints program notes with people seated with their heads in their hands, a posture stills and pull quotes that echoed her work’s critique that viewers found themselves instinctively imitating. of the power of mass media images, and the result, with When they did so, the artist’s voice—saying, “Now I in its slogans and bold style, had an affinity with the work you without a body move,” a line from George Herbert, a of Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer. seventeenth-century metaphysical poet—came through Mako Idemitsu came from Japan in 1986 to discuss their hands as if entering their consciousness.16 This her Great Mother series, which scrutinizes the emotional was accomplished by a speaker and driver, concealed interactions of mothers and children, revealing the under- in the table, that transmitted sound vibrations through lying volatility of seemingly placid households. The videos solid material, in this case through bones rather than air. take place in claustrophobic rooms of ordinary urban As synthesizers and electronic keyboards became homes, each one with a prominently placed television routine in the art and music worlds, Anderson followed set; its screen, displaying close-up shots of various family her interests and made the logical next step. Armed with a members, is a window into the characters’ minds. In Warner Records contract, she made her first music video, HIDEO, It’s Me Mama (1983, no. 10) a son away at college O Superman (1983, no. 1), with multimedia artist and is shown only on the television set on his mother’s kitchen animator Perry Hoberman as the video’s artistic director. table. Both go about their daily lives: he studies, listens Made for the small scale of the television screen, the to music on earphones; she putters in the kitchen, makes video concentrates on close-up shots of Anderson and dinner for her husband. The mother puts the son’s meals exaggerated versions of her onstage activities—silhou- in front of the television, and he consumes them on ettes of her shadow-puppet hands, her glowing face screen. Idemitsu provides troubling observations—never illuminated by a tiny pillow speaker placed inside her solutions—about family discord, exposing the constraints mouth and emanating a prerecorded violin solo that of social conventions and the conflicts caused by living in she modulated with her lips. a hybrid of Japanese and Western cultures. Early video artists had I first met Idemitsu in 1978, when, with a grant from little to do with television— electronics manufacturer Matsushita (now Panasonic), 8. Laurie Anderson (American, born 1947). Self-Playing Violin. although a few, such as Emily I went to Japan. On that trip I encountered a disparate 1974. Modified violin with Armstrong and Pat Ivers, took group of lively artists who had all turned to video from built-in speaker and amplifier (sound), 23 x 10 x 4 1/2" (58.4 x advantage of the laissez-faire other mediums—experimental film, music, sculpture, 25.4 x 11.4 cm), 31 min. loop. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Agnes Gund & Daniel Shapiro and the Rockefeller Foundation LONDON 363 9. Dara Birnbaum (American, 10. Mako Idemitsu (Japanese, born 1946). Technology/ born 1940). HIDEO, It’s Me Transformation: Wonder Mama. 1983. Video (color, Woman. 1978–79. Video (color, sound), 26:49 min. The sound), 5:50 min. The Museum Museum of Modern Art, of Modern Art, New York. New York. Acquired through Committee on Media Funds the generosity of Margot and John Ernst

printmaking, and computer graphics—and were finding alone and in her twelve-year collaboration with ; In 1983 Video Viewpoints moved into the comfortable presentation, discussed her approach to bridging cinema their own way, experimenting on the fringes of a staunchly her exploration of the limits of the body, ego, and 220-seat Titus Theater 2.19 Here, with new equipment and video even as she embraced their complementary entrenched hierarchical society. The trip turned into the artistic identity; and the limitations of early portable and a regular technical crew, we were poised to evolve attributes. In Peggy and Fred in Hell: The Prologue (1985) exhibition Video from Tokyo to Fukui and Kyoto in 1979, video cameras: with the medium. Younger artists attended the lectures; she collaborated with two children, setting her video and included one of Idemitsu’s early videos. In her Video the artists presenting their work got to see their tapes on camera on a tripod in her basement, aiming the lens at Viewpoints talk she elaborated on the way Japanese media In the early ’70s we really hated video. It was the a big screen, shown by a state-of-the-art video projector the children, and leaving the room while they devised a artists approached video, according the medium a certain worst thing that could happen to you. The bad that enlarged the image and made it frameless, like a land- make-believe narrative. respect, which gave their work a certain formality and image, the bad sound, everything was bad about scape, but did not provide the same saturated color as a By the late 1980s computerized video-editing allowed self-consciousness. She herself was interested in observa- it. It was limited to one hour and it was boring. monitor. The theater’s Dolby surround-sound—the best artists to edit works frame by frame, as accurately as film, tion, using video to record the daily routines of women, So the video in those days we used only as a docu- video sound system in town—mollified some of the more taking the medium into a controlled and polished realm “to deal with the daily life of women, which also included mentation record of our performance. We mostly dubious presenters. far removed from the old rough-and-ready, shoot-from- non-routines. In this way video became a medium I used asked the cameraman to put the camera on in With the advances in home-computer technology, the-hip aesthetic of the early days. The surge of program to explore women’s conscious and unconscious behavior.”17 one spot. . . . These videos are just like this . . . including advanced and readily accessible graphic and and advertising slots available on cable television resulted In 1984 I went to Amsterdam to see Het lumineuze one image hardly using a zoom and never using sound capabilities, the shift from analog to digital video in a proliferation of commercial postproduction video Beeld/The Luminous Image at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk a cut. . . . [After 1980] we didn’t make any more took root. Most filmmakers still had no interest in aban- studios in New York, many of them accessible to artists Museum, an exhibition featuring twenty-two new instal- videotapes, any more documentation of perfor- doning film resolution and tactile editing processes until at reduced rates when they weren’t being used by profes- lations by artists engaged with media. While there I talked mance. We tried to document it, if we could later in the 1990s, when video editing became more sionals. Other artists used completion funds from public extensively with Marina Abramovi´c, and as a result she on film, because the quality is much better and precise and portable at the same time that film-lab work television and foundation grants for postproduction, a came to speak at Video Viewpoints in 1985. She spoke you can project the image from the floor up and became frightfully expensive. A crossover slowly took critical and difficult-to-fund project phase. For some about her practice as a performance artist, both working you see the life-size body in the space.18 place. Leslie Thornton, in her 1990 Video Viewpoints artists, such as Max Almy, high-end production values

364 FROM VIDEO TO INTERMEDIA LONDON 365 12. Kristin Lucas (American, born 1968). Host. 1997. Video (color, sound), 7:36 min. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Margot Ernst and Susan Jacoby were a way of making the transition into television synthetic hues of photocopiers, tie-dyed T-shirts, and and Hollywood. kitschy plastic jewelry—and distortions that play with This new high-tech ethos produced a backlash from scale to create a feeling of surprise, sensuality, and younger artists, who saw rawness as an act of creative celebration. Rist is both serious and spirited, and honestly resistance. Many of these younger artists upheld a perfor- wants her work to make viewers feel good; her 1996 what Mumbai-based artist mative spirit reminiscent of video’s beginnings; one such Video Viewpoints presentation captivated the audience Nalini Malani describes as a artist was Sadie Benning, Video Viewpoints’ youngest with exuberant images. committed cross-national speaker: a persistent loner who started making videos at Artists of Rist’s generation, who came of age watching artists community.21 Born in age fifteen, using a toy black-and-white camcorder that MTV, were very comfortable sampling art and popular Pakistan in 1947, Malani grew recorded onto an audiocassette. In her 1991 lecture, deliv- culture and did not feel constrained by the usual catego- up in India, where indepen- ered when she was eighteen, she discussed her tell-all ries of art and commerce. In the late 1990s this mix dent media activity began autobiographical narratives, which had a refreshing feeling was visible in ad hoc screenings and installations in new with the arrival of satellite of moxie and candor. galleries and spaces in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and the and cable television in the I had met in 1986, while I was on the Lower East Side, in work by artists such as Alix Pearlstein 1980s. Against India’s com- jury for Bonn’s Videonale festival, which awarded her first and Cheryl Donegan. In 1997, together with Sally Berger plex and turbulent backdrop, prize for I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much (1986, no. 11). and Stephen Vitiello, I organized the exhibition Young and and with a sense of political Rist, a member of the postpunk girl band and performance Restless, which gathered twenty-one witty and insightful urgency, Malani creates her group Les Reines Prochaines, distinctive installations. These was inspired by Paik’s hyper- works that took a playful look at feminine social and weave together traditional and contemporary materials kinetic aesthetic; in her work sexual behavior. Concurrent with the exhibition, Kristin and storytelling methods in a dynamically layered, she subverts the music-video Lucas staged an action for Video Viewpoints in which, immersive environment. Violence—its presence and uni- format to explore the unruly wearing a tiny camera attached to a pith helmet, she versality—is a constant factor. Game Pieces (2003/2009, female voice and body in pop- revealed the computer processor within her (a similar no. 13) features enormous, rotating, translucent Lexan ular cultural representations, action unfolds in her video Host [1997, no. 12]). drums, on the interior of which are painted angelic figures merging rock music, electronic Around this time the dot-com industry was growing and animals, familiar creatures from ancient stories and manipulation, and perfor- very quickly, and some artists turned to the creation of miniatures, whose purpose is to restore harmony in an mance. She evokes the fiction Internet hubs. In 1997 I met with the nonprofit research embattled world, here floating on an ironic pretext of of childhood with bold, con- and development group äda’web, which paired nonmedia delicacy. Through these drums Malani projects video; temporary colors—the vivid artists with dot-com specialists and producers to its light illuminates the painted images and casts their experiment with and reflect on the Web; among the shadows on the gallery walls, but its images—projected results was Holzer’s please change beliefs (1995), a work nuclear bomb explosions in vivid reds and yellows— that inhabited the landscape of the Internet in the same also obliterate the painted creatures. As a result, the past spirit as her public art projects. I had long been meaning collides within an ever-shifting present. 11. Pipilotti Rist (Swiss, born to put my research on the Internet, and this informal New technologies evolve at an accelerating pace. The 1962). I’m Not the Girl Who conversation turned into Stir-Fry, a Web journal about latest tools trigger excitement and innovative experiments, Misses Much. 1986. Video (color, sound), 7:46 min. my subsequent trip to China and the thirty-five artists but as artists gain control they move on to a dialogue The Museum of Modern Art, I met there.20 with content rather than hardware or software. The New York. Acquired through Artists outside of North America and Europe had also Museum of Modern Art’s media collection begins with the generosity of Kathryn R. O’Donnell been harnessing new technologies as they appeared, in a fertile moment in the late 1960s, with video classics

366 FROM VIDEO TO INTERMEDIA LONDON 367 by distinguished artists whose pioneering work paved forging new ways of working in a setting that combines the way for subsequent boundary-breaking practices. art, social causes, technology, and social networks. The latest generation of media artists is poised to reinvent Breakthroughs appear out of the blue, changing everything the avant-garde. Today artists use the latest gear as readily in the uncontrollable, loosely defined field of media art, as they sip water. Hackers, programmers, and tinkerer- which crosses boundaries of every kind. As a custodian revisionists draw on local culture and international of this dynamic field, The Museum of Modern Art takes sources. Women are at the forefront of this new frontier, its stewardship seriously.

1. The exhibition had a cata- was popularized by media the- 7. EXPORT, in “Interview with Geiger,” Review: Latin American 15. On the development of logue with an embossed metal orist Gene Youngblood in his Andrea Juno,” in Juno and Literature and Arts, no. 48 Laurie Anderson’s style, see cover depicting MoMA’s facade book Expanded Cinema (New V. Vale, eds., Angry Women (Spring 1994): 55; reprinted in RoseLee Goldberg, Laurie and dynamic street life. K. G. York: E. P. Dutton, 1970). This, (San Francisco: Re/Search Anna Bella Geiger: Constelações Anderson (New York: Harry N. Pontus Hultén, The Machine the first book to consider video Publications, 1991), p. 187. (Rio de Janeiro: Museu de Arte Abrams, 2000), p. 47. as Seen at the End of the as an art form, was influential 8. Many of the earliest master Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, 16. For Anderson’s description Mechanical Age (New York: The in establishing the field of tapes sat in their moldy base- 1996), p. 81. of Handphone Table, see Laurie Museum of Modern Art, 1968). media arts as a scholarly disci- ments or hot attics, and as a 11. Paulo Herkenhoff, quoted Anderson, “Control Room and 2. Projects came about after pline. Youngblood argued that result were gumming up, cor- in Ashton, “Anna Bella Geiger,” Other Stories: Confessions of prolonged efforts by several a new, expanded cinema is roding, and flaking. From an p. 81. a Content Provider,” Parkett, curators in the Department of required for a new conscious- archival standpoint it was clear 12. On Passagens, see Tadeu no. 49 (May 1977): 132. Painting and Sculpture, namely ness and described various that unless cultural institu- Chiarelli, ”Fax para Anna Bella 17. Mako Idemitsu, statement Kynaston McShine and types of filmmaking that uti- tions placed the work in cli- Geiger,” in O mundo talvez, olam in Barbara London, ed., Video Jennifer Licht. In early 1970 lized new technology, including mate-controlled storage ulay (The world, perhaps) from Tokyo to Fukui and Kyoto Licht organized two exhibitions special effects, computer art, facilities, this part of art history (Ipanema: Joel Edelstein Arte (New York: The Museum of that were early models for the video art, multimedia environ- would slowly disintegrate and Contemporanea, 1995), pp. 6–7; Modern Art, 1979), p. 14. series: Robert Breer: The Osaka ments, and holography. fade away. The Museum’s regis- excerpts reprinted in Anna 18. Marina Abramovi ´c, Sculpture and Robert Irwin’s 5. My thoughts on expanded trar, the official keeper of Bella Geiger: Constelações, pp. lecture, Video Viewpoints, The Room Work. Licht’s exhibition cinema are indebted to VALIE records and storage locations, 39–40, “Fax to Anna Bella Museum of Modern Art, New Spaces, with installations by EXPORT, “Expanded Cinema gave the newly acquired video Geiger,” trans. Stephen Berg, p. York, January 7, 1985. Michael Asher, Larry Bell, Dan as Expanded Reality,” lecture in sub-masters acquisition num- 79. 19. By this time video had Flavin, Robert Morris, Pulsa, “The Essential Frame: Austrian bers, and the tapes were 13. On Mapas elementares 3, become part of the Department and Franz Erhard Walther, took Independent Film, 1955–2003,” placed under archival condi- see Karin Stempel, “Anna Bella of Film. As time-based medi- place in early 1970. Licht and London, May 31–June 1, 2003, tions. A media acquisition can Geiger,” in Anna Bella Geiger: ums, film and video have simi- I together selected videos to archive.sensesofcinema.com/ be thought of as a subscription: Arbeiten, 1975 bis 1995 lar storage and preservation accompany the 1973 loan exhi- contents/03/28/expanded_ a long-term commitment to (Herausgeber, Germany: Galerie issues. bition Some Recent American cinema.html. preserve the artwork in as Bernd Slutzky, 1996); excerpts 20. “Stir-Fry: A Video Curator’s Art, which traveled to Australia. 6. EXPORT, quoted in Sophie close to the original form as reprinted in Anna Bella Geiger: Dispatches from China,” This video selection recurred Delpeux, “VALIE EXPORT: possible, with eventual upgrad- Constelações, pp. 47–48, trans. adaweb.walkerart.org/context/ as Projects: Video I in 1974. Semper et Ubique/De-Defining ing from its obsolete format to Sylvia Frota, pp. 80–81. stir-fry/. 13. Nalini Malani. (Indian, born 3. Dick Higgins, “Intermedia,” Women,” Art Press, September the next archival standard. 14. Together with her partner, 21. Nalini Malani, quoted in Pakistan 1946). Gamepieces. Something Else Newsletter, 2003, p. 36. On EXPORT’s use of 9. Joan Jonas, quoted in Joan Woody Vasulka, Steina Vasulka London, “New Forms,” in 2003/2009. Four-channel 1966. In 1968 Hans Breder her body in video works, see Simon, “Scenes and Variations: made technological investiga- Gayarti Sinha and Paul video (color, sound), six founded the first university Kristine Stiles, “CORPORA An Interview with Joan Jonas,” tions into analog and digital Sternberger, India: Public rotating acrylic reverse-painted program in the United States VILIA: VALIE EXPORT’s Body,” in Art in America 83, no. 7 (July processes; their development Places, Private Spaces: Lexan cylinders, 12 min. The to offer a Master of Fine Arts Else Longhauser et al., VALIE 1995): 75. of electronic imaging tools Contemporary Photography and Museum of Modern Art, New in intermedia, at the University EXPORT: Ob/De+Con(Struction) 10. On Anna Bella Geiger’s place them as major architects Video Art (Newark, N.J.: Newark York. Gift of the Richard J. of Iowa, Iowa City. (Philadelphia: Moore College coming of age in Brazil, see of an expressive electronic Museum; Mumbai: Marg Massey Foundation for Arts 4. The term “expanded cinema” of Art and Design, 2000), p. 26. Dore Ashton, “Anna Bella vocabulary of image-making. Publications, 2007), pp. 10–11.­ and Sciences

368 FROM VIDEO TO INTERMEDIA LONDON 369