The Prehension of Painting
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DOCUMENT UFD023 Ina Blom Becoming Video (The Prehension of Painting) In this edited extract from her new book The Autobiography of Video: The Life and Times of a Memory Technology, Ina Blom examines the memory and history of early analog video, and investigates how the medium, heralding new forms of technological and social life, URBANOMIC / DOCUMENTS prehended the forms and forces of painting. URBANOMIC.COM Memories of Painting phenomenon that psychologists call ‘iconic image- ry’, referring to the fact that images are retained by ‘Someone started talking about video history: “Video the brain in complete and full detail for as long as a may be the only art form ever to have a history be- second after their exposure. We assume that these fore it had a history.”’1 This is Bill Viola, recalling a are live images of the world, whereas they are in fact dinner scene at Chinese restaurant in New York on some sort of retention or ‘recording’. For Viola, this a February evening in 1974. Only a few weeks ear- opened up new and confusing avenues of thought. lier—by most accounts an early date in the history Where did memory begin and stimulus end? Were of video art—the Everson Museum in Syracuse had all images always already memories? Was memory opened the first retrospective exhibition of the work actually a future-oriented filter rather than a sense of Nam June Paik, accompanied by a catalogue with of the past—a process of continual invention at the Paik’s reprinted notes, letters, and published writings service of present action? in a messy facsimile format that at once managed to give the impression of instantaneous access to a Such thoughts not only presented human mem- work in progress and of archival findings attesting ory—‘the other half of the equation of technical to some hallowed moment in the past. At the time, hardware’—as a natural corollary to the live video Viola was deeply immersed in questions pertaining signal that is also a brief moment of retention. In to memory. Having spent years focusing almost Viola’s writings, they also pointed to a peculiar feed- entirely on technical hardware, he realized he had back loop between video history and the question of missed out on ‘the human half of the equation’—no- video as a technology of history. On that February tably, human ‘hardware’ such as ‘senses, perception, 1974 evening, the group of diners dissecting the ev- the brain, memory.’ As part of this new concern, he idence of a clearly premature need for a video art had been busy trying to trace the process of encod- retrospective was treated to what may have been ing an image backward, from a stored mental im- just a sarcastic remark about the maneuverings of age to a real-time pattern of light—from long-term certain artists and curators. However, Viola saw it memory to short-term memory to the working of as an epistemological argument: when it comes to the retina. In the process, he had come across the video, history and invention are of a piece.2 1. B. Viola, Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House (Cam- bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 123. 2. Ibid., 121–35. 1 This entirely general feature, present in all video re- ‘From now on there is no more history gardless of brand or generations of machine models, but only Imagery or Videory’ seemed to imbue video with the instant reflexivity of cognitive systems. Hence the intuition that vid- This argument could be grounded in a variety of cir- eo had agency—a capacity for active perception cumstances. It could indicate the evanescent impact of other objects in the world, which became part of any technology in an age of rapid media develop- of video’s progressive self-definition or individuation. ment—the dawning suspicion that video was almost Hence, also, the intuition that video was a self-re- already a thing of the past. It could refer to the pres- cording system—that is, a system whose memory ence of a highly self-reflexive media culture, fuelled by or history ran ahead of it, so that video history could off-the-cuff analyses of the here and now by popular not be configured in terms of the conceptual dis- figures like Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller. tinction between the lifespan of an object and its Or it could point to the sudden emergence of a new subsequent status as an archival object or record and troublesome type of historical archive where ‘in- of history. formation’ equaled ‘overload,’ as represented by the growing stacks of rapidly deteriorating videotapes: ‘a What exactly was this thing called magnetic city dump’ and ‘almost as much of a bother to maintain,’ as Viola put it.3 But none of these ide- video? What determined its existence? as really seemed to catch Viola’s imagination. What seemed pressing to him, what in fact pressed itself Such a point of view might put any newly minted URBANOMIC / DOCUMENTS on him and appeared to speak through him and oth- video artist on the alert. At the moment when a ers, was a more limited technical feature. To describe number of institutional forces conjoined to affirm URBANOMIC.COM this feature, the temporal linearity of everyday lan- the artistic and technical expertise invested in vid- guage would have to be circumvented; hence, Viola eo, the constitutional heterogeneity of this tech- called it ‘recording-simultaneously seeing-instantly nology also seemed to assert itself. If video was playing-back.’4 The expression referred to the fact the first art form or artistic medium to be always that signal transfer in video is always a live force, even already historical, if it made history emerge as a when triggered by magnetic recording, and the (relat- technology of memory at odds with the technical ed) fact that images may be produced in a feedback affordances of video, then what exactlywas this loop between camera and monitor without recourse thing called video? What determined its existence? to recording on a magnetic support. Video quite Television? Electronic sound experiments? Radar? simply seemed to blur the distinction between the Visual art? Computer technology? Could it even be forces of stimulus and retention, or an event and its called a medium and, if so, under what circumstanc- representation. In fact, in a January 8, 1972, letter to es did ‘it’ appear as such? What affected video to Radical Software, published in the Everson Museum affect itself? catalogue, Paik pointed out exactly this. In this retro- spective context he underscored video’s problematic Several artists and art historians have identified relation to history: ‘The word history came into be- connections between postwar abstract painting ing, because our events were told and written down and the interest in specific features of televisual thereafter. Now history is being recorded in image or technologies and media. Formalist impulses in mod- video. Therefore, from now on there is no more his- ern art—emphasis on the essence of painting—ap- tory but only Imagery or Videory.’5 Memory, in video, pear in sympathy with the early view of television as was simply a question of an imperceptible time delay, an empty medium, one whose message was indeed a minimal difference between before and after that the medium itself.6 More socially and politically ori- is simply an internal feature of machinic functioning. ented tendencies in television and video art mainly 3. Ibid., 125. 6. Raymond Williams, quoted by C. Mehring in ‘Television Art’s 4. Ibid., 124. Abstract Starts: Europe circa 1944–1969,’ October 125 (2008), 5. N.J. Paik, ‘Letter to Radical Software’, in Videa ‘n’ Videology 29–64: 30. Raymond Williams has discussed the early view of 1959–1973, exhibition catalogue (Syracuse, NY: Everson Muse- television as an empty medium in his book Television: Technol- um of Art, 1974), unpaginated. ogy and Cultural Form. 2 seem to emerge with the somewhat later aware- similarities that set new critical standards for art in ness of the ideological impact of television—the the media age. But these scenarios also mean that notion that television did in fact have ‘content,’ and analyses of video’s more direct implication in social that this content is political manipulation as well as and political thought come to depend on the idea a spectacle through which audiences, as Richard of an initial and foundational centering on issues of Serra put it, are ‘delivered’ to advertisers.7 For all its medium specificity and form. Such identification of pertinence, this is in many ways also a centripetal historical stages in television’s reception in culture reading of television and video art. It places video underpins a well-established dividing line within the in history and as an artistic medium by distinguish- field of video art in the 1970s—one made in the ing it from the television art that preceded it, and name of media politics and social reflection. On the by providing an account of these distinctions via one hand, you have the painter-engineers who pur- the complexes and variations of form and medium sue their quest for new electronic imagery by creat- specificity that first united painting and television. ing video synthesizers, multikeyers, and sequencers, The abstract-modernist quest for formal invention exploring and expanding on a repertoire of technical in painting validates experiments with the specific and formal effects, and, on the other hand, you have properties of electronic image technologies (for in- the artists who primarily access video for the pur- stance, the radar technologies used by the German poses of media critique and political intervention.9 painter Karl-Otto Götz) by placing such experiments Yet neither the dialectics of media essentialism and firmly within the sphere of culture.