TECHNOLOGICAL DETERMINISM AND MEDIUM ONTOLOGY IN FILM AND EARLY VIDEO A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE DEPARTMENT OF ART AND ART HISTORY AND THE COMMITTEE ON GRADUATE STUDIES OF STANFORD UNIVERSITY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Rudolph Navarro May 2014 © 2014 by Rudolph Navarro, II. All Rights Reserved. Re-distributed by Stanford University under license with the author. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/ This dissertation is online at: http://purl.stanford.edu/fd162kx3899 ii I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Pamela Lee, Primary Adviser I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Scott Bukatman I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Jean Ma I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Claudia Mesch Approved for the Stanford University Committee on Graduate Studies. Patricia J. Gumport, Vice Provost for Graduate Education This signature page was generated electronically upon submission of this dissertation in electronic format. An original signed hard copy of the signature page is on file in University Archives. iii ABSTRACT This dissertation examines the unexplored relationship between film and early video. While video and film cultures of the sixties and seventies frequently sought to separate themselves, I consider the two mediums in constellation to reveal a series of tandem concerns and effects. In their investigation of liveness and self-awareness with the forms and operations of video, seminal artists Frank Gillette, Ira Schneider, and Paul Ryan displayed a formalism that was contemporaneously theorized in avant- garde film and minimalism. The early work of Nam June Paik shares with the structural films of Paul Sharits a fascination with technological dysfunction and obsolescence. Jud Yalkut’s exemplary videofilms probe the boundary between film and video mediums to investigate a cultural preoccupation with authenticity in an environment increasingly mediated by electronic communications. In delineating these point of conjunction I make two arguments. First, I claim that this constellation of film and early video destabilizes traditional notions of an immanently defined medium, thereby making the film/video configuration a signal moment in the development of intermedia. By focusing on the shared operations and subject effects of film and early video rather than intrinsic qualities, I reconsider the medium as something contingently defined by its variable processes and results rather than its morphology. Contrary to some conceptualizations of intermedia as a fusion of mediums or a disregard for medium, the concurrence of film and video I research characterizes intermedia as a considered analysis of how differentiated mediums interact. To consider film and video together as intermedia is to recognize that while they both form and inform their objects in particular ways, their interaction reveals iv something unique about their effects that could not be ascertained by considering them separately. My second argument complicates the technological determinism that runs through these artists’ work and has been used to criticize their practices. Immersed in the culture of McLuhan, information, and cybernetics, my artists often celebrated their technology as a powerful ameliorative to problems caused by the social, political, and economic order. For these artists, using and watching video was sufficient to alter and direct social and political processes. Though they never explicitly attack the socio- political order or structurally consider their technology’s ties to the masters that developed and purposed the technology, they do refashion video with contrary intentions and ends. By drawing on film theory and considering film and video together as dominant cultural media that organize our perception and world, I show how the divergent practices of these artists meaningfully critique the socio-political order even as they work within the confines of that order. v CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter 1. Video and Film Forms in the Work of Frank Gillette, Ira Schneider, and Paul Ryan 28 Chapter 2. Nam June Paik, Paul Sharits, and the Dysfunctional Operational Form 100 Chapter 3. Jud Yalkut’s Videofilm and the Search for Authenticity 160 Conclusion 230 Appendix 235 Bibliography 246 vi INTRODUCTION A recent museum visit with my class conveniently reminded me why I undertook this research. Installed in the museum was a one-person exhibition consisting of works in a variety of mediums: paintings, sculptures, installations, large- scale photographs, and textiles. Tucked away in this proliferation of artistic forms was the requisite flat panel monitor and artist’s video. The moving image appeared anemic and inconsequential amidst the other artworks on wall and floor. While my exposure to the artwork was admittedly brief and cursory, it seemed to me that the artist had instrumentalized the moving image. He treated the video screen as merely one more site to display his social message while ignoring over one hundred years of a rich historical and theoretical development that could have informed, even transformed that message. When artists do address the history of film, their artworks frequently quote particular films or directors as cultural artifacts rather than meaningfully engage with the forms, operations, and historical transformations of the moving image. I believe that artists and their digital clips should recognize that how we see and read a moving image today is indebted to a language developed in a long and complex filmic tradition and that our being in the world is beholden to how we see and read the moving image. In the same way that surgeons build upon decades of medical research and practice to perform their operations, progressive artists should also consider their practice within the lineage of the moving image, whether they seek to advance or reject that lineage. This is the sentiment I bring to my study of early video. In the sixties and seventies, artists, curators, and critics were eager to claim video for the museum and as 1 a radical communications device. To a large degree, they argued for video’s separation from film in order to advance these claims. For example, in a 1969 interview for the East Village Other, Frank Gillette announces video’s difference from film: “Film people come to videotape as an extension of film; it’s a relief for them. They see videotape in a large part as a means of making film easy, whereas tape is an entirely different realm, having many more bogus similarities to film than genuine ones.”1 Gillette’s claim, however, becomes problematic when his artistic partner, Ira Schneider, recognizes that Gillette is speaking as a painter and good-naturedly laughs off his proclamation. Schneider, who is a filmmaker, goes on to describe his own involvement with video as an extension of his filmmaking: “What I wanted to do was environmental and very loose, and I found it much easier to work with videotape equipment than with film equipment because basically you got everything down…”2 This tension between the specificities of film and video continues to assert itself to the present day while it also begs the question as to the nature of the relationship between film and video. Must film and video be considered as separate mediums each with their own distinct formal operations and effects or are they interdependent with their natures derived, to whatever degree, from the other? As with my contemporary artist, these early commentators ignored the fact that the very legibility of the video image, from the semantics of its shots to the way an individual orients themselves to the image, is indebted to the dominant visual medium of the twentieth century. This ignorance is all the more noticeable when we consider 1 Frank Gillette and Ira Schneider, “Parts I and II of an Interview by Jud Yalkut.,” Radical Software 1, no. 1 (Spring 1970): 9. 2 Ibid. 2 that the moment of video’s genesis also saw a burgeoning of artist’s film and critical attention to the New American Cinema, underground, and structural film in scholarly journals and other forums. These critics, impresarios, and director/artists were also noticing video by discussing it in their columns and writings or taking up a video camera themselves. How video’s early reception avoided engagement with this culture of film is another topic, but what concerns me is how our understanding of early video might change were we to place it in this expansive and dense tradition of the moving image. As a moving image, the first videos necessarily participate in a discourse that has never been fully discussed. In beginning this project I was faced with, and immobilized by, the innumerable ways in which film and video’s association can be figured. A cursory scan of the film and art milieus during the sixties and seventies reveals a dizzying exchange among filmmakers, artists, and institutions associated with art and cinema. Artists like Andy Warhol, Bruce Nauman, and Nancy Holt made both films and videos. Powerful investigations of the filmic and videographic images were conducted by artists and filmmakers such as Bruce Conner, Stan Vanderbeek, and Scott Bartlett while Gerry Shum’s Television Gallery sponsored films made specifically for television. Even Jonas Mekas, that indefatigable proponent of the New American Cinema, frequently ran articles and discussions about television and video art in his journal Film Culture and his columns for the Village Voice.