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New American Video Art" Surveys the Emergence of Removed from the Control of the Individual

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New American Video Art Introduction by John G. Hanhardt, Curator, Film and Video "New American Video Art" surveys the emergence of removed from the control of the individual. Their first video as an art form from its beginnings in 1967 to 1980. exhibitions, held in West Germany and the United These first years in the history of video art saw a wide States, reflect the international dimension of video art's variety of approaches that sought to describe and de- beginnings, They also show how television contributed fine a new field of art-making, But behind the diversity to the changing dynamic of the arts in the early 1960s, a of these initial efforts lie three features common to video process that involved a reexamination of sacrosanct art in this period: acollaboration with the other arts, an visual traditions. One manifestation of this change was involvement with political and ideological debates, the focus on popular culture at large, formalized in and an intentional distinction from commercial tele- painting and sculpture as Pop Art. vision. Just as the emergence of independent filmmaking in By the late 1960s, television had become a pervasive the 1940s owed much to the development of the small- mass medium viewed in virtually every home. On gauge 16mm camera, video became more accessible home television sets, the public was offered ahomoge- to artists and activists in 1965 when the Sony Corpora- neous selection of programming that followed for- tion introduced its portable videotape recorder into the mulas for structure, running time, and content . The NewYork market, NamJune Paik and Les Levine were viewer's perception of the medium was largely deter- the first artists to use it. In 1965, at the Cafe a Go-Go in mined by the role television had come to play as a NewYork, Paikshowed his firstvideotape-of Pope Paul commercial entertainment and information industry VI's visit tothe city, shot with aportablevideo camera he whose success-and therefore profit-was gauged by had boughtthatday In asense, Paik's action symbolizes the number of viewers it attracted. In an attempt to the initial attraction of this equipment: it was portable, challenge the television industry's hegemony, many and, unlike film, which had to be processed, you could artist-activists worked, often as collectives, to use video immediately see on a monitor what the video camera as a tool for social change . At the same time, video was recording, artists began producing tapes and installations de- It was commonly believed that the new video equip- signed to explore the medium's potential for a new ment would enable the avant-garde producer to re- aesthetic discourse, It is the work of this latter group that move the production of video from the economic and "New American Video Art" seeks to elucidate. ideological constraints of the television industry. Fur- While a number of artists began experimenting with ther, in keeping with Marshall McLuhan's theories, en- television in the mid-1960s, the direct appropriation of capsulated in his aphorism "the medium is the mes- television began with the manipulation or destruction sage,"many artists envisioned an electronic age where of the television set itself in the early Fluxus art projects the individual and collective producers would partici- of the Korean-born composer and musician Nam June pate in a "global village" of information and images Paik and of the German artist Wolf Vostell. Vostell and that superseded national and cultural boundaries. Paik's actions signaled a reevaluation of the television While many of these expectations remain unfulfilled, set as a cultural icon and as a technological product this optimism and spirit resulted in a rich and diverse group of works that prompt us to think about the poten- contains excerpts from their speeches and interviews, tial of television as both a social and aesthetic force. presents these men as foolish and hypocritical. "New American Video Art" surveys, within a chrono- An early effort to bring video artists to television was logical framework, the kinds of technical changes and made by WGBH, Boston, which, like WNET, New York, aesthetic and philosophical issues that appear and re- and KQED, San Francisco, was one of the most inno- appear throughout the period. Although it is impossible vative stations of the Public Broadcasting System. Six to categorize every tape, a number of approaches can artists (Aldo Tambellini, Thomas Tadlock,Allan Kaprow, be identified. In image processing, an aesthetic that Otto Piene, James Seawright, and Nam June Paik) were has evolved in contrast to broadcast television's "spe- commissionedto create programs for public broadcast cial effects," a variety of electronic devices transforms and given access to the station's facilities. The 30-minute both prerecorded and electronically generated imag- combined program, The Medium Is theMedium, is one ery. In personal documentaries, the hand-held video of the first examples of video art to appearontelevision. camera becomes the means to examine the dynamics We see image-processing techniques employed to of places and events. Performance videotapes employ transform prerecorded footage and generate new a range of narrative strategies to investigate the artist's kinds of abstract imagery. These include colorizing, self, the psychology of image manipulation, and the where a color signal is added to a black and white or relationship between the viewer and the artist/per- another color signal, resulting in brilliant, intense im- former. Other tapes use the properties of the video im- ages; mixing,which involves the superimposition of two age and the image-making process to explore the epis- or more images, like photographic double exposure; temology of perception. Finally, some artists have chroma-keying, a masking process in which an image produced narratives and texts in order to criticize or is inserted into specific areas of the frame; switching, in counter the ubiquity of commercial television. which two video images are displayed alternately at varying rates; and fades and wipes, which are vari- ations of switching and mixing. The Medium Is the Me- dium also includes productions that demonstrate tele- vision's potential as a two-way communications medium. In Kaprow's Hello the participants talk with each other via a live feed, and in Electronic Opera No. 1 Paik humorously invites viewers to respond to his in- structions. In addition to producing single-channel videotapes, artists began using television in video environments, which later became known as installations . These large-scale video projects added a temporal dimen- sion to sculpture through the use of live and pre- recorded video. Ira Schneider's videotape record of the 1969 Howard Wise Gallery exhibition, TV as a Cre- ative Medium, documents some of the twelve pieces included in the show, among them Serge Boutourline's Videotape StudyNo. 3,1967-69, Jud Yalkut and Nam June Paik . Telediscretion, Paik and Charlotte Moorman's TV Bra for Living Sculpture, Eric Siegel's Psychedelevision in Color, Thomas Tadlock's Archetron, Aldo Tambellini's Program 1 begins with two tapes that are directly re- Black Spiral, and Joe Weintraub's AC/TV (Audio Con- lated to the institution of broadcast television and the trolled Television). The tape is a straightforward pre- political climate of the late 1960s. In Videotape Study sentation of the featured works, in which Schneider No. 3, Jud Yalkut and Nam June Paik, who viewed the walks through the gallery and captures the exhibition's medium as potentially subversive, mocked the actions ambience and scope. TV as a Creative Medium also of politicians and the role of television during this includes Ira Schneider and Frank Gillette's Wipe Cycle, period of urban unrest and the United States military a project conceived of as a kind of television mural. involvement in Vietnam. Yalkut and Paik satirized Presi- Viewers faced a bank of nine monitors in which they dent Lyndon Johnson and New York City Mayor John could see themselves and the surrounding space from Lindsay by manipulating footage of their TV ap- different points of view, at different moments in time; this pearances. The resulting distortion, which is counter- video alternated with programming from commercial pointed by an equally manipulated soundtrack that television. 2 narrative meaning. Lip Sync should be viewed in rela- tion to Program 3, in which single actions have decep- tively complex effects. Program 3 opens with Vertical Roll, in which the cho- reographer and dancer Joan Jonas uses the vertical rolling action of a misadjusted television set-normally seen as a technical flaw-as a constantly moving frame for her performance . Her actions are directed not only to the camera but through it, to the monitor itself. Be- cause heractions change with each roll, she calls atten- tion to the ephemeral nature of the video image. Ac- companying Vertical Roll in this program is Undertone by Vito Acconci. A leading body art and Conceptual performance artist, Acconci is seatedin this tape at the head of a table facing the camera and the viewer. He delivers a monologue exhorting the viewer to imagine Undertone, 1972, Vito Acconci . what he is doing with his hands underneath the table top. Often highly charged and erotic, Acconci's speech implicates the viewer as a voyeur, all the while express- In Schneider's tape and others from this period, the ing the performer's need for an audience. grainy qualityof the image and instabilityof the picture In Program 4 John Baldessari, William Wegman, and reveal how technically inferior was the video equip- Peter Campus, like Nauman in Program 2, and Jonas ment used compared to the broadcast TV standard. But and Acconci in Program 3, capitalized on the potential despite these limitations and, indeed, because of the privacy of video production; artists could simply set up intentional distancing from broadcast TV, low-cost a camera in a stationary position anyplace and en- video offered an attractive means for artists seeking to gage in single-take, unedited performances .
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