The First Fifty Years the First Fifty Years

Barbara London The First Fifty Years Introduction 4 1 Defining a Medium, Defining a Field 20 2 Early Practitioners 44 3 Multimedia: Video, Performance, and Music 68 4 Video Takes Center Stage 98 5 Narrativity 126 6 The Rise of Installation 158 7 Media Art Diversifies 182 8 Media Art, Globalism, and Identity Politics 214 9 Facing the Future 244 Afterword 266 Notes 268 Acknowledgments 274 Index 275 Picture Credits 280 In the beginning, video as art was shaped by a congenial hard core that Early Practitioners consisted of overlapping groups of early adopters, who were joined by others who simply passed through. Decisive strides were made by artists engaged with the medium in different parts of the world. Simply put, video functioned as a vehicle for ideas, and practitioners embracing video and the new naturally intersected with experimentation in performance and sound art, as well as more conventional disciplines. Each of these trailblazing artists contributed a distinctive approach that was proof of video’s versatility as an artistic medium. Nam June Paik A bright-eyed, astute, and generous artist, Nam June Paik is celebrated as an interdisciplinary mastermind behind video art’s rise. I was charmed when he greeted me with a cheery hello upon our first encounter in 1974, when we both happened to be riding the same bus. Paik early on had settled into a studio in Lower Manhattan on Canal Street, an ideal spot for an artist fascinated by the detritus of modern living. During the day, the shops along Canal would empty secondhand electronic and machinery wares onto the sidewalks. The helter-skelter piles of rusted motors and TV carcasses were the palimpsests of the Fluxus energy in Paik’s assemblage installations. The corner deli was the only outpost of civilization in the handful of downtown artist neighborhoods of the late 1960s. The desolate streets were not a place to linger, but Paik often ran into fellow locals, such as musician Steve Reich (b. 1936) and Michael Snow. Snow once told me that their polite and enthusiastic sidewalk conversations resembled far-out performances. Paikspeak was rich and expansive and heavily accented, whether he spoke in Japanese, German, or English. Some listeners perceived abstract sounds rather than comprehensible language. In the mid-1970s, whenever Paik was in town and not traveling, he would stop by my minuscule office in a former utility closet at the end of a long hallway. Surrounded by an overflowing bookshelf and an overstuffed filing cabinet, we would sit and chat about his new projects and the state of video and the world. He usually arrived with an armful of treasures: his out-of-print early catalogs; old, yellowed newspaper clippings with reviews that he would sign; posters and other rare printed matter. In his inimitable sagacity, he knew that my collection of ephemera document- ing video’s history would one day become an important research archive. He understood I would save and organize everything, which I did, and eventually I transferred it to the MoMA Library. The reference materials Paik donated became important resources. Early Practitioners 5 Artists’ ambitions and their interconnectedness had far-reaching conse- quences throughout the 1970s. Adapting the now friendlier consumer tools to single-channel tapes, performances, and installations, artists collaborated, and crossovers multiplied exponentially. The dynamic cross-fertilization that occurred between video, performance, and music was labeled multimedia. I appreciated the diversity, especially the growing alliance between the areas of video and music. Given that a video artwork is based equally on image and sound, I followed how visual artists were engaging with music. Some found the experimental-music scene more conducive to their iconoclastic ideas than the handful of contemporary art galleries. After studying painting in art school, Ana da Silva (b. 1948) and Gina Birch (b. 1955) in London and James Nares (b. 1953) and Kim Gordon (b. 1953) in New York all formed noise bands, initially performing in clubs where nonconformists gravitated, or in alterna- tive spaces that were becoming professionalized and run by administrators. The artist-musicians Laurie Anderson (b. 1947) and the Bay Area group the Residents were among the first to make innovative music videos, before tran- sitioning to interactive CD-ROMs. Around 1976 I caught up with the American composer and visual artist Arnold Dreyblatt (b. 1953), then the young assistant of Shigeko Kubota and Nam June Paik. An impoverished multimedia artist and good friend of Bill Viola and other interdisciplinary artists, Dreyblatt lived rent-free in the attic of a big abandoned house (later torn down to make room for the South Street Seaport complex), poaching electricity from a nearby streetlamp. He was combining time-based installation art and music. At Buffalo State College, State University of New York, his unconventional composition and media studies professors had included experimental film and video makers Woody and Steina Vasulka, Hollis Frampton, and Paul Sharits (1943–1993), and electronic composers Pauline Oliveros (1932–2016), Morton Feldman (1926–1987), and La Monte Young (b. 1935); at Wesleyan, he later studied with experimental-music composer Alvin Lucier (b. 1931). I kept my eyes on Glenn O’Brien, an adroit cultural insider whom Andy Warhol had plucked out of Columbia University in the early 1970s to become editor of Interview magazine, the crystal ball of pop culture, which featured intimate conversations between celebrities, artists, musicians, and creative thinkers. When he became Interview’s music critic, I would read his column “Glenn O’Brien’s Beat” and be sure to see the punk band performances, graffiti artist shows, and work of other denizens rocking the underground that he suggested. Making it past Tina L’Hotsky, the downtown “it girl” and doyenne guarding the entrance to the Mudd Club, I’d dance under the Joan Jonas, Mirage, 1976 flashing lights until dawn like a sweaty maniac to the music of early DJ Performance at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, 1976 turntablists Johnny Dynell and graffiti artist Fred Brathwaite (b. 1959, a.k.a. 6 Multimedia: Video, Performance, and Music 7 following to the BBC’s board of management: “Access” or “community” programmes, which are spoken of so frequently in the current debates about broadcasting, are taken to be programmes which are made by viewers who have applied for airtime, and for which professional broadcasters supply the technical facilities necessary for production and transmission, but play only a minimal part in editorial decisions. Two of the elements that such programmes can bring to a network are believed to be— (i) voices, attitudes and opinions, that, for one reason or another have been unheard or seriously neglected by mainstream programmes;—(ii) stylistic innovations, new ways of handling film or videotape which professional broadcasters have either ignored or rejected; new editorial attitudes that do not derive from the assumptions of the university educated elite who are commonly believed to dominate television production.1 With the rising tide of video, artists pursued all sorts of outlets. In 1978 artists were opening their own nightclubs; by 1982 they were launching galleries. New York, London, Berlin, and Tokyo, among other cities, proved Laurie Anderson, O Superman, 1981 to be incubators and facilitators of a few multimedia artists’ successful Video, color, sound, 8 min. trajectories. MoMA in the Mid-70s Fab 5 Freddy). While there I would catch news flashes from Diego Cortez, a former guard at MoMA and an omniscient artist-curator who went on to At MoMA I found support in Riva Castleman, the curator of prints and organize the New York/New Wave show at MoMA PS1 in 1981. illustrated books. She had backed my launching MoMA’s artists’ books O’Brien hosted his Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party program on public access collection—my first major endeavor as a curator there, prior to video— cable between 1978 and 1982, with filmmaker Amos Poe (b. 1949) as director. and recognized that the makers of inexpensive offset artists’ books had Guests on the show included musicians Mick Jones (b. 1955); David Byrne motivations similar to those of video artists; both wanted their idea-driven (b. 1952); Debbie Harry (b. 1945) and other members of the band Blondie; work to reach interested audiences, outside of the art market. Castleman James Chance (b. 1953); performance artist Klaus Nomi (1944–1983); and the knew that a fledgling contemporary medium needed administrative up-and-coming painter Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988). Public access— support in order to thrive. Around 1976 she helped convince Director Richard a free-speech forum open to all on a first-come, first-served basis—was Oldenburg to increase the small operating budget and give the video created in the 1970s as a means to derive public benefit from the laying of exhibition program a boost with additional funding for shows. cables by private television companies on public land. It became a claimable I worked to cultivate a reputable position for myself within the venue for media experiments and cultural debates in the United States. organization. I spent my lunch hours following in the footsteps of the more In London, correspondingly vociferous debates raged around the topic established curators by frequenting the same powerful 57th Street of access within the community video movement that had begun in the galleries they went to—Sidney Janis, Tibor de Nagy, Pace, Light Gallery, 1970s. Around this time, David Attenborough, director of programming for Blum Helman, and Marian Goodman—as well as visiting Holly Solomon the British Broadcasting Corporation, summed it up when he wrote the in SoHo, hoping to make contacts upon whom I could eventually draw for 8 Multimedia: Video, Performance, and Music 9 Everyone has a story, and video proved to be an ideal medium to convey one.

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