The Temporalities of Video: Extendedness Revisited Author(s): Christine Ross Source: Art Journal, Vol. 65, No. 3 (Fall, 2006), pp. 82-99 Published by: College Art Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20068483 Accessed: 22/08/2010 15:16 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=caa. 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Bruce uneasy reception early protracted temporality: Nauman/SODRAC more than other has criticized (2006); photograph "Video, any medium, been for being tedious and provided by Electronic Arts Intermix) self-indulgent. In the early '70s this was a valid criticism, because the length of artists'... works were dictated standard to many by videotape length?30 60 ' minutes?which in some cases was much too same long." During the period, Nam June Paik, one of the key pioneers of electronic arts, Christine Ross made his most famous claim: video is time. Although this suggests that Paik supported the first generation of video whose work a sense The of Video: artists, effectively conveyed of extended Temporalities to the it its duration viewer, he reproved for poor under Extendedness Revisited standing of time: "What Godard says about cinema ('truth times a not in 24 second') does hold video. Because in video, there is no space (delimited frame) there is only time (lines without one to thickness).To produce color in video has translate color in time. Colors in video aremillionths of seconds. Video is essentially time. And this explains why the works of the first video artists were so boring: coming mainly from visual no arts, plastic arts, conceptual art, they had experience with time. Video will make progress if people coming from cinema, dance, theater, and music start to with the assessments are a experiment medium."2 These just few examples of the ambivalent of a that to generally reception early video, practice sought investigate the of time?the consideration time as a making of material?through its explo ration of extendedness, delay, boredom, banality, nonproductive ty, and repetition to and Contrary London's Paik's arguments, however, these experiments were not seen most artists as by shaped by technological determinism (i.e., the standard videotape length) or by their lack of experience in time-based arts, but as means to dominant unique disrupt conventionalities of time, notably accelera tion and As as temporal linearity. early 1976, the curator, writer, and video artist Willoughby Sharp, referring to Bruce Nauman's 1968-69 sixty-minute video performances, which showed the artist in his studio engaged in the repetitive, seemingly banal, and futile actions designated by their titles (ViolinTuned D.E.A.D., 1969), argued that his work in fact "took advantage of the actual length of the to transmit actions with no or to a structure tape" beginning end, according of 1.Barbara London, "Independent Video: The First not to at Fifteen Years," Artforum 19, no. I (September redundancy that would only allow the spectator "come in any time" bui OB 41. W 1980): also render editing ultimately unnecessary.3 Supporting video's exploration of 2. Nam June Paik, "L'Arche de Nam June," Art unedited themedia artist Davidson contended that the sense S Press 47 (April 1981 ): 7-9. My translation. real, time, Gigliotti 3.Willoughby Sharp, "Videoperformance," in was a means of temporal extendedness emerging from such practices of coun Video Art An Anthology, ed. IraSchneider and Beryl the time of TV and radio.4 Bill Viola of the Korot (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, tering compressed Similarly, spoke 253. need to counter accelerated culture: a 1976), "Our society has evolved such warped 4. Davidson "Observations on the Gigliotti, Scope sense of time. As accelerates into a and of Multi-Channel Video Work," in Schneider and technology everything higher higher 215. and our dreams become on more we are Korot, velocity, centered becoming efficient, finding thatwe actually have less and less time. Lack of time is one of the greatest and our institutions... .The central problems haunting the video field modern problem of the day is how tomaintain sensitivity and depth of thought (both in context our In own video functions of time) the of accelerated lives."5 Viola's has meant actions to increase the production, this favoring seemingly uneventful and so that "one lib spectator's sensorial, attentional, cognitive faculties, might erate oneself from the habit of viewing objects as we see them."6 Expanded time thus became for some an aesthetic strategy that could problematize the opticality of the image. As Les Levine subsequently put it, inasmuch as the "main issue that is relates to time and television deals with time," the "way that perception space in artist is in Per is very important considering why the involved television."7 are ception, cognition, and memory all "timing devices." In this article, Iwant to briefly examine the ways in which the electronic making of time has been and still is one of the most substantial contributions to to aesthetics contemporary art's investigation of the image, the development of se. start a on as per Video has been from the practice and about time but, will become clearer below, this practice articulated itself along a split between defenders of extentedness and eventfulness, duration and immediacy. Why this debate still matters iswhat the present essay seeks to explore by briefly situating the discussion in the context of research of the last forty years that claims that the acceleration of history is one of the key symptoms of modernity and that this meant time as well as a pace has the progressive absorption of by space growing can to disconnection between past, present, and future. One only hope here refer succinctly to some of these studies on the waning of time, but I do want to show that video art is a significant player in that reflection. In The Productionof Space (1974), the sociologist Henri Lefebvre argues that "with the advent of modernity time has vanished from social space," stating 5. Bill Viola, "History, 10Years, and the more time has ceased to occur within In precisely that the apprehension of space.8 Dreamtime," in Video: A Retrospective (Long an era that values the economic and uses of Lefebvre contends, Beach: Long Beach Museum of Art, 1984), 22. political space, 6. Bill Viola, "The European Scene and Other time becomes an isolable and isolated category, fragmented for the sake of profit, Observations," in Schneider and Korot, 277. recorded on instruments, subordinated to itself, and des 7. Les Levine, "One Gun Video Art," inNew exclusively measuring Artists Video: A Critical ed. to trace. More the new-media Anthology, Gregory tined be disposed of without leaving any recently, Battcock (New York: Dutton, 1978), 77. theoretician Sean Cubitt has confirmed Lefebvre's conclusions by showing how 8. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. and Steadi-cam tech Donald Nicholson-Smith ( 1974;Oxford, UK, and postwar cinema (through slow motion, freeze-frame, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1991), 95. a niques) and digital media (through the spreadsheet, which "organises tempo 9. Sean Cubitt, The Gnema Effect (Cambridge, ral ... into a articulate the of time.9 One MA: MIT Press, 2004), and "Analytic of the process spatial form") spatialization Towards a for Dimensionless; Prolegomena any decade after Lefebvre's study, however, urban planner Paul Virilio published his Future Materialism," paper at the presented which maintains that the exhaustion of time should "What's Left of Theory?" conference of pivotal L'Espacecritique ( 1984), 3 Australian Cultural Studies Association, University not be understood solely in economic terms (as a consequence of capitalism) of Tasmania, Hobart, December 8-10, 2001, but as the effect of the of of communication. Since the available online at http://neme.org/main/ expansion technologies it is not so much that absorbs time as time 303/analytic-of-the-dimensionless. implementation of television, space itself?the instantaneous time of electronic transmission?that erodes the tem porality of delay. The subordination of time to itself identified by Lefebvre here reaches another its time is now as stage: after detachment from space, postulated its own as abolishing existence interval, duration, and retardation. ForVirilio, the predominance of speed and instantaneity over delay can only be highly problem atic, for it tolls the knell of perspectival viewpoint and the sense of criticality that this viewpoint made possible.,0 The historian Fran?ois Hartog and the anthropologist Marc Auge have equally concurred on the time in waning of contemporary societies, although this loss " is more in terms on understood of presentism than spatialization.