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

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http://www.jstor.org 3 Bruce still from Violin Tuned Nauman, In an article written for Artforum in 1980, MoMA video curator Barbara London D.E.A.D., black-and 1969, single-channel situated the of video art in its white videotape, 60 min. (artwork ? 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, , 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 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. In his book Time inRuins (2003), Auge stipulates that ruins?and here lies their productivity ?enable the observer to the a can experience passage of time, temporality that not be completely equated with historical time. Auge s emphasis on the temporal dimension sets out to in of ruins, however, critique the disappearance of ruins not current contemporary culture: the lack of preservation of ruins but culture's to ruins. inability produce The presentism of contemporary architecture (its ephemeral and substi tu table dimension) and the communicational function of information technologies that seek to dissolve the obstacles ?f time and space through a logic of instantaneity and transparency are two key instances in which the production of ruins is fundamentally blocked. Indeed, if the prevailing of our as as regime historicity characteristic of times, Hartog recently argued, is an presentism?the turning of the present into absolute value, whose absolute ness now means a real disconnection from the past (perceived as lost) and the future (perceived as increasingly uncertain)?the temporal productivity of ruins appears substantially jeopardized. While the preoccupation with the present can and must be seen as a consistent critique of modernity's dismissal of the as a to present and need counter problematic modern conventions of time based, on in a in notably, progress, chronology, and permanence, such regime, it is fact the possibility of history which is claimed to be on the threshold of loss. While these studies, to say it bluntly, do succeed in demonstrating how durational time has been increasingly manhandled and fragilized in (post) moder nity, it is also clear that it is not time but specific forms of temporalities that are and is being lost, transformed, enforced, negated. Further research required to understand such a mutation. Video art must be seen as m fully contributing ?/i to this as a inquiry, practice that produces both temporal extendedness and insta?taneousness. S o' c<-t Indeed, itwas not only duration, which Fried in his critique of Minimalism D 10. Paul Virilio, L'Espoce critique (Paris: Christian called the beholder's inclusion in a situation that on and on, which created Bourgois. 1984), 37. My translation. goes 11. Fran?ois d'historicit?, a reverse: more Hartog, R?gimes pr?sen problem for early critics but also its the immediacy of the image, tisme et exp?riences du temps (Paris: Seuil, 2003); the of the video camera?as soon as it is switched on and in Marc Auge, Le temps en ruines (Paris: Galil?e, precisely property 45. contrast to cinema?to an 2003), photography and instantaneously produce image that is de facto visible on the the monitor as a screen, functioning mirroring device for any object or subject located in front of the camera at the moment of shoot ,2 ing. This criticism, based on the perception of time (of video per se) as a at core predicament, stands the of Rosalind Krauss's famous dismissal of video art as a narcissistic For practice. Krauss, narcissism?the absorption of the other by the self?finds its cause specifically in the performer's failure to detach him or herself from the instant feedback provided by the simultaneous reception and transmission of the video image. Focusing on 's Centers (1971), in which the artist films himself pointing his finger at the center of his own image on the video monitor for whole minutes and the twenty-two forty-three seconds of the the art sees a an tape, historian "sustained tautology" traced by axis of sight starting at Acconci's plane of vision and ending at its double diffused by the monitor: is as two "Consequently, the body though centered between machines which are the opening and the closure of a parenthesis. The first is the camera; the second is the monitor that re-projects the image of the performer with the a '3 is a a immediacy of mirror." The result collapsed present, the deployment of time a sense its own as present "severed from of past," of history per se.'4 Even as late the 1990s, the immediacy of video?not only its feedback and instantane ity features but also its production of images made from the ceaseless flow of electrons scanning the surface from left to right and top to bottom?would become the basis on which the cultural critic Fredric Jameson deprecated video and associated itwith yet another temporal incompetence: the failure to produce to no in com memory. "But memory," he writes, "seems play role television, mercial or otherwise (or, I am tempted to say, in postmodernism generally) : nothing haunts the mind or leaves its afterimages in the manner of the great moments of film ..."1S

Yet, as was the case with the debate around video extendedness, this criti

cism was far from unanimous and was also blind to the fact that, in the 1970s, artists and critics stressed the importance of experimenting with the indexical of the video the quality image, guaranteed by medium's simultaneous produc tion and projection of images, because it enabled a unique relation of copresence (void of any delay) between the image and its referent. Such experiments were a means to be attentive to the here and now or to the otherwise fleeting present. Although Krauss was right in identifying how Acconci's work stages processes of confusion between the self and the other, she was not attentive to its relational 12.Michael Fried, "Art and Objecthood," in the that in such as Minimal Art A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory dimension, fact tapes RecordingStudio fromAirtime (1973), for Battcock (New York: Dutton, 1968), 124. the artist was his to make the a example, interpellating partner point about love 13. Rosalind E. Krauss, "Video: The Aesthetics of in New Artists 45. evaluated, confessed, and condemned. It is also Narcissism," Battcock, Video, relationship successively 3 signifi 14. Ibid., 48. cant Acconci as a to a that speaks of his work practice that seeks establish "face 15. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or, The to-face between himself and the viewer via a monitor as Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: relationship" perceived Duke 1991 70-71. a area on one University Press, ), "a middle-ground, depository for objects?an where I, off-screen can over to on the other This side, hand things the viewer, off-screen side."l6 on now the also underlies the art critic and emphasis the of viewing relationship curator most of the medium Bruce Kurtz's argument that "the powerful aspect is its ability to transform even the events of ancient history into the flowing pre or not is or on the is sent, whether what being telecast, what appears monitor, or actually live, taped, filmed.... Newness, intimacy, immediacy, involvement, a sense are Even in and of the present tense all characteristics of the medium. on commercial the tense prerecorded programming television, present prevails in our in the which occur in the idiosyncrasies of sets, 'disturbances' constantly its still frames is an the image.... Film, with twenty-four complete per second, its illusion of movement, while television, with constantly changing configura '7 tion of dots of light, is an illusion of stillness." Krauss s and Jameson's condemnations of video are condemnations of the instantaneity (presentism and flow) otherwise defended by Kurtz and Acconci, or any artist using the feedback capacities of the media. But in video art this is more than dichotomy between extendedness and instantaneity often apparent us real. Even in works that engage with extendedness and real time?let think here of the work of Nauman, Marina Abramovic and Ulay, Steina andWoody Vasulka, Viola, Thierry Kuntzel, Madelon Hooykaas and Elsa Stansfield, Gary Hill, Lisa Steele, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Mich?le Waquant, Douglas Gordon, Stan Douglas, and Craigie Horsfield, to name just a few?the durational never a and In Viola's Passions is simply negation of instantaneity acceleration. series of video projections and LCD transmissions (2000-01), for example, the extendedness of emotional waves enacted by different actors ismade possible by the technical hybridization of cinematic acceleration and video deceleration. The scenes were on as at at rates shot 35mm film, single takes and very high speed, of up to three hundred frames per second, then transferred to digital video, radically slowed down, edited, and played on flat screens. Video art, especially in its recent developments, is thus not without complications in the opposition time duration and between space temporalization and spatialization, immediacy. must be seen as contributions to reflec Its temporal investigations significant tions on the waning of time, the fragilization of the sense of history, and the Iwant contemporary reinforcement of presentism. To understand these aspects, to focus here on one of the latest international exhibitions to have shown OB renewed forms of video extendedness while overdy manifesting the victory 5 of video over its "dark of and near condemnation: the age" uneasy acceptance "o' Fifty-first Venice Biennale. IL even more so two In continuity with but than the previous Biennales, " Plan For in 16.Vito Acconci, 10-Point Video," video was present everywhere in the 200 c Venetian display of technological Schneider and Korot, 8-9. from the video to the more video or 17. Bruce Kurtz, "The Present Tense," in heterogeneity, simple projection hybrid Schneider and Korot, 234-35. film screen projection on DVD (digital video disk), notably in Rosa Martinez's Arsenale exhibition, Always a LittleFurther, where video comprised nearly half of the exhibited works. But in all sections of the Biennale, circulating through the rooms meant screens or rooms and pavilions moving around large entering solely six-screen or -monitor it meant occupied by one-, two-, installations; walking on floors or alongside walls illuminated by video representations, lying down under a ceiling transformed by the kaleidoscopic display of electronic landscapes (Pipilotti Rist, Homo sapienssapiens, 200c), or looking inside cardboard boxes with video images projected within (Blue Noses, Quest, 200c), often accompanied by the soundtrack of the next video work further down. The Biennale showed how

at can screen to much, this point, any surface suffice for projection, from archi tecture to water to (Rebecca Bellmore, Fountain, 200c) train wagons (Xu Zhen, Shout, 2ooc), and how the present field of video art includes both established and younger artists from everywhere. Initially disparaged (but also revered) for its art exploration of border-temporalities, marginalized both by institutions and is now art television, the parent pauvre of cinema, video widely accepted by the system. It has been proliferating increasingly since the 1990s, to the point of a art. becoming pleonasm for contemporary In light of the 200c Biennale, three observations can be made to explain the quasi-tyr?nnical proliferation of video and the depreciation of the history of video related to this which risks as a proliferation, remarginalizing the medium art event significant practice. First, the confirmed Martha Rosler's anticipation

that the "museumization" of video has meant the acceptance of video installa tion or in large-screen projections, which "can only live" spacious and well equipped exhibition spaces, to the detriment of single-channel pieces known for use their community-activist orientation, social negativity, and lighter of tech nology.'8 Second, the generalized integration of DVDs also made palpable the impact of the digital revolution on the burgeoning of video, the digital becom ing?because of itsmalleability, immutability, and precise coding of data?the predominant mode of support for both video and film, suggesting, as already noted by media theoretician Philippe Dubois, that video, in its "pure" electronic came to a and between form, only occupy fragile, transitory, marginal position two strongly established image-and-sound technologies, cinema and the digi 18.Martha Rosler, "Video: the Shedding Utopian tal. While'9 video as a continuous represents information flux of analogue data Moment," in Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide on an sensors to Video Art, ed. Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer (New to be displayed electronic screen, digital transform luminous York and San Francisco: Aperture and the Bay data in a temporal succession of calculable binary digits (bits) that can adopt Area Video Coalition, 1990), 44 and 49. the value of 1 or o. as Andr? Rouill? has there is a mate 19. Philippe Dubois, "La question vid?o face au Hence, argued, although cin?ma: d?placements esth?tiques," inGn?ma et or contact at moment rial continuity between things and images the of capture, derni?res technologies, ed. Frank Beau, Philippe the recorded ismade from mathematical to be adminis Dubois, and G?rard Blanc (Issy-les-Moulineaux, image entirely symbols and INA and France, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium: trated by programming3 systems that disconnect the image from itsmaterial De Boeck Universit?, 1998). mathematical means that data remains the same from one 20. Andr? Rouill?, La Photographie (Paris: origin.20The coding 614-17. transmission to in Gallimard, 2005), the other, while the analogue signal weakens time. The digital, a not moreover, introduces malleability which surpasses analogue imagery: only can the images now circulate, endlessly and rapidly, from one digital site to as are can another, inasmuch these related by digital links, they also easily be or reassem modified (retouched, reframed, partially suppressed, fragmented, bled). The in-between, fleeting status of analogue video?and this brings us to the third observation?is reinforced all themore by the extensive use of digital technology as amere media support deprived of any critical questioning of viewer more as representation, narration, interrogation, and, significant, time, though earlier video had never occurred and could not thus be the historical on to new basis which produce media works. The sweeping institutional acceptance of digital video installation has a and recent electronic a established cleavage between early arts, depreciation

of historical awareness. When video reaches this stage of omniscience, when it one as a becomes of the main media of art, used mosdy support from which are structural, optical, temporal, narrative, and sound investigations dismissed, it disappears. It is not thatwe are facing yet another "end" (following the alleged end of history or painting). Rather, video art becomes merely a digital our or can extension of digital lives where any image, sound, word be processed, played out, or manipulated atwill, but leaving us perplexed as towhy and so cannot be as or even how they should be and why and how other media more legitimate. one In this context, could better appreciate the Biennale's video works that screen not to to a put the into crisis abolish it, but articulate form of silencing thatmade the viewer aware of the critical necessity to think about the whys and screen. hows of the Matias Foldbakken's one-minute DVD video projection, Black a camera a Screen (200c), which activates that films the inside of cinema theater a a was in as was and ends with shot of blank, black screen, pivotal this regard, Mark Raidpere's video projection ShiftingFocus (200c), showing himself with his mother, first adjusting the camera for focus, then slipping into a confessional in to seems to a mise-en-situation which he attempts share what be painful, secret. scene was cut out intimate The actual of confession during the editing the viewer's not the scenario but process, frustrating expectation shaped only by also by reality TV and InternetWebcams that ShiftingFocus partly reproduces. These are to a instances when video succeeds, despite its progressive reduction support o? among others, in keeping in touch with its historical development to affirm as a to time I itself practice in mutation that still has something say about and Co' representation. Entering its digital phase, video is destined to be hybridized 3 61 more more it and with other media?be film, painting, photography, computer or to be interwoven with generated images, architectural components?and any or (administrative, scientific, artistic, popular) image, sound, digitally assisted activity. As such, there is no point in trying to single out the specificity of video Mark Raidpere, still from Shifting Focus, art to notice that can be made not to in can except video disappear the digital, 2005, video 9 min. 30 sec. projection, (art inform it in its own work ? Mark Raidpere; photograph provid specific ways through history. ed by Centre for Contemporary Arts, In a pivotal book published in 2000, the new-media specialists JayDavid Estonia) Bolter and Richard Grusin coined the word "remediation" to refer to the ways inwhich any new medium is always both a refashioning of an earlier medium as Marshall McLuhan had a and, already observed, novelty understood through previous media novelties.21 This field of research is crucial in that it not only rec the remediation at in new ognizes play any evolving medium (i.e., the historical debt of new media toward earlier media) but also experiments with the aesthetic possibilities at play in the meeting of temporal and nontemporal media. The use of the digital is crucial here since it opens up video to other media in away that can renew all is potentially media involved. Such the case, notably, of Shahzia Sikander's SpiNN (2003) wall painting and DVD installation, which show both how much painting can gain aesthetically through activation by the layering, and electronic and how art can loss, reemergence of images, video be complicat ed when it is interwoven with rich pictorial traditions known for their sustained and narrative sexu powerful development of forms of representation of identity, and the that have video since its ality, intercultural?areas3 occupied beginnings. 21. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, video, Sikander's is asmuch about the and Remediation: Understanding New Media Temporalized by painting perception MA: MIT as the of the tradition Indo-Persian miniature (Cambridge, Press, 2000). interpretation recalling of painting. Shahzia still from Sikander, SpINN 1,2003, The tradition is enlivened by the undecided tension between aWash wall paint animation with sound, 6 min. 38 sec, digital and a animation onto that the dimensions variable (artwork ? Shahzia ing digital projected surface, projection setting Sikkema an Sikander; photograph provided by into play uninterrupted flow of images of imps, lovers, and birdlike flying Jenkins & Co., New York City) shapes (the black hairdos of the evanescent nude gopis), sampled both from and mass a traditional imaginary media, that emerge from and dissolve against gradually changing background of aMughal throne room and a landscape. The as one projection veils and reveals, adds and retracts it also reads and transposes scene to our a with another alter perception of the whole and suggest sense of in 200c new temporality the construction of meaning. The Biennale showed that media art, when it is embedded in a critical understanding of media history, does provide vibrant experimentations that both inscribe themselves and renew video art's investigation of time. As I hope to show through further examination of some of the works of the when in such key Biennale, engaged investigations, 3 video art can still provide strong insights as to the evolution of the image. It is when it addresses that it in so. To time, interestingly, succeeds doing demonstrate Candice Breitz, stills from Mother, 2005, Iwill focus on two this, temporal aesthetic strategies?decontextualization and six-channel installation, 13min. 15 sec, the best disclose how video art endowed with historical awareness dimensions variable (artwork ? Candice loop?that Breitz; Alexander a sense to photographs by Fahl, provides of futurity the image. provided by Galleria Francesca Kaufmann)

Decontextualization

The Biennale presented several works which show how the field of video art is currently engaged in original investigations of what Iwould call, for lack of a better decontextualization. This aesthetic word, procedure substantially redefines the mimetic understanding of the image. It does so by connecting three types of In temporalities?instantaneity, extendedness, and mutability. the late 1970s, a Dara Birnbaum produced series of single-channel tapes, including Technology/ Transformation:Wonder Woman (1978) and Kiss theGirls: Make ThemCry (1979), which devised an aesthetic to strategy of appropriation deconstruct televisual representa tions of The works femininity. appropriated short sequences from soaps, sit-coms, and quiz shows and replayed them by repeating selected fragments to disclose discursive constructions of in gender otherwise impalpable the narrative flow. Candice Breitz's twin six-monitor video installations Mother and Father (200c), pre sented at the Biennale, inscribe themselves fully in Birnbaum 's strategy of appro but move toward priation linguistic reorchestrations of the pirated material. Appropriating from Hollywood films not sequences or fragments but mere or instants of statements phonemes uttered by famous actors (including Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts for Mother and Steve Martin and Dustin Hoffman for Father),Breitz digitally cuts these instants from their initial contexts, sets them a neutral and then and against black, background, replays, repeats, finally relocates them in the new context of the where screens are installation, plasma arranged in "dialogue" with each other. Although the process of appropriation does have the effect, as in Birnbaum 'swork, to disclose discursive constructs?here, Ameri can fantasies about motherhood and can never as fatherhood?it be read merely a critique in that the isolation and orchestration of the statements become the means a new by which version comes about. These versions are made from too to function as smooth narratives are many syncopes but the equivalent, in visual of and a to reactivate terms, DJ pirating sampling, way the excerpted instants and turn them into to one talking heads that reply another and create, in this reorga new of Kurtz in nization, possibilities meaning. Instantaneity, which designated 1976 as "the most powerful aspect" of video ("its ability to transform even the events of ancient history into the flowing present") is explored here in its narra tive as a to reinvent narrative the potential, way through practice of sampling. The of as a also discloses the concept 3 representation sampling procedure role of the image in the increasing interdependence of fiction and reality in (post) modern societies. What Gilles Deleuze has said about the time-image of 3 it post-Neorealist cinema?that articulated the direct representation of time by to one reversing time's subordination movement, and that of the main effects of this reversal was to abolish the distinction between the real and the imaginary? is not so to as in art much transposable problematized video when representa tion is in can investigated nonmimetic, nonoptical terms.22 Fiction and reality to one can to one still be explored substitute for another, but also be made chase in a us to HD another critical tension, and this brings Antoine Prum's video 3cmm single-screen projection MondoVeneziano: High Noon in theSinking City (200c). A narrative of the Venice Biennale itself, the work stages?in the city of Venice? a a a four specialists of the field (a curator, critic, painter, and "convivial" artist) engaged in a debate about contemporary art. It proposes a fictional world that looks real but whose artificiality progressively becomes manifest and whose high raises to a it can never level of fiction the question of fiction's relation reality completely absorb. The debate is structured by the sampling and assemblage of statements on art and But are readymade culture. although they uttered by the as in a protagonists, who often read their lines though rehearsal, the assemblage is so logical in its interweaving that it is only the credits at the end that reveal the statements. is in appropriations of the "Venice" also gradually exposed its fiction ality: empty and dry (without inhabitants or water), the city is a fake Venice?a set in a town large stage situated southern of Luxembourg, used for the making are in a continuous of feature films. Prum's images inserted logic of the confu sion of fiction and reality, a logic that is inseparable from the digital revolution. As Rouill? has observed, digital malleability implies that the image can easily be and is even to amateur expected be modified?further fictionalized?by any pro ducer with the help of a variety of image-processing techniques. While this leads him to conclude that the truth function of the image is slowly dying, Mondo on Veneziano shows the contrary that this truth effect persists, albeit substantially transformed. This becomes even more manifest toward the end of the work. As

the artists continue to search one actor a dis for the definition of art, performs section on an in a state apparently live body, of complete indifference. This pro jection does not end the blurring of fiction and reality, but does succeed in challenging it by bringing into contact art and the body, the latter as the element though which the fictional and entertainment value of art (the persistent laws of transgression that support the consecration of the artist) are disclosed and called

into question. The process of decontextualization at play in the sampling procedure, which I argue is significandy tied to investigations of temporality, also has the effect of abrupdy separating the image from its referent or the represented action from its 3 cause. Nikos Navridis's looped video projection Difficult Breathno. 41 (2004) makes that in its brief of a of female 22. Gilles Deleuze, Gn?ma 2?L'image-temps rupture explicit deployment group performers de 108. camera (Paris: ?ditions Minuit, 1985). 15,93-94, who drink water and then spit it out at the very moment when the 3

Stephen Dean, still from Vofto, 2002-03, video-DVD loop, stereo sound, 9 min. (artwork ? Stephen Dean; photograph provided by Galerie Xippas, Paris) removes them from the frame. The remaining, quite poetic sequence?sparkling water event its as slowly moving in mid-air?cuts the from source, Rouill? would about the not so much to the source as to an argue digital, negate provide to the the act to focus on what is other autonomy event, favoring of forgetting wise invisible and impalpable: the evolution of breath in time, its power yet inevitable ending, together with the choreographic dimension of droplets of spit as an one-screen in space. Breath is, such, extended instant. Stephen Dean's three video projections, Pulse (2001), Vblta (2002), and Bloco (2004), also proceed with decontextualization by cutting not the cause but the referent from the image, flooding the screen with images of dense crowds inmotion, which makes it impossible to detach the representation from themateriality of the screen.While are mass events a soccer these strong documentary images of (a religious rite, a units to crowd, carnival), the crowds remain abstract and their tend merge so is not the with the electronic signals, that what becomes important explana tion of the events but their existence as a pixelized chromatic unfolding that conveys the unpredictable passages from euphoria and ecstasy to disappointment and silence. Showing no interest in providing a sociological, anthropological, or psychological understanding of crowds, Dean's work conveys aesthetically the sensuality and unpredictability of crowds by focusing on their affective or rela mutability. Hence, the disruption of the cause-and-effect image-referent tion becomes yet another temporal strategy: away to disclose the imperceptible mutation of things (be they breaths or affects). Extendedness here doesn't come as from the extension of duration, in early video, but from the very practice of decontextualization.

The Loop

The Biennale made manifest how much the loop has become a key mechanism in the task of addressing the viewer through time. Itwas certainly the privileged structure for all DVD projections, usually merely as an exhibition device, but as a In a recent sometimes genuine part of the temporality of the work. interview, the artist Marina who made extensive use of video to performance Abramovic, record her performances with Ulay in the 1970s and 1980s, underlined how the loop has introduced a temporal paradox in video, both shortening and extend ing the length of the work: "These days the young generation of video or perfor mance uses in to artists excessively the video media loop form. It's interesting see how from the 90s until now that these loops have become shorter and shorter. From 7 minutes to 3 minutes, and now from one and a half minutes to 30 sec 3 onds. Time has become condensed more and more. What really is different is artists that the artists of the 1970s made long duration performances, but the of today by constructing video loops are producing the illusion of the long process Willie Doherty, still from Non-Specific Threat, 2004, video projection, 7 min. 46 sec. (artwork ?Willie Doherty; photo 3 graph provided by Alexander and Bonin, NewYork) performance without going through the experience themselves."23The loop both inscribes itself in and substantially changes early video's exploration of extended ness It an one to and repetition. extends action, but only through repetition, be perceived by the viewer but produced by the computer and not through the actual the artist. This means that is now performance of phenomenology solely on viewer a scene the side of the who observes through its digital repetition. means as an It also that the extendedness of time initially explored aesthetic strategy to disrupt its linearity (the beginning-and-end logic) and to favor the mentalization of the image (itsmove beyond the optical) is articulated now not so to in to much destroy representation (as Hal Foster argues relation Minimal ism) or to disclose myths (following Roland Barthes's definition of the critical mythologist, creatively explored by Birnbaum, among others) but?and here I follow Giorgio Agamben's own definition of repetition?to reconstitute the past with the possibilities it had and make these possibilities available again to

renewed repetition. Willie Doherty's one-screen, seven-minute-and-forty-six-second video projection Non-SpecificThreat (2004) articulates a looping that plays an active a part?a necessary role?in the renewal of the viewer's perception. Presenting motionless man standing in a dark, deserted warehouse but filmed by a camera rotates a that slowly and insistently around him, the projection stages male voice-over that at least at to the in seems, first, express protagonist's thoughts

relation to the viewer. All statements are about a relation to an "other" and power over is I am this other ("Your death my salvation.... the face of evil. I'm self

contained. There will be no music. I'm your victim. You are my victim. There will no I I be newspapers. share your fears. know your desires.. .").The threatening awe of these statements is nourished both by the site and the skinhead, gangster But as camera look of the white man?elements that suggest malignancy. the more as circles and circles around the body and, important, the loop repeats and scene to viewer aware repeats the make the of the initially imperceptible expres sive movements of the body, the orientation of the words becomes less and less to reactions to setded. These expressions appear gradually be the words which might not after all be referring to the man's thought but to the viewer's. Slowly disclosed, therefore, is the viewer's attempt to define the face of evil in an age of generalized terrorist threat, aswell as the ways inwhich this attempt ismarked by how media (and the politicians using media) define evilness. Along with this comes a our man disclosure loosening-up of initial reading of the and the incite ment to reinterpret that past and let it signify differently. The loop?which has 23. Marina Abramovic, quoted inKlaus become one of the most modes of in a fact made Biesenbach, "Interview with Marina Abramovic," important presentation video, inVideo Acts: Channel Works the in 3 at P.S. 1 in a Single from manifest the Loop exhibition 2001-02?allows for temporal pro Collections of Pamela and Richard Kramlich and the that can, ifwe follow the of recent research, New Art Trust, ed. Biesenbach et al (New York: cessing findings cognitive lengthen P.S. I Art 14. is to to Contemporary Center, 2002-03), duration experience precisely because the observer solicited attend the time to more resources to passage of and allocate attentional processing time related In information.24 other words, the loop, the potentially endless repetition of a short lead to an extension at at scene, may of time, least the level of judge

ment, perception, and experience. These recent works show the importance of establishing a historical connec tion a between analogue and digital video art, connection without which?and this has been my claim?recent experimental video becomes either remarginal ized, misunderstood, or simply absorbed by the digital, erasing in effect the original contribution of video art to the aesthetic investigation of the image. Although the analogue and the digital seem to be worlds apart, video persists in its exploration of duration, but now focuses on the instant or the looping of short sequences, reclaiming the instantaneity of the video image to extend it and in introduce mutability the video situation. Lefebvre, Virilio, and other investiga torsmight well be right in their observation that technologies of communication have absorbed or contributed to instanta duration, spatialized time, the reign of and sometimes even in its neity presentism. Experimental video succeeds, digital in extendedness within this permutation, producing temporal from realm.

Christine Ross is the James McGill Chair in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. A regular contributor to Parachute, she is the author of The Aesthetics of Disengagement Contemporary Art and Depression (University of Minnesota Press, 2005) and Images de surface: l'art vid?o reconsid?r? (Artextes, 1996). E-mail: [email protected]

24. See, notably, Richard A. Block, "Models of Psychological Time," inCognitive Models of Psychological Time, ed. Block (Hillsdale, NJ: L Erlbaum Associates, 1990); Harvey Richard Schiffman, Sensation and Perception: An Integrated Approach (New York: Wiley & Sons, 2001); 3 and Time and Mind II: Information Processing Perspectives, ed. Hede Helfrich (Cambridge, MA, and G?ttingen, Germany: Hogrefe & Huber, 2003).

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