VideoStudio Playback Houston Conwill Maren Hassinger Fred Holland Ishmael Houston-Jones Ulysses Jenkins Senga Nengudi Howardena Pindell 10 06 16 Spring 2011 04 –“I am laying on the between the predeter- “No, Like This.” floor. My knees are up. mined codes of language Movements in My left arm is extended and their meaning to the side.” when actually used. Performance, –“Is it open?” By setting live human Video and the –“The palm of my left hand bodies to a technologically is open. Um, it’s not really reproduced voice, Babble Projected Image, open. It’s kind of cupped a addresses the mutable 1980–93 little bit, halfway between boundary between human open and shut.” and machine. While –“Like this?” mechanical manipulation Thomas J. Lax –“No, like this.” is commonly thought to –“Do we have to do this be synthetic and external now?” to original artistic work, –“Like this?” their performance demon- –“Okay.” strates the ways in which –“Okay.” technology determines something thought to This informal, circuitous, be as organic and natural instruction begins a as the human body. vignette in Babble: First Impressions of the White For its conceptual frame- Man (1983), a choreo- work, this exhibition graphic collaboration draws on Babble’s tension between artists Ishmael between spontaneous Houston-Jones and human creativity and Fred Holland. Although technology’s possibilities Houston-Jones is, as he and limitations. Bring- says, laying on the floor ing together work in film with his knees up and and video made primarily his left arm open, his between 1980 and 1986 voice is prerecorded and by seven artists who were removed from his onstage profoundly influenced by body. Babble goes on, performance, music and incorporating pedestrian dance, VideoStudio: Play- reflections on the perform- back considers the ways ers’ experience (“My boots that artists have explored are making black marks”) technology’s mediation and anxieties about the of our lives, public and performance’s success personal, artistic and (“We’re two minutes and everyday. Responding to twenty-two seconds into the proliferation of tech- the performance. Do nologies of reproduction— you think enough has handheld cameras and the happened yet?”). Bringing moving-image culture of contact improvisation— broadcast television and a characteristic form of computer graphics—the improvised postmodern artists in Playback charted dance—and recorded new paths for the percep- sound together, Babble tion and reception of art stages what is simultane- in three important ways. ously a performance that First, their use of video has already occurred and and film contrasts with a rehearsal for a perfor- the assumed use of these mance to come. forms as documentary media. Rather than accept Houston-Jones and a single, objective point Holland’s performance of view, the videos use draws attention to the technology to document dancers’ encounter performances that with the audience and emphasize the multiple highlights the difference positions of performers and audience members exchanged ideas and they adapted the move- channels like YouTube, by drawing attention experimented with new ment they created into Facebook, Twitter and CNN to how these viewing work. 01 Emphasizing a set of rules, limiting iReport, the seven artists positions shape and the importance of ritual, factors and transitions in Playback represent an create subjective expe- these artists referenced to give dancers structure early precedent for new riences. Second, their African cultural forms for a performance. Across media discourses in art juxtaposition of moving in their work, which was their videos, the artists history and artists who at images with installations often improvisatory and emphasize a tension an early moment forecast- and multilayered perfor- performance-based. While between extemporization ed the ways identity and mances underscores their at the time other artists of social life would become emphasis on engagement African descent referred VideoStudio: increasingly mediated with art objects. In this to African tropes to stand Playback con- by the kinds of spectator- way, they asserted that in or represent blackness, siders the ways ship enabled by techno- art objects were things the group associated that artists logical innovation. to be related to, and not with Studio Z emphasized have explored simply static reflections materiality and abstraction technology’s Playback is the fourth of the real world. Third, over figuration. installment of VideoStudio, videos made to stand mediation of our an ongoing series of video alone extended artists’ Many of these artitsts also lives, public and film exhibitions formal considerations worked in New York, where and personal, inaugurated in fall 2008. of shape, color and they showed at filmmaker artistic and Reflecting the Studio scale from painting Linda Goode Bryant’s everyday. Museum’s commitment and sculpture into the (b. 1949) Just Above to time-based art, the moving-image format. Midtown Gallery (JAM). and control, reflecting program demonstrates the All three modes of artistic The first black-owned a committed interest in influence of recent tech- production—documen- New York gallery, JAM was serious play. nology on contemporary tation of performance, an interdisciplinary space art. The spring 2011 sea- incorporation of film and that supported artists Often working actively son of VideoStudio is the video into performance, including Houston Conwill together, these multime- first exhibition in a series and the televisual shift to and Howardena Pindell, as dia artists generated an dedicated to video works stand-alone video—bring well as artists of color who intense artistic cross-fer- made in the late twentieth together formal concerns at that time were often tilization as collaborators, century. While previous with the visual cultures of exhibited only at commu- performers, videographers VideoStudio exhibitions television and mass media nity centers and “commu- and object-makers for one have presented compila- and the political and social nity galleries” at cultural another’s works. Mediat- tions of contemporary context in which these institutions. Holland and ing technological shifts video, Playback reflects on technological and cultural Houston-Jones—who through art-making, these the historical use of video developments arose. also showed at JAM—first artists demonstrate how by multimedia artists. met in Philadelphia, where the increased availability Working in Southern they trained in postmodern of cameras extended 01 Kellie Jones, Taming the Freeway California, Philadelphia contact improvisation, understandings of real and Other Acts of Urban HIP- notism: African American Artists and New York, the artists which emphasized time into posterity. This in Los Angeles in the 1960s and in Playback emerged in physical contact as the access also fundamen- 1970s (Boston: The MIT Press, the mid-1970s and early starting point for explora- tally changed the physical forthcoming), and Kellie Jones, “African American Avant-Gardes, 1980s. At the time, con- tion through movement experience of spectator- 1965–1990: Modern Art in ceptual, performance and improvisation. 02 As part ship to one in which new Los Angeles, A Conversation” installation art had been of the downtown New York technologies created a (public program with Maren increasingly used as forms performance art scene, human body contingent Hassinger, Ulysses Jenkins, Barbara McCullough, Senga of artistic production and Holland and Houston- upon and formed by Nengudi and Kellie Jones, Getty critique, and continued to Jones joined a group technology. Indeed, these Research Institute, Los Angeles, offer new possibilities for of artists, including artists questioned whether January 16, 2008). socially engaged artists. In Meredith Monk (b. 1942) technology accommo- 02 For more about the emergence Los Angeles, in the wake and Robert Wilson (b. dates human creativity of contact improvisation—and of the 1965 Watts Rebel- or precedes it, setting its relationship to the civil rights 1941), who were seeking movement and black social pro- lion and urban sprawl, to expand avant-garde parameters for how art test—see Danielle Goldman, “Bod- artists including Maren theater to include music, and visual culture are ies on the Line: Contact Improvisa- Hassinger, Senga Nengudi, film projections, instal- made and understood. tion and techniques of Nonviolent protest,” Dance Research Journal Ulysses Jenkins, Barbara lations and sculptural As digital technology 39 (Summer 2007): 60–74. McCullough (b. 1945) and objects. Using contact and social networking David Hammons (b. 1943) improvisation as both have enabled both social gathered at Studio Z, research methodology and movements and global art a hub where artists performance technique, practices to occur through 03 Houston Conwill (b. 1947) Cake Walk (stills), 1983 In November 1983 at Just a child’s first steps and from each of the cities. University of Southern Above Midtown/Down- the process of learning to A third element, a cosmo- California in 1976. He is town, the second location walk and move through gram, or graphic represen- the recipient of various of Linda Goode Bryant’s the world, while the other tation of a belief system, commissions and awards, exhibition space that was is a scientific explanation is painted on the floor and including the 1984 Prix de one of the first New York of the process of walking, is the most visible of all of Rome and a Louis Comfort galleries to show the work taken from orthopedic the installation elements, Tiffany Foundation Award of artists of color, visual surgeon and scholar Verne as the dancers in Cake in 1987. He is best known artist Houston Conwill T. Inman’s 1981 paper, Walk move on and around for large-scale sculptures presented Cakewalk, an Human Walking. it during the performance. and installations that he installation and perfor- created in collaboration mance piece that signified a cakewalk was a “funny, strutting with poet Estella Conwill a culmination of a decade dance” that originated in the mid- Majozo (b. 1949) and of artistic development. eighteenth century architect Joseph DePace Cake Walk (1983), the (b.