Video Art, Artist Cheat Sheet IB ARTS
Nam June Paik Mini Bio: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0656760/bio
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Nam June Paik was the first video artist who experimented with electronic media and made a profound impact on the art of video and television. He coined the phrase "Information Superhighway" in 1974, and has been called the "father of video art."
He was born Nam June Paik on July 20, 1932 in Seoul, South Korea. He was the fifth son of a textile manufacturer. Young Paik was fond of music and art, he studied piano in Seoul. In 1950 the Paik family fled from the Korean War, first to Hong Kong, and later to Japan. There he graduated from the University of Tokyo (1956), where he studied art, music history, and philosophy, and wrote a thesis on Arnold Schönberg.
Paik continued his music studies in Germany. He collaborated with Karlheinz Stockhausenand John Cage, who inspired his transition into electronic arts.
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Paik's modified TV monitors were first presented in 1963, in his solo show titled "Exposition of Music-Electronic Television" in Germany. In 1964 he moved to New York and continued experiments with music and video performance. His ground-braking interactive video-works began in 1965, when he started experiments with his video camera, with electromagnets, and with color TV. At that time Paik also collaborated with engineer Shuya Abe in Japan. He continued as artist-in-residence at WGBH public broadcaster in Boston, USA.
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There he constructed the first video synthesizer together with Shuya Abe in 1969. A large magnet outside the TV monitor was used to alter the image and create an abstract picture. He produced random patterns of light by causing distortions to the electron emission spot on a phosphorous screen. Paik later used multiple TV monitors and robots, made of TV sets, metal and electronic components. In his TV project " TV Buddha" a statue of a sitting Buddha is facing it's own image on a closed-circuit TV.
Paik was the founding father of Video Art. He advanced our perceptions of the temporal image and it's role in contemporary art. His largest project was "Wrap around the World" designed for the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul, Korea. There he mounted a giant media- tower shaped like a birthday cake, called "The More the Better" and used 1003 TV monitors for a non-stop presentation of Video-Art images and performances by Korean drummers and international artists: Laurie Anderson, David Bowie, Merce Cunningham,Sergei Kuryokhin among others.
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Nam June Paik is credited for creating the term "Electronic Super Highway" in his 1974 report, commissioned by the Rockefeller Foundation. In the 90s, when "information superhighway" became a hot phrase, he commented, "Bill Clinton stole my idea." In 1996 Paik became disabled after having a stroke, and was in a wheelchair for ten years in his later life, but his energy and intellect were as productive as ever. He was a highly creative member of society, a provocative experimental artist and thinker whose ideas and performances made a profound effect on the art of video and television. His works are now preserved in museum collections across the world. Nam June Paik died on January 29, 2006 in Miami Beach, Florida, USA.
Joan Joans Mini Bio: http://www.eai.org/artistBio.htm?id=408
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An acclaimed multi-media performance artist, Joan Jonas is also a major figure in video art. From her seminal performance-based exercises of the 1970s to her later televisual narratives, Jonas' elusive theatrical portrayal of female identity is a unique and intriguing inquiry.
Trained in art history and sculpture, Jonas was a central figure in the performance art movement of the mid-1960s. In works that examined space and perceptual phenomena, she merged elements of dance, modern theater, the conventions of Japanese Noh and Kabuki theater, and the visual arts. Jonas first began using video in performance in Organic Honey's Visual Telepathy (1972), in which a live camera and monitor functioned as both a mirror and a masking device, a means of transforming and layering images, space and time.
www.tate.org.uk newsoffice.mit.edu Jonas' early video works break new ground in their application of the phenomenological properties of the new medium to a self-reflexive study of female identity. Her classic early works, including Vertical Roll (1972), explore the phenomenology of the video medium — its one-on-one directness and function as a mirror — to create a theater of the self and the body.
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Jonas' investigation of subjectivity and objectivity is articulated through an idiosyncratic, personal vocabulary of ritualized gesture and self-examination. Often performing in masks, veils, or costumes, Jonas uses disguise and masquerade to study the personal and cultural semiotics of female gesture and symbols. The layering of mirrors and mirrored images is one of her most powerful metaphorical devices. Among Jonas' signature formal strategies are the manipulation of theatrical and video space, the use of drawing to add a rich density of texture and content, and objects that convey meaning as cultural icons, archetypes and symbols.
From her earliest, face-to-face confrontations with video as a mirroring device, to her densely collaged narrative texts, Jonas herself always appears as a performer, confronting the viewer in an enigmatic theater of self-discovery.
Bill Viola Mini Bio: http://www.blainsouthern.com/artists/bill-viola
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Bill Viola (b. 1951) is internationally recognised as one of today’s leading artists. He has been instrumental in the establishment of video as a vital form of contemporary art, and in so doing has helped to greatly expand its scope in terms of technology, content, and historical reach. For over 40 years he has created architectural video installations, video films, sound environments, electronic music performances, flat panel video pieces, as well as works for television broadcast, concerts, opera, and sacred spaces. Viola’s video installations—total environments that envelop the viewer in image and sound—employ state-of-the-art technologies and are distinguished by their precision and direct simplicity.
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They are shown in museums and galleries worldwide and are found in many distinguished collections. His single channel videotapes have been widely broadcast and presented cinematically, while his writings have been extensively published and translated for international readers. Viola uses video to explore the phenomena of sense perception as an avenue to self-knowledge.
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His works focus on universal human experiences—birth, death, the unfolding of consciousness—and have roots in both Eastern and Western art as well as spiritual traditions, including Zen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism, and Christian mysticism. Using the inner language of subjective thoughts and collective memories, his videos communicate to a wide audience, allowing viewers to experience the work directly, and in their own personal way. Peter Campus Mini Bio: www.artspace.com
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American born artist, known for his interactive and single channel video work of the early 1970s After military service, Campus studied film editing and worked in the film industry as a production manager and editor, making documentaries until the early 1970s.
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Peter Campus is an American artist well known for his contribution to the transformation of video art into an accepted fine art medium. In addition to video art, Campus has also worked with photography and computer imaging, focusing on the subject of nature and the exterior. Since 1972, Campus has had over 40 solo exhibitions, including shows at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum in New York City.
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According to Campus, making the shift from video art to photography was less about the medium used and more about switching from the interior to the exterior. His experience with classical photography eventually led him to digital imaging, which gave him more opportunities to reconstruct the images in a way that more clearly communicated his thoughts. Pipilotti Rist Mini Bio: http://www.eai.org/artistBio.htm?id=8817
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Pipilotti Rist burst onto the international art scene with visually lush video works and multimedia installations that explore female sexuality and media culture through playful and provocative remixes of fantasy and the everyday.
After working as a graphic designer in her native Switzerland, Rist gained a following in the mid-1980s as a member of the experimental post-punk pop group Les Reines Prochaines, for which she made some of her earliest video works. Rist created a series of music-based single-channel tapes that subvert the form of the music video to explore the female voice and body in pop cultural representations, merging rock music and performance with electronic manipulation.
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Rist's burgeoning interests in all forms of electronic media production made her well suited for the wave of video installation that emerged in the art world of the early 1990s. Over the next ten years, she developed a video aesthetic that takes its cues from television and advertising, as well as from a rich history of feminist video work. Rist's achievement has been to join themes from this tradition with the influence of Nam June Paik and the hyper-kinetic aesthetic that he pioneered. The results have been successful and influential; Rist has become one of the most recognizable names in contemporary video art.
Rist's critical engagement is marked by a pointed exploitation of pop culture's investment in desire. Fantasy is at the heart of her work: her dream-like scenes often seem so loaded with suggestive images and scenarios that they threaten to collapse under their own meaning, saved, in the end, by her light touch and ironic humor. The willful performance of femininity — perhaps one of mass culture's foundational fantasies — functions, within the context of the pop video, as a tool or weapon. Rist gives the audience what it wants, and it is the resulting oscillation between voyeuristic pleasure and discomfited alarm that gives her work its ambiguity and impact.
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"I have the greatest respect for some MTV clips," she has said, "since they have a power of innovation and a spirit of discovery that really surpasses video art." From her earliest tapes through her recent multi- media installations, Rist has crafted a body of work in which she appropriates this spirit for her own ends, exploring the intersection of sexuality, technology, and pop culture.