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Video art

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Video art is a type of art which relies on moving pictures and is comprised of video and/or audio data. (It should not however be confused with television or experimental cinema). Video art boomed into existence during the 1960s and 1970s, is still widely practised and has also given rise to the widespread use of video installations.

Overview

Video art is named after the video tape, which was most commonly in the form's early years, but before artistst had already been working on film, and with changes in technology Hard Disk, CD-ROM, DVD, and solid state are superseding the video tape as the carrier. Despite obvious parallels and relationships, video art is not film.

One of the key differences between video art and theatrical cinema is that video art does not necessarily rely on many of the conventions that define theatrical cinema. Video art may not employ the use of actors, may contain no dialogue, may have no discernible narrative or plot, or adhere to any of the other conventions that generally define motion pictures as entertainment. This distinction is important, because it delineates video art not only from cinema but also from the subcategories where those definitions may become muddy (as in the case of avant garde cinema or short films). Perhaps the simplest, most straightforward defining distinction in this respect would then be to say that (perhaps) cinema's ultimate goal is to entertain, whereas video art's intentions are more varied, be they to simply explore the boundaries of the medium itself (e.g., Peter Campus, Double Vision) or to rigorously attack the viewer's expectations of video as shaped by conventional cinema (e.g., Joan Jonas, Organic Honey's Vertical Roll).

History of video art

Video art is often said to have begun when Nam June Paik used his new Sony Portapak to shoot footage of Pope Paul VI's procession through New York City in the autumn of 1965. That same day, across town in a Greenwich Village cafe, Paik played the tapes and video art was born. This fact is sometimes disputed, however, due to the fact that the first Sony Portapak, the Videorover did not become commercially available until 1967. In 1959 Wolf Vostell incorporated a television set into one of his works, "Deutscher Ausblick" 1959, which is part of the collection of the Museum Berlinische Galerie possibly the first work of art with television. In 1963 Vostell exhibited his art environment "6 TV de-coll/age" at the Smolin Gallery in New York. This work is part of the Museo Reina Sofia collection in Madrid.

Prior to the introduction of the Sony Portapak, "moving image" technology was only available to the consumer (or the artist for that matter) by way of eight or sixteen millimeter film, but did not provide the instant playback that video tape technologies offered. Consequently, many artists found video more appealing than film, even more so when the greater accessibility was coupled with technologies which could edit or modify the video image.

The two examples mentioned above both made use of "low tech tricks" to produce seminal video art works. Peter Campus' Double Vision combined the video signals from two Sony Portapaks through an electronic mixer, resulting in a distorted and radically dissonant image. Jonas' Organic Honey's Vertical Roll involved recording previously recorded material as it was played back on a television — with the vertical hold setting intentionally in error.

Prominent video artists

Many of the early prominent video artists were those involved with concurrent movements in conceptual art, performance, and experimental film. These include Americans Vito Acconci, John Baldessari, Joan Jonas, Dan Graham, Bruce Nauman, Peter Campus, William Wegman, Martha Rosler, and many others. There were also those such as Steina and Woody Vasulka [1] who were interested in the formal qualities of video and employed video synthesizers to create abstract works.

Notable pioneering video artists also emerged more or less simultaneously in Europe and elsewhere with work by Wolf Vostell (Germany), Dieter Froese (Germany), Wojciech Bruszewski (Poland), Wolf Kahlen (Germany), Peter Weibel (Austria), David Hall (UK), Lisa Steele (Canada), Colin Campbell (Canada) and others.

Video art today

Although it continues to be produced, it is represented by two varieties: single-channel and installation. Single-channel works are much closer to the conventional idea of television: a video is screened, projected or shown as a single image; Installation works involve either an environment, several distinct pieces of video presented separately, or any combination of video with traditional media such as sculpture. Installation video is the most common form of video art today. Sometimes it is combined with other media and is often subsumed by the greater whole of an installation or performance. Contemporary contributions are being produced at the crossroads of other disciplines such as installation, architecture, design, sculpture, electronic art, and digital art or other documentative aspects of artistic practice.

The digital video "revolution" of the 1990s has given wide access to sophisticated editing and control technology, allowing many artists to work with video, and create interactive installations based on video. Some examples of recent trend in work include entirely digitally rendered environments created with no camera, and video that responds to the movements of the viewer or other elements of the environment. The internet has also been used to allow control of video in installations from the world wide web or from remote locations.

Emerging in the 1970s, Bill Viola (USA) continues as one of the world's most celebrated video artists. Matthew Barney is another well-known American video artist, creator of the Cremaster Cycle. Other contemporary video artists of note include Americans Gary Hill and Sadie Benning, Pipilotti Rist (Switzerland), Shaun Wilson (Australia), Stan Douglas (Canada), Douglas Gordon (Scotland), Martin Arnold (Austria) and Gillian Wearing (UK).

Research resources

References

  • Videography: Video Media as Art and Culture by Sean Cubitt (MacMillan, 1993).
  • A History of Experimental Film and Video by AL Rees (British Film Institute, 1999).
  • New Media in Late 20th-Century Art by Michael Rush (Thames & Hudson, 1999).
  • Mirror Machine: Video and Identity, edited by Janine Marchessault (Toronto: YYZ Books, 1995).
  • Video Culture: A Critical Investigation, edited by John G. Hanhardt (Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1986).
  • Video Art: A Guided Tour by Catherine Elwes (I.B. Tauris, 2004).
  • A History of Video Art by Chris Meigh-Andrews (Berg, 2006)

List of video art organizations

See also

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