Back to the Video Art class - Back to Teaching
Week Three: Early Video Art I Explorations of Presence, Performance & Audience Readings: - Chapter 1 from A History of Video Art by Chris Meigh-Andrews, "In the Beginning: The Origins of Video Art" - Chapter 5 from A History of Video Art, "Musique Concrete, Fluxus and Tape Loops: The Influence and Relationship of
- "Videa, Vidiot, Videology" by Nam June Paik with Charlotte Moorman, from New Artists Video edited by Gregory Battcock
Before Video Art - late 1960s: The Civil Rights Movement, youth culture, US involvement in Vietnam, AIM, gay rights movement - emphasis on participatory democracy - centralized and controlled access to production of media - interdisciplinary art investigations - modernism's materials-based formal vocabulary - feedback, process, immediacy - performance art uses the artist's body in the present, local audiences, chance events
Marina Abramovic Video Art: In the Beginning
- impermanent, ephermeral, temporary, transient nature of video - a way to avoid the influences and commercialism of the art market - as video technology has advanced, relative production costs have decreased - equipment has become more reliable, more compact, more readily available -Marita Sturken: pointed out that early video artists explored the properties of video to distinguish it from other art forms, but video had much in common with conceptual art, minimal sculpture, and performance - Stuart Marshall: In the UK, video art modeled itself after the experimental film community in terms of funding & distribution, also video art developed in art schools in the UK - many artists were attracted to the medium because it did not have a history or critical discourse - feminists artists used video, it was not a male-dominated medium - other artists with radical agendas also used video art because of its immediacy and less commodifiable nature - artists at this time searched for new materials, media, venues, auriences, methods of dissemination, new political and social awareness, hybrids, collaborations, methods that cross disciplinary boundaries |
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Fluxus - 1950s - 1970s, loose group of international artists interested in creating subversive work, anti-art, used chance operations, everyday materials, critical of materialism and consumerism, ironic, happenings - George Maciunas - thought there was no need for art, people should take an art attitude toward everyday occurrences - George Brecht, Water Yam, book of scores/scripts - several Fluxus artists took Cage's course at the New School in NYC - La Monte Young, concentrated his compositions around single events, Composition 1960 Number 10, "Draw a straight line and follow it" - Yoko Ono, Henry Flynt, Tony Conrad
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The Portapak - the Portapak was introduced in 1967 - 1968, handheld, affordable |
The Sony Portapak |
Wolf Vostell - b. 1932, Germany, Fluxus founder - TV de-Collage (1961) - distorting the TV image using random interference of television receivers installed in a Paris department store - used public space and reversal of collage techniques (erasing, removing)
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Nam June Paik -b. 1932, South Korea - started out in avant garde music, influenced by Cage - wanted to irritate and shock audiences, cut people's clothes in theaters - Homage to John Cage (1959) - Paik approached Cage, poured shampoo on him, cute off his tie, then called from another room saying the performance was over - considered the piano taboo, symbolic destructive acts, rebellion against the representatives of the musical status quo - 1962, worked in secret studio in Cologne, experimented with TVs, how to change the signal, image, incorporate user feedback - exhibited the modified TV sets as "Exposition of Music-Electronic Television" in Germany - ' random access' - randomness, arbitrariness important to Fluxus, Cage - how to create participatory works with images and effects produced through actions of the audience, wanted to reverse the usually passive mode of the audience - engaged directly with available technology, challenged established one-way process of broadcast TV - Martha Rosler critiques Paik, saying he didn't advance the cause of radical video art - Paik screened first video publicly in 1965, the story is that it was a video of the Pope in NYC, shot with Portapak, Cafe a Go Go |
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Charlotte Moorman - b. 1933, Arkansas, cellist (the topless cellist) - founded the New York Avant Garde Festival - collaborated with Paik
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John Cage - b. 1912, composer, philosopher, mushroom collector - interested in the liberation of "pure sound" from musical convention - influenced by Zen religious ideas - Music for Magnetic Tape project - William's Mix - recorded, copied & catalogued sounds, then selected & organized them using chance operations - interested in using microphones and other mechanical means of creating sounds - eventually rejected audiotape format, incompatible with notions of indeterminancy and live performance |
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Experimental Music: Musique Concrete, Tape Loops, Process Music, Minimal Music - Pierre Schaeffer (France) - founder of musique concrete, form of electronic music composition that is constructed from recordings of everyday environmental sounds - GRM (Groupe de Recherche Musicale) - researched electronic sounds - Tape Loops - experiments with recording, layering sound - Steve Reich - It's Gonna Rain, 1965, two identical loops played simultaneously, eventually fall out of synch
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Dan Graham - b. 1942, Urbana, IL, critic, conceptual artist - Performer, Audience, Mirror - video as document for investigation into perception and real time informational "feedback" - performance is reflected back on audience twice: mirror & Graham's lecture, which are delayed - person sees himself (objective/subjective) then hears himself described (objective/subjective) - duration and attention (qualities of time and experience)
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William Wegman - b. 1943, Massachusetts, works mainly in photography now - Selected Works - humorous work comments on how broadcast TV manipulates its viewers
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John Baldessari - b. 1941, California, conceptual artist, text paintings - Baldessari sings Lewitt - explores expectations of high and low art - made an earlier photographic series of "Art Lessons"
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Vito Acconci - b. 1940, Bronx, NY, studied poetry, works in installation, architecture - Undertone - studies relationships constructed between performer and his/her audience through a video mirror - entertaining, threatening, erotic gestures - exposes his intentions within his performances, asks audiences to consider their own assumptions - examines "performance areas" that exist between people - explores variations on his needs and wants - looks at two different types of disclosure: public and private
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Joan Jonas - b. 1936, New York City, trained as sculptor, moved into performance - Vertical Roll - Jonas performs as a belly dancer, Organic Honey - the video frame continues to roll, a monitor adjustment - a second camera records this monitor - spoon beats in time with the roll - the monitor distorts and obscures the image - viewer can't watch this writhing female body - disorienting, assaulting, disturbing
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