Video Art Historicized

Traditions and Negotiations

Malin Hedlin Hayden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317001959
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Contemporary Art

Video art emerged as an art form that from the 1960s and onwards challenged the concept of art - hence, art historical practices. From the perspective of artists, critics, and scholars engaged with this new medium, art was seen as too limiting a notion. Important issues were to re-think art as a means for critical investigations and a demand for visual reconsiderations. Likewise, art history was argued to be in crisis and in need of adapting its theories and methods in order to produce interpretations and thereby establish historical sense for moving images as fine art. Yet, as this book argues, video art history has evolved into a discourse clinging to traditional concepts, ideologies, and narrative structures - manifested in an increasing body of texts. Video Art Historicized provides a novel, insightful and also challenging re-interpretation of this field by examining the discourse and its own premises. It takes a firm conceptual approach to the material, examining the conceptual, theoretical, and methodological implications that are simultaneously contested by both artists and authors, yet intertwined in both the legitimizing and the historicizing processes of video as art. By engaging art history's most debated concepts (canon, art, and history) this study provides an in-depth investigation of the mechanisms of the historiography of video art. Scrutinizing various narratives on video art, the book emphasizes the profound and widespread hesitations towards, but also the efforts to negotiate, traditional concepts and practices. By focusing on the politics of this discourse, theoretical issues of gender, nationality, and particular themes in video art, Malin Hedlin Hayden contests the presumptions that inform video art and its history.

1

HESITANTLY ART:
Great expectations of a medium

An emerging art form

For scholars, critics and curators to structure a body of material, irrespective of whether it is to produce a text or an exhibition, one needs concepts, categories and various other structuring devices, such as chronology and a well-defined notion of art, in furtherance of making the material at hand legible as a conceptual site. Even if artists making video art in, for example, the 1990s not only employed video but digital techniques, and (technically) it all began with film and broadcast television, the term is still used for the art form (though the umbrella notions projected art or new media art are increasingly used today). The moment when video art was established as an art form in its own right could tentatively be argued to coincide with the possibility of a grand-scaled exhibition¹ – that is, when enough interesting and thus acknowledged video art works had been produced, hence providing a cumulative body of art works (as contrary to singularities) which were designated as that particular phenomenon henceforth called video art. At this tentative moment, then, certain features appeared as discursive conditions for what was inscribed in the history of video art and, consequently, what was not. An issue that may be irrelevant to artists, but which is important for interpreters creating coherent narratives, is to decide what and who is legible as a representative of a particular practice. Choosing the representative moments and agents defines – and hence discursively frames – the practice(s) of video as art, yet evidently only up until the present moment. There are not seriously different ideas of when and where – and from whom – video art began; on the contrary, the consensus is striking.

By beginning with three dictionaries’ entries on the concept/art form, the most concise definitions that circulate within the discourse of video art are presented. The apparent function of dictionaries is to briefly deliver what is generally considered to be the most essential, but filtered, information and knowledge of well-separated phenomena. With these quotations I thus want to initially highlight a general agreement of when, where and from whom it all started – that is, the significant events that circulate as origins. As will become clear in the following chapters, the historical narratives all testify to the difficulties of handling the concept of origin, but at the same time they all seem to need it. Part of this problem involves the two chief trajectories: the first focusing on a fine art context, whereas the other centres on technology. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms defines video art thus:

Video made by visual artists, it originated in 1965 when the Korean Fluxus artist Nam June Paik made his first tapes on the newly available Sony portable video camera and showed them a few hours later at the Café au Go Go in Greenwich Village, New York. Video is a medium, not a style, and embraces an extremely wide range of activity and level of achievement.²

The online Oxford Companion to Western Art begins its entry on video art:

a form of art which emerged in the 1960s, and which was based around the manipulation of videotaped images and their projection or replay on television screens. Although contemporary with early experiments in computer art, and despite superficial formal similarities, the earliest manifestations of Video art were not characterized by a specific interest in technological exploration, but were informed rather by an intention to subvert the conventional uses of television and film as communicative media. The most famous examples of such art are the films of Andy Warhol, such as Sleep (1963) and Empire (1966), both of which last for more than six hours, are silent, and show only one static image.

The origins of Video art are generally attributed to the work of Nam June Paik (1932–), a member of the Fluxus group.³

And according to Wikipedia, where anyone inclined can alter the text:

Video art is a type of art which relies on moving pictures and comprises video and/or audio data. (It should not however be confused with television production or experimental film). Video art came into existence during the 1960s and 1970s, is still widely practiced and has given rise to the widespread use of video installations. Video art can take many forms: recordings that are broadcast, viewed in galleries or other venues, or distributed as video tapes or DVD discs; sculptural installations, which may incorporate one or more television sets or video monitors, displaying ‘live’ or recorded images and sound; and performances in which video representations are included.⁴

Obviously, the general conception (as long as we agree to understand dictionaries as representing that) is that video art appeared at the moment when professional visual artists began using video recording techniques to make art works. According to the first quote, two originary moments appear as decisive for the art form: the invention of the Sony Portapak and a particular video work shot and screened by Nam June Paik in 1965. The assumptions to be drawn from these entries are that the art form consists of various visual formats and different technologies, it is in some cases related to performance, Paik was the first video artist, video art is not a style but a medium, and initially it aimed to subvert various conventions. Interestingly, conventions within the field of (fine) art production are not mentioned here.

Comparing this with the early anthologies on the subject and the surveys in focus, all of these aspects are presented as historical facts. For example, in Videokonsten: en introduktion, Max Liljefors writes: ‘The year video art was born is usually marked as 1963.’⁵ What happened then was Paik’s first solo show at Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal, entitled Exposition of Electronic Music – Electronic TV, and amongst the works on display was Zen TV, an often reproduced work about which a great deal has been written.⁶ This was not, speaking strictly from a medium perspective, video art, but consisted of a number of works made up of television sets.⁷ However, already in 1958 Wolf Vostell had made works with modified TV sets, exhibited in 1963 at his show TV Trouble at the Smolin Gallery in New York, in which the often reproduced TV Dé-coll/age No. 1 of 1958 was on display.⁸ This piece has since been nominated as one of the very first video art works.⁹ During this time Vostell also made use of TV sets in performances, and hence was one of those artists connecting these two up-and-coming artistic modes of expression, making his work manifestly contemporaneous. A sub-category of early video art is TV art, which can be tentatively defined as a branch focusing on the TV set as a ready-made object both submitted to aesthetic investigations and employed as a vehicle for moving images.¹⁰ Several essays and a number of shows testify to the focus on both the concept and cultural impact of TV.¹¹ Both Paik and Vostell modified and distorted television programmes by magnetically disturbing the images. Using the TV sets but not recording technique is, however, part of the beginning of video art as it is told in all of the surveys addressed here; it expresses the interest in and employment of broadcasting and moving images. In Paik’s own practice they were frequently used, and were also amongst the first video installations which emerged as a particular kind, or branch, of video art production. The interest in TV was not only due to the new image technology per se and new habits of acquiring various forms of culture and information, but that it was a new object that increasingly inhabited the households of the Western world during the 1950s and onwards.¹²

Even though Vostell is recurrently mentioned as completely contemporaneous with Paik, he is rarely acknowledged as being the original video artist.¹³ Paik is the one generally given the status of the inventor of video art. Singling out Paik in this way involves video art being given a very precise date and time of its inception, an event that operates well in chronologically structured narratives as well as in relation to art history writings, which circulate specific names/signatures as a narrative core. What is crucial for my following discussions is to acknowledge already here inventions as that which are historically inscribed as causing ruptures, discontinuities and deviations from that which then become previous regarding concepts (the ‘epistemological acts and thresholds’ of which Foucault writes).¹⁴ Furthermore, in Paik’s practice both aesthetic ideas and aims and technological innovations merge to an extent that makes his art ready for (almost) inventing the two major trajectories: socio-cultural critique and technology as both the medium and the conceptual site of the art form. Through his involvements in Fluxus, ideas of chance – as championed by John Cage – and ‘the performative approach’ – introduced to painting by Jackson Pollock – were engaged in tandem with the new technique of moving images.¹⁵ The merging of a rather broad set of interests and developments in Paik’s work and his (increased) focus on moving image technologies have made him more than suitable for this radical starting point of video art – and this reappears in narratives of video art practices located outside of the Euro-American context.¹⁶ Paik, who is said to have bought a number of Portapaks the very same day that they came on the market in the US, is furthermore said to have made one of the two first proper video art works.¹⁷ On 4 April 1965 Paik video-recorded Pope Paul VI visiting New York, and later the same day it was screened before an audience – an event that every single one of the monographs (and several of the essays addressing the formative and nascent phase of the art form) examined here pay attention to.¹⁸ However, a few weeks earlier Andy Warhol is credited with having shown video recordings, an event which is rarely noted.¹⁹

Regarding the beginning, there is, for example, the fact that in the early 1960s several artists recorded their performances, which is an image-making practice that may precede an artist’s later working directly with video in order to produce an art work consisting of moving images. In some of these historical narratives, the actuality that artists employed moving image technique (often alongside photography) is regarded as part of video art’s (pre-)history, while disregarding that the aim was to record for her/his private archive an otherwise lost work and not to produce a video art work per se.²⁰ I do not consider that kind of pre-history of making video documentations – but, then, nor do I examine the oeuvre of particular artists – the intention of producing an art work is thus crucial to my understanding of the notion of art, as one defining criteria, that is. Several of the publications which I examine begin their chronological surveys not only with the invention of film but of more or less related technological inventions such as sound recording (irrespective of whether this temporally structured story is part of the introduction, as in some of the anthologies, or is the main trajectory of the entire book). According to Michael Rush’s Video Art, it was when the portable Portapak entered the scene that visual artists and others working outside the corporate realms of television and cinema could begin to develop a new form of ‘moving image art’.²¹ That is, when the opportunity to possess one’s own, easily accessible, video camera arrived, artists could leave the studios of broadcast companies (where – in the US – they had until then been able to rent the equipment). This physical detachment obviously implied a much more varied situation, opening up for potentially more varied and creative video works. It was thus not least the particular situation of availability of the necessary technical equipment that principally instigated video art.²²

By the end of the 1960s and in the early 1970s, the proliferating employment of video technology by artists began to make imprints beyond singular events in the periphery of the art world. During these two first decades, several collaborative video artists and activist groups were established in both the US and Europe. Both Liljefors and Meigh-Andrews juxtapose the emerging collectives with the political situations in the US and Europe during this time and the ambitions of video artists and/or activists to use the video medium in order to urge political changes in society.²³ Furthermore, art schools began to teach video in the 1970s – an important condition for the professionalization and thus establishment of the art form about which, however, few authors speak.²⁴ This, I think, is somewhat remarkable since professionalism is not only related to the notion of art, but part of the legitimizing and establishing processes, and therefore also to the definition of video as an art form. Art institutions and commercial galleries followed the increasing interest in the art form/medium. The first video collection, according to Sylvia Martin, was that of the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, establish...