Video Art A Guided Tour
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and Adam Chodzko began to use computers to introduce random elements
to abstruse narratives, a chance technique that was already well established
in avant-garde music from John Cage onwards. Douglas has produced highly
theatrical scenes that are shuffled to create endless narrative permutations. In
the UK, Steve Hawley is also randomising image, sound and subtitle for his
forthcoming series of ‘non-stop cinema’ works. No two visitors to the gallery
or movie theatre see the same work. The arbitrary nature of language and its
tenuous hold over meaning constitute the overriding themes of such works.
Their refusal of linearity in the deployment of narrative themes promotes a less
goal-oriented, secure conceptual framework and introduces a more maze-like,
aleatory and non-hierarchical approach to storytelling. Chance in art, as in life,
throws up the real challenges and surprises.
H I G H - G LO S S A N D S OA P S
The influence of dominant forms of cinematic and televisual narrative persists,
even when lyrical, fanciful or chance elements are introduced. The experience
of life as an extended soap opera is reflected both in the choice of narrative
idiom and in the increasing adoption by artists of Hollywood’s high-gloss
production values. Video-makers like Eija-Lisa Ahtila create pseudo-soaps in
which actors perform significant or difficult moments in life, drawn from stories
told to the artist by real people. In The House (2002) a young woman isolates
herself in a woodland cabin and, like Lilian Gish in The Wind or Catherine
Deneuve in Repulsion, she begins to imagine from external sounds that people
and objects are about to burst through the walls. Unaccountably, the girl
transforms herself into a version of Peter Pan’s Wendy and takes flight through
the woods. The escape into fantasy might be interpreted as the last resort in a
world of manipulated desires. For his part, the Canadian artist Mike Hoolboom
describes his work in the 1990s as ‘documentaries of the imaginary’. No longer
attempting to pursue reality in the medium of truth, his tapes are ‘more faithful
32. Stephanie Smith and Edward Stewart, Mouth to Mouth (1996), videotape.
Courtesy of the artists.
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renderings of how I dream, or imagine the world to be, or imagine my place
in it’.
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If the new task of moving image is to transmit the magic of dreams, then
the spectacle of video is now as important as its ability to convey information.
Even Bill Viola is polishing his act. Embracing the new high resolution of digital
video and plasma screens, he links video to an earlier purveyor of dreams, to the
High Renaissance. Appropriating the themes of religious painting, he has been
producing a series of videos that deliberately aspire to the condition of painting
in their hyperrealist crispness. Cinema and fresco painting combine in video
once again to astonish and captivate the jaded eye of the contemporary media
junky. Spectacle is the binding agent, a role once played by the Christian beliefs
evoked by Viola’s work. Gradually, through the 1990s, artists have played down
video’s traditional role as a medium of witness and concentrated on its power
to conjure up an atmosphere, suggest a state of mind and stir the emotions. The
individual subjectivity of the artists, their televisual dreams and hallucinations
are given a Hollywood makeover with the high resolution of plasma screens
and large-scale digital projections. In this respect, video art clearly shares with
mainstream film and video the desire to transport and enchant its audiences. In
this post-mesmeric age, its visual culture saturated with extreme imagery, it is
not an easy task to enthral an audience.
R E A L I T Y V I D E O, R E A L I T Y T V A N D T H E I N T E R N E T
When you are bending down looking at somebody’s anus,
someone else is looking at y
ours
.
Senegalese saying, quoted in Trinh Minh-ha’s Naked Spaces: Living is Round (1985)
The
r
eturn to art history, lost faiths and the imaginary may have been partly
prompted by the colonisation of ‘the personal’ by reality TV. However, many
video artists have continued to use social documentary formats based on
empirical research among individual members of society. We saw how Ann-
Sofi Siden worked with European prostitutes, Kutlug Ataman with transvestites
and ageing divas, and myself with veterans of the Second World War. For her
part, Eija-Lisa Ahtila has focused on teenage girls, Georgina Starr on people
she has never met, while Gillian Wearing took as subjects alcoholic vagrants
and anyone who responded to her advert for individuals willing to confess all
on tape. Those who ‘confessed’ shared the same compulsion that reality show
subjects have to expose themselves to the nation. They know that they must
satisfy broadcasters’ insatiable appetite for the salacious and the grotesque and
so construct identities and one-dimensional ‘life crises’ that will bring them
their fifteen minutes of fame.
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Viewers revel in the pleasures of schadenfreude
or, as John Stallabrass calls it, ‘holidaying in other people’s misery’. As I argued
in Chapter 7, the subjectivities represented in reality TV are removed from
any social or political context. Although a large degree of self-reflexivity is
maintained, down to the camera operators periodically being drawn into the
fray, what is kept hidden is the programming, funding, commercial and political
pressures that govern the style and content of broadcasting. Television as an
institution is still veiled in secrecy. Many years ago, Rosalind Krauss accused
video artists of retreating into a narcissistic, hermetically sealed world delimited
by the closed-circuit, corralling artist, on-screen image and camera. There is
little doubt that reality TV does much the same work, but this time manages to
separate the mass of individual couch potatoes not only from their own lives
but, in the one-dimensionality of the representations they see on the screen,
from any deeper understanding of contemporary life.
Video art embracing the personal can just as easily share television’s dubious
obsession with ‘freak show’ documentaries and the narcissistic exhibitionism
that is as endemic in art as in televisionland. Tracey Emin unashamedly spills
her guts in her art as she did famously on a BBC Newsnight Review debate
in which she drunkenly staggered off the set whilst giving her co-panellists
the benefit of her colourful views on art in general and the Turner Prize in
particular. Unlike feminists’ careful linking of their experiences to a critique
of a patriarchal political system, Emin deals in individualised acts of excess.
As she happily declared to a television interviewer, ‘I wasn’t confessing, I was
throwing up.’ The 1990s did not invent narcissism. Even 1980s feminists could
indulge in introspective confessionals, much encouraged by the unblinking
stare of the video camera and its ability to record over long periods of time.
One might think that any woman’s experience aired in public is by extension a
political act, especially at times when women have not been able to speak out.
Back in the 1980s, Martha Rosler held the view that the personal is not political
when ‘the attention narrows to the privileged tinkering with, or attention to
one’s solely private sphere, divorced from any collective struggle or publicly
conjoined act and simply names the personal practice as political. For art this
can mean doing work that looks like art has always looked, that challenges little,
but about which one asserts that it is valid because it was done by a woman.’
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Contemporary reality television and the individualism of art in the early 1990s
contributed to the gushing of purely therapeutic confessionals throughout the
culture and did little to change the conditions under which people lived.
The Internet has now become a major repository for these liturgies of
neurotic interiority. Individuals set up web cameras in their homes, sometimes
one in each room, so that the world can tune in, 24 hours a day, to the banality
of their lives.
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Chris Darke asks perceptively, ‘what is video voyeurism after
all, but a kind of intimate surveillance?’ Contrary to video’s traditional claim
to offer an encounter with reality, this two-way gaze, this mutual super-vision
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constitutes a flight from reality. Both viewer and viewed suffer a ‘deflection
of consciousness away from the social towards a twilight zone of interactive
waking dreams’.
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It is electronic contact with those spectral presences on the
Internet that became the subject of recent work by the Canadian video and
performance artist, Tom Sherman. SUB/EXTROS and HALF/LIVES (2001) are
constructed fr
om downloaded footage of unnamed webcam broadcasters. Men
and women of all ages and physical types sit, apparently transfixed by their
monitors, their faces lit by an unearthly greenish cast emanating from the screen.
Sherman adds to the slow-scanning images his own soundtracks consisting of a
combined monologue and music track composed in collaboration with Bernhard
Loibner. Although intent on long-distance communication, these ‘webcamers’
seem painfully alone, addictively plugged into an interaction, not so much with
another person as with a system of communication that allows the illusion of
contact while avoiding the risks of face-to-face human intercourse.
The French artist Patrick Bernier actualises the desire of webcasters to open
the intimate spaces of their homes to others. In Hébergement/Hostings (2001)
he approaches individuals offering a link to their website from his exhibition
in exchange for lodgings. In this way, Bernier is ‘running through the two-way
mirror’ of the Internet and physically invading their homes. ‘Already a voyeur, I
make myself visible’, he declares.
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Having reached the inner sanctum, Bernier
33. Tom Sherman, SUB/EXTROS (2001), videotape, 5 min. 30 sec. Music:
Bernhard Loibner. Courtesy of the artist.
the artist-interloper reveals those parts of the house that the restricted, keyhole
range of the webcam cannot reach. Artists in the UK, like the Wades and Fran
Cottell, are also frustrated by the lack of real contact on the Internet and have
opened their homes to the public. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, there has
been a spate of ‘relational’ art that involves the public in participatory activities
like eating, telephoning or kicking a football around the gallery. I take this as
further evidence that artists are combating the fear of actual human contact
fuelled by virtual reality, cyber sex and other inventions of the communication
age. Back in 1988, another French artist, Pierrick Sorin, made the definitive
parody of artists’ and webcasters’ compulsive exhibitionism. C’est mignon tout
ça (1988) reveals the artist admiring his own anal caresses by means of a closed-
cir
cuit
video system whilst dressed in women’s black underwear. The widespread
navel- or anal-gazing that the work satirises confirms the dissatisfaction and
lack of completeness that Sherman and Bernier’s Internet subjects also betray.
It would appear that with the help of video cameras, many of us are slipping
into an exclusive relationship with our own nether regions. The question then
arises: how can the twenty-first-century video artist combat both the insidious
narcissism of western culture and the undifferentiated information overload to
which we are all subjected?
I N P RO V I S I O N A L C O N C L U S I O N
Video began life as a counter-cultural force worrying the edges of both fine
art and broadcast television with which it shared a common technology. Over
the past forty years, video has moved steadily from a marginal practice to the
default medium of twenty-first-century gallery art. Here, the convergence of
formats precipitated by the advent of digital technology has brokered a merger
between the parallel practices of artists’ film and video. With television,
fashion, advertising and the pop industry no longer regarded as the enemy,
many artists now draw freely from existing cultural genres without feeling the
need to develop a critical stance either towards their content or the position
they occupy in the marketing structures of a consumer culture. Moving image
artists not only plunder popular cultural sources for their art, but they also apply
their creativity to commercial fields with many acting as a bridge between the
two. With the exponential expansion of the art world in the last decade and
institutions like the Tate Modern in London drawing in unprecedented numbers
of visitors, awareness of artists’ moving image is now widespread. I doubt
that there exists an advertising or television executive who hasn’t heard of Bill
Viola. Video has come a long way from the days when a dozen aficionados of
the medium gathered after hours for a screening of ‘difficult’ work at a smoke-
filled Air Gallery in London.
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Many of the belief systems and counter-cultural ambitions of the early avant-
garde have dissolved into postmodern webs of signification and individual
expression. Theoretically, within a plural and pseudo-egalitarian visual culture,
no one representation is given more weight than any other, although the actual
visibility of artists ranges from rock-star status to virtual obscurity. A free-
floating intertextuality has held sway for the last decade against a background of
an ever-diminishing, but ubiquitous, monoculture. Promiscuously quoting the
canon of popular culture and high art, contemporary image-makers appropriate
the original while often reducing the act to stylistic gesturing that is only as
good as its novelty value. Within a culture defined by a short attention span
and an insatiable desire for the acquisition of property and consumer goods, art
struggles to defend its traditional right to address the complex and unfathomable
questions of human existence. Seduced by the rewards of venture capitalism
or a simple desire to make a living, video artists have bought into the market
place represented by the commercial gallery system, whilst simultaneously
attempting to create in their work an oasis of calm in what Chris Darke calls
the contemporary ‘image storm’.
The gallery as well as civic spaces have been turned into moving image
installations where an aesthetic of spectacle adapted from Hollywood film has
been grafted onto deconstructive methodologies left over from an earlier age.
Although many of the radical formal and conceptual innovations of early video
art have been absorbed by the mainstream or been lost under the mass amnesia
of a commercialised art world, many of their methodologies have survived and
are reinvented against a changed social, political and technological landscape.
Some artists are disillusioned with what they see as the creative bankruptcy of
popular entertainment. In the case of figures like Bill Viola and Daniel Reeves,
they are adopting a new asceticism, a contemplative stillness that both counters
the ‘contemporary excess of meaning and events’
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and turns the gallery into
a modern cathedral of art. People now go to galleries as a refuge from the
‘image storm’ and for spiritual nourishment on Sundays when they used to go
to church.
As we turned into the twenty-first century, a revival of socially engaged art,
of a ‘relational’ art with a global reach, looked to shatter the postmodern ennui
of the yBa generation. This new political awareness was only occasionally the
product of cultural tourists entering an exotic land and bringing back curiosities
for the amusement of a superior nation. To my mind, the most interesting
work emerging in our so-called post-colonial world has been the mobilisation
of indigenous creative energies whose vision, though inevitably marked by
western influences, cannot but change the conceptual framework and, indeed,
the form that art will take in the future. In the films and videos of artists
like Shirin Neshat and Zacharias Kunuk, political awareness is not seen as
an alternative to aesthetic considerations, but as intrinsic to the business of
speaking out. Beauty and horror co-exist in the reports they send back of their
experiences in what Germaine Greer has called the ‘unsynthesised manifold’, in
the messy trenches of reality.
Where traditions of video art persist, moving image will always be deployed
as the factual medium, whether as evidence of historic and political events or as
a personal archive. Tom Sherman warns against the use of video as a catalogue
of memory binding together ‘the loose ends of our imperfect memories’.
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The realism of video has a tendency to make us forget how easily it is edited
and reworked just as our memories are constructed and reconstructed over
time. For those of us in the West, the moving image artist will always be up
against the editing of reality in pre-existing forms of television. Video art will,
of necessity, maintain a dialogue with video games, picture messaging, the
proliferating linguistic practices of the Internet and whatever communication
systems the new century throws up. In this context, artists will constantly
reflect their times, but they can still act as the ‘ghost in the machine’, the
irritant that questions the power structures and entrenched practices of the
image-brokers. In their constant search for innovative imaging techniques,
they will extend the boundaries of what is possible with new technologies and
communication systems. Tom Sherman has proposed that in the information
age, artists could act as ‘intelligent agents’, guides or ciphers steering viewers
through the morass of undigested information that bombards us every day.
Artists are endowed with the skill of repositioning the viewer’s perceptions
and drawing meaning out of the clamour of an increasingly mediatised world.
They will always illuminate the ‘other’ point of view, the blind side, that which
is hidden under the manipulations of vested interests dominating the political,
industrial and imperial West.
By virtue of their medium, moving image artists will always be in the business
of enchantment and wonder. They will systematically pursue beauty even
though, in the past, few have admitted to this quest. The aesthetic dimension
of moving image has been harnessed as a conductor of meaning from the
beginning and its ability to move the emotions will continue to play a part
in whatever project artists undertake. Given my background in oppositional
video, I would like to think that artists would set aside their disillusionment
with party politics and once again contribute to collective endeavours like the
anti-capitalist movement, environmental conservation and the international
condemnation of American expansionism. However directly or indirectly they
address contemporary issues, artists must always ask the difficult, unfashionable
and prescient questions. There is a degree of clairvoyance involved, a leap of
faith and a mobilisation of that old enemy of postmodern cynicism, the unruly
artistic imagination.
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Notes
C H A P T E R 1 : I N T RO D U C T I O N – F RO M T H E M A RG I N S T O T H E
M A I N S T R E A M
1. Throughout this book, I use the term ‘televisual’ in the sense that it was first
employed in the 1970s by Stuart Marshall, namely to denote the language and
representational conventions of realism in broadcast television with the implied
receptivity, if not passivity of the viewer. I distinguish the term from John Thornton
Caldwell’s later use of the noun ‘televisuality’, referring to visually arresting
material on television designed to harness the aesthetic sensibilities of the viewer.
See Caldwell, Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television,
Rutger
s University Press, 1995.
2. The Sony Portapak was a bulky portable video recorder that was powered by
large, rechargeable batteries and linked to a camera by a power cable. It took video
cassettes that allowed twenty minutes of continuous recording time.
3. Paik is widely accepted as a pioneer in the field although antecedents and parallel
developments have been identified elsewhere. See for example Edith Decker-
Phillips, Paik Video, Barrytown Ltd., 1998.
4. Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, Fontana/Collins, 1977.
5. Peter Kardia, ‘Making a Spectacle’, Art Monthly, no. 193, 1996.
6.
It
could be argued that artist-run spaces still exist and that contemporary art on
the Internet successfully sidesteps the gallery system. A full discussion of this issue
is outside the scope of this book, but I will return to other demotic initiatives in
chapter 7.
7. It
is only recently that American performance tapes have found their way into the
prestigious Kramlich collection.
8. See Amelia Jones, ‘Presence in Absentia, Experiencing Performance as
Documentation’, Art Journal, Winter 1997.
9. Postcard (1984), Air Gallery, London.
10.
Douglas Crimp, ‘The Photographic Activity in Postmodernism’, Performance Texts
and Documents, Parachute, 1980.
11.
Bruno Bettleheim, The Uses of Enchantment, Peregrine Books, 1976.
12. Nam June Paik, ‘Input-Time and Output-Time’, in Ira Schneider and Beryl Korot
(eds.), Video Art: An Anthology, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976.
13. Dan Reeves in conversation with Chris Meigh-Andrews, www.meigh-andrews.
com.
14
. All quotes by Marty St. James taken from ‘Video Telepathies’, Filmwaves, No. 15,
2001.
15. Frank Poper quoting Hervé Fisher in Art of the Electronic Age, Thames and Hudson,
1993.
16. See Dan R
eeves in conversation with Chris Meigh-Andrews, op. cit.
C H A P T E R 2 : T H E M O D E R N I S T I N H E R I TA N C E
1. Stuart Marshall, ‘Institutions/Conjunctures/Practice’, in Recent British Video
catalogue, 1983.
2. For a comprehensive account of the deconstructive techniques of structural film-
making by artists, see A.L. Rees, A History of Experimental Film and Video, BFI
Publishing, 1999.
3. F
or a fuller discussion of Paik’s relationship to John Cage, see Edith Decker-Phillips
in Paik Video, Barrytown Ltd, 1998.
4. Quoted b
y Edith Decker-Phillips, ibid.
5. Pierre Théberge on Michael Snow, in Schneider and Korot (eds.), Video Art: An
Anthology, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976.
6. Richar
d Serra, in Schneider and Korot (eds.), Video Art: An Anthology.
7. See
Mick Hartney, An Incomplete and Highly Contentious Summary of the Early
Chronology of Video Art (1959–1976), London Video Arts catalogue, 1984.
8. I will consider some exceptions in my discussion of UK scratch video in the 1980s
and its reinvention in contemporary Canadian video. See chapter 6.
9. Edith Decker-Phillips, op. cit.
C H A P T E R 3 : D I S RU P T I N G T H E C O N T E N T
1. David Ross, ‘The Personal Attitude’, in Schneider and Korot (eds.), Video Art: An
Anthology, op. cit.
2. Sally
Potter, ‘On shows’, in the catalogue of About Time, Performance and
Installation by 21 Women Artists, ICA publications, 1980 (unpaginated).
3. Dara Gellman, catalogue entry in UK/Canadian Video Exchange 2000, London,
Toronto.
4. Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses, Women, Art and Ideology,
Routledge & K
egan Paul, 1981.
5. This view held sway for many years partly as a result of Laura Mulvey’s influential
article ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, Vol. 16, 1975, pp. 6–18.
6. Eric Cameron, ‘Structural Video in Canada’, Studio International, 1972.
7. Luc
y Lippard, ‘The Pleasures and Pains of Rebirth – European Women’s Art’, in
Feminist Essays on Women’s Art, Dutton Press, 1976.
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8. Jayne Parker, The Undercut Reader, Wallflower Press, 2002, p.118.
9. See Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, Routledge, 1993.
10. See Jean Fisher, ‘Reflections on Echo – Sound by women artists in Britain’, in Chrissie
Iles (ed.), Signs of the Times catalogue, Oxford Museum of Modern Art, 1990, pp.
60–7.
11. Vera Frenkel’s own description of the work in a correspondence with the author.
12. Vera Frenkel, from the script for ‘The Last Screening Room’, in Peggy Gale and Lisa
Steele (eds.), Video re/View: The (Best) Source for Critical Writings on Canadian
Artists’ Video, Art Metropole and Vtape, 1996.
13. T
amara Krikorian quoted in Julia Knight (ed.), Diverse Practices: A Critical Reader
on British Video Art
, Luton Press/Arts Council of England, 1996, p. 77.
C H A P T E R 4 : M A S C U L I N I T I E S
1. In 1977, I was accused of a similarly reductive approach to masculinity when Annie
Wright and I spent some time disguised as men. Andre van Niekerk reproached
me for my conception of what it means to be a man with this scathing comment:
‘Man? Perhaps we should substitute that word for dirty, oily and thoroughly
unwholesome, depraved person.’
2. Marilyn Frye quoted by Peggy Phelan in Unmarked: The Politics of Performance,
Routledge
, 1993, p. 101.
3. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked, op. cit.
4. Bruce
W. Ferguson, ‘Colin Campbell: Otherwise Worldly’, in Gale and Steele (eds.),
Video re/View, op. cit.
5. Ibid.
6.
Stuart Marshall quoted by Rebecca Dobbs in David Curtis (ed.), A Directory of
British Film & Video Artists, Arts Council of England publication, 1996.
7. John
Greyson, ‘Double Agents: Video Art addressing AIDS’, in Gale and Steele
(eds.), Video re/View, op. cit.
8. Negativ
e capability was the characteristic first attributed to male poets like Keats
who were seen to have flexible ego boundaries enabling them to take on different
identities and sensibilities. It was also a quality that was attributed to women’s art
in the 1980s.
9. Vito Acconci in conversation with Klaus Biesenbach, Video Acts: Single Channel
Works from the Collections of Pamela and Richard Kramlich and the New Art Trust
catalogue, P
.S.1 New York, ICA London, 2003.
10. Tom Ryan, ‘Roots of Masculinity’, in Andy Metcalf and Martin Humphreys (eds.),
The Sexuality of Men, Pluto Press, 1985.
11.
Ibid.
12. See Linda Nochlin, ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’, in T.B. Hess
and E. Baker (eds.), Art and Sexual Politics, Collier Macmillan, 1973.
13. R
ozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art & Ideology,
Routledge & K
egan Paul, 1981.
14. See chapter 6 for an account of Bourn’s work.