Early Video

Early video

With the exception of Ant Farm’s “Media Burn”, the selection of early video art Maia and I watched this week didn’t deal too heavily with its history like our readings did. Nauman’s videos were good examples of how performance artists used video in its early days. The titles of his videos are pretty perfect descriptions of the video performances themselves—in “Pinch Neck”, Nauman pinches and grabs his neck skin in different ways for a few minutes; in “Walking in an exaggerated manner around the perimeter square”, Nauman walks slowly in an effeminate manner around a square; etc. The role of video in recording performance is interesting because before many performances were meant to be a unique, uncaptured and therefore uncommodifiable form of “anti-art”, and recording these performances on video provided a way to document them with another “anti-art” form. Though, as Martha Rosler notes all of this “anti-art” eventually became “anti-art art” because the art world “swelled to take them in”.

The next video we watched was Ant Farm’s “Media Burn” in which a Kennedy-esque “artist-president” gives speech above a TV that rails against the media and television then drives a Cadillac through a tower of flaming televisions. This video is embodies many of video art’s early elements: anti-television, anti-establishment, and collectivist mentality. The 60s and 70s had a swath of art collectives using video for a variety of reasons; groups like Ant Farm used video with egalitarian media proliferation and Marxist ideals in mind, others like Radiance were for-profit collectives concerned with formalist and theoretical issues.

One of the conceptual/theoretical based video artists we watched was Peter Campus. His videos “Double Vision” and “Three Transitions” are dry but interesting pieces dealing with methods of perception. Gary Hill’s videos on the other hand are more formal explorations of video technology as a new medium with videos that invert color, flicker, disintegrate and reintegrate. These videos only represent a tiny portion of the early video art though, partially because video is a rapidly deteriorating medium, causing many videos to have been lost. It is this ephermerality of video that Martha Rosler argues is was what caused video art be historicized so quickly and thus mythologized while it was still in its infancy.

Hopefully we’ll watch more videos next week than we did this week.

Articles we read:

Martha Rosler – “Video: Shedding the Utopian Moment”

Marita Sturken – “Paradox in the Evolution of an Art Form”

Videos we watched:
(All can be found on Ubuweb and/or Youtube)

Bruce Nauman – Manipulating a T Bar

- Pinch Neck

- Walking in an exaggerated manner around the perimeter square

- Stomping around the studio

Ant Farm – Media Burn

David Hall – Video Interruptions

- Video inscriptions

Peter Campus – Double Vision

- Three Transitions

Gary Hill – Mirror Road

- Bathing

- Soundings

- Electronic Linguistic

- Sums and Differences

- Windows

- Objects with Destinations