Art history loves creation myths or stories that locate the founding moment of an art form. Art history also loves firsts. The widely accepted creation story of video art goes something like this:
In 1965 Korean born artist Nam June Paik walked into a New York store and purchased a Sony Portapak from the first US shipment. On his way home he was caught in a traffic jam, he pulled out the camera and made a video recording of the scene from the cab window. Later that night he showed the tape at a café and video art was born.
This story, whether you believe it or not, privileges the popular origin of video art. Paik’s camera was one of the first available on the open market. The artist chose a technology that was soon to become commonly available and he used it to record a commonplace event or experience. He then shared his artwork in an everyday space, in a café rather than an art museum. This tale also highlights the immediacy of video. Paik records the moment and then a short time later screens the artwork. Many art theorists argue that video is an avant-garde medium; used as an alternative to static, museum-based art, it aims to collapse art and life.
Championed for its immediacy from the very beginning, video art was part of the seventies push away from the art object and art as commodity. In Australia and elsewhere, video was used by performance artists and land artists to bear witness to time based process in their shunning of art as product. The video camera was a witness to ephemeral art acts. Australian artist Mike Parr used video as early as 1970. He and fellow artist Peter Kennedy set up an artist run space in Sydney called Inhibodress where performance art, conceptual art and video were regularly shown. The second ever Biennale of Sydney in 1976 also included video art.The 70s are often referred to as the structuralist period for video art. In its infancy video art was transfixed by its own formal properties and these properties often became the subject or content of video art. Emerging video artists were content to focus on what the world look liked through this new medium.The truth status of video was the subject of a 1970 work by American artist Bruce Nauman. In his work titled Live-Taped Video Corridor Nauman played tricks with the surveillance capacities of video to expose video’s capacity to re-present reality.
Experimentation remained video arts defining trait until the 1980s when postmodernism killed 70s structuralism. The music video clip emerged in the 80s exerting a massive influence both on popular culture and on the way artists were working with video. VCRs were also readily available on the home market and hence, the initially new and remarkable formal properties of video became familiar and widely accepted. Instead of focusing on the medium itself video artists began to sample from popular culture. The postmodern aesthetic of pastiche and appropriation became commonplace. From the late 80s onwards Swiss born artist Pipilotti Rist has used the video clip format in her art making utilising sharp montage in contrast with slow motion. Rist was a member of an all girl rock band and she often composes and performs her own music in her video installations.
By the 1990s video art had been hijacked by other, newer and sometimes older technologies, rendering it a hybrid medium. Artists began working with video and computer technologies together. Other artists began using video projection to imitate, or even perhaps replace, painting. American artist Tony Oursler is best known for his sculptural video projections where expressive faces are projected over found or constructed objects. Oursler probes the psychological impact of screen culture.
Today it seems that video as a medium is no medium at all. Co-opted by other media it is now intrinsically hybrid. Now in its digital phase, video is more malleable than ever. Today moving images are everywhere…you can broadcast yourself on youtube or make videos on your mobile phone.
It is the artform for the download generation. Video art is portable and you never need to feel lonely for your art collection – you can take it with you on your laptop.
Dick Quan
YOUR VERY OWN VIDEO COLLECTION
MOVE: Video Art in schools is a partnership between Kaldor Art Projects and the NSW Department of Education and Training.
Your own school is now a collector of contemporary art. The five video works, commissioned as part of the first stage of MOVE, are now the beginning of your school’s art collection. In the next few years this collection will expand to include a total of twelve works of art.
Think about the best way to experience these works of art, taking into consideration the technology and spaces available in your school. How do you think each artist would like their work to be viewed? Consider how the presentation of the work to the audience impacts on its meaning and success.
VIDEO TIME
Count to three very slowly.
Now remember the last time you looked at a work of art. It may have been a painting or perhaps even a sculpture. It’s likely that you only looked at the art work for a short period of time. Most people spend only a couple of seconds looking at an artwork before moving on.
In that brief moment of time the audience of an artwork makes a large number of decisions about the work, usually based on aesthetics. It’s not a long time to appreciate or fully understand an artwork. Split second decisions are made as to which aspect of a work demands the most interest or attention and the other elements tend to be overlooked or discarded.
Sometimes our appreciation of an artwork has nothing to do with art, we might spend our precious three seconds trying to understand why an artwork might be worth a lot of money or that it’s much smaller or larger that we thought it was.
If the work is a sculpture or a painting, the overall image of the work can be revisited through a picture or poster. However the deeper details, for example the texture or the three dimensional nature of sculpture, are lost in reproduction. Artworks that may have taken years to complete may only have a captive audience for three seconds!
Looking at art is as much about our relationship with time as with familiar elements like colour or composition.
Maybe you are on an excursion or a bus tour and perhaps you only have twenty minutes to see the whole art gallery. So you run from one artwork to another in fast forward trying to soak up all those ideas and all that work in small slices of time. Later you will try and make sense of it all in your head. You will try and slow the scene down again in your mind, perhaps with the aid of photographs or even a video on your phone. You will try and change time to suit your needs.
Most artwork doesn’t change. Most artwork is exactly the same before you look at it and it is the same after you leave. During the three seconds you are looking at the artwork it mostly doesn’t change either. It is a static recording of the artist’s ideas and processes.
Now imagine if the artwork is constantly changing. Imagine that the work might be different before you look at it and different again after you leave. Imagine the work changing while you are looking at it! How can you fully experience a work like this in your allocated three seconds? You can’t take a photograph or get a poster because all you are doing is capturing one particular moment in a constantly changing series of moments.
This is time-based art: art that changes.
Video art is just one example of time-based art. It uses a technology that we are all familiar with: video, to explore ideas. Time is the common element in all video art.
The following artists all use video in one form or another to make art. All the works are very different but all have time as a common link. Some of the artists like Daniel Crooks and Todd McMillan, address time directly as a central theme. Other artists like TV Moore, Grant Stevens and John Tonkin make time a requirement of the viewer in order to appreciate their ideas.
Three seconds just isn’t enough.
Video art not only addresses time as an issue, it requires the viewer’s time. As such, video art has its own established sets of conventions. The audience must become familiar with these in order to appreciate the experience of video art.
We all know how to watch T.V. Most of us have been watching T.V. since we were small children. We weren’t taught the rules of T.V. we just learnt them as we went along. Watching television means understanding a complex series of rules and codes. We know that a television program has a beginning and an end, indicated with titles at the start and credits at the end. We know that to understand a T.V. program we must watch everything from start to finish. We understand this so well that we can allow the main program to be broken up by other smaller programs. These little programs have nothing to do with the main program (they are ads) and have their own completely different stories. They often interrupt the main program at crucial points to our understanding. And yet we know we have to watch these as well and can still work out what is going on the whole time. We often find ourselves doing all of these complex things even if the show isn’t particularly interesting to us!
Video art has its own rules and codes which although similar to T.V. in some ways are also very different.
Video art is presented to the audience in many different ways. It might be on a T.V. monitor just like a regular T.V. (single channel) or in a cinema-like dark room on a big screen (single channel). It might be presented on more than one screen at once (multi –channel). It might involve the technology it’s presented with in a sculptural way. It might be interactive.
In addition to the use of hardware, video art also has its own visual language. Video art might slow down or speed up images or it may be looped in an endless repetition or use a conventional narrative. Video art can be original work or appropriated images. It may be stylized or distorted or be a conventional documentary.
Video art may borrow the conventions of T.V. and cinema but it is not T.V. or cinema.
Perhaps video is caught somewhere between cinema and TV?Video theorist John G. Hanhardt argues that television is the nearest technological neighbour of video. But video differs radically from both TV and cinema. Where TV and cinema happen in a defined domestic or public space (the lounge room or movie theatre), video does not demand a single temporal-spatial position for the viewer.
Video grants the audience agency. The audience is free to determine their relationship to the work both temporally (in time) and spatially (in space). Often the audience is free to move about, talk and enter and exit as they please. Video challenges our accepted mode of viewing and refuses to grant the audience a passive role.
EXHIBITING VIDEO
In 2002 a purpose built space called the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) opened in Federation Square, Melbourne. This was the first art space designed specifically for the moving image and today this space showcases film, video and interactive installation.
More conventional art museums have also embraced the moving image. The Anne Landa Award began in 2005 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. This is the first award exhibition for the moving image and new media in Australia, established in honour of Anne Landa, a Trustee of the Art Gallery of New South Wales who died in 2002.
However, the reception to video art in the art museum (the appearance of the black box in the white cube) is mixed. Feminist art historian and video artist Martha Rosler cautions us against what she calls the “museumisation” of video, that is, the widespread expectation that video art should be seen be viewed only in spacious, well equipped art museums. Rosler argues that video must remain a democratic and low-tech medium.
Video art today is a dominant medium in international survey exhibitions. The screening of video art has been prolific at the recent Venice and Sydney biennales and at Documenta. Video is also an inexpensive way of Australian artists to partake in the international art scene.
Two of the three artists selected to represent Australia at the 2007 Venice Biennale exhibited video installations.
COLLECTING VIDEO
Until recently, collecting institutions have been reluctant to collect video art, a time based and technology-dependant medium.
Video installations also consume space, require long installation time and often generate sound that impinges on viewing experiences elsewhere in the art museum.
Video art in Australia is usually produced in small editions. Within these editions, the copies become more expensive as they become more scarce. Therefore, the last one sold will be more expensive than the first. When sold video art often comes with a master copy and a playing copy, a sturdy case (not your video store variety) and a certificate of ownership. The certificate both authenticates the artwork and proves ownership.
In 2007 Shaun Gladwell’s Storm Sequence became the first video artwork to be auctioned in Australia. It was sold for $84,000.
CREDITS
| Kaldor Art Projects John Kaldor Adam Free |
NSW Department of Education and Training |
| Text by Lisa Slade Web design by Rach Kirsten |
| Art Gallery of New South Wales Thanks to Brian Ladd, Head of Public Programmes and Tristan Sharp, Senior Coordinator Education Programs |
WORKSHOPS
4D/Moving/Time Based forms
7-12 Contemporary video art practice
Workshops will be conducted in metropolitan and regional locations to support the implementation of 4D forms in teaching and learning programs from Year 7 to Year 12.
The workshop program will focus on the Move video in art in schools resource as a departure point for investigating contemporary video art practice, the work of contemporary video artists, the historical development of video practice, research tasks and activities, developing case studies, programming and assessment.
Register here to register
Curriculum K-12 | CREATIVE ARTS HOMEPAGE
© 2008 NSW Department of Education and Training