Video Art (1992)
(Including Alternative & Community Television, Artists’ Video, Guerrilla Television, Satellite Art, Street Video, TV Art, Video Sculpture.) Excerpt fr. John A. Walker’s Glossary of Art, Architecture & Design since 1945, 3rd. ed.
artdesigncafé | café library | Published 18 May 2011
This text is an excerpt from Walker’s 1992 glossary previously published by Library Association Publishing, London.
Video Art
Video Art is videotape recordings or video sculptures and installations made by fine artists. The Latin word "video" meaning "I see" was employed in the United States in the 1950s to refer to television. As TV became a mass medium in that decade one of the first artistic responses was to attack it by erasing programmes, burying TV sets, using magnets to distort its images, etc. Technological developments in the second half of the 1960s made portable video equipment (portapaks, cameras plus videotape recorders) available to artists who could then play back their recordings via TV monitors. Videotape cassettes could then be produced for sale in the same way as records and sound tapes. In the 1970s a number of art galleries began to market videotapes by artists in the same way as prints and multiples, e.g. Gerry Schum’s "Videogalerie" in Germany and Castelli-Sonnabend in New York. Museums and art centres (such as MoMA in New York and the ICA in London) began to collect artists’ tapes in order to establish video archives.
Video’s significance was that it broke the monopoly of broadcast television. Individuals and small groups could afford to make TV "programmes" and in doing so could challenge and subvert the norms and conventions of broadcast TV. Much early Video Art was a self-reflexive exploration of the medium itself and it usually had a love-hate relationship with mainstream television. In the United States some artists gained access to broadcast TV facilities and had their electronic experiments transmitted to the public as early as 1968, but in Britain it was not until the 1980s that Artists’ Video began to appear regularly on TV arts programmes.
Although at first picture and sound qualities were poor, images were only black and white, and there were limited editing facilities, video artists were attracted by the immediacy of the medium, its instant record, erase and playback facilities. Community artists seeking an alternative to the gallery system employed video in the streets to communicate local news to the people of a neighbourhood or they established Video workshops so that non-artists could acquire video skills and produce their own television. This "alternative television" movement was part of the counter culture of the late 1960s and its ideas were explored in the journal Radical Software [(1) 1970)]. Producing social change rather than art was the principal goal of "alternative" or "community television". As the counter culture lost impetus in the years that followed, video became more and more a genre of fine art.
Video had a particular appeal to artists working in the live arts and time-based genres of dance, performance and body art because it enabled them to watch themselves on TV monitors in real time and to record their actions for posterity. Video’s mirror-like capacity plus its time-shift possibilities enabled artists to devise strange installations in gallery spaces which involved the artist’s and spectator’s self-image in various ways. Other artists emphasized the TV monitor as an object and constructed robot-like sculptures and environments from them. Multiple sets arranged as a "videowall" could all show the same image or different images in sequences controlled by computers. The term "Satellite Art" refers to the use of communication satellites in space as a means of bringing together live, video work by artists from different countries.
Video Art: 1 | 2
ads by artdesigncafe
Facebook comments
