Video art emerged as an art form less than forty years ago, when the handheld camera and portable videotape recorder brought ease, mobility, and, most importantly, affordability to the art of the moving image. Throughout its short history video art has challenged many of the conventions of the art world, ranging from questions of reproduction to issues surrounding acquisition. First seen on tiny television screens in alternative art spaces, video art has moved to dominate international exhibitions of contemporary art with projections covering entire walls and huge factory-size installations. While the early days of video featured a low-tech, do-it-yourself quality (Vito Acconci’s performance-based works from the 1960s and 70s, on view last semester at the Johnson, are a good example of this early video art), recent works share the high-end production values of Hollywood cinema. In spite of its original potential to question the rarefied status of fine art, video art of recent years has repositioned itself within the white cube of the gallery. According to the New Museum of Contemporary Art, who coproduced Point of View, “the market for video art is no longer distinguishable from that of oil paintings or bronze sculptures, with limited editions by today’s most sought after video artists currently selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
The early history of video art is also characterized by alternative ways of distributing artists’ works. Media art centers like Electronic Arts Intermix and Video Data Bank were founded in the 1970s to support artists and to find new ways to disseminate artists’ video works, apart from the conventional gallery system. Acting upon video art’s original promise of broad distribution, these organizations have a long history of making historical as well as contemporary video works accessible to a wide audience. In the late 1980s, however, when equipment to produce and exhibit large-scale installations became more widely available, a younger generation of artists found financial backers within the gallery system, which follows the rules of a free market, where supply and demand determine prices. The suggestion, therefore, that video art could also be produced “within a more open framework,” which is the underlying premise of the Point of View anthology, is quite a subversive proposition, reaching back to video art’s democratic potential.
On the most pragmatic level, the Point of View anthology is based on the premise that instead of following strict rules of scarcity and demand, a digital medium like video art can also be produced for a broader audience, within a more open framework. In this spirit, the eleven artists commissioned to create new works for Point of View made their contributions with the knowledge that the final result would be distributed within an unlimited format. Point of View: An Anthology of the Moving Image functions simultaneously as an archive, a teaching and research tool, and an exhibition inside a box. Each DVD contains the commissioned work, along with an interview between the artist and a well-known critic or curator, a biography, and images of other works. Taken together, the works provide an international, intergenerational overview of the state of video art in 2004. (From the New Museum’s press release)
Point of View was produced by Bick Productions (Ilene Kurtz Kretzschmar and Caroline Bourgeois) and the New Museum of Contemporary Art as the first commercially available anthology of the moving image in contemporary art. It is available through the New Museum store and website. The Point of View anthology was purchased with funds from the Donors to the Contemporary Art Fund.
Andrea Inselmann
Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art
William
Kentridge (South African, born 1955), Automatic
Writing, 2:38 min.
William Kentridge gained international attention for his animated
films Felix in Exile: Geography of Memory
(1994), History of the Main Complaint
(1996), and Weighing…and Wanting (1997),
which explore the history and psychology of South African apartheid. His films
derive from charcoal drawings that develop within a process of erasure. In
video historian Michael Rush’s words, “Kentridge works in a stream of
consciousness that allows impressions and momentary flashes to take form and
then yield to new images, without any loss of momentum; indeed, quite the
opposite; momentum builds with each frame.” Reminiscent of Surrealism,
Kentridge’s film Automatic Writing explores
the point where writing and drawing intersect.
Isaac Julien (British, born
1960), Encore, 4:38 min.
Isaac Julien is Britain’s preeminent black filmmaker as well as an
internationally recognized artist, writer, and scholar. He was a founding
member of Sankofa Film/Video Collective, set up in the UK in the 1980s to
protest British racism and to form a new politics of representation. Sankofa
created a new genre that contested the realism of both the British documentary
movement and of fiction feature films. Julien’s best-known works are
biographical meditations on the lives of influential black authors. Foremost
among them is Looking for Langston (1989),
widely considered a founding text of New Queer Cinema, which examines the life,
politics, and sexuality of Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes, focusing
particularly on the repressed gay subtext in Hughes’s writing. However, more
poetic than didactic, Julien’s films are characterized by their dreamlike
imagery and sensuality. In recent years, he has moved away from the single
screen toward the use of multiple screens. He has stated that this arrangement
allows him to explore certain compositional ideas that are impossible with a
single screen and counteracts a kind of “conservatism” in how the viewer
perceives images on screen. Through its intense engagement of visual pleasure
Julien’s work also seeks to expose, deflect, and reconstruct the cinematic
gaze, exploring issues related to questions of race, gender, and sexual
difference. For Encore, Julien
reworked outtakes from his longer three-channel projection piece Paradise/Omeros (2002) that refers to
the African Diaspora and the emblematic search for the “new life” in a New
World.
Paul McCarthy (American,
born 1945), WGG (Wild Gone Girls),
5:20 min.
California-based and active since the late 1960s, Paul McCarthy
gained recognition for his intense performance-based video work on taboo
subjects such as the body, sexuality, and shamanistic initiation rituals. His
work has also explored themes of violence and dysfunction as they relate to
sacrosanct notions of family and childhood. To get at the underbelly of
American popular culture he often restaged culturally charged myths and icons,
such as Heidi and Pinocchio, in the context of family
psychodramas, Hollywood genres, and mass media. Incorporating sausages and ground
meat, ketchup, mayonnaise, and chocolate syrup, his work distorts and mutates
these familiar narratives into disturbing and carnivalesque tableaux. Because
of the shocking nature of much of McCarthy’s work, its innovative aspects as
well as its historical roots have tended to be overlooked until recently, when
several major museum shows took a closer look at his influential body of work.
McCarthy’s work has to be seen in relationship to the politically and sexually
brazen performances of the Viennese Actionists of the 1950s and 60s as well as
the traditions of 1960s Performance art. “But while the work of the Actionists
was about the blood,” McCarthy has noted, “my work is really about the
ketchup,” indicating the important role Hollywood’s factory of fantasies should
play in our understanding of his often graphic performances.
Gary Hill (American,
born 1951), Blind Spot, 12:27 min.
Hill is one of the pioneers of video art. He completed his first
single-channel video in 1973 and began producing video installations as early
as 1974, consistently employing new technologies to expand the vocabulary of
his work. One of Hill’s main interests is the conceptual nature of electronic
media, particularly its relationship to writing, the voice, and the body. In
the short film Blind Spot, excerpted
from the larger five-channel installation Accordions
from July 2001, the artist examines the threshold of where language begins
and ends. Here, gestures and facial expressions act as a surrogate for
language. Shot in the Arab neighborhood of Marseilles, the camera singles out
one man in a crowd. As the camera zooms in slowly, the imagery is interrupted by
increasing segments of black to create an almost still portrait–like
photograph. Following the events of 9/11, one cannot help but interpret this
encounter in political terms.
Joan Jonas (American,
born 1936), Waltz, 6:24 min.
Since the 1960s, Joan Jonas has been a key figure in the field of
performance and video art. Trained in art history and sculpture, Jonas’s early
works examined space and perceptual phenomena, merging elements of dance,
modern theater, the conventions of Japanese Noh and Kabuki theater, and the
visual arts. Jonas first began using video in performance in 1972,
incorporating a live camera and monitor that functioned as both mirror and
masking device. Her investigation of subjectivity and objectivity is
articulated through a personal vocabulary of ritualized gesture. Often
performing in masks, veils, or costumes—situated outdoors in natural or
industrial environments— Jonas uses disguise and masquerade to study the
personal and cultural meanings of female gesture and symbols. The layering of
mirrors and mirrored images is one of her most powerful metaphorical devices,
returning the viewer to that moment of ego formation described by Jacques Lacan
as the mirror stage. Her work has always involved a preoccupation with feminist
concerns: “There is always a woman in my work, and her role is questioned.” In
recent years, Jonas has been developing work which extends the concerns of
earlier pieces with a particular emphasis on notions of the visual. Her recent
piece Lines in the Sand for Documenta 11 is a subjective meditation
on the fate of self and civilization. Utilizing many of the artist’s formal
techniques and deeply personal, Waltz incorporates
mythology into its narrative alongside spontaneously occurring events,
reiterating Jonas’s important position in the development of both early
formalist and early feminist video.
Pipilotti Rist
(Swiss, born 1962), I Want
to See How You See, 4:48 min.
Like so many European girls of her age, Pipilotti Rist was riveted
by Astrid Lindgren’s fairytale girl-heroine, Pippi Longstocking; so much so,
she created her by now famous first name by combining her pet name with that of
Lindgren’s swashbuckling character. Known for saturated colors, sensual
imagery, and an unconventional use of space and scale, Rist is fluent in a
visual language that embraces aspects of mass media and experimental video,
playfully confronting the high/low debate; she compares the video medium to
“paintings behind glass that move.” One of her best-known works is the
unabashedly feminist two-channel projection piece Ever Is Over All (1997), in which she walks down a typical
obsessively clean Zurich street smashing in car windows on one screen
juxtaposed with shots of a country garden on the other. Like much of Rist’s
work, I Want to See How You See is
seductively corporeal, at once tangible and boundless, open to many
interpretations. One such interpretive possibility might be related to her
physical relationship to her recently born child and her desire to understand
how a baby might see and experience the world.
Douglas Gordon
(Scottish, born 1966), Over
My Shoulder, 13:48 min.
Douglas Gordon is best known for film installations that feature
classic films by directors such as Alfred Hitchcock and Martin Scorsese. Gordon
excerpts and/or alters film sequences, drawing international attention with his
1993 piece 24 Hour Psycho, in which a
radically slowed version of Hitchcock’s film is projected on a suspended screen
to explore psychological states and memory. In Through the Looking Glass (1999) Gordon projects the famous scene
with Robert De Niro from Taxi Driver onto
two facing walls, with the viewer caught in the crossfire. In the interview
included in Point of View, Gordon
states that he has never liked video, but that he has always been interested in
cinema, an attitude that he shares with many contemporary artists working with
video. Many of Gordon’s works are based on dichotomies—passion and angst, hate
and love, seduction and violence, life and death, perception and memory. In Over My Shoulder, Gordon uses hand
gestures against a white sheet to communicate a wide variety of emotions, a by
now clichéd cinematic trope to cut away from a sexual or violent scene,
especially in Hollywood movies from the 1940s and 50s.
Pierre Huyghe (French, born
1962), I Jedi, 5 min.
While artists like Douglas Gordon manipulate actual Hollywood
films, Pierre Huyghe re-creates them with his own actors and sets. These
reenactments allow Huyghe to explore issues of identity and memory, only
present as a subtext in the original movie. His piece Remake (1994–95) is a remake of Hitchcock’s film Rear Window that exposes the structure
of the original film through various distancing techniques. Many of his works
address the territory between reality and fiction and the construction of
narratives. His two-channel projection The
Third Memory (1999) takes as its point of departure a bank robbery
committed by John Woytowicz in Brooklyn in 1972 that formed the basis for
Sidney Lumet’s movie Dog Day Afternoon (1975).
For his project, Huyghe tracked down Woytowicz. He reconstructed the set of
Lumet’s film and, using amateur actors, asked Woytowicz to direct them
following his memory of the crime. The final piece is a combination of scenes
from Lumet’s film, rehearsals for the current film, and shots of the film
equipment and crew; this creates a third
memory, which becomes a probing critique of media spectacle that leads
viewers to their own questions about time and memory. Addressing similar issues
and paying homage to Steven Spielberg in I
Jedi, Huyghe splits the screen in half, creating a mood of suspense, as we
wait for something to happen.
Francis Alÿs (Belgian, born
1959), El Gringo, 4:12 min.
Born in Antwerp, Francis Alÿs has lived in Mexico City since 1987.
Alÿs develops his artworks, primarily in the form of videos, slide shows,
drawings, or paintings, from situations he encounters on walks through the
streets of Mexico City. A close observer and occasional manipulator of the
quirks of everyday life, Alÿs is mainly interested in the fleeting or
transitory aspects of experience, adopting the viewpoint of a passerby who is
at once involved and separate. In this respect Alÿs follows in the tradition of
the Situationists and the Fluxus artists. Based on the artist’s experience of
living in a foreign country, El Gringo presents
the discomfort of being an outsider when the camera is confronted by a pack of
snarling dogs, while literally destabilizing the cinematic gaze.
Anri Sala (Albanian,
born 1974), Time after Time, 5:22
min.
Anri Sala is part of a group of emerging artists from parts of
Europe that were once believed to exist outside mainstream contemporary
European art. Trained as a painter, Sala has lived in Paris since the
mid-1990s, but he grew up in Tirana during the repressive Communist era,
witnessing Albania’s difficult path to capitalism. In the past few years his
work has received much international attention, including the Young Artist’s
Prize of the Venice Biennale in 2001. His photographs and video works are a
blend of documentary, narrative, and autobiography, in which he explores the
relationship between language and image, speech and action, and elusive
historical fact. While his earlier videos, such as Intervista (1998), were about individual experiences that
indirectly revealed sociopolitical events, his more recent work causes
detachment and intimacy to coincide through a subtle mix of light, shadow, and
sound. His richly textured images are laced with pain, disillusion, and loss,
closely bound to a painterly tradition.
David
Claerbout (Belgian, born 1969), Le
Moment, 2:44 min.
David Claerbout can be counted among today’s youngest talents in
the field of artistic video production. Originally trained as a painter,
Claerbout uses in his installations either overlays of static images and subtly
moving video projections or straight video projections. Often using existing
film footage and photography, Claerbout refers to himself “as an editor rather
than a creator.” Creating works in which the linear progression of time is
unraveled, the artist poses questions relating to the reliability of the
photographic in a digital age. In Le
Moment Claerbout uses cinematic techniques to create a suspenseful journey
through a dark forest only to undermine the viewer’s expectations set in motion
by exactly those narrative strategies.
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