Into the mainstream? - video works at the New York, New York Film Festival

Art in America, July, 1993 by Ernest Larsen

Last fall, for the first time in its 30-year history, the New York Film Festival included video in its programming, in the form of a six-day sidebar billed as "Videorama: A Celebration of International Video Art." Since the New York festival is the only major film event to carve out space for video, one was compelled to ask: Did this presage a sudden rise in video's always indefinite cultural status? Was this unexpected ushering of video into the sepulchral white temples of Lincoln Center a sign from on high that at long last video was deemed worthy of mainstream recognition? Or was this merely the most recent demonstration that if video is indeed to connect with mainstream audiences it will need many more such modes of support?

Well aware of how consistently video has been marginalized, the series curators, Richard Pena, program director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and Marian Masone, associate programmer, were careful to note that they had long planned to stage a video festival but had lacked proper facilities in the past. With the installation of a high-quality video-projection system, the year-old Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center became, in Pena's words, "one of the few really well-equipped video theaters in the country." Thus the video program was inaugurated--not as the full-scale video festival many producers desired, but a safer option: an addendum to the big show at Alice Tully Hall.

Full-scale institutional recognition of video is long overdue. After all, video art came into being some 30 years ago, in part a utopian dream machine, in part a principled rejection of its natural parent, television. As a consequence, video has since enjoyed an illegitimate status, exploiting the ambiguous freedom that accrues to an orphan--a freedom that in this case has been capitalized upon principally by hardy survivors of '60s alternative culture. The often reluctant refinement and eventual dispersal of that alternative culture into academia, the art world and the entertainment industry has pulled video producers into the uneasy embrace of the only preexisting institutional structures that could still afford the burden of video's illegitimacy, which is to say, its critical dimension. Mainstream writing about video is virtually nonexistent, and there is no adequate distribution system for independent video. As a result, the audience for video, though sophisticated, is submicroscopic, with the greatest interest coming from academics trying out the latest film theory on video. Unfortunately, some of the programming of the video portion of the Film Festival tended to accentuate the average viewer's lamentable inability to distinguish between film and video. For instance, the curators concentrated much of their limited attention on what they called "filmmakers who have discovered the wonders of video," including Raul Ruiz, Richard Leacock, Mark Rappaport and Isaac Julien. Considering the importance of this trial balloon for theatrical exhibition of video, one might have hoped for programming that was more self-consciously educational, making clear distinctions for the benefit of critics and audiences whose knowledge of video is certain to be shaky. Instead, the programmers opted for the scattershot heterogeneity characteristic of, well, a film festival.

The many videomakers, producers, curators and distributors I spoke with were unanimously thrilled by the festival's potential for attracting new audiences. At the same time, they were universally grumpy about the program's minimal coherence. Perhaps the organizers thought that the excitement and prestige of the festival would eclipse all such objections. But they could easily have sidestepped much of the criticism by simply restricting entries to videotapes produced during the previous 18 months. Such a move would have streamlined the 12 individual programs, many of which included some very brief and not very recent works that looked suspiciously like filler. Curatorial pruning would have brought into sharper relief, for example, the concerns of the large number of recent U.S. videotapes that were screened. More crucially, the programmers could have scored a minor coup by spotlighting the extraordinarily relevant thematic obsessions of U.S. videomakers--particularly the knotty issues of crossdressing and gender-bending, the rough and confusing legacies of our racist past, and the probing and highly subjective aspects of autobiographical narrative. Organization along such deliberately edgy tracks would have argued, in effect, that American videomakers are crossing political, esthetic and personal boundaries with a greater immediacy and sense of commitment than most artists in other mediums, including film.

Consider in this light Tami Gold's loosely structured, 27-minute documentary Juggling Gender (1992), an absorbing and openly problematic portrait of a real-life bearded lesbian who is also a performer. Whether lounging in her bath, juggling at a Coney Island "freak" show or clowning in a lesbian theatrical troupe, Gold's hirsute subject articulates a surprisingly complex awareness of her largely self-appointed role as provocateur, one who unsettles all attempts at gender definitions. Having rather bravely elected not to shave, she seems to relish upending every attempt to define her on the basis of her appearance. Curiously, however, despite this rich and fascinating material, Gold's playful video ends up disappointing. Gold herself seems seduced by the intimacy of the portrait format, and she refuses to be critical of the less appealing aspects of her subject. As a result, we are left with lots of unanswered questions, suggesting that a beard is always a mask--even when worn by a woman.