Video Art - Book Review

Afterimage, Jan-Feb, 2004 by Suzanne Bestler

by Michael Rush

Thames and Hudson/224 pp./$45 (hb).

Chronicling the history of a medium is always a tricky business. Invariably, in choosing who to include and who to leave out, it is impossible to satisfy every academian and still create an interesting, well-rounded, and easily readable text. Rush himself is Director of the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, and is currently co-organizing a biennial exhibition of video art along with an international team of consultants including Lori Zippay of Electronic Arts Intermix. This gives him a great deal of clout as an author and video historian. As his publicist claims, "there has been no complete, up-to-date overview of this influential art form in English," and Video Art seems to be positioned as the historical and critical answer to this absence.

However, Video Art functions better as a gorgeous coffee table reader then a serious history text. With an enormous diversity of full- and half-page color stills, the book is a treat to peruse although much of the visual documentation is confusingly situated with respect to the images themselves. The historical overviews it contains are cursory at best, with Rush relying on laundry-list type sentences to outline trains of artistic contemporaries and preferring to let stills and their lengthy captions describe specific pieces and artists. Understandably, Rush focuses on some artists to the detriment of others but often to an extreme: while artists like Ham June Paik and Vito Acconci are admirably described at several points in the book, several artists (Sadie Benning is an example) featured on the "artist list" directly following the title page are mentioned only in passing, listed with their contemporaries, only their name and date of birth offered.

Rush's real skill comes towards the end of the book, where be begins to uncover trends and ideas common to the most contemporary video pieces. His knowledge of artists from around the world is extensive and intelligent and his commentary is insightful, and belies his position as a curator of some experience. Also included is a select bibliography and chronology of important video works, which ends the text on a positive note Sometimes insightful and sometimes inspiring, Video Art is a flashy romp through the history of video but is far from being a definitive critical text.