Video Art: Stayin' Alive

Afterimage, March, 2000 by Cynthia Chris

Just over three years ago, I wrote an essay for Afterimage on current trends in artists' video ("Video Art: Dead or Alive?," Afterimage 24, no. 3). It seemed that during the late 1980s and early 1990s many videomakers, programmers, grant-providers and media librarians had managed changes in the financial climate of the art world, public and private philanthropy and university budgets by turning away from single-channel video as an obscure and unprofitable art form. Still, rumors of the death of video art were greatly exaggerated. On the contrary, a look at a flurry of critical attention to video art, and to the recent use of video by artists, suggested that it was under close scrutiny and evolving in response to a complex set of aesthetic interests, technological developments and restructured opportunities for exhibition.

As the twentieth century draws to a close, video is alive and kicking, even commonplace, in the art world in the form of multi-media installations and interactive projects in both physical and virtual space. Analog, digital and HDTV formats and the convergence of film and video technologies have only just begun to transform all aspects of independent feature filmmaking, from visual texture to budgeting. Countless artists and media activists working in narrative, experimental, documentary and hybrid forms continue to use video as their primary medium, showing their work in dozens of festivals accepting both film and video, and in ostensibly video-only festivals such as L.A. Freewaves, the Dallas Video Festival, the Worldwide Video Festival in The Hague and the New York Video Festival, whose publicity materials for their July 1999 festival claimed that "video is now...an almost classical notion." Long-time video curator David A. Ross (now director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art [SFMOMA]) can confide ntly state that "a whole new generation of artists now uses video like a pencil, as John Baldessari predicted." [1]

Indeed, both established and emerging artists who use video are exhibiting, accumulating press coverage and winning prestigious awards in unprecedented numbers. A handful of artists with decades of experience working primarily in video have been graced with retrospectives (e.g., Antonio Muntadas at the Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango in Bogota in 1999; Tony Oursler at the Williams College Museum of Art and the new Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, both in Massachusetts, in 1999; Bill Viola at six museums in the United States and Europe from 1997 to 2000; Bruce and Norman Yonemoto at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles in 1999 [see Afterimage 27, no. 3]; and "Martha Rosler: Positions in the Life World," a retrospective honoring Rosler's influential works in various media including video, which originated at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, England in 1999 and travelled to several international venues before its scheduled installation at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City in J une 2000 [see Afterimage 27, no. 1]). While these exhibitions have surveyed both new and old work by well-known artists, video from the 1970s has also resurfaced in venues varying from historical exhibitions such as "Reel Work: Artists' Film and Video of the 1970s" at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, in 1996 to single-channel sidebars in exhibitions of otherwise new work. For example, the Cheim & Read Gallery in New York City showed Female Sensibility (1973) by Lynda Benglis alongside an exhibition of her new sculpture in 1998. Similarly, the same year, the Geffen Contemporary at The Museum of Contemporary Art-Los Angeles (MOCA-LA) complemented an installation of Richard Serra's recent sculptures with selections from his earlier work in film and video such as Television Delivers People (1973, with Carlotta Fay Schoolman) and Boomerang (1974, with Nancy Holt).

Not all of the current frenzy surrounding artists' video focuses on its origins and originators. Video by younger artists--at least in the form of installations--has been embraced wholeheartedly by galleries, museums, the art press and even some private collectors. Perhaps it was clear that video was not dead when Artforum, its editorial finger characteristically on the pulse of the latest trend, used a frame from Alex Bag's incisive performance video Fall '95 (1995) on its January 1996 cover. Since then, video has taken center stage with such pervasiveness that a comprehensive survey of the trend would constitute quite a lengthy list; a few examples may be sufficiently emblematic. Jessica Bronson's video installations earned her the Emerging Artist Award bestowed by MOCA-LA and Citibank in 1998 (the award includes a one-person exhibition at MOCA). In 1999 Sam Taylor-Wood, a 1998 Turner Prize finalist, produced a major video installation for the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. Taylor-Wood is one of seve ral members of the much-heralded generation known as the Young British Artists to use video in her work; others include 1999 Turner Prize winner Steve McQueen, who also works in film, and collaborators Jane and Louise Wilson, whose installations are shot on film and projected as video (see Afterimage 27, no. 3). Several generations of artists contributed video installations to the 1999 Venice Biennale (Doug Aitken, Christian Marclay, Shirin Neshat, the late Dieter Roth and Rosemarie Trockel, among others); reviews by the New York Times's Michael Kimmelman and other critics dwelt on the prominence of the medium in the show. The Dia Center for the Arts in New York City exhibited new video installations by Stan Douglas and Douglas Gordon in 1999-2000; Gordon's work in video garnered the Turner Prize in 1996 and the Guggenheim Museum's Hugo Boss Prize in 1998. At least a quarter of the 40 Artists--including Neshat and the Wilsons--chosen for the 1999-2000 Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh used video in some aspect of their work. Late in 1999 SFMOMA mounted "Seeing Time: Selections from the Pamela and Richard Kramlich Collection of Media Art," from a collection believed to be the largest private collection of its kind. [2] Unfortunately, the cluttered, cacophonous exhibition design failed to account for the fact that media art often, provides auditory as well as visual experiences, allowing soundtracks from nearby pieces to compete and even drown out one another. Video art even has greatest hits, one of which is Peter Fischli and David Weiss's endlessly clever The Way Things Go (1987), where household items bump and combust their way along a 100-foot-long Rube Goldberg-style contraption. Originally, Sonnebend Gallery sold the tape in a limited, signed edition for $300 to $400 per VHS copy; an unlimited edition is currently available from First Run Features Home Video for $19.95.