A DUTTON PAPERBACK

NEW ARTISTS V IDEOA C R I T I C A L A N T H O L O G Y E D I T E D B Y

GREGORY BATICOCK ..

A C R I T I C A L A N T H O L O to

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S fJlFT? * C 1 ,p!ex ' d >P stndy containing.ieo$;t*h:s f r of ,be urb b- J ' fOf ? t a p e Vofd a tapfe VertiCa\ Roll> J a* Jonas presents not just a tape or a tape of a performance, bu t records the image of that tane on aFane tT m om tor_the Payback undergoing a slow vertical roll The tape thus contains a continuous circumstance, the playback roll wrthm a specific time frame, creating a kind of temporal topo J a p h yiT FrsFhT gT nt time in thiS w0rk is both disturbing in that t jars the sense of propriety in the visual image, and reassuriL in

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immediate access to relived psychotic episodes that deliver an in g co 7nSxUtCh m re eaS% aPPrehended - he safety

t o S^ V V Z r - n^ SP1CG all WS a kind of immersion to occur that heightens the bone-bare reductive e l e m e n t s o f aichard Landry work like Quad Su ite -a tape focusing in a four-way

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split screen on the lips and fingers of a Landry flute piece, doubletracked in stereo video and audio. In curious contrast, Charlemagne Palestines videotaped performance works Body Music I and Body Music 11 (bo th produced in Florence at A rt/T apes/22 ) illustrate how an intensity can be generated by the integration of the camera into the core of the work rather than establishing the camera eye as a neutral observer to the action. In Body Music II, Palestine transformed w hat in Body W ork I reached the viewer as the observation of an observers view by locating the camera within his own actionliterally extending his eye to include the viewer as well.

In contrast, Nancy Holt ( Underscan, 1974), and Beryl Korot and Ira Schneider (Fourth of July in Saugerties), employ a traditional literary arrangement to portray differing points in historical time. The basis of Holts worWas a recollection of family history, while Korot and Schneider (coeditfcrs of the alternative media journal Radical Softw are) havd borrowed from the kino-eye theories of early Russian revolutionary filmmakers like Dziga Vertov, investigating aspects of video reality in relationship to real time and place in this case, the experience of a patriotic celebration in a small town two hours north of New York City.

It is interesting to: note that in multiple-monitor works like Beryl Korots Dachau 1974, where a short real-time activity is separated into four time strands and then rewoven with the precision of a complex weaving, the artists are once again dealing with the fact that the work is being shown in a gallery situation closer to theatricality ( in its publicness) than television should be. This underscores the curiously sculptural qualities that the television set assumes when taken out of the normative home context.

Paul Kos, a San Francisco artist closely associated with video installation work, created Cym bals/Symbols: Pilot Butte at the De Young Museum in San Francisco. In this piece, Kos integrated the soundtrack of the piece (a t one point the pun: There are tiny sounds in the desert; there arent any sounds in the desert ) with a pair of tin sheets that had been rigged to act as loudspeakers. The tin speakers literally and figuratively completed the wordplay, and in a real sense served to materialize the notion of opposition at work.

In his most recent work, Tokyo Rose (1975-76), Kos again extends the field of his tape by surrounding it with a sculptural context that uses the television image as bait to lure and capture the viewer.

Nancy Holt: Underscan. 1974 Black & w hito j o tesy Castelli-Sonnabend Tapes and Films New York ^ ^

Marlene and Paul Kos: Tokyo Rose. 1975-76. Black & white, with sound, 11 mins., 10 secs. Courtesy Castelli-Sonnabend Tapes and Films, New York. Photograph: Paul Kos.

A Provisional Overview of Artists Television 157Approaching a large mesh cage lit from angles so oblique that one can hardly see inside, the viewer hears a droning seductive voice (Marlene^ Kos, the works coauthor) coaxing: you cant resist f 1" ' J:tc- s inside, you see her face, taped behind a screen

which flies land and take off, still enticing the viewer in sensual rhythmic cadence to give up, stay with her, etc. Beyond the obvious p ay of screen/material and screen/video, the combination works in a way like Naumans screen room to heighten the viewers sense of place and passive condition in relation to the work itself.

Juan Downeys multiple-channel works that comprise his Video 1 rans Americas series are built from tapes edited to be played simultaneously in pairs Structured with incredible precision, works like, Nazca, Inca and Cuzco develop temporal harmonies and dis-Jhrn T W1l n Stere organizati

William Wegmnn: Selected Works Reel *6 . 1975. Black & white, with sound, 20 mins. Courtesy Castelli-Sonnabend Tapes and Films, New York.

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DoAu g k seD arv f 2 o h S " relationships with television is into his work a u n d e r s t a X g o T T h e ^ X c d a, ?implications of video. In his A u lr ia n T a p is a r e lo r d o /a T v e S formance broadcast on Aiicfrta + i 5 d ot a ,lve per-Davis specifically a t t a c f e t h e n *2 * ^ summer of 1974, in relation to both television and a notlons of viewer passivity actually acting out a direct e n c o l t ^ l w W 7 suggesting andparticipant is invited to undress in f r o T n f th e' p f w^ ' m which the touch like parts of the bodv w t tw i , ? the television screen and la ten tfears of the cold i l l , th e a r t ls t> D avis a t once exploits to-one nature K S 1? - d .^ p h a s iz e s i J o n e - contrast to the m v t i b S / lew m t o r relationship, inwho have so thoroughly exnlored aJ,dlence ) J ^ e r e are few artists only Joseph Beuys and Hhns r r , asP.ect of the medium; perhaps

reality. H i s ^ o k r tape T l ^ T r a m U i o l T i 1973f * Ct functions of

t h e V e w ^ X ^ r ^ e c t e d 0 " T T 1duc8d exPe edirectly, b m by X work S ^ by th artist nOT the viewer time. Ly; ss d i i& e t h a n f as a concentrated cluster of liehr i r W01'ks, sev existsspace. The video p r S or is f T g ,m & SeTerely darkened

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Douglas Davis: Images from the Present Tense I. 1971. Black & white, with sound, 30 mins. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix, Inc., New York. Photograph: Peter Moore.

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viewer a condition in which the notion of fixed points of reference gives way to the experience of multiple points of view and multiple points in time. Anamnesis, probably more than any of Campuss earlier works, represents the previous phase of this artist, originally schooled in experimental psychology. In a way far more elegant and surely more deeply moving than tire illustrations used to illuminate the theories of Gestalt psychologists like Edgar Rubin, Kurt Koffka, or W olfgang Kohler, Campus creates experimental epistemologies tha t provide the situation in which a participant will formulate a learning experience to support the reality of his immediate perceptions of the situation Campus has created. In Anamnesis (meaning to recollect or to reproduce in memory) the viewer enters a large dark space to find one pool of light created by a narrow-focused spotlight. Upon entering the lighted field, the viewer-participant sees his or her image video-projected, life-size, on the facing wall. As the viewer stares at his or her image, he is unaw are tha t it is composed of a live, real-time video signal as well as an image taken off a delay loop three seconds past and superimposed upon the live image. It is only upon moving that the viewer-participant discovers that he is pulling a three-second time trailer behind, at every instant leading to some sort of mediation between the two dissimilar though simultaneously apparent points in time and space.

With video you can do everything and still watchits a continuationof your life.

Nam June Paik, 1975

Finally, we must consider T V Garden (1974), Nam June Paiks tour de force consisting of twenty-five color TV sets all playing Paiks international version of American Bandstand, Global Groove, in all colors, shades, and hues. In an essay written in 1965, Paik noted tha t Cybernated art is very important, bu t art for cybernated life is more important, and the latter need not be cybernated. Combining interests in Zen, cybernetics, painting, musical composition, and a global politics devoted to survival and constant change, Paik blazed the trail for a whole generation of video and conceptual artists. . .

The T V Garden featuring Global Groove is indicative of Paiks

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eclectic character. The garden is indeed real, as the array of television sets nestles among dozens of live greens, some of which partially obscure the view of certain screens while others fram e as many as three sets at a time. The tape itself starts out w ith a Broadway version of a 1960s rock and roll dance set to Bill Haleys Rock Around the Clock. The scene changes rapidly to a Korean drum dancer, then to Allen Ginsberg as his face is distorted by a video synthesis process invented by Paik and the Japanese engineer Shuya Abe in 1969. The tape continues to jump wildly from a Navajo Indian, to the Living Theatre, to a Nigerian dancer, to a 1930s fan dancer, and back to rock and roll. Originally produced to ,h e a broadcast on a United Nations satellite, the whole collage was a spoof on Marshall McLuhanls notion of global village. Implicit in Paiks tape is the threat/of the possible misuse of global communications systems in a comAercially overdosed fashion, analogous to the fate of U.S. telecommunications ever since 90 percent of all available VHF broadcast frequencies were aw arded to commercial developers way back in 1953. But on a far simpler level the work is as enjoyable as Paik could make it; it is a concerted effort to make a truly avant-garde form both entertaining and effective.

There is no way in w hich a completely comprehensive view of American video activity could be presented; bu t probably more important, it is doubtful w hether such a view should be presented. The range of artists using television for one reason or another is not enough to w arrant any categorical statement of their similarity based on the use of a particular medium. There exists, after all, a tendency tow ard the narcissism of the perform er as well as a tendency toward the anonymity of the documentarian; a tendency tow ard the straightforward representation of realities acknowledged in any num ber of ways as well as the creation of abstract, nonrepresentational imagery; and all of this w ithin w hat is too often simplistically labeled

video art. Clearly, the development of artists use of television is the result of a num ber of simultaneous phenomena, some of which are grounded in the advance of communications technology, some of which are grounded in arts recent tumultuous history, and some of which are the direct result of a more general planetary malaise involving politics, biology, and the complex interface tha t links them- both. Like other forms of contemporary expression, the roots of artists television in America are deep and complex.

Nam June Paik: Allen Ginsberg Photograph: Davidson Gigliotti.

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In 1934 Walter Benjamin, writing in his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, noted that in the early part of the twentieth century a good deal of futile thought was devoted to the question of whether or not photography was an art. The primary question, Benjamin observed, had not been raised: Had the very invention of photography not transformed the entire nature of art? Likewise, the current boom in video work should not prompt us to debate over the legitimacy of this works claim to art-ness, but should lead us to examine changes effected by video throughout a r t-an d , by extension, throughout the full range of our cybernated society.

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Chris Burden: Do You Believe in Television? 1976. Black & white. Photograph courtesy the artist.

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