Difference between revisions of "Video art"

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At the end of the 1960's several artists shared the idea that the traditions governing painting and sculpture had entered a period of great crisis. They rejected the commercialization of art that was turning it into a commodity, its transformation into consumer material; they objected to the idea of artists turning into merchants and believed in the need for a new approach towards all these new developments.
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Hence, artists tended to working with tools/forms that could not be bought or possessed, aiming to partly liberate themselves from the art market, thus positioning themselves against production of such commercial art works. Therefore, new genres of art emerged; a boom in the performance arts, theatre, dance variations, and photography, film and video that have their basis in on the spot production of the present and are mechanically reproducible, and present an attack aimed at the idea of the uniqueness of art. Thus, ''video' combining these two escapist ideas were invented in the midst of those art forms as a tool that can record, keep and infinitely play all kinds of performances and actions.
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In the United States of America, video art showed an inclination towards the production of performance recordings such as 'Process and Body Art' and the anti-television discourse led to the belief that 'guerilla' tactics would sooner or later transform television and lean towards experimentation with an alternative television broadcasting. In Germany, video artists were more interested in creating objects and sculptures out of monitors. The Fluxus artists in Germany inherited a history of radio that was used as a propaganda tool for manipulating the masses. The use of TV monitors as the basic material of art works started at the beginning of the 1960's, a time when portable video tools did not yet exist and artists were not able to record images with handy-cams. Ernie Kovacs' experiments with distorting TV signals in 1952 are considered to be the first steps towards electronic art. Woolf Vostell's glorious burial ceremony of a TV monitor in the ground in 1962; Nam June Paik and Vostell's works involving distortion of images by using magnets, that were exhibited in 1963 at the Galerie Parnesse in Wuppertal and in 1964 in Boston; Joseph Beuy's castration of a monitor by covering it with felt in 1966 ("Felt-TV") are the first examples of monitor sculptures.
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Artists of that period regarded the monitor as the node of television broadcasting where commercials reach the homes of ordinary people, a symbol of capitalist social order. Those artists attributed different functions and meanings to the monitor by turning it into sculpture, thus developing a critical outlook of the essence of the capitalist system. They completely rejected the entertainment element in commercial television and took ennui as the key issue. They sought to activate the viewers by including them in the creative process as an act against the viewers passivity induced by television.
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Frederic Jameson stated that "video art, while it refuted the general logic of television by using perceptive patterns constructed by television on one hand, is also an art form on the other, waging war against those perceptive patterns, trying to change them." Martha Rosler made the following comment on Korean media artist Nam June Paik who pushed the critical relation with commercial television to extremes by converting the monitor into an art object.
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"The mythic figure Paik has done all of the bad and disrespectful things to television that the art world's collective imagination may wish to do. He has mutilated, defiled and fetishized the TV set, re-duplicated it, symbolically defecated on it by filling it with dirt, confronted its time-boundedness and thoughtlessness by putting it in proximity with eternal Mind in the form of the Buddha, in proximity with natural time by growing plants in it, and in proximity with architecture and interior design by making it an element of furniture and finally turned its signal into colorful and musical noise."
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Video art realized itself from the beginning within the context of three areas. First area is a constructed electronic research area that is based on the graphic traditions of the twentieth century that included the emphasis on special effects and “synthesizer” production; the second is the area that highlights documentist/documentarist aspects of the video image and the third is the area that incorporates records of performances and conceptual art works.
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Video was already epistemologically a sculpture even before it became a sculpture as a monitor. Unlike photography and cinema that are constructed by reflecting light; video consists of light dots called pixels, this is an internal light. The electronic processing of light and the removal of colors, the electronic manipulation of pixels makes the re-interpretation of reality possible, beyond the direct relation of video to reality. The communication theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out the epistemology and sculptural aspects of the video:
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"The mode of TV image has nothing in common with film or photo, except that it offers also a new nonverbal gestalt or posture of forms. With TV, the viewer is the screen. […] The TV image is visually low in data. The video image is not a still shot, it is not a photo in any sense but a ceaselessly forming contour of things limned by the scanning-finger. The resulting plastic contour appears by light through, not light on, and the image so formed has the quality of sculptures and icon rather than a picture."
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Video images address the tactile senses as well as the visual ones. The video artist Woody Vasulka expressed his views on the plasticity of the video image as follows:
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"There is a certain behavior of the electronic image that is unique... It's liquid, it's shapeable, it's clay, it's an art material, it exists independently."
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Ege Berensel
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Ege Berensel, [http://www.goethe.de/ins/tr/lp/prj/art/med/str/en9834692.htm  "Video Art from ’Monitor-Sculpture‘ to ’Video-Sculpture"], ''Goethe.de'', 2012
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==Pages==
 
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Revision as of 12:43, 2 March 2014

At the end of the 1960's several artists shared the idea that the traditions governing painting and sculpture had entered a period of great crisis. They rejected the commercialization of art that was turning it into a commodity, its transformation into consumer material; they objected to the idea of artists turning into merchants and believed in the need for a new approach towards all these new developments.

Hence, artists tended to working with tools/forms that could not be bought or possessed, aiming to partly liberate themselves from the art market, thus positioning themselves against production of such commercial art works. Therefore, new genres of art emerged; a boom in the performance arts, theatre, dance variations, and photography, film and video that have their basis in on the spot production of the present and are mechanically reproducible, and present an attack aimed at the idea of the uniqueness of art. Thus, video' combining these two escapist ideas were invented in the midst of those art forms as a tool that can record, keep and infinitely play all kinds of performances and actions.

In the United States of America, video art showed an inclination towards the production of performance recordings such as 'Process and Body Art' and the anti-television discourse led to the belief that 'guerilla' tactics would sooner or later transform television and lean towards experimentation with an alternative television broadcasting. In Germany, video artists were more interested in creating objects and sculptures out of monitors. The Fluxus artists in Germany inherited a history of radio that was used as a propaganda tool for manipulating the masses. The use of TV monitors as the basic material of art works started at the beginning of the 1960's, a time when portable video tools did not yet exist and artists were not able to record images with handy-cams. Ernie Kovacs' experiments with distorting TV signals in 1952 are considered to be the first steps towards electronic art. Woolf Vostell's glorious burial ceremony of a TV monitor in the ground in 1962; Nam June Paik and Vostell's works involving distortion of images by using magnets, that were exhibited in 1963 at the Galerie Parnesse in Wuppertal and in 1964 in Boston; Joseph Beuy's castration of a monitor by covering it with felt in 1966 ("Felt-TV") are the first examples of monitor sculptures.

Artists of that period regarded the monitor as the node of television broadcasting where commercials reach the homes of ordinary people, a symbol of capitalist social order. Those artists attributed different functions and meanings to the monitor by turning it into sculpture, thus developing a critical outlook of the essence of the capitalist system. They completely rejected the entertainment element in commercial television and took ennui as the key issue. They sought to activate the viewers by including them in the creative process as an act against the viewers passivity induced by television.

Frederic Jameson stated that "video art, while it refuted the general logic of television by using perceptive patterns constructed by television on one hand, is also an art form on the other, waging war against those perceptive patterns, trying to change them." Martha Rosler made the following comment on Korean media artist Nam June Paik who pushed the critical relation with commercial television to extremes by converting the monitor into an art object.

"The mythic figure Paik has done all of the bad and disrespectful things to television that the art world's collective imagination may wish to do. He has mutilated, defiled and fetishized the TV set, re-duplicated it, symbolically defecated on it by filling it with dirt, confronted its time-boundedness and thoughtlessness by putting it in proximity with eternal Mind in the form of the Buddha, in proximity with natural time by growing plants in it, and in proximity with architecture and interior design by making it an element of furniture and finally turned its signal into colorful and musical noise."

Video art realized itself from the beginning within the context of three areas. First area is a constructed electronic research area that is based on the graphic traditions of the twentieth century that included the emphasis on special effects and “synthesizer” production; the second is the area that highlights documentist/documentarist aspects of the video image and the third is the area that incorporates records of performances and conceptual art works.

Video was already epistemologically a sculpture even before it became a sculpture as a monitor. Unlike photography and cinema that are constructed by reflecting light; video consists of light dots called pixels, this is an internal light. The electronic processing of light and the removal of colors, the electronic manipulation of pixels makes the re-interpretation of reality possible, beyond the direct relation of video to reality. The communication theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out the epistemology and sculptural aspects of the video:

"The mode of TV image has nothing in common with film or photo, except that it offers also a new nonverbal gestalt or posture of forms. With TV, the viewer is the screen. […] The TV image is visually low in data. The video image is not a still shot, it is not a photo in any sense but a ceaselessly forming contour of things limned by the scanning-finger. The resulting plastic contour appears by light through, not light on, and the image so formed has the quality of sculptures and icon rather than a picture."

Video images address the tactile senses as well as the visual ones. The video artist Woody Vasulka expressed his views on the plasticity of the video image as follows:

"There is a certain behavior of the electronic image that is unique... It's liquid, it's shapeable, it's clay, it's an art material, it exists independently."

Ege Berensel

Ege Berensel, "Video Art from ’Monitor-Sculpture‘ to ’Video-Sculpture", Goethe.de, 2012



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