What is Video Art

Lecture 2 Video art

 What is Video art?
The genre known as video art, is a new type of contemporary art, and a
medium of expression commonly seen in Installations, but also as a
stand-alone art form.
Video art, form of moving-image art that garnered many practitioners
in the 1960s and ’70s with the widespread availability of
inexpensive videotape recorders and the ease of its display through
commercial television monitors.
The introduction of video in the 1960s radically
altered the progress of art. The most important
aspect of video was that it was cheap and easy
to make, enabling artists to record and
document their performances easily.
This put less pressure on where their art was
situated giving them freedom outside the
gallery.
What is Video Art
The 2nd half of the 20th century was dominated by
the medium of television and film.
Where once art galleries were major sources of
entertainment now it was movie theatres. Mass
produced films shown to the masses and making
millions of dollars in revenue. But as film and video
technology expanded so did artwork
• Andy Warhol(American) and Nam June Paik (Korean) shot
experimental videos in the early 1960s. Nam June Paik's "TV Clock"
was 24 monitors each a Zen inspired colour band. While Warhol
filmed happenings of performance art, Nam June Paik was essentially
using the video camera as a paintbrush and the TV screen as a canvas.
• Recent advances in digital computer and video
technology, enabling artists to edit and
manipulate film sequences, have opened up a
range of creative opportunities and drawn
numerous artists into the genre. Indeed,
the Turner Prize - a key indicator of excellence
in the postmodernist art world - was awarded
to video artists in 1996/1997/1999.

A still from Jonas' 1972 video

Video art is often said to have begun
when Paik used his
new Sony Portapak to shoot footage
of Pope Paul VI's procession
through New York City in the autumn of
1965 Later that same day, across town
in a Greenwich Village cafe, Paik played
the tapes and video art was born.

A Sony AV-3400 Portapak

• Many of the early prominent video artists
were those involved with concurrent
movements in conceptual art, performance,
and experimental film. These include
Americans John Baldessari, Norman
Cowie, Bruce Nauman, Nam June Paik, Bill
Viola, Martha Rosler and many others.
• There were also those such as Steina and
Woody Vasulka who were interested in the
formal qualities of video and employed
video synthesizers to create abstract works.
• Kate Craig, Vera Frenkel and Michael Snow
were important to the development of
video art in Canada.
Canadian Joyce Wieland also experimented
with video art in the later 1960s and 1970s,
eventually even shooting a feature film: "The
Far Shore". She also made a funny
documentary called "The Rats Life and Diet in
North America", which is a farce on Vietnam
War draft dodgers. Its a story of a group of rats
(the draft dodgers) being chased by a cat (the
United States military) while on their way to
Canada.
• In the 1980s new artists like Bill Viola and Gary Hill
used video to capture a stream of conscious thought,
to show the mind's eye moving from one thing to the
next as a narrative (complete with metaphors).
• Viola's "Nantes Triptych" (1992) used Tantric Buddhism
and Christian mysticism to discuss the mysteries of life
and death. It consisted of three video panels (15+ feet
high each) showing his wife giving birth on the first, his
mother dying on the third and in the middle himself
swaying and drifting underwater.
• Gary Hill's early works were abstract but he eventually started using the
human figure and voices, like in his "Primarily Speaking" (1983).
• In 1992 he stopped using spoken words to create "Suspension of
Disbelief" in which he shows a nude man and woman on 30 screen
monitors with the camera flowing over them at different speeds
(sometimes so fast its just a blur).
• Although it continues to be produced, it is represented by two varieties: single-channel
and installation.
• Single-channel works are much closer to the conventional idea of television: a video is
screened, projected or shown as a single image;
• Installation works involve either an environment, several distinct pieces of video
presented separately, or any combination of video with traditional media such as
sculpture. Installation video is the most common form of video art today.
• Sometimes it is combined with other media and
is often subsumed by the greater whole of an
installation or performance.
• Contemporary contributions are being produced
at the crossroads of other disciplines such as
installation, architecture, design, sculpture,
electronic art, and digital art or other
documentative aspects of artistic practice
• The digital video "revolution" of the 1990s has
given wide access to sophisticated editing and
control technology, allowing many artists to work
with video, and create interactive installations
based on video.
• Some examples of recent trend in work include
entirely digitally rendered environments created
with no camera, and video that responds to the
movements of the viewer or other elements of the
environment.
• The internet has also been used to allow control of
video in installations from the world wide web or
from remote locations.

Amy Youngs - interactive video installation "Why

Look at Animals?""
Thank you
☺
Any question