Video art

Video art. A broad term applied to works created by visual artists in which video and television equipment and technology are used in any of various ways. Wolf Vostell incorporated working television sets in assemblages in 1959, but the creator of Video art as a genre is usually regarded as Nam June Paik (1932– ), a Korean musician, Performance artist, and sculptor, who settled in New York in 1964 and acquired a portable Sony video recorder in 1965 as soon as this new equipment was available there. He is said to have made his first recording on the day he bought the recorder and to have shown the tape the same evening at an artists' club, the Café-a-Go-Go. Paik had trained as a pianist, and after he turned to video he often collaborated with the cellist Charlotte Moorman (1940–94), notably in Bra for Living Sculpture (1969), in which she played her instrument whilst wearing a bra incorporating two miniature television screens (predictably dubbed ‘boob tubes’). (Moorman was arrested for indecent exposure whilst performing in another Paik work.)

Whereas Paik sees himself as an entertainer (he has often appeared on television chat shows), another well-known specialist in Video art, the American Bill Viola (1951– ), is more serious—his detractors might say portentous—in tone. A representative work is To Pray without Ceasing (1992), which Viola describes as ‘a contemporary “book of hours” and image vigil to the infinite day, functioning as an unfolding sequence of prayers for the city’. It consists of a twelve-hour cycle of images accompanied by a recording of a voice reciting poetry by Walt Whitman. ‘The images are projected continuously, 24 hours a day, seven days a week,’ comments Viola. ‘During the day, sunlight washes out the image and only the voice is present. The video playback is synchronized to the time of day by computer.’ Rapid advances in computer and video technology have encouraged many artists to work in the field, which became highly fashionable in the 1990s; the Turner Prize was won by Video artists in 1996, 1997, and 1999.