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. Edward Lucie-Smith (Visual Arts in the Twentieth Century, 1996) writes that Frank Popper, in his Art of the Electronic Age (1993), ‘distinguishes at least six types of video art: the use of technological means to generate new visual imagery; the use of video to give performances a more permanent form; what he calls “guerrilla video”—that is, the use of video to distribute images and information likely to be suppressed by the ruling establishment; the use of video-cameras and monitors in sculptural installations; live performances which involve the incidental use of video; and finally, advanced technological manifestations, often involving the use of videos with computers.’

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 showed the tape the same evening at an artists' club, the Café-a-Go-Go. Paik had trained as a pianist, and had been inspired by John Cage's ‘prepared piano’ to experiment with magnets to interfere with broadcast images on television screens. 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. A 12–hour cycle of images plays continuously onto a screen mounted to a window facing the street. The images are projected continuously, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. A voice can be heard quietly reciting a text (excerpts from Walt Whitman's “Song of Myself”), audible from speakers mounted above and on each side of the window, interior and exterior. 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 … The 12 sections or ‘prayers’ in the work vary in length from 15 minutes to two hours and describe a cycle of individual and universal life.’

Such works have won praise from many critics; the catalogue of the exhibition ‘American Art in the 20th Century’ (Royal Academy, London, 1993), for example, refers to Viola's ‘technically virtuoso installations’ and his ‘magical deployment of electronic impressionism'. However, in the same year Brian Sewell described Viola's work as ‘amateur and incompetent’ and wrote that ‘his claims to be an artist are inexcusably pretentious, and the support of his apologists is quite absurd. His wretched video films have nothing to do with the arts of painting and sculpture … Viola's work has no place in an art gallery—it simply isn't art; if it has a place at all, then it is in the cinema—but in that context it is no more than the wretched stuff of peripheral experiment and jiggery-pokery.’ Twelve years earlier, in more measured terms, Calvin Tomkins had questioned the basis of such art in his essay ‘To Watch or Not to Watch’ (1981): ‘Museum-going is a tiring business, granted, but nothing brings on a nap quicker than a semi-dark room, a sofa, and a little video art. The notion of using video as a purely visual medium seems like a wrong notion to me, for the simple reason that video takes place in time. Visual artists, who are trained to deal with space, often have a very uncertain grasp of time, and of the importance of time-defined arts such as theatre … Video art asks for the kind of concentration that we are expected to give to painting and sculpture, but it also asks us to give up our time to it. Nothing I have seen to date comes anywhere near to justifying those demands.’