Videos, then and now, tell a story

Technology has changed, but many of the messages are just as pointed

PROVIDENCE - "The consumer is consumed," the text reads in "Television Delivers People," a stark 1973 video made by Richard Serra. "You are the end product delivered en masse to the advertiser. You are the product of TV."

Serra's video screed indicting television as the tool of a corporate oligarchy scrolls monotonously down a blue screen while sickeningly pleasant Muzak plays in the background, driving home the narcotic effect of watching TV. It's a seminal piece of video art in "Alternating Beats," an exhibit organized by Zeljka Himbele that matches early video work with contemporary pieces, on view in the tiny Spalter New Media Gallery in the Museum of Art at Rhode Island School of Design.

The debate over the degree to which media corporations spoon-feed messages to the masses still rages, but there's another layer of meaning in "Television Delivers People" that feels especially pertinent to this show. We are the product of TV, and in turn YouTube. Video has shaped how we think, and artists have grown more masterful at shaping videos.

Video art took off in the late 1960s, when hand-held cameras became widely available. Artists took to the street; they videotaped performances, and they seized the opportunity, as Serra did, to critique television. Most of the earlier videos here - all by American pioneers in the form - look clumsy, slow, and claustrophobic next to their contemporary counterparts, but the lineage between old and new is wonderfully clear. The work is still conceptual or performance-based, and often political.

It doesn't matter that Martha Rosler's 1980 piece "Secrets From the Street: No Disclosure" is an awkward, grainy pastiche of street scenes shot in a Latin American neighborhood of San Francisco. The editing lacks rhythm, and Rosler's preachy voice-over about power dynamics sounds like a bad night at a poetry slam. That's from a 21st-century point of view.

But look at it beside Carlos Motta's lyrical, layered 2005 video "Letter to my father (standing by the fence)." Motta weaves scenes from Ground Zero into an elegiac montage. The artist's voice-over mourns the losses of Sept. 11, 2001, and that of his mother, who in her final illness believed she had been a victim of 9/11. "Letter to my father" is so clearly a descendant of the scruffier "Secrets From the Street" that, viewed together, they become imbued with new meaning and sentiment.

Both videos screen in the "On the Street" section of "Alternating Beats." Other sections include "The Expressive Body," "Capturing the Everyday" and "Under the Influence (Television and Representation)," where Serra's video shows up. The younger artists work all over the world.

Each grouping features at least one first-generation work and several contemporary pieces, except "Capturing the Everyday," which regrettably has no early reference, and feels lacking in context. The artists in this section deploy documentary techniques, but their lyrical narratives suggest something more like fiction or poetry. Bernie Searle's hypnotic "Vapour" is almost painterly in the way Searle lets the images weave magic. She videotaped several vats of water on low fires, a scene that references a Muslim festival celebrated in the artist's native Cape Town. The fires burn and steam billows into the night as Searle wanders through the mist.

Serra would be proud of Shannon Plumb's "Shampoo" (2002) and Josephine Meckseper's "0% Down" (2008) which run on the TV-themed loop. Plumb and Meckseper fillet the underbelly of the sale. Plumb shoots herself with a Super 8 camera in black and white, and transfers it to video. Here, she comically preens and tosses her hair while flashing a shampoo bottle that reads "sham" on one side and "poo" on the other.

Meckseper turns up the slickness of car ads by bleaching out the color. Everything has a pewter sheen, and with quick-footed editing and a grinding, industrial grunge rock soundtrack, the message is one of overwhelming, impossibly sexy, speed and power - all yours for no money down, or with zero-percent financing.

It's a relief to turn to "The Expressive Body." The early video here wasn't functioning when I visited the museum, but I found Peter Campus's "Three Transitions" (1973) on YouTube.

Campus was an early master, and even decades later "Three Transitions" seems strikingly original and blessedly simple. In each "transition," Campus destroys an image of himself, twice replacing it with another. He slices through a projection of his back on a paper wall, poking himself into and out of the filmic self-portrait. It's a sweet, comic, mildly unnerving evocation of how we slip into personae and then shed them.

Kate Gilmore's 2006 video "Anything. . .," in the same group, is equally enchanting. In a red dress and white shoes, the artist builds a rickety tower of tables and chairs in order to climb closer to the camera above. Each time she ascends, she gets closer to us, reaching out and making eye contact. That provokes surprised laughter; in every other work here, the viewer is merely a passive observer.

Tamy Ben-Tor's video sendup of the art world, "The End of Art" (2006) is, like Plumb's work, intentionally low-tech. The camera remains static as the artist steps into two wickedly funny characters. The first has got to be a satirical take on the Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, who has cooked up fancy Thai dinners as art installations, although he is not identified. The second is a hoity-toity art critic who puts finger quotes around every other word in a sentence, including "artist" and "studio," as if to prove how deeply she thinks.

"Alternating Beats" has a satisfying variety of video works, but the great pleasure comes in seeing how they relate to and echo one another over the years and across the miles.