There's pop in these videos
The history of video art is short and intense. It zooms through little more than four decades, riding technologies that have evolved with such speed that most people, indeed most museums, don't have the antiquated equipment needed to show work from the early days. We never ran into this problem with paintings.
Perhaps since Nam June Paik recorded the pope's visit to New York with a hand-held video camera in 1965, which many cite as the first foray into video art, artists have had a love/hate relationship with the form's powers of seduction. Early video artists saw what sway commercial television held over viewers. "Look out!" those artists cried to their audience, like a friend warning you away from falling for a Casanova.
Then they fell themselves. Not for the panaceas of sitcoms and soap operas, but for all that technology could offer: the large-scale, visually compelling, filmic qualities of projected video installation.
Video artists have also grappled with the intimacy of their form. Because it happens in time, unlike a painting, video can draw the viewer into a narrative. But video art has also challenged viewers to think critically about their relation to what they see.
New media collectors Pamela and Richard Kramlich have assembled a library of video works dating back to the 1960s, many of which trace the arc of artists' affair with video. Ten years ago, they founded the New Art Trust to research the preservation and presentation of video art.
Two shows at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, the meaty and provocative historical survey "Video Trajectories" and the too narrowly focused "Sounding the Subject," draw from the Kramlichs' collection. Meanwhile, artist Cliff Evans has mounted a contemporary, high-impact digital video installation at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
"Video Trajectories," organized by Caroline A. Jones, traces the development of video art from a bare-bones black-and-white format. WGBH in Boston was a hotbed of early video art. Many artists took the venue of a monitor to scold viewers about the dangers of TV. Their antidote to the narcotic of commercial television was to be abrasive or visually daring. Many early video artists seized the opportunity to critique TV; others pushed its limits toward spectacle, anticipating the installation art to come. Some, like Paik, did both.
Vito Acconci's "Theme Song" (1973) offers a close-up view of him as he attempts to seduce the viewer, with Bob Dylan and Van Morrison albums playing in the background. "I can feel your body right next to me," he says, adding "I know I'm only kidding myself . . . you're not here." "Theme Song" played up video's capacity to reach out intimately to the viewer, only to highlight the absence of real human connection.
Paik collaborated at WGBH with Shuya Abe to create the Paik-Abe video synthesizer, which enabled the artist to create purely abstract images on screen and to manipulate more recognizable scenes. Paik's eye-popping 1973 video "Global Grooves" is a potpourri of wild images, with pulsating color, synthetically multiplied go-go dancers, and a score that includes rock music, Asian dance music, and political speeches. A voice-over intones, "This is participation TV, follow the instructions," and Paik commands, "Close your eyes," and "Open your eyes."
Paik and Acconci call the viewer "you," and their time-based media let them coax, cajole, and order "you" around. Video could directly address the viewer, but that also served to underline the fact that what's reaching out is a recording, not a live person.
In the 1980s and 1990s, MTV changed the face of video. Artists such as Pipilotti Rist riffed on and satirized music videos. Rist's 1986 "I'm Not the Girl Who Misses Much" in "Sounding the Subject" is a disarming, comic, and fraying scene of Rist dancing bare-breasted, out of focus, singing a line from the Beatles' "Happiness Is a Warm Gun." The audio speeds up and slows down, and finally releases into John Lennon's velvety voice. Technologically, "I'm Not the Girl Who Misses Much" is more sophisticated than Acconci's "Theme Song," but it pokes at the same nerve, being at once alluringly expressive yet, with the clanging audio and blurry focus, pushing the viewer away.
Projected video surged into museums in the 1990s, following, says Jones in her catalog essay, "the reluctance with which early video artists joined the specular imagescape." Critiques of commercial TV gave way to the filmic drama of large-scale installations.
"Video Trajectories" wraps up with glitzy 1990s video projections such as Mariko Mori's futuristic "Miko no Inori" (1996), featuring a glittering cyborg-geisha in a gleaming technological setting, and Doug Aitken's "Diamond Sea (linear version)" (1997), a gorgeous desert landscape that turns out to be a foreboding Namibian diamond mine. The visuals are sumptuous, but the lush, sweeping quality of video projection trumped the take-home messages.
"Sounding the Subject," curated by Daniel Birnbaum and Mechtild Widrich, uses several videos to examine how video artists use audio to explore and fracture the sense of identity, a topic artists have been addressing at least since the Cubists flattened, chopped up, and distorted the figure. Sound is crucial to a video artist's toolkit, and these artists use it astutely, but this curatorial approach frustrates. It's hard to tease out the impact of audio from the rest of the video-viewing experience.
For instance, in Stan Douglas's 1992 video "Hors-champs," one soundtrack of jazz improvisation fuels two videos, mounted back to back, of the same performance - one dwelling more on the individual players, the other on the ensemble. "Hors-champs" focuses on music, but the dissonance is visual, not aural. Paik's "TV Buddha" (originally made in 1974; this one dates to 1989) sets a Buddha silently in front of a closed-circuit camera, contemplating his own image, broadcast a split second later. It's a wonderful meditation on self-image and self-reflection. The use of sound? There is none.
Eija-Liisa Ahtila's "The House (Talo)" (2002) is the most dramatic and disturbing work in "Sounding the Subject." Across three screens, a young woman goes mad. The sound is displaced - we hear a car's engine running after the car has parked - but there's so much more going on than that. There's a fairy tale quality to the piece: The woman lives in a house in the woods; she flies (or is that in her head?). The three screens show different perspectives on the same scene, as the heroine's identity breaks up. "The House (Talo)" is another lovely example of how video conveys the shadowy uncertainty of the ego.
Cliff Evans made his five-channel video installation "Empyrean," at the Gardner Museum, on his computer. The 6 1/2-minute looped piece is projected on screens that take the shape of an altarpiece.
Evans collected images from the Internet and assembled them in an animated montage that is as bright, poppy, and seemingly cheery as a soda commercial. The parade of pictures, from Brad and Angelina riding a camel through the desert to smiling spa-goers and Iraqi police clad in black ski masks, rushes by in a delirious quickstep, one sunny landscape giving way fluidly to the next, jammed as much with violence as they are with gorgeous people and suggestions of salvation.
It's so wittily packaged, you might miss the scathing irony that drives it. These things, Evans suggests - celebrities, violence, war, face-scrubs, and
Evans uses cutting-edge technology to create sweet, buzzy eye candy, which turns out to have much more substance than sugar. In some ways, he brings video art full circle, using spectacle to its utmost in order to point out how empty it can be. 