Video art

The video format has had to clarify its autonomous nature: is it film or is it TV? The video monitor’s physical resemblance to the household TV set, whether as a solo box or as part of an installation, tends to perplex the viewer, as if it were merely some educational tool, or even a domestic appliance suitable for low culture but antithetical to fine arts.

Derided by intellectuals as an idiot-box, television was remade into an artform by Nam June Paik, playing fast and loose with the temporal image. Paik’s ‘prepared’ TVs altered the networks’ transmissions – much as John Cage had done with pianos and radios – while his physical manipulations of the TV sets themselves made them into a new kind of sculptural object.

In his January 1981 essay ‘The porcupine and the car’ for Image Forum, Bill Viola maintained that the difference between film and video has to do with the technical evolution of the two mediums: film as motion pictures is a succession of film stills creating the illusion of movement; while the video camera ceaselessly scans lines and thus ‘stillness’ is the basic illusion. ‘Looking at the technical development of both video and film, we immediately notice a profound difference: as film has evolved basically out of photography (a film is a succession of discrete photographs), video has emerged from audio technology. A video camera is closer to a microphone in operation than it is to a film camera; video images are recorded on magnetic tape in a tape recorder. Thus we find that video is closer in relationship to sound or music than it is to the visual media of film and photography.’

For Viola, the alliance of video to sound, and thus to the passage of time, makes the experience more existential, more real, and hence likely to connect to more emotion in what is otherwise today’s highly visual objective culture.

Compared to the great moments in film, we don’t often think of video as haunting the mind or leaving after-images in the same way. Perhaps it has to do with the flypaper attraction of the cinema rectangle – its scalelessness – that hypnotic enveloping plane in the big movie house. Video, with its original amoeboid shape, is like an object in the room that you can see past. Also the video image, unlike the incremental frame of film, tends to fall apart with nothing to see but raster lines. What’s more, video art demands a shift in your usual viewing patterns; unlike the way we take in a painting or a sculpture, video is a time-based medium. The all-encompassing glance of a fixed image or object doesn’t work for video art, which asks you to be stationary (though less so for multiple-monitor installations). Paik took those limitations as spurs to his creativity, and the frameless continuous nature of video – as with the Paik–Abe colour video synthesiser – allowed him to expand and contract the image like a concertina.

Since the 1990s, video projection has come to replace the monitor as the central means of display in public settings. In the early 1970s, its low-resolution and costliness made it a less-than-reliable medium. The electronic arts – video and TV – have long been regarded as film’s poor relation, and despite the advances in technology that have rendered most of the negative comparisons invalid (lack of clarity in sound and image, for example), the condescending attitude persists. Yet in those early years (the 1960s and ’70s), video was a part of conceptual art and the related practices of performance art and process art, and video used those limitations – black-and-white picture, crude editing and finish – as a badge of cutting-edge radicalism.

In the 1980s, Paik began using video projection with lasers and sculptural forms to push the medium forward. By the late 1980s, improvements in the technology gave it the edge over monitors, and a new generation of artists welcomed the high-production values of cinema, often using film and video in combination. Shirin Neshat, Doug Aitken and William Kentridge, for example, shoot on 16mm film and then transfer to video; while Viola has used special high-speed 35mm film cameras to make his slow-motion video installations. They have broken out of the box of the monitor and effectively compete with other media for the attention of viewers and collectors.

So, why isn’t video art today, with its time-based moving images and often darkened rooms, just cinema without seats? As it happens, distinct visual languages have grown up: not just formal and technical (how they record and display information, how they frame time and space) but historical. Just as early video artists such as Vito Acconci and Bruce Nauman made a point of highlighting the viewer’s identity, as opposed to the tranced complacency of the commercially-driven boob-tube, cinema has challenged the conditions of its spectatorship.

In the 21st century, we’ve witnessed a vast migration of images from movie-projection houses towards exhibition spaces, all made easier by the digital revolution. Cinema has been redefined within these new parameters: outside traditional film history and within the larger orbit of art history.