Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
I consider the video art of the 1970s, proto-AR. Like the proto-cinema program
cited by Stephen Heath, video art in the gallery is defined by its apparatus—
the apparatus locates the genre. A Bill Viola video work, represented on James
Cohen Gallery's website, describes the artistic material, “Color High-Definition
video triptych, two 65
00
plasma screens, one 103
00
screen mounted vertically, six
loudspeakers (three pairs stereo sound)” (for the work, Ocean Without a Shore,
2007). SFMoma, in their web catalogue, gives the genre or medium of Peter
Campus' 1975 video art work 'Dor', “closed-circuit color video installation,” but to
truly locate the work below they note, “A discreet video camera is placed near the
entrance, filming visitors entering and exiting the space; their live image is projected
onto an adjacent wall.” Then it goes on to the “sujets actuels.” In description, these
are not video works made of light, subjects, scenes, or even images, instead they are
configurations of wires, capture devices, and rendering screens. In 1976, as video
art came on the scene, Rosalind Krauss wrote the well known essay, “Video and the
Aesthetic of Narcissism,” which addressed many of the new video works, including
the above mentioned 'Dor' by Peter Campus, and hypothesized a fundamental shift
in the practice of art and its material for expression. In it, Krauss theorizes that
these artists' expressions must be worked through “an object-state, separate from
the artist's own being, through which his intentions must pass,” like the pigment
bearing substances of painting and the matter through space of sculpture: a material
for expression that was the artist enmeshed in the media apparatus—a psychological
state as material. She defines the crucial element of the looping electric video circuit
images of Acconci and Campus as the instantaneity of the communication from
notion to message: “This is why it seems inappropriate to speak of a physical
medium in relation to video. For the object (the electronic equipment and its
capabilities) has become merely an appurtenance. And instead, video's real medium
is a psychological situation, the very terms of which are to withdraw attention from
an external object—an Other—and invest it in the Self.” The object is bracketed out,
and instead the artist is creating within a psychological state invoked by the mapping
of the mind onto this network; the medium becomes the nervous system. In her
analysis this self-gazing video art, such as Vito Acconci's long-take videos, are for
the spectator like viewing an electronic and psychological loop between the artist,
camera, and screen. Krauss differentiates the video works: installations like Cam-
pus' 'Dor' which install the narcissistic circuit within the gallery, and works like
Vito Acconci's 'Centers' (a looping pre-recorded video in which Acconci, watching
himself in his live video monitor, repeatedly points at the center of the screen, coin-
cidentally at the viewer and the focal point of the art work) which use the narcissistic
circuit as a stage for performance that is then played back in the gallery. One is
documentation of an apparatus and the other installation of apparatus in which the
viewer is immersed. Like avant-garde film, these works seek to reveal the apparatus
to the spectator—the perception and the construction are identical. In the fashion of
the Baudry diagram, we could draw the video art apparatus like I have in Fig.
6.2
.
There is no need for a dotted line because the perception of the viewer travels the
same route as the wires. Both types of works are loops, one presented as an object in
the gallery, the other actually installed so that it can be stepped within (and frustrated
