After the New American Cinema: Shirley Clarke's Video Work as Performance and Document

Writing about film, Gilles Deleuze claims that "the essence of a thing never appears at the outset, but in the middle, in the course of its development, when its strength is assured" (3). Many scholars of moving-image media, however, would refuse to apply Deleuze's statement to the history of video. In contrast to the happy tale of film's maturation into a temporal-based cinematic art, video's story is one of frustrated promise, in which the heroic ideals of the 1960s and 70s gave way to the cynical sell-outs of the 1980s and beyond. Video's early proponents envisioned the emergence of a new art form transcending the limits of commercial broadcast television; instead, they witnessed the videocassette reduced to a medium to distribute Hollywood feature films, public access TV marginalized by corporate control of cable, and experimental work isolated in museums and galleries (Rosler 49).

Many critics and artists regarded the "physical mechanisms" that made up video's material support as mere "appurtenances" inimical to the essential video process (Krauss 52, 57). Eventually, these would become obsolete, and a pure video art would emerge. Various statements and manifestos of video's early years draw on the discourse of "dematerialization" typically associated with conceptual art and process art.¹ Across diverse media, politically radical artists championed "live" performance, hoping that emphasizing process over product would frustrate commercial exploitation (Bryan-Wilson 103). The performance's aftermath would leave no material residue to sell. Such thinking produces a curious paradox, however, because the resistance to reifying artwork purposely created to disappear is accompanied by a concern that such work will leave no trace. For example, video historian Chris Meigh-Andrews worries that the transient nature of video may mean "that written histories . . . will eventually be all that remains." Yet he also fears that "important works will inevitably be 'written out' of history, marginalized, or ignored" (5). Ironically, Meigh-Andrews commits just such an omission by neglecting Shirley Clarke's video work.² Although Clarke's reputation as video artist has not attained the Olympian status of, say, Nam June Paik's, her influence on a generation of video practitioners is undeniable. For instance, Videofreex founder Parry Teasdale praises Clarke as "the person . . . who exercised the strongest influence on my perceptions of the medium" (116).

Despite such testimonials, Clarke's revered place in the history of cinema has so far depended on her experimental documentary films such as Bridges Go Round (1958) and Skyscraper (1959) and especially on those films considered essential works of the New American Cinema: The Connection (1960), The Cool World (1963), and Portrait of Jason (1967). However, whereas Clarke's films have received a certain amount of critical and scholarly attention,³ practically nothing has been written on her video work, even though she made hundreds of tapes. In fact, video was Clarke's preferred medium throughout the 1970s and early 80s,⁴ and no accurate assessment of her contribution to cinema is possible without serious consideration of this work.⁵ However, such comprehensive consideration can occur only by giving the actual extant videotapes their due.

In the case of most histories, such a claim would appear uncontroversial; in relation to Clarke's video art, however, it calls for a defense. Like many early video artists, Clarke regarded video as a performative practice rather than as a recording medium. Thus, most of her video pieces were conceived and executed as performances rather than as one discrete phase—the "shooting" phase—of the protracted procedure of film production and exhibition. Working out of her Chelsea Hotel loft with a collective she dubbed the Tee Pee Video Space Troupe, she produced events and interactive installations such as the Video Ferris Wheel and an electronic crystal ball called the VID-E-ORACL.⁶ Although these performances survive through the verbal recollections of witnesses, such secondary documents are inferior substitutes for experiences that relied on the simultaneous presence of artist, audience, and technology. The artistic experience was transient. Andy Gurian, a key member of the Tee Pee...