Video Art: Expanded Forms

I ART/SCIENCE FORUM I VideoArt:Expanded Forms John G. Hanhardt From its origins in the 1960s the history of video as an art form is complex, comprising many different issues of aesthetics, subject and style. Shaped both by technological developments and the influence of film, television, performance, sculp ture, painting, installation and musical composition, video art has a distinctive interdisciplinary quality. An exhibition that I curated for the Whitney Museum of American Art at Equitable Center (18 February-30 March 1988), titled “Video Art: Expanded Forms”, presented a selection of largeand small-scaleinstallations and sculp tures by seven leading video artists. The work on view explored the expressive potential that resides within the material and properties of the video medium. The first work one saw upon entering the exhibition was NamJune Paik’s Connection(with Wings) (Fig. 1). Created for the exhibition , it is an expansion of an earlier piece Connection (1986) (first shown in Paik’sone-artist exhibition at the Holly Solomon Gallery in New York in 1986),constructed out of old televisions and radios to form an architectural passageway. This project, in turn, echoes Paik’s Magnet 7 Y(1965). one of his first works that used the television set as a sculptural element, and Vy-ramid (1983),one of Paik’s large-scale works fashioned out of televisions , both of which are part of the Whitney Museum’s Permanent Collection in Painting and Sculpture. In his many installations and projects Paik has used the television to introduce the moving image and exploit its potential to create a metaphorical space. His work has been internationally recognized and collected by major museums in this country and in Europe andJapan as well as by private and corporate parties. John G. Hanhardt (lilm and video curator). Whitney Museum01 American Art, 945 MadisonAvenue. New York. NY 10021. U.S.A. Received 26 August 1988 Adapted from an article puhlirhrd in Slnll& Arlr: AH i n h M i r I’hlnrrr, SpecialSupplement.11. No. 6 (1988) p. 3. (D 1990ISAST PergamonPress plc. Printedin Great Britain. 0024494W90$3.00+0.00 Paik, a leading participant in the Fluxus, a neo-Dada anti-high art movement active during the late 1950s and 1960sin New York and Europe, was greatly influenced by Marcel Duchamp’s notion of transforming the boundaries of art by challenging the institutional definitions of the art object. Connection(with Wings)combines , through his use of old televisions , a response to television’spast with a poetic claim to rebuild its material history as he refashions them into a triumphal arch. That form contains Paik’s computer-synthesized images on the screens and is a celebratory vision of the video medium. Another concern of video artists is to remake the medium into expres sive forms that echo other objects and art historical meanings. Consider the series of pieces produced in the 1970s by Shigeko Kubota, which celebrated the art and spirit of Marcel Duchamp. Kubota’s Meta-Marcel Window (Fig. 2 ) is based on Duchamp’s Fresh Window, a wood-framed window construction with black leather substituting for the panes of glass. Kubota has left the glass clear so that we see through the window-and what we see is the screen of a television set. The screen is on its side and is filled with ‘snow’, the effect achieved when the television is tuned so that the image is distorted into a random electronic pattern . Instead of being asked to imagine what is on the other side of the window through the black leather, we are asked to perform the same exercise through the video pattern . Kubota’s Duchampinspired staircase has been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art. After this series of works, Kubota produced a series of large-scalelandscape installations . One of these projects, River, consists of three monitors suspended screendown over a crescent shaped metal structure filled with water. The videotapes playing on the monitors are seen reflected in the water and on the sides of the structure. In its elegant use of metaphor, this work is clearly developed from the Duchamp series. A central property of the video medium is its ability to see in real time what...