{"id":5547,"title":"Media Buff: Media Art of Buffalo Being In Between","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/media-buff-media-art-buffalo-being-between","version":"c221e7c54a8546515ea4c66ab0352bf11d4e33bcc2ee6d634fe0ce27ca4f46f1","modified":"2026-09-13T21:52:04.4375164+00:00","credits":[{"role":"Curator","name":"Richard Herskowitz"},{"role":"Editor","name":"Richard Herskowitz"}],"authorKeys":["Herskowitz, Richard"],"subjects":["Texts by Author"],"metadata":[{"label":"Publisher","value":"Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art","url":null},{"label":"Date","value":"9/9/88 - 11/12/88","url":null},{"label":"Place","value":"Ithaca, New York","url":null},{"label":"Organizer","value":"Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art","url":null},{"label":"Site","value":"Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art","url":null},{"label":"ETC archive","value":"ETC0435","url":null},{"label":"Curator(s)","value":"Richard Herskowitz","url":null},{"label":"Exhibition Dates","value":"9/9/88 - 11/12/88","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022Media Buff: Media Art of Buffalo  Being In Between.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/media-buff-media-art-buffalo-being-between.","publication":"Media Buff: Media Art of Buffalo Being In Between. Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art. 9/9/88 - 11/12/88.","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/5547.ris"},"links":[{"label":"Scanned document","url":"https://archive.org/details/ETC0435","relationship":"linked document; contents not retrieved","contentType":"application/pdf"}],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":24208},{"name":"abstract","source":"recorded publication abstract","generated":false,"characters":383},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":919},{"name":"archive_summary","source":"existing ETC archive summaries: ETC0435","generated":false,"characters":222}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"Buffalo is the fulcrum between New York and the rest of the world. It really is. We\u0027re right in the middle. It\u0027s like a case study. --Tony Conrad Trickster: a mythological character; breaker of taboos and violator of social authority; mediator between cultural oppositions, who teases and desecrates both sides, and fosters the creation of new discursive differences. New York, New York New York City is a home base of the commercial media. Entertainment conglomerates based there dispense spectacular, technically sophisticated illusions for the world\u0027s consumption. Out in the world, spectators are seemingly contented and pacified by the emanations from New York City. The lack of opportunity for audiences to respond and contribute to the media\u0027s messages, however, produces disturbing symptoms frequently noted by critics of the \u0022society of the spectacle\u0022. New York City is also a center of media art. Independent producers (independent from the dictates of the commercial industry) gravitate to this receptive environment for experimentations which shatter media conventions. Alternative media organizations proliferate-producers\u0027 service organizations (like Media Alliance and Film/Video Arts) and exhibitors (The Kitchen, Collective for Living Cinema, and Millennium, among others), all funded by a supportive state arts council also based in the city. Among the general public, few people are aware or clear about what independent media artists are doing. Tony Conrad writes: \u0022They think that we\u0027re making music videos. It\u0027s really vague. You can\u0027t imagine what people\u0027s imaginations do to the independent media community out there.\u0022 1 Buffalo, New York About as far away from New York City as you can get and still be in New York State, Buffalo has a thriving community of independent media and other artists that, as critic Louis Marcorelles wrote in Le Monde, is \u0022the spearhead of experimentation in the United States.\u0022 (2) Buffalo has been the creative laboratory where influential avantgarde artists such as Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, Paul Sharits, and Hollis Frampton got their start or settled, and through teaching and organizing artists, inspired hundreds of others to produce not only new art, but new art movements (such as postmodernism, the roots of which lie largely in Buffalo). New York, however, has remained, in the words of video artist and curator Chris Hill, \u0022the significant proscenium, conferring meaning on the work and authorizing artists within the field.\u0022 3 Therefore, few are aware of Buffalo\u0027s significance, including the artists of Buffalo themselves. Conrad writes: \u0022We\u0027re used to feeling insecure about our city. I think we\u0027re the leaders for the country in that...\u0022 4 What makes Buffalo\u0027s media art so important? Its artists have strived, through their art and theories of artmaking, to liberate the entranced viewers of the entertainment industry. They have made their works function as therapy, both for viewers narcotized by the mass media\u0027s visual pleasure, and for other avant-garde media artists who have lost track of the social purpose of media experimentation. Buffalo artists have achieved this by developing discourses (frameworks for self-expression and argument), embodying them in institutions, and then moving creatively among them. Discourse I: Materialist Media In the early seventies, accomplished structural/materialist film and video artists Paul Sharits, Hollis Frampton, Tony Conrad, and Woody and Steina Vasulka signed on with the Center for Media Study (CMS) at SUNY Buffalo. Their common orientation was the investigation of the material properties of film and video. Rather than simply, and invisibly, employing the codes embedded in the technology and conventional practices of media production-formations normally used to structure visual and aural information and produce a realist illusion--they reflexively fumed their attention to the codes and technical materials themselves. Paul Sharits, for example, exposed and explored the nature of film as physical strip in Ray Gun Virus, and as flickering still images in T*0*U*C*H*I*N*G. More than simply examining, the Media Study artists and students were pushing media machinery toward new expressions. The Vasulkas were engaged in \u0022dialogues with tools,\u0022 and their path-breaking experiments with image processing (colorizing, keying, and otherwise transforming the video image) were intended to discover images which their minds could not preconceive. The utopian goal was to expand the perceptual and conceptual range of viewers whose consciousness had been limited by realist codes and machinery. By foregrounding the media, the artists could therapeutically aid viewers to reflect an media and message simultaneously, helping to inure them from the manipulation of omnipresent, transparent media products. Ian Christie has noted that \u0022in [Sharits\u0027] preoccupation with the intensification of materiality can be read a concern equally with the emancipation of the film apparatus and the viewer from their inherited prejudices.\u00225 Gerald O\u0027Grady, the Centers founder and director, regularly cited the importance of the Center\u0027s explorations for public policy making, and championed new media tools\u0027 \u0022potential for transforming hierarchical urban structures into non-hierarchical structures of participatory communities of peers.\u00226 O\u0027Grady, whose Center is occasionally criticized today as a \u0022formalist\u0022 stronghold, often situated its formal explorations in a context of support for cross-cultural communication and political action (the influential presence of activist documentarian James Blue on the faculty helped define this purpose). Tony Conrad has taught in the Center for Media Study for over a decade. His structural filmmaking in the seventies was, to an extent, compatible with his co-professors. The project of investigating filmic materiality was nearly launched by his classic minimalist film The Flicker (1965) and, earlier, as a musician working with LaMonte Young, John Cale, and others, his playing emphasized tuning, pitch, precision, and other materials of musical performance. 7 Conrad\u0027s reflexivity was, however, slightly off, and invested with far more self-mocking humor than the other visionary materialists could muster. The artist\u0027s struggle with media equipment and codes, the effort to force them past their oppressive limitations, became an Herculean, or Chaplinesque, battle with an unyielding authority. In Film Electrocution, Conrad attempted to make an image without exposing the film to light, submitting it instead to boiling, baking, and electroshock; in Film Feedback, he resisted film\u0027s refusal, unlike video, to provide instant feedback by instantly processing, projecting, and refilming a strip of movie film. The Vasulkas\u0027 heroic applications of the Rutt-Etra and other image processors to re-form the video image had their pathetic flip side in Conrad\u0027s early videotape Cycles of 3\u0027s and 4\u0027s scored by a calculator: \u0022The performance,\u0022 John Minkowsky writes, \u0022is, however, an erratic one, full of faulty computations, proving the calculator to be a computer which lends itself to human error.\u00228 In later videotapes, he would extend his comic critique of image processing\u0027s misplaced applications--in Ipso Facto, he satirizes the video \u0022flying rectangle\u0022 by running around a dark room with a TV set, and in In Line, he ruminates on the possibility of transcending a mystifying self-presentation through video by employing \u0022digitization.\u0022 The Center was, fairly or not, perceived by some students and critics as caught in a modernist mire,\u0022 a techno-rational obsession with media forms and tools. 9 And CMS Professor Tony Conrad was, consciously or not, reaching and leading others toward a past-modern challenge to this orientation. Discourse II: Postmodern Performances In the late seventies, an alternative to the media-visionary discourse about \u0022codes\u0022 and \u0022materiality\u0022 which pervaded CMS emerged at the Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, an increasingly popular haven for Buffalo artists (some CMS faculty and students inducted). For one thing, Hallwalls regulars (and visiting artists, like the \u0022neo-underground\u0022 filmmakers Hallwalls imported from New York) assumed an ironically direct and confrontational punk sensibility, which contrasted with the intellectual and technological distance the materialist artists imposed between themselves and their audience. New media works from Buffalo, like much of the performance art seen at Hallwalls which influenced them, exposed the artist as a confrontational figure engaged in a power relationship with the spectator. The communication of media producer and spectator, mediated by film and video, had been neglected by structural artists whose attention was fixated on the media. Like the academic film structuralists of the seventies (whose work was critically dissected and taught to CMS students by Professor Brian Henderson), collectively shifting their analytic concentration from the filmic text to its dialogic context, Buffalo\u0027s postmodern media artists remained resolutely committed to deconstructing media formations; they simply expanded the scope of their reflexivity to encompass the filmmaker/spectator relationship. The confrontational approach can be found in the works of all three of the artists in this exhibition-Tony Conrad, Barbara Lattanzi, and Julie Zando. In Conrad\u0027s tapes, the artist directly taunts, cajoles, and manipulates the spectator\u0027s view (\u0022I think I\u0027ll have you think about Webb Pierce,\u0022 he sadistically announces in In Line, and proceeds to stuff a Pierce album cover in the lens and in our face while playing his music on the soundtrack). Conrad also combined and alternated his video productions with live performance art; this inter-arts proclivity, shared by many Hallwalls-influenced artists, can be seen as a turning away from CMS artists\u0027 careful exploration of each medium\u0027s specificity. Lattanzi, who did structuralist filmmaking (such as the film Skins, which experimented with film emulsion) while influenced by Hollis Frampton and others at CMS, turned to inter-art (photography, audio, and video) installations in the early \u002780s. Within Lattanzi\u0027s spaces, cinematic effects are achieved through the flashing of lights and sounds upon images and words. The sequence of events, however, is less evident than in a typical narrative film. The viewer\u0027s attention oscillates, the usually darkened room, unlike a comfortable movie theater, provokes feelings of both \u0022claustrophobia and undeterminable expansiveness,\u0022 and It is this \u0022anxiety on the part of the spectator that creates the work.\u002210 In Life of the Party, Lattanzi\u0027s installation in our exhibition, written texts describe a dream and then quiz the viewer with impossible questions. Lattanzi turns the benign, but latently manipulative, experience of media viewing into an evident \u0022skirmish.\u002211 Zando\u0027s videotapes submit the audience to an instant reminder of the camera\u0027s analytic privilege and directly address spectators in a disturbing, discomfiting fashion. Of I Like Girls for Friends, Zando writes, the \u0022audience is seduced by the female narrator, while at the same time repelled by the seductress\u0027 desperate need for love and approval\u0027 Hey Bud\u0027s title first seems to come out to an anonymous viewer from the screen but then turns to address Bud Dwyer, a government official who killed himself before a television audience, and who Zando harshly regards as a pornographer. The tape eventually turns its shifting address to Zando herself and other women, who \u0022must seek power via exhibitionism and exploitation they gain power only through death-of-self.\u0022 This recognition, of herself and ourselves in Bud Dwyer seems to permit the compassionate expression that quietly ends the tape: \u0022Bud, don\u0027t.\u0027 Zando\u0027s tapes instigate and investigate spectator voyeurism, then apply psychoanalytic frameworks to expose the pathological systems which parallel our viewing conditions. 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