{"id":5558,"title":"Video is Being Invented","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/video-being-invented","version":"d48fd251ac3584490461de3721fa0f80719a436f93c733c6195250b837a38c41","modified":"2026-09-16T10:54:01.7802994+00:00","credits":[{"role":"Author","name":"Bruce Kurtz"}],"authorKeys":["Kurtz, Bruce"],"subjects":["Texts by Author"],"metadata":[{"label":"Publication","value":"arts magazine","url":null},{"label":"Publisher","value":"Art Digest","url":null},{"label":"Date","value":"December 1972/January 1973","url":null},{"label":"Place","value":"New York, NY","url":null},{"label":"Volume","value":"47","url":null},{"label":"Issue","value":"3","url":null},{"label":"ETC archive","value":"ETC0544","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022Video is Being Invented.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/video-being-invented.","publication":"Bruce Kurtz. Video is Being Invented. arts magazine. vol. 47, no. 3. Art Digest. December 1972/January 1973.","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/5558.ris"},"links":[{"label":"Scanned document","url":"https://archive.org/details/ETC0544","relationship":"linked document; contents not retrieved","contentType":"application/pdf"}],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":33677},{"name":"abstract","source":"recorded publication abstract","generated":false,"characters":100},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":652},{"name":"archive_summary","source":"existing ETC archive summaries: ETC0544","generated":false,"characters":102}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"Nam June Paik has been one of the seminal forces behind the recent emergence of Video as a viable art form, both as the earliest artist to seriously work in video, and as a kind of invisible, protean energy which has produced a mental and aesthetic environment predisposed toward video as an area of important activity. Paik, a Korean, first worked with television in Germany where he studied at the University of Cologne from 1956-58. At that time he altered a black and white television to electronically change images from live channel television, a predecessor of the Video Synthesizer which he and Shuya Abe produced in 1970. Later Paik took the television with him to Japan, where he extended the experimentation into color television, and then shipped the results to New York, where he came to live and work in 1964. The area of vanguard art activity, which interested Paik at that time, was energized by Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg, Kaprow, John Cage, David Tudor, and Yvonne Rainer. Paik, who is a composer, performer, and engineer as well as a visual artist, quickly assimilated the most advanced American art of the time and became their associate. He was especially close to Kaprow, Cage, and Tudor, but was also the benefactor of generous donations of TV sets from Rausclrenlwrg, Hans Haacke, and Jasper Johns, Soho gave Paik a color television. What all these artists had in common was an interest in extending the formerly fixed boundaries of art-making activity between visual art, music, dance, and theater into areas which included sound (music, happenings, dance, performance), movement (dance, theater, happenings, music), visual images (painting, dance, performance, happenings), tactile sensations (happenings, performances, painting), time, and issues of duration and sequence (happenings, performances, music, dance, painting), and active participation and involvement between the spectator and the art object or event. In many ways, the activities of Johns, Rauschenherg, Cage, Tudor, Kaprow, and Rainer made possible the extension of image making into video art, as video art combines visual, tactile, and auditory sensations, as well as movement and time. The earliest stimulation for video activity came not from film but from happenings, performances, dance, theater, music, and painting, though video was to be considerably influenced by Warhol\u0027s later \u0022reel time\u0022 films and by the cinema of Michael Snow. Mc Lillian writes of television being responsible for the re-integration of our senses, away from the primarily visual orientation of print technology. According to Mc Luhan, television is primarily audio-tactile, and has not only provided a new balance, hence reintegration, of our senses, but has eliminated the fixed point of visual thinking in favor of an illuminating, all-encompassing auditory-tactile which surrounds us (have you ever heard of a \u0022point of hearing,\u0022 or a \u0022point of feeling\u0022?). The presence of television as the most advanced, pervasive, and persuasive communications medium of the \u0027fifties was partly responsible for the emergence of art making activity directed toward the reintegration of the senses. Paik was at the center of this activity and awareness. In fact, he may have been the only artist seriously working in video at the time. In 1964, the year Me Luhan published Understanding Media and immediately became a sensation, Paik bought the first portable video tape recorder and camera in New York. The story is that he made a tape in a cab from the store to his destination, and when he arrived he declared that video would replace painting. A number of video objects and video events, date from this time to the late \u0027sixties, such as the T. V. Chair (1968)1, a chair with a clear plexiglass seat under which is a globe-shaped television (a reference to Me Luhan s global village?), and the Television Bra which he designed for Charlotte Moorman. The ubiquitous and indefatigable Charlotte Moorman, a consummate performer, wore the Television Bra while playing the cello. The Video Chair requires involvement and action on the part of the spectator, and involves movement, visual imagery, tactile sensations, sound, and performance. The Television Bra, a \u0022liberation of TV from TV box-,\u0022 makes a most intimate environment of television, both for the wearer and for the spectator, and involves all of the sensory responses of the Video Chair. The Video Synthesizer which Paik and Shuya Abe invented in 1970, permits the artist to control and manipulate the entire video image.\u0027 With the Synthesizer one can add any quantity and quality of color to a number of black and white images fed into it, as well as distort and manipulate the image, turning faces inside out, etc., or abstracting images entirely. Many signal sources can be used, and audio inputs can control the visual image, thus electronically making sound visible. The color is electronically originated-produced, invented, and controlled entirely by the artist. When Cartier-Bresson saw the Synthesizer demonstrated in Colorado, he said that it created color unlike any he had ever seen before, -:either in art or in nature. What distinguishes Paik\u0027s Synthesized color is its appeal to tactile sensations. It is a transparent, luminous, highly saturated, warm, smooth, caressing color. Rather than being merely visual, it is color which massages the viewer, color composed of light projected at the viewer, with the viewer\u0027s skin becoming the surface of the color. Paik\u0027s Synthesized images deal with a kind of color and surface unique to video, paralleling concurrent investigations into color and surface in the medium of painting by Olitski, Poons, and Bannard. That it is an area of important activity is evidenced, by the fact that these artists continue to work on issues of surface and color to this day.4 Video clearly involves an entirely different aesthetic than other art forms, as it has entirely unique image-making capabilities. The emergence of major video art requires a reassessment, or perhaps a recreation, of critical criteria. The place for criticism to begin is where artists have begun: with an investigation into the inherent characteristics of the medium and their imagemaking capabilities. Definition of the inter-relationships of color, surface, space, and material has characterized the art of Keith Sonnier in his latex and flocking pieces, gauze and flocking pieces, neon and glass piece, films, performances, live video pieces, and video tapes. In all of these works, surface as an integral aspect of colored material located in space is a primary consideration. This may be an obvious statement in verbal language, but in pictorial language it is an idea of impressive subtlety. Surface is not defined in Sonnier\u0027s art as an inherent characteristic of any medium. In fact, Sonnier has been able to integrate with apparent ease aspects of visual ordering characteristic of painting, sculpture, film, video, and performance in the same work. The most unique quality and the greatest strength of Sonnier\u0027s art is that it deals with an integration of color, surface, space, and material unlike any other art. Video is an integrated image-making process. Sonnier has produced color video tapes of exceptional subtlety and beauty. That the tapes deal with painterly, sculptural, and performance issues relates them to his sculpture, which deals with sculptural and painterly issues, and identifies them with his strengths: the ability to work outside of confines and to integrate various qualities. Sonnier\u0027s inclination toward integration is well served by the medium of color video which, by its very nature, is an imagemaking process consisting of the integration of moving colored light with surface and simultaneous sound. In Sonnier\u0027s video tape TV In TV Out, two images are superimposed, one shot off network television and the other shot from a studio performance situation involving some of the materials and visual qualities of his sculptures. This live image is colorized by a device which adds color to a black and white image and in turn manipulates the color. Colorized color is more opaque and less three-dimensionally tactile than synthesized color, but it is tactile in its video scan-line texture. The two images in TV In TV Out are, in effect, rubbed against each other, determining spatial positioning, and as the live, colorized image changes, moves, goes from opaque to transparent, flat to three dimensional, the image on which it is superimposed appears and disappears, flattens and becomes three-dimensional, defining and altering the perception of the surface of the video image as the various surfaces with the image become visible. Though the images move back and forth in space, the surface of the image is always on the surface of the TV screen: there is no illusion of looking into space, but the surfaces which are located in space are brought to the surface of the medium. There is no \u0022in front of\u0022 or \u0022behind\u0022 except as one surface rubs against another, and this is done by a variation of the dots of colored light which comprise the video image and which are two-dimensional (some even say one-dimensional, as the video tape moves across the tape head in one way). These changes are done almost entirely with color, and the color is completely controlled by operating the colorizer. Surface and space are determined by colored light. One is tempted to make parallels with formalist paintings, as the images frequently look like occasional colorfield paintings, but this would be a mistake because the images are generated in audiotactile-visual space, consist of light, not \u0022luminosity,\u0022 and are in motion, all characteristics which video does not share with painting. The measure of Sonnier\u0027s color video tapes is not the extent to which he extends painterly values, though there is some continuity there, but the extent to which he defines the surface, space, and color of the material of video. Linda Benglis\u0027 tape, Noise, extends the work of art into an audio-tactile space which surrounds the viewer. The sound track consists of street noises amplified so much as to be physically involving. The video image is of a subject taped, then played on a monitor and retaped, and in some cases replayed again and retaped, thus removing the image enough times from the original to make use of the dots and lines, as well as static, snow, and varying density characteristic of video images. The awareness of these characteristics is achieved by use of the capability of video for instant replay. The video image is a visual and tactile equivalent to the sound of amplified street noise. The subjects are five different friends who are shown roughly from the shoulders up, but. they are not important to the tape as they are only the material from which the video image is made. Altogether, the tape is an amazingly clear perception of the process of video\u0027s ordering of information and of its audio-tactile nature. In Home Tape, Benglis took a portable video tape recorder with her when she visited her family in Louisiana. She saw most of the experience through the video camera, thus giving her a distance from. an emotionally involving situation. The tapes were replayed and reshot off a monitor and commented about by Benglis, and these sequences were interspersed in the finished tape with sequences of the initial images and the original sound. It is a deeply personal tape about an emotionally involving situation, but it is precisely controlled. It makes use of the intimacy of video, of the one to one relationship between the viewer and the monitor which distinguishes video so much from film, resulting in the feeling of shared experience though the experience is not in the least dramatized. In fact, the experience is presented in a very low-keyed fashion, with a monotone voice and a very factual verbal and visual description. \u0027 Besides using the intimacy of television and the instant replay capa","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":33677,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}