{"id":5560,"title":"Video Spaces: Eight Installations","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/video-spaces-eight-installations","version":"995bcd66772b14836c8e101bb80db44b17d802d59deccbe189f9f196d8c52e83","modified":"2026-09-13T21:52:04.4384454+00:00","credits":[{"role":"Author","name":"Barbara London"}],"authorKeys":["London, Barbara"],"subjects":["Texts by Author"],"metadata":[{"label":"Publisher","value":"The Museum of Modern Art","url":null},{"label":"Place","value":"New York, NY","url":null},{"label":"ETC archive","value":"ETC0579","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022Video Spaces: Eight Installations.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/video-spaces-eight-installations.","publication":"Barbara London. Video Spaces: Eight Installations. The Museum of Modern Art. 1995.","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/5560.ris"},"links":[{"label":"Scanned document","url":"https://archive.org/details/ETC0579","relationship":"linked document; contents not retrieved","contentType":"application/pdf"}],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":53449},{"name":"abstract","source":"recorded publication abstract","generated":false,"characters":175},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":787},{"name":"archive_summary","source":"existing ETC archive summaries: ETC0579","generated":false,"characters":175}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"Video as an art form began in the mid-1960s, when portable video equipment became available in the consumer market. Until that time the medium had been restricted to well-lit television studios, with their heavy, two-inch video apparatus and teams of engineers. Not that users had an easy time with the Portapak. It consisted of a bulky recording deck, battery pack, and cumbersome camera, and the half-inch tape, stored on open reels, was awkward to operate. Still, artists found the Portapak affordable, and the ability to record in ambient light made the medium attractive. They recognized that video was wide open, with promising artistic potential. During the subsequent thirty years the field has expanded to include a variety of forms, most notably single-channel videotapes, video sculptures, and environmental installations. This introduction serves as a historical context for the artists in Video Spaces, and highlights their participation in the development of the medium. In the early days, some artists adopted video as their primary vehicle, while others incorporated it into areas such as sculpture, dance, performance, and Conceptual art. For example, in the droll videotape John Baldessari Reads Sol LeWitt (1972), Baldessari faces the camera and in a deadpan voice says, \u0022I\u0027d like to sing for you some of the sentences Sol LeWitt has written on Conceptual art.\u0022 He begins off-key: \u0022Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.\u0022 Then, to the tune of \u0022Tea for Two,\u0022 he continues: \u0022Formal art is essentially rational.\u0022 The barebones presentation and straightforward delivery suggest that the artist felt unconstrained by this new medium. Richard Serra, already well known for his \u0022process\u0022 sculpture, became involved with a group of sculptors and performance artists who were experimenting with video in the early 1970s. In Surprise Attack (1973), the sculptor\u0027s lower arms appear on the screen. He slams a lead ingot from hand to hand, declaiming a text taken from The Strategy of Conflict (1960) by sociologist Thomas C. Schelling. The rhythm of the words becomes more and more emphatic, matching the vehement thrust of Serra\u0027s hands. Video\u0027s black-and-white imagery, low resolution, and defined space are suited to examining this kind of simple action. Dancers who worked with video developed specific forms of choreography for the \u0022camera space\u0022--the small area directly in front of the camera. Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown, and Simone Forti defined the field of view of the monitor, in some cases putting tape on the floor and in effect, the video frame became a proscenium. The fact that dancers were able to see themselves \u0022live\u0022 on a monitor also contributed to the emergence of new kinds of productions. In Blue Studio (1975), five Merce Cunninghams perform together as a \u0022corps\u0022 in the same space without falling over each other-a dance that can exist only as video. One of the few artists who has moved fluidly between video and other mediums is Bruce Nauman. Throughout his extensive career Nauman has explored the traditional forms of drawing and sculpture, as well as the twentieth-century mediums of film, holography, video, and installation art. In Corridor Installation (1970), he constructed six passageways, three passable and three not. At the end of one cramped corridor were two stacked video monitors showing the empty corridor. As viewers advanced down the narrow space, their backs unexpectedly appeared on one of the screens-the \u0022real time\u0022 image on the surveillance monitor contrasted sharply with the stasis of the other screen. The conflation of present and past is a theme that recurs in video in different guises. The career of one of today\u0027s best-known video artists, Nam June Paik, began with a doctored-up series of old television sets that he turned into sculpture. A few years later, in 1965, he obtained one of the first portable video cameras to reach New York. Paik, excited as a child with a new toy, took the camera into his studio, onto the street-in fact, nearly everywhere he went. His recordings, mischievous and exuberant, were showcased at a local artists\u0027 hangout, the Cafe a GoGo. In 1967 Paik\u0027s voracious appetite for everything current led him to focus on John Lindsay, then mayor of New York. Paik purloined several moments from a televised press conference in which the mayor said, \u0022As soon as this is over, you may start recording.\u0022 Viewers were able to lampoon the famous politician by sliding magnets across the top of the monitor, distorting his handsome features. It was early interactive video, for the sometimes playful radicalism of the 1960s. Paik later converted the black-and-white footage into psychedelically colored videotapes using an \u0022image processor\u0022 that he and Shuya Abe soldered together. (1) Paik often assembled his tapes with the fast cutting style typical of television commercials, and in some works with multiple screens he did not coordinate the relationships between images on the various monitors. Here, influenced by the compositional ideas of John Cage, Paik was seeking a serendipitous juxtaposition of images. Technical factors initially made it difficult for museums to exhibit video. Reel-to-reel tape decks required someone to thread up, start, and rewind each tape. Video was first presented at The Museum of Modern Art in the 1968 exhibition The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age. The show was mainly about kinetic art, but it included Paik and many other artists working in electronic mediums. Paik turned his Lindsay Tape of 1967 into an installation by rigging an endless-loop device. He set an open-reel, half-inch playback deck on the floor several feet away from a sewing machine bobbin and spool, and ran the spliced tape between them. This loop anticipated the videocassette. The following year, TV as a Creative Medium, the first exhibition in the United States devoted exclusively to video art, was presented at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York. The show emphasized the machinery of video rather than its images. Paik presented several of his television sculptures, and Frank Gillette and Ira Schneider showed Wipe Cycle (1969), a work of nine monitors arranged in a grid. This early \u0022video wall\u0022 combined both live and delayed coverage of the comings and goings in the gallery, intercut with commercial television programs. In keeping with the contemporaneous influence of Marshall McLuhan, the medium, not the content, was the message. In the late 1960s, artists such as Woody and Steina Vasulka were seeing what they could coax out of video technology itself. The Vasulkas manipulated the video signal directly, bypassing the camera-recorded world. Their images were based on the wave form of the video signal, modulated by the sound component. Their loft, cluttered with video paraphernalia and secondhand computer components, became a gathering spot where friends showed their new videotapes. Before long, the crowds became too large, and the Vasulkas moved the screenings to the basement kitchen of the Mercer Art Center. When the building collapsed in 1973, the Electronic Kitchen moved to Soho, where it flowered as The Kitchen Center for Video, Music, and Dance. Climbing the dark stairway to this lively alternative space, visitors were never too sure what they might encounter: aggressive political activity, the first Women\u0027s Video Festival, or the latest breakthrough in video installation or performance art-or some amalgamation of them. Still today, with the proliferation of overlapping art forms, it can be difficult to categorize these artworks. A number of artists were intrigued by the nature of video as a light-borne medium. Like film, video uses light directly to convey the image. Mary Lucier was inspired to treat this light as a physical material. In live performances at The Kitchen, Lucier aimed her camera at stationary lasers, burning pencil-thin lines into the camera tube. The burned-in traces appeared as scars in subsequent live camera shots of the audience. Bill Viola investigated the transient nature of the light-transmitted image. In Decay Time (1974), a strobe intermittently illuminated a dark room. Only for an instant did a camera positioned in the room have enough light to form a likeness of the viewer, which appeared as a life-size projection on the wall. An image was born, flashed before the viewer\u0027s eyes, then died in blackness. The representation endured only in the memory of the viewer. At the Anthology Film Archives, another alternative space in New York, the video sculptor Shigeko Kubota organized a weekly forum where artists gathered to show their works-in-progress. During this formative time, many video works resembled sketches, in that they were stages of problem-solving and focused on single ideas. In one short videotape, Gary Hill gives words tangibility by showing a small speaker vibrating to his spoken text. In another study, abstract forms metamorphose into recognizable shapes as Hill recites a series of double entendres. Joan Jonas\u0027s work at this time involved the interaction between live performance and her recorded actions, shown simultaneously on several monitors on stage. Like many other artists, Jonas developed each project as three separate units-a performance, an installation, and a videotape for distribution. The introduction of the 3/4-inch videocassette in the early 1970s made it feasible to exhibit and distribute video to a wide audience. Within a short time, a new museum position-video curator-came into being, when David Ross joined the staff of the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse. With youthful enthusiasm, Ross promoted video as the art of today and of the future. This theme was echoed at an international exhibition in 1975. Organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Video Art surveyed videotapes and video installations from North America, South America, Japan, and Europe. Many museums in North America and Europe subsequently initiated video exhibition programs, and a literature began to form around the work. (2) In concert with these developments, artists advanced from the production of relatively simple works to projects that were thematically sophisticated. Two classic works raised issues that have remained central to video over the last twenty years. Present Continuous Past(s) (1974), an installation by Dan Graham, consisted of two adjacent rooms lined with mirrors. Viewers had endless opportunities to see themselves reflected \u0022now,\u0022 while simultaneously seeing on a monitor their actions of moments before. The video delay collapsed the past into the present, distorting the normal seriality of events. Space too, was rearranged, rendered discontinuous in this infinity box of mirrors. For aen (1974), Peter Campus used a camera and projector to confront viewers with live images of their faces projected upside-down, directly onto a wall. In the darkened room, the enlarged, high-contrast images provoked viewers to interact with their \u0022portraits.\u0022 No matter how they turned their heads or changed their facial expressions, they were startled by the blunt, relentless portrayals of themselves. The expressive possibilities of interactivity engendered other imaginative installations involving viewer response. However, today, in the intersecting fields of video and computers, evolving in the form of multimedia, interactivity is at a primitive level where little work has gone beyond button-pushing. Video, like most human activities, has not escaped the embrace of politics. Participants in the women\u0027s movement, which began its current phase at roughly the same time as video, found the medium accessible. With no established bureaucracy or history, video allowed artists to find room and jump right in. On the West Coast, Judith Barry engaged in a theoretically informed feminism, interpreting femininity and masculinity as social constructs based upo","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":53449,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}