{"id":5612,"title":"Why Don\u0027t They Tell Stories Like They Used To?","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/why-dont-they-tell-stories-they-used","version":"27e51889eaf0dd4327fc2da90fd8ac3e51ddd994528da230e48d1ef77e4392bd","modified":"2026-09-13T21:52:04.4416969+00:00","credits":[{"role":"Author","name":"Ann-Sargent Wooster"}],"authorKeys":["Wooster, Ann-Sargent"],"subjects":["Texts by Author"],"metadata":[{"label":"Publication","value":"Art Journal: Video - The Reflexive Medium","url":null},{"label":"Publisher","value":"College Art Association","url":null},{"label":"Place","value":"New York, NY","url":null},{"label":"Volume","value":"Fall","url":null},{"label":"Issue","value":"1985","url":null},{"label":"ETC archive","value":"ETC0975","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022Why Don\u0027t They Tell Stories Like They Used To?.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/why-dont-they-tell-stories-they-used.","publication":"Ann-Sargent Wooster. Why Don\u0027t They Tell Stories Like They Used To?. Art Journal: Video - The Reflexive Medium. vol. Fall, no. 1985. College Art Association. Fall 1985.","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/5612.ris"},"links":[{"label":"Scanned document","url":"https://archive.org/details/ETC0975","relationship":"linked document; contents not retrieved","contentType":"application/pdf"}],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":47908},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":701}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"Video art is a hybrid adapting and sharing the aesthetics, content, and history of the visual arts, literature, music, film, and-most recently-the computer. It brings together ideas about how to construct a story and how to structure experience, fragmentation, disjunction, and chance based on avant-garde ideas developed over the last 100 years. Yet for all its historical precedents and for all the varieties of criticism to which it is open, video art has proved opaque not only to its critics but also to its practitioners, who frequently do not understand the origins of the structures they share. In reply to a statement by Frank Gillette at the 1974 Open Circuits Conference, Robert Pincus-Witten said: \u0022It is not a medium to which the humankind you are so conscious of has access; it\u0027s an exceptionally inaccessible medium.\u0022 (1) More than ten years have passed since that time, but a critical model for video has not yet been constructed. Because it shares the technology and look of broadcast television, video art has been frequently treated as an aberrant outgrowth of that medium. But to see video art primarily in the context of television is to exacerbate the confusion that already surrounds it. A complex mixture of factors explain video art\u0027s continuing lack of clarity. Those who scorn television as a mass-culture medium without any redeeming aesthetic or intellectual qualities dismiss video art in the same breath with the Dukes of Hazard. To television aficionados, on the other hand, video art is \u0022poor\u0022 television not living up to general expectations of the medium because of its comparatively impoverished technology. Moreover, they are alienated by its radical, art-for-art\u0027s-sake content featuring personal material, abstraction, and disjunctive narrative for its own sake. Television critics generally see video art as using a language totally different from that of broadcast television and outside their province even when video art is broadcast-such as the recent productions of independent video on WNET, New Television, Alive From Off Center and Independent Focus and do not write about it. In its early years (1968-74), video art was treated as an outgrowth of the visual arts, largely because many of its practitioners had crossed over from traditional art forms. Furthermore, the early single-channel tapes and multi-channel installations were usually shown in art galleries and museums. Videomakers, such as video\u0027s chief polemicist Nam June Paik, contributed to the identification of video with painting and sculpture by asserting that it was the art form of the future: \u0022as collage technique replaced oil paint, so the cathode-ray tube will replace canvas.\u0022 He added that the synthesizer made it possible to shape the TV screen as precisely as Leonardo as freely as Picasso as colorfully as Renoir as profoundly as Mondrian as violently as Pollock and as lyrically as Jasper Johns (2) Although art critics found themselves responsible for writing about video art along with other time- and performance-based art forms in the early seventies, they were never wholly comfortable with any of these mediums. Video, in contrast to painting and sculpture, demands too much time in viewing. Although the medium has some of the properties of collage and the arrangement of monitors in installations does have certain sculptural properties, video art has less in common with painting and sculpture than it does with film or performance. After condemning video art for being narcissistic and boring, art critics shifted their focus away from video and began to treat it as invisible. Video artists themselves have contributed to the murkiness of critical discourse. In the early years, artist-generated publications such as Radical Software, Video Art, The New Television, and others abounded with artists\u0027 statements on their own work and the nature and potential of the medium. These writings stressed video\u0027s capacity for expanding consciousness and enfranchising those disenfranchised by broadcast television. They saw television idealistically: a magic totem capable of generating Marshall McLuhan\u0027s Global Village, and in their hands bringing peace on earth. Others, who came to video from kinetic art and Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), celebrated their hands-on involvement with its technology in the Spaghetti City Video Manual and other publications. As a group, the early video artists saw video art as a way of reinvesting a technological art form with a spiritual aura and rarely placed their work in a historical context, often implying in their writing a lack of connection with previous art forms. As three-quarter inch color tapes and lower-cost editing systems replaced the early, crude black-and-white portable systems, the generation that followed the first wave (post-1975) video art produced more high-tech and more tightly constructed work. Because a new generation of polemicists and theoreticians failed to arise in the community to write about the new work, an aura of wordlessness surrounded video art. We are only now beginning to see a change in critical attitudes towards the medium. Video\u0027s lack of continuity with the avant-garde tradition is compounded by the modernist and formalist rhetoric prevalent at video\u0027s genesis. Accordingly, an art form should be about itself or only the nature of its materials be discussed, or both. Noel Carroll discussed this problem in his paper on \u0022category exclusivity\u0022 at the Symposium on Self-Invented Media - Video, Opera, Photography, and Performance at the Kitchen, Spring 1984. Carroll pointed out that in an attempt to distinguish itself from other art forms, each new medium stressed its uniqueness and denied the influence of other mediums. Video had not only the difficulty of functionally having no history before 1970 but also the additional burden of being not-film, not-TV, not-theater, and so forth. Although many early video artists such as Shirley Clarke, Ed Emschwiller, Stan VanderBeek, and Doris Chase began as filmmakers, film was the art form video art was most eager to distinguish itself from. Shortly after the publication of Gene Youngblood\u0027s Expanded Cinema in 1970, which clearly delineated the evolution of video from film, film and video were never discussed in the same breath. The concept of category exclusivity, which remained in operation until postmodernism began to chip away at its boundaries, left video without access to its filmic or other pasts and without the benefit of the language that had been developed for describing film. The Origins of Disjunctive Narrative Video art is the heir of the new set of assumptions about what constitutes reality that developed in the nineteenth century. This was a time marked by a revolution in consciousness as notions of a hierarchical order as expressed in Renaissance perspective were replaced by a multiplicity of spatial and temporal points of view. The causal or parallel developments in mathematics (especially non-Euclidean geometry and the fourth dimension), physics (Einstein\u0027s theory of relativity), psychology, and philosophy, and the invention of new methods of transportation and communication altered the perception of time and space. One of the consequences of these intellectual and technological developments was the shift from an external, Euclidean, and generally knowable reality to a more private and subjective one. (3) The avant-garde and the bourgeois took up opposing positions on consciousness and mimesis. The creators of such bourgeois art forms as realistic painting and sculpture asserted that their works represented imitatio naturae and were the true mimetic art forms. Building on the new notions about \u0022reality\u0022 derived from science, psychology, literature, and art, the avant-garde argued that their private visions and manipulations of form, color, space, and time imitated the true reality of the self and constituted the true mimesis. The emphasis on a subjective ordering of the world based on personal logic was inherited by the makers of video art. One of the commonest forms of construction in video art is a form of stream of consciousness in which reality is ordered in strings of successive or interleafed images. Although William James is credited with the invention of the term \u0022stream of consciousness,\u0022 the present use of the form owes rather to literature, to Laurence Sterne and Edouard Dujardin, as well as to Gustave Flaubert\u0027s style indirect libre - where the point of view of the speaker constantly shifts and there are abrupt temporal leaps using flashbacks and flashforwards - and, finally to the elaborate four-dimensional web of James Joyce\u0027s Ulysses, in which time, action, and meaning, as well as the thoughts and actions of the characters, are treated as temporally fluid. The literary experiments were influenced by Freud\u0027s and other psychologists\u0027 work on dreams and the unconscious. This approach to reality also asserts the primacy of the individual over the collective structures of society. Its highly personal order and hermetic or solipsistic references limit its legibility to the artist and his or her immediate circle. The extensive historical antecedents for stream of consciousness and disjunctive narrative are often forgotten. Within the self-contained video community, it often seems as if Nam June Paik is the progenitor of this type of organized chaos. It has actually become the normative structure for all avant-garde mediums and through a trickle-down effect has influenced the structure of broadcast television, especially commercials and music videos. The introduction of film further complicated the definition of reality. Film maintained the illusion of reproducing reality, but it accomplished this by chopping up nature even more radically than had any of the other inventions. Editing or montage further chopped up reality, but instead of increasing film\u0027s parsing of reality, it became in the hands of mainstream filmmakers a vehicle for synthesis. Peter Burger has observed that montage is simply the basic technical procedure of filmmaking, but its meaning depends on how it is employed.(4) Used to interrupt or comment on reality in a way that is designed to startle the viewer and make him or her conscious of the illusionistic portrayal, it serves a disjunctive function; used allegorically-as in Eisenstein\u0027s films-it serves a poetic one. Through the conventions of seamless editing or montage classique (such as cutting on motion, dissolves, and so forth), mainstream filmmakers subverted the essential disjunctiveness of montage and generated the illusion of continuous reality. Even the flashback-borrowed freely from ideas about the past derived from psychology and literature-became merely another tool for furthering their realistic illusions. For the avant-garde artist, the so-called reality of film was a burden, something they had to subvert to express an inner vision, and they adopted different strategies to deal with it. One group said if film is a machine-generated art that slices objects and events into sequences, logically it should be used to film machines and people doing machine-like things such as swinging in a trapeze. This is precisely what Hans Richter did in Ballet Mecanique (1924). His method of composition-building chains of like or analogous formscontinues to be one of the strategies of abstract film and video. (Richter is also credited with producing the first self-reflexive work because at one point the image of the filmmaker is reflected in a mirrored ball.) The development of abstract film and film-as-object continued with the rotating nonconcentric circles of Duchamp\u0027s Anemic Cinema (1925) and in the work of Oskar Fischinger and the Link group in Germany before 1933. The heritage of this work can be seen in the structural films of the mid-to-late sixties such as Tony Conrad\u0027s The Flicker, which deals with retinal response to different stroboscopic conditions;","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":47908,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}