{"id":5650,"title":"Did the Portapak Cause Video Art? Notes on the Formation of a New Medium","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/did-portapak-cause-video-art-notes-formation-new-medium","version":"3899d583bc98b97c58a9bc03a2b37ec714e819adcc3b886f8c150d6d2705f097","modified":"2026-09-13T21:52:04.4441621+00:00","credits":[{"role":"Author","name":"Jon Burris"}],"authorKeys":["Burris, Jon"],"subjects":["Texts by Author"],"metadata":[{"label":"Publication","value":"Millennium Film Journal","url":null},{"label":"Date","value":"Fall 1996","url":null},{"label":"Volume","value":"29","url":null},{"label":"ETC archive","value":"ETC1156","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022Did the Portapak Cause Video Art? Notes on the Formation of a New Medium.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/did-portapak-cause-video-art-notes-formation-new-medium.","publication":"Jon Burris. Did the Portapak Cause Video Art? Notes on the Formation of a New Medium. Millennium Film Journal. vol. 29. Fall 1996.","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/5650.ris"},"links":[{"label":"Scanned document","url":"https://archive.org/details/ETC1156","relationship":"linked document; contents not retrieved","contentType":"application/pdf"}],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":85130},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":760}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"While surveying the history of video art, I was struck by an apparent contradiction in the relation of technological tools to aesthetic expression. Particularly in the medium\u0027s formative years (1965-c.1977) I noticed a sort of anomaly between artists\u0027 statements and their stylistics: those artists who were most deeply involved in new technology were producing works most rooted in familiar aesthetics, while many artists whose relation to the new technology was essentially functional were producing works which were, in art world terms, the most aesthetically \u0022advanced.\u0022 Moreover, like most artists of the period, those of the former category were engaged in a discourse firmly embedded in the notion of the avant garde, but in their particular case, the avantness of the garde was often linked to technological issues, in that the legitimacy of the art work issued in various ways, simple and complex, from the newness of the medium, its apparatus and implications. To choose two of many possible examples, Woody and Steina Vasulka\u0027s experiments in the linkage of electronic sound and image are philosophically and stylistically linked to certain Constructivist currents, while Vito Acconci\u0027s work can be considered an extension of his contemporaneous performance, super-8 film and installation works. Compare the following statements, first by Woody Vasulka and then by Acconci: Our context was not really artistic when we started to work with video. It was very far from what I would recognize as art. . . . I was educated in film at a film school. I was exposed to all the narrative structures of film, but they weren\u0027t real to me and I couldn\u0027t understand what independent film was. I was totally locked into this inability to cope with the medium I was trained in. So for me, video represented being able to disregard all that and find new material which had no esthetic content or context. When I first saw video feedback, I knew I had seen the cave fire. It had nothing to do with anything, just a perpetuation of some kind of energy. Video as an idea, as a working method, rather than a specific medium, a particular piece--something to keep in the back of my mind while I\u0027m doing something else. (It can bring me up front, pull me back onto the surface, keep me from slipping away into abstraction.) . . . Video monitor as one point in a face to face relationship: on-screen, I face the viewer, off-screen. (Since the image is poorly defined, we\u0027re forced to depend on sound more than sight: \u0022intimate distance.\u0022) Video functioned differently for each of these artists. For Vasulka, the medium offered a means of escape, the possibility of stepping outside tradition to explore an elemental material unencumbered by received aesthetics. For Acconci, video was an extension of his \u0022working method,\u0022 a means of extending the confrontational dynamics of his contemporaneous performance work. But if video offered freedom from prevailing aesthetics, why is it that Vasulka\u0027s production at the time was in fact, if not in intention, firmly grounded in a fully formed aesthetic tradition? And as the years passed and Vasulka extended his investigations to digital imaging, where greater methodological rigor was possible, he moved even closer to the machine aesthetic of post-war constructivism, as is evident in his still image matrices Didactic Video (1975) and The Syntax of Binary Images (1978). This is not about the relative merits of Vasulka and Acconci, or of one aesthetic over another. Rather, this apparent inconsistency of intention and production is an important indicator of the complexity of the relationship between technology and aesthetics, and of the dynamics by which video, and by extension all technologically-based media, establish their aesthetic foundations. Early video, as one significant example, provides a fundamental case study of those dynamics. Emergence Video and the portapak appeared simultaneously. With the 1968 introduction of this first camera-recorder combination priced at a level accessible to individuals and small institutions, video simply exploded on the scene.3 From the first moment it seemed that everyone was doing everything possible with it. Some saw themselves as artists, others as anti-artists, others as altogether outside art. Many were ambivalent, others were simply confused. While early video might be categorized, it can\u0027t be generalized: many of the early makers were attracted more to video\u0027s implications for alternate life styles, or political activism, or ethical philosophy, or ecology than to art. And as such, video provided the nexus for the realization of a panoply of concerns, both internal and external to the medium. Whereas previous new media had emerged gradually with one or two styles or aesthetic approaches, the most distinctive aspect of video\u0027s formation was the immediate and simultaneous emergence of multiple genres: activist, documentary, synthesized and image-processed, abstract or abstractive, performance, conceptual, ecological, diaristic, agit-prop, dance, music, bio-feedback and other forms made their appearance in the years 1968-1972. Moreover, there was a high degree of cohesiveness: all these approaches were video (experimental, independent, underground, guerrilla, artists\u0027, as they were variously christened), none were excluded from the field and many artists worked in multiple forms. There was an atmosphere of mutual support and a sense of a shared and privileged destiny investing video with powerful aspirations to be what no other medium had been, nor had been asked to be: at one and the same time a medium through which to view the world, a means to test the limits of the world, a political tool, a communications tool, and a responsive art medium. Significantly, the one form not in evidence during those years is that most native to cinema and television: narrative fiction. The emergence of that genre around 1977 would mark the end of video\u0027s first developmental stage. The standard historical account ascribes video\u0027s emergence to the arrival of the portapak. If taken at face value, this would present an unusual state of affairs. In no previous case did the mere appearance of a technical substructure immediately result in the emergence of an art form. Of the five major technological art media (photography, cinema, electronic music, video and computer graphics/digital arts), almost without exception, the new medium passed through a period in which commercial issues were primary. Film lay largely dormant as an independent medium for decades after the invention of 16mm film, while the rationalization of photographic aesthetics began only after about ten years of intense discussion of photography\u0027s utilitarian and commercial possibilities. Yet the number of American video practitioners went from a score or so in 1965-1968 to hundreds or thousands only a few years later. The transition from nonexistence to inclusion in the 1973 Whitney Biennial took eight years and video had only to wait a few more months for a major museum conference (\u0022Open Circuits\u0022 at the Museum of Modern Art in January 1974). By then video had become an established part of the curriculum in more than a few university art departments and art schools, and it was possible to earn a diploma in this medium in which the professors themselves had worked for only two or three years. Even allowing for the artified nature of our society, something else was going on here. Video was obviously fulfilling integral cultural needs; otherwise its development would have been more tentative and gradual. These cultural dynamics will be discussed later on. But first, there is a peculiarity to the advent of video, a sort of Holmesian dog that didn\u0027t bark. What is surprising and difficult to account for is why there was virtually no artists\u0027 video before the portapak. Given the omni-presence of television in American society, the general interest in issues of art and technology and the readiness of the 60s art world to incorporate elements of popular culture, one would think that artists, tenacious creatures that they are, would have somehow managed to gain access to broadcast facilities, or used relatively cheap surveillance equipment, or worked with the medium in ways that did not require recording and playback (such as modifying circuits in television sets, as Nam June Paik was doing). But the fact remains that before the general availability of the portapak, the use of video by artists was extraordinarily limited. In the standard histories, only two names are cited, Paik and Wolf Vostell for their gallery installations of modified and unmodified TV sets, mostly in Germany (Vostell\u0027s work began in the late 1950s, Paik\u0027s in 1963). Certainly there were others, but the number of art works involving video or television prior to 1968 is astonishingly small. This is a singular circumstance. If there appears to be a causal link between the first appearance of the portapak and the advent of video art, it might be useful to compare the emergence of computer graphics. Although computers were large, complicated, uninviting and exceedingly expensive before the mid-1970s--not unlike broadcast television equipment--computer art dates nearly from their origin. Time on commercial and research computers was in such short supply as to be rationed, but even with their inaccessibility and user-unfriendliness, artists did manage to get their hands on them. In many cases the computer scientists themselves made their own art works. While the personal computer running off-the-shelf software--the digital equivalent of the portapak--has altered and accelerated the growth of computer art, it is far from being the prime mover. Even with strong technological and economic parallels with video, computer art didn\u0027t burst on the scene; it followed a more gradual trajectory. Did the portapak \u0022cause\u0022 video art? A fundamental question. In the strict sense obviously not, because raw technological determinism rarely accounts for social phenomena. But as noted above, in most histories the advent of video is attributed either to the portapak alone or to the fortuitous convergence of the portapak with the singular political and counter-cultural landscape of the late 1960s. Yet even this expanded technological determinism masks important relationships. I believe that video art emerged when it did not because of the invention of the portapak but because video held out the possibility of escape from a crisis of modernism, a vain attempt to keep alive the optimism and belief in progress which lie at the heart of the modernist enterprise. Video, before all other arts, took on this function because its intrinsic attributes enabled it to serve artists in a multiplicity of ways. However integral the portapak was to the subsequent development of the medium, it may well be that the simultaneous appearance of the portapak and video art was essentially coincidental. Although this coincidence makes it appear that the portapak was the source of independent video, one could hazard that a video art--albeit quite different in character--might have emerged at around the same time even in the absence of the portapak. And conversely, it is plausible that if the portapak had been invented earlier, the device might initially have been employed mostly in non-artistic utilizations, so that video art might not have emerged until the time when it finally did. It is obviously not possible to know this with any certainty; we can only analyze the stream of history, not isolate its variables. But there is much in the long and fundamental association between modernism and technological media to support this view. As we shall see, it may be that debates surrounding photography, the first technological art medium, provided the stimulus for the appearance of aesthetic modernism. These relationships are complex, but if we view the emergence of video substantially as an aesthetic issue ","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":85130,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}