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's formative years (1965-c.1977) I noticed a sort of anomaly between artists' 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 "advanced." 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's experiments in the linkage of electronic sound and image are philosophically and stylistically linked to certain Constructivist currents, while Vito Acconci's 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't real to me and I couldn't 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'm 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're forced to depend on sound more than sight: "intimate distance.")

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 "working method," 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's 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't be generalized: many of the early makers were attracted more to video's 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's 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', 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's first developmental stage.

The standard historical account ascribes video's 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's 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 ("Open Circuits" 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't bark. What is surprising and difficult to account for is why there was virtually no artists' 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's work began in the late 1950s, Paik's 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't burst on the scene; it followed a more gradual trajectory.

Did the portapak "cause" 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 rather than a technological one, we gain great explanatory power over video's early manifestations.

Video and Modernism

Modernism, being a tendency rather than a codifiable movement or style, defies simple definition. Under its broad umbrella can be found a range of sometimes contradictory attitudes, aesthetic approaches, political and ethical stances. Modernism is inherently linked to a belief in progress, in society as in the arts, where it is manifested in the essential dynamic of the avant garde: the cycles in which new conventions overturn established ones only to become established and overturned themselves. This succession is seen as having dual aspects: it is both progressive, in that one aesthetic stance is seen as an "advance" over the preceding, and cyclical, in that an aesthetic or stylistic ethos which has been used up is superseded by its nominal opposite. To choose a musical example, such composers as Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Yannis Xenakis saw late Romanticism as having exhausted itself, stimulating them to arrive at compositional methods founded upon analytic techniques diametrically opposed to the large expressive structures of Mahler, Bruckner and their confrËres. This overturning of established convention is at the center of the avant-garde ethic and of the modernism for which it serves as the prime mover of cultural progress.

Perhaps the best-known and most influential modernist formulation is that of Clement Greenberg. For Greenberg, formalism was the direct issue of the avant garde, so that just as modernism and the avant garde are inseparable, so inevitably does the avant-garde stance dictate a concentration on formal experiment:

As the first and most important item upon its agenda, the avant garde saw the necessity of an escape from ideas, which were infecting the arts with the ideological struggles of society. Ideas came to mean subject matter in general. (Subject matter as distinguished from content: in the sense that every work of art must have content, but that subject matter is something the artist does or does not have in mind when he is actually at work.) This meant a new and greater emphasis upon form, and it also involved the assertion of the arts as independent vocations, disciplines and crafts, absolutely autonomous, and entitled to respect for their own sakes, and not merely as vessels of communication.

In his view, the elimination of all that was extrinsic to a medium or shared with other media would enable each to achieve a purity which would become its qualitative standard. By so doing, the medium might stave off decadence through a constant distillation of its purposes and methods. As he puts it in an oft-quoted passage,

The essence of modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it, but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.

Each art, it turned out, had to perform this demonstration on its own account. What had to be exhibited was not only that which was unique and irreducible in art in general, but also, that which was unique and irreducible in each particular art. Each art had to determine, through its own operation and works, the effects exclusive to itself. By doing so it would, to be sure, narrow its area of competence, but at the same time it would make its possession of the area all the more certain.1

Greenberg believed that naturalistic painting was a dissembling of the medium which concealed its inherent elements in illusion. In contrast, "modern art" called attention to its own essence through flatness, the shape of the support, the properties of pigment, etc. It is important to note that Greenberg's highly reductionist position does not specifically necessitate abstraction, but it does necessitate breaking the conventional barriers that place recognizable objects in a recognizable space. To do otherwise is to recall another art and to render the work compromised, "impure."

While Greenberg does not discuss technologically-based media and makes only passing references to the relations between photography and painting, his notion of finding the essence of the medium in its materiality seems to derive in part from ideas current in the 1920s. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, an important Constructivist and Bauhaus faculty member, noted,

. . . no material, no field of activity, can be judged from the special character of other materials, other fields, and that painting or any optical creation [i.e. photography and cinema] has special laws and missions independently of all others.

And,

. . . a work of art should be created solely out of means proper to itself and forces proper to itself.

Moholy-Nagy does make the connection to photography and film, holding that the articulate elements of technological media derive directly and specifically from their underlying technology. He observes that "Film practice has so far been largely restricted to reproducing dramatic action without, however, fully utilising the potentialities of the camera in an imaginatively creative manner."1 Thus, the potentialities of cinema are to be found in the creative possibilities inherent in the apparatus and not, as was film industry practice, of essentially literary issues.

This view is highly reductive, and one not at all consonant with mid-19th century sensibilities. Thus, it comes as a surprise to find the emergence of similar sentiments in controversies surrounding the young art of photography in France in the 1850s, about a decade after the invention of the Daguerreotype and only a few years after the diffusion of negative/positive processes. Essentially, there were three parties to this controversy: 1) those who entirely excluded photography from the realm of the fine arts, 2) those who admitted photography to the fine arts but only to the degree that it might reproduce prevailing aesthetic models, and 3) those who sought aesthetic autonomy for the new medium. What is particularly significant is that in support of their positions in this raging debate, each party engaged in close material analyses of the new medium. It is as if the attempt to critique a new technological medium, whatever one's inclination, of necessity forces a proto-modernist framework.

A. Bonnardot, a commentator of the period, excluded photography from the realm of art a priori because its material and technical structure were, in his view, inherently incompatible with artistic achievement. As he put it,

Reality mechanically fixed necessarily carries the stamp of its origin: it lacks soul, it presents to the spirit only an idea, it exists only in the present. Art knows how to join the present with the sentiment of the past and of the future . . .

Art can go beyond the effects of physical nature and, without violating its laws, accumulate in a landscape the effect of light, shadows and harmony, that the real world offers only successively, or even never possesses, to our material senses. In a word, it creates, that is to say that from the uniting of a thousand beauties, which are only alternatives in reality, it produces from them a unity surpassing nature's work. It is this beauty, the distillation of all the scattered beauties in the real world, which in literature, in music and in painting one calls poetry.

For Bonnardot, the artist's task is to combine multiple aspects of nature to create a unified beauty. Photography, seeing through one lens at one time and in one place is, by virtue of its construction, incapable of artistic creation.

Those who held that photography could fulfill the aesthetic requirements of the fine arts, but only by adopting beaux-arts aesthetics, agreed implicitly with Bonnardot's first premise: that art cannot be founded in a direct optical transfer from nature. However, they differed from him in that they recognized that certain photographic practices could create images which mimic those of such old masters as Van Dyck, Rubens and Titian. In so doing, they applied to photography the "theory of sacrifices" in which the artist sacrifices fidelity to nature for the sake of interpretive truth. The artist's role, then, was to eliminate all inessentials--details and other extraneous elements--in order to better grasp the essence of the subject. Significantly, proponents of this position condemned the Daguerreotype for its "indiscreet prolixity of detail" in favor of the softer and less precise Calotype.1 It should be noted that in seeking to rationalize photographic aesthetics with those established for painting, they were forced into an engagement with the precise visual and working properties of specific technical procedures. Although they concluded that photography was not sui generis, their analysis starts from the premise that photography's inherent properties defined the new medium's appropriate utilizations, even to the extent of excluding as artistically invalid specific practices of which it might be capable.

But for those who located artistic validity in the specificity of photography, we see the beginnings of a mediatic determinism. For them, the nature of photography is to be found in its unique material conditions. The following is by Jules-Claude ZiÈgler, from his survey of the photographic works displayed at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1855:

Each of the arts has a domain which is specific to it, a sort of exclusive character which is its essence. Thus, painting on glass has for its special object the most vivid explosions of brilliant colors which it might accomplish, whatever the thought or the subject. It is most of all about the power and the triumph of transparent color revealed by the sun's rays . . . It is so with each of the other arts: whatever they might have in common, each has a character which is exclusively reserved to it.

Applying this principle to photography, we shall say with conviction and even certitude that its essential character is extreme sharpness. The field of photography begins or ends that of the pencil and the engraver's needle. From this one can draw a rule regarding the dimension of prints, which should not exceed certain limits, under pain of entering into a domain which is not its own and where it might encounter the rival hand of the masters. A photographer who, under the pretext of approaching the works of another art, neglects sharpness is no longer in the true: he strays from his element and wanders.

Significantly, ZiÈgler takes the position diametric to that of the adherents of the theory of sacrifices. For him, the artistic justification is to be found precisely in its fineness of detail, not in its capability for soft and diffuse effects.

Among the controversies of the period was one surrounding the propriety of retouching photographic images. EugËne Durieu, President of the SociÈtÈ franÁaise de photographie during the mid-1850s, argued forcefully that retouching was fundamentally inappropriate to the photographic art, and in so doing, arrived at a sort of Greenbergian formalism avant la lettre:

. . . the procedures [of each art form] differentiate them and each has its determinant conditions: these are the conditions which constitute and individualize each branch of art. . . .

Color an engraving; however capable might be the coloring, you won't have a painting, and you will no longer have a gravure: you will have something without a name . . .

. . . each art must find its true power in itself. That is to say, in the skillful use of the procedures which are unique to it. And to engage our present subject, to use the brush in the aid of photography under the pretext of so introducing artistry, that is precisely to exclude the photographic art.

Thus, Durieu, ZiÈgler and their colleagues, in asserting the superiority of "pure" (my word, not theirs) exercises of photography, in refuting the appropriateness of extra-photographic procedures as a priori foreign to the proper exercise of the photographic art, and in indicating that the photographic art by virtue of its material structure is distinct from all other art forms, formulated a theory of the medium which was to be codified by Greenberg as applied to painting and other "high art" almost a century later. In full reaction against what he saw as a gathering decadence in painting, Greenberg located his modernism in a quest for a near-spiritual purity. However, the early photographic theorists were not engaging in any such quest. Rather, they sought to circumscribe an unconventionalized medium by determining the elements essential to its practice, grounding their arguments in photography's material and operational structure. This propensity for reduction, whether Greenbergian in nature or not, is symptomatic of new media. In early photography the tendency was not well developed--the theory was more reductive than the practice--as prevailing aesthetic models and the intense commercialization of the invention tended to counteract reductiveness. In later media however, this analytical reductiveness took varied forms and had wide impact on the aesthetic expression of these media in their formative years. We will see how the arrival of video at exactly the end of the modernist period served to resurrect the modernist quest, however temporarily. What is particularly interesting, although outside the scope of this article, is that the same dynamic seems to be operative in certain utilizations of computer graphics, even though its rise occurs well after modernism's end. It is almost as if there is a "modernist process" re-enacted with each new medium, as many of those artists most concerned with the rationalization of the new technology are drawn into aesthetic concerns replicating those of earlier media.

Many early video artists, having previously worked in other media, expressed strong discontent with prevailing art world models while looking to video for a redefinition or rejuvenation of aesthetic parameters. For Tom DeWitt, originally a filmmaker, modernist reduction had led art to the bivalent state of reductionism and non-intentionality. For him, video represented a means of re-establishing intentionality and compositional mastery in the visual arts.

. . . I realize that dada has given way to data, that video art is on the other side of the keyhole cut in the wall of art history by the black canvas and the exploding sculpture.

After discussing problems of controlling the video image, he asks,

What are meaningful time-related spatial changes? Can light be codified in some equivalent to musical theory? Are there primal forms from which a vocabulary of shape can be built? As fundamental as these questions are, they must be answered before video art can really develop. . . . While there are many interesting things one can do playing with the guts of TV sets and computers, the basic aesthetic questions of space must be solved before universal compositional machines can be built.

For DeWitt, the narrowing of aesthetic possibilities ("the keyhole") could only be overcome by resorting to a new medium which would enable one to construct afresh an expressive language for video, and by extension, for all time-based visual arts. Video was to be the methodological repository for this wide-ranging quest to arrive at a "universal compositional machine."

If for DeWitt the rationalization of a new medium must precede its implementation, others looked to video's technological structure to provide the foundation for this new expressive language. Steve Beck, a video artist and engineer who designed several important video synthesizers for his own use and for the National Center for Experiments in Television in San Francisco, described an evolution which places him solidly in the modernist tradition. Significantly, the process of designing his video synthesizers took him down analytic paths similar to those taken by the Bauhaus even before he was aware of the correspondences. He began by working with the simplest electronic waveforms (sine, triangle and square waves) which when translated to images, create elemental forms.

I had experiences of seeing the visual field break down into elements, and when I was doing the design for the synthesizer, I structured these elements: color, shape, texture, and motion. And I further took the element of shape into sub-categories of point, line, plane, and illusion of space. I later read Kandinsky's work [On the Spiritual in Art] and I found it was really close: I had no foreknowledge of his work when I arrived at the same, or a very similar scheme. I was astounded. I was reading his notes for his class at the Bauhaus and there it was, the very same analysis.

When visual literacy has advanced sufficiently, many will no longer consider the synthesized image as a by-product of television technology, but as a visual reality of its own, distinct from the terms of the representational, photographic image, an image which is more glyphic than literal.

The appearance of electronic imaging instruments such as the video synthesizer and image processors ushers in a new language of the screen. Non-representational and departing from the conventional television image, these methods will stimulate the awareness of new images in the culture.

Taking a position not unlike that of the Futurists and post-war Constructivists, Beck saw new machines as giving birth to new expressive modes, which are themselves constitutive of cultural progress ("When visual literacy has advanced sufficiently . . ..") He posited a language of the screen, analogous to that of musical composition, on which he based both his compositions and synthesizer designs. This language, formally abstract, was to transcend the denotative and representational to become "a visual reality of its own."

Nam June Paik's initial involvement was in music, and one can read much of his video work as an attempt to transfer certain musical concepts and techniques to a visual medium. Paik had found himself weary with music's institutionalized avant garde, and so employed multiple strategies, including Fluxus performance and video, as a means of finding new possibilities:

I am tired of renewing the form of music. -serial or aleatoric, graphic or five lines, instrumental or bellcanto, screaming or action, tape or live . . . - I hope must renew