Video Art

Video Art, a term describing works of art that employ video and television apparatus and technology. This type of art originated in the 1960s, grew rapidly in popularity as equipment became more accessible and sophisticated, and by the 1990s had become one of the favourite means of expression among avant-garde artists. The term is a broad and imprecise one, and as well as sometimes being hard to distinguish from experimental film-making, “Video Art” often overlaps with other fields of avant-garde art: many conceptual artists, for example, have used video as a convenient way of recording their work.

The creator of video art is generally reckoned to be Nam June Paik, a Korean-born artist and musician who settled in New York in 1964. As early as 1959 he experimented with using magnets to distort pictures on television screens, and in 1965 he began using portable video equipment (a Sony Portapak hand-held camera), virtually as soon as it came on the market. He often worked with the cellist Charlotte Moorman (1940-1994), their best-known collaboration probably being TV Bra for Living Sculpture (1969), in which she played her cello while wearing the garment of the title. It incorporated two miniature television receivers in which the images changed in accordance with the music.

This work was included in the exhibition “TV as a Creative Medium” (1969), a show that is regarded as a landmark in the acceptance of video art as a distinct genre. It was held at the Howard Wise Gallery, New York, and Wise later founded a company called Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) to edit and distribute artists' tapes. By the 1980s video was becoming so popular that numerous artists were using it as their primary means of expression rather than merely as an adjunct to other work, and major museums began to set up specialist departments to cater for it.

Video art has attracted exponents for a number of reasons. Its father figure, Nam June Paik, considered himself an entertainer and his work was typically lighthearted in spirit. Some practitioners, however, approach video primarily from a technical angle. The American Dan Sandin, for example, developed his own electronic processor to alter images. Other artists are interested in the medium mainly as a means of exploring social or personal issues. In particular, it has appealed strongly to artists with a feminist agenda. To many such artists, the traditional forms of expression (such as painting or sculpture) are tainted with patriarchal conventions, and newer media such as video offer more scope for exploring their ideas. The Palestinian-born, British-resident Mona Hatoum has even used video equipment to photograph inside her own bodily orifices.

In contrast with such self-referential use of the medium, some video artists attempt to deal with universal experiences such as birth and death. The most notable example is the American Bill Viola, who is probably the best-known specialist in video art working today. He is often inspired by Old Master paintings, as for example in Observance (2002), a study in grief based compositionally on the celebrated Four Apostles (1526, Alte Pinakothek, Munich) by Albrecht Dürer. It is part of a series called The Passions. Viola shot Observance on 35mm film at high speed, then drastically slowed the film, so that it is seen in extreme slow motion, and transferred it to high-definition digital video; it is played on a flat plasma screen that produces extremely sharp images and enables subtle shifts in expression to register. Viola usually makes these works in only small editions, and they are sometimes shared by major art galleries. One copy of Observance is in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.

The technical sophistication of which video is capable has been enhanced by the use of computers. Among the artists particularly associated with the merging of the two media is the Canadian Stan Douglas. A representative work by him is Win, Place, or Show (1998; one copy is in Tate Modern, London), in which two images are projected side by side, presenting the same action (a quarrel between two men) simultaneously from different angles. The footage is re-edited by computer, a randomized process generating thousands of variations of the narrative.

Most video art is shown in interior spaces (usually in art galleries), but it has also been presented out of doors to spectacular effect, for example by the American artist Tony Oursler. In 2000, in a work called The Influence Machine, he projected video images in Soho Square, London, creating talking trees and buildings in what has been described as a “psycho-landscape”.

The medium gained greater recognition and a higher profile when video artist Gillian Wearing was awarded the Turner Prize in 1997.