Video History

Boomerang

This is a tape which analyzes its own discourse and processes as it is being formulated. The language of Boomerang, and the relation between the description and what is being described, is not arbitrary. Language and image are being formed and revealed as they are organized.

This title is only available on Surveying the First Decade: Volume 1.

Paul McCarthy

Black and White Tapes

Black and White Tapes derive from a series of performances Paul McCarthy undertook in his Los Angeles studio from 1970 to 1975. Conceived for the camera and performed alone or with only a few people present, these short performances use video to articulate both monitor and studio space. In the first excerpt, McCarthy paints a white line on the floor with his face, dragging his body from one end of the studio to the other. In doing so, McCarthy performs a recognizable formal gesture--drawing a white line.

Vito Acconci

Association Area

As a document of an early performance, this video details the process of orientating the body and self in space, providing a physical metaphor for the process of adjusting oneself in society.

"Blindfolded, ears plugged: our goal is to sense each other’s movement and bearing, to attempt to assume the same movement and bearing. An off-screen voice, heard only by the audience, gives directions that would help us attain our goal."

—Vito Acconci, "Concentration-Container-Assimilation," Avalanche 6 (Fall 1972)

Hermine Freed

Art Herstory

“In her brilliant video Art Herstory, [Freed] has restaged art history, putting herself in the model’s role in numerous paintings.... Time dissolves under her humorous assault—one moment in the painting, then out of the canvas and into that period, then back in the studio."

—Jonathan Price, “Video Art: a Medium Discovering Itself,” Art News 76 (January 1977)

An excerpt of this title (14:49) is also included on Surveying the First Decade: Volume 1.

Woody Vasulka

Artifacts

An important record of Woody’s process of experimentation and play: a collection of images initiated by basic algorithmical procedures to verify the functional operation of a newly-created tool—the “Digital Image Articulator”—designed and constructed by Woody and Jeffrey Schier. Saying at the beginning of the tape, “The images come to me as they come to you, in a spirit of experimentation.” Vasulka presents a series of manipulations in which the image shifts and moves, dissolving through two- into three-dimensionality.

Lynda Benglis

Enclosure

Benglis uses the video format as a metaphor for other types of limiting conditions or limited realities. "The constant motion of Benglis's hand-held camera (scanning her studio and two television sets) calls attention to the limits of the camera's field of vision: the walls of the studio are the ultimate 'enclosure' of the camera's eye. The open window and the sound of children (from the street) seem to suggest release; yet the confines of the studio are never truly broken."

John Baldessari

Ed Henderson Reconstructs Movie Scenarios

Baldessari has Ed Henderson examine obscure movie stills and attempt to reconstruct the films’ narratives. By removing the image from its ordinary context—in this instance the chronological flow of film time—the process of interpretation itself and the contextual meaning carried by images is examined. During these interpretative exercises, Ed Henderson urges the viewer to question where the meaning of an image lies: within the image itself or within the spectators’ reading of the image.

This title was in the original Castelli-Sonnabend video art collection.

Nancy Holt

East Coast, West Coast

In this rare and humorous record of the art dialogue of the late 1960s, Holt and "guest" Robert Smithson assume opposing artistic viewpoints: the uptight, intellectual New Yorker versus the laid-back Californian. Their play-acting lays bare the cliches and stereotypes of a "bi-coastal" art world. While Holt stresses analytic, systematic thinking, Smithson represents the polar opposite, privileging visceral experience and instinct, saying, "I never read books; I just go out and look at the clouds." and "Why don't you stop thinking and start feeling?"

Martha Rosler

The East Is Red, The West Is Bending

Rosler uses the format of a cooking demonstration (as in Semiotics of the Kitchen) to address cultural transaction--the meeting of Eastern and Western cultures. Reading directly from a West Bend Electric Wok instruction booklet, Rosler wryly comments upon the Oriental mystique conjured by the West Bend manufacturers, a mystique evoked and then "improved" upon through Western technology--i.e. non-stick surfaces and electric power.

Susan Mogul

Dressing Up

A reverse striptease, non-stop comedic monologue about shopping for clothes, while eating corn nuts. Dressing Up was inspired by the artist’s mother’s penchant for bargain hunting. Mogul produced Dressing Up as a student in the feminist art program at the California Institute of the Arts in 1973. This now classic video was shown in Southland Video Anthology in 1975 at the Long Beach Museum of Art. Curated by David Ross, it was one of the first museum surveys of video art in the United States.

Lawrence Weiner

Do You Believe in Water?

The performers are seated around a pink octagonal table on pink, violet, and silver cinder blocks. One performer (Robert Stearns) stands up, recites the credits for the piece, and then says, “Do you believe in water? Robert Stearns.” He claps and turns to the next performer who asks the same question and gives his name. Next the players split up into pairs and attempt to relate to each other—playing tug-of-war, making love, arguing over who has the most integrity, and fighting for possession of the props.

Peter Campus

Double Vision

Campus investigates the metaphoric overlap between properties of the video camera and processes of human perception, an area of great interest to many early videomakers.

Martha Rosler

Domination and the Everyday

Rosler calls Domination and the Everyday, with its fragmented sounds, images, and crawling text, an artist-mother's "This Is Your Life." Throughout this work, we hear--but do not see--a mother and small child at dinner and bedtime while a radio airs an interview with a gallerist about California art of the 1960s. The soundtrack moves into overdrive with feedback, a passing train, barking dogs, and a bedtime story. The visuals, all still images, are drawn from television, movies, advertising, and the family album.

Lawrence Weiner

Done To

Done To (alternately titled It Is, Done To) consists of simple still-frames accompanied by a complex, incongrous soundtrack, or silence. There are instances where image and sound coalesce; however, the majority of the images are overwhelmed by the at-times symphonic, at-times cacaphonous soundtrack, displacing the normal film viewing experience. The standard film format of going from frame to fram--and then and then and the--is what this film is concerned with.

Lynda Benglis

Document

With Benglis standing in front of a photograph of herself, which is then affixed to a monitor bearing her image, the notion of "original" is complicated—making the viewer acutely aware of the layers of self-images and layers of "self" that are simultaneously presented. Like Martha Rosler's Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained, Benglis presents the viewer with a "document" of questionable veracity. It is a document attesting not to the "real" Benglis, but to the impossibility of discerning one real identity.

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