Early Video Art
Early Video Art is a collection of over 200 titles that are central to an understanding of the historical development of video art. This collection includes, but is not limited to, many titles from the original Castelli-Sonnabend collection, the first and most prominent collection of video art assembled in the United States. All of the work in this collection was produced between 1968 and 1980. These works represent important examples of the first experiments in video art, and include conceptual and feminist performances recorded on video, experiments with the video signal, and "guerilla" documentaries representing a counter-cultural view of the historical events of the 1960s and 70s. Many of these tapes represent a desire for a radically redefined television experience that is centered on the innovative, the personal, the political and the non-commercial.
  This extraordinary performance carries a wealth of associative meanings in the sexual dynamics of privacy and power-man and woman pitted against each other in a struggle for mental and physical control.
Collection: Early Video Art, Single Titles Tags: conceptual art, performance, video history |
Capitalizing on the visual aspect of musical performance, Quad Suite explores the essential link between the image of music and its sound. In Six Vibrations, the camera is riveted to a close-up of the four upper frets of Landry’...
Collection: Early Video Art, Single Titles Tags: music, sound, video history |
Two years after the riots and deaths at Attica, New York, a community day was organized at Greenhaven, a federal prison in Connecticut. Think Tank, a prisoners' group, coordinated efforts with African-American community members outside the prison...
Collection: Early Video Art, Single Titles Tags: documentation, politics, race, video history |
There has to be a way to win is the refrain. Three women fold clothes, stroll and shop as they discuss jealousy, murder and dead bodies. An enquiry into the generosity of women. Players: Trina Vester, Karin Westerlund, Lise Kelleman....
Collection: Early Video Art, Single Titles Tags: experimental film |
The Red Tapes is a three-part epic that features the diary musings of a committed outsider: revolutionary, prisoner, artist. The series offers a fragmented mythic narrative and a poetic reassessment of the radical social and aesthetic...
Collection: Early Video Art, Single Titles Tags: performance, politics, video history |
Two performers, Acconci and a young woman, occupy two wooden boxes in separate rooms, connected via monitor, camera, and microphone. The situation is symbolic of a vicarious and distended power relation, a relationship built through and reliant...
Collection: Early Video Art, Single Titles Tags: gender, installation, performance, video history |
In a piece commissioned by Remy Martin, Birnbaum adopts the language of commercial advertising, using the body, gestures, and glances of a heavily made-up woman to create a scene of glamour and romance—while slipping in a disparaging narrative...
Collection: Early Video Art, Single Titles Tags: consumer culture, feminism, video history |
“Nancy Holt’s Revolve, a videotape where the artist, off-camera, interviews her friend Dennis Wheeler who is dying of leukemia, uses his illness and mental reflection as a metaphysical site. Her interview is recorded from the perspective...
Collection: Early Video Art, Single Titles Tags: death and dying, video history |
The inverted camera catches Nauman standing at the end of the room, slowly spinning around on one foot, first head down in one direction, then head up in the other direction. The tape seems to be as much a trial of Nauman’s endurance as an...
Collection: Early Video Art, Single Titles Tags: body, performance, video history |
