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.
  In her oft-cited essay “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” Rosalind Krauss says, “self-encapsulation—taking the body or psyche as its own surround—is everywhere to be found in the corpus of video art” (October 1, Spring 1976). This...
Collection: Early Video Art, Single Titles Tags: body, feminism, video history |
Acconci sits with a man and a woman before a microphone. The man and the woman read from two different texts (novels by Mickey Spillane and Raymond Chandler), and Acconci repeats everything the man says. From time to time, an off-screen voice...
Collection: Early Video Art, Single Titles Tags: conceptual art, gender, language, performance, video history |
Holt's terrain is her Aunt Ethel's home in New Bedford, Massachusetts, presented in still images and excerpts from letters to the artist from her aunt. Holt pays particular attention to her aunt's poignant story of aging, altering the images by "...
Collection: Early Video Art, Single Titles Tags: aging, family, feminism, video history |
In this now infamous tape, exemplary of his early transgressive performance style, Acconci sits and relates a masturbatory fantasy about a girl rubbing his legs under the table. Carrying on a rambling dialogue that shifts back and forth between...
Collection: Early Video Art, Single Titles Tags: conceptual art, gender, performance, sexuality, video history |
I moved three thousand miles from the east coast to join the feminist art program at CAL ARTS in 1973. I had only been in LA three weeks when Judy Chicago took us to a "Menstruation" art exhibition at Womanspace Gallery. The exhibit...
Collection: Early Video Art, Single Titles Tags: body, feminism, gender, video history |
“[This tape] gives a clear picture of the consistency of Jonas’s concerns. The performance was based upon the merging of two fairy tales—The Frog Prince told backward and The Boy Who Went Out To Learn Fear told forward. These...
Collection: Early Video Art, Single Titles Tags: feminism, gender, myth, performance, video history |
In this well-known early tape, Jonas manipulates the grammar of the camera to create the sense of a grossly disturbed physical space. The space functions as a metaphor for the unstable identity of the costumed and masked female figure roaming the...
Collection: Early Video Art, Single Titles Tags: body, feminism, mental landscape, performance, sound, video history |
Gusella's title creates a pun on the term video "tape" by using a split screen in which one half is the electronic negative of the other. Gusella set up a glass sheet and suspended it from light poles. The glass was covered with black or white...
Collection: Early Video Art, Single Titles Tags: image processing |
