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.
  Acconci listens to his own recorded monologue of sexually intimate secrets and repeatedly tries to obscure these secrets by shouting over the tape, demonstrating the paradoxical situation of the artist confounded by two desires: to reveal oneself...
Collection: Early Video Art, Single Titles Tags: performance, sexuality, video history |
Over a montage of family photographs, Freed’s narration questions the consistency of memory and self over time, with Freed displaying a quizzical and sometimes hostile relation to her past. In a manner that recalls philosopher Roland Barthes’s...
Collection: Early Video Art, Single Titles Tags: family, feminism, memory, video history |
As two heavily made-up women take turns directing each other and submitting to each other's kisses and caresses, it becomes increasingly obvious that the camera is their main point of focus. Read against feminist film theory of the "male gaze",...
Collection: Early Video Art, Single Titles Tags: feminism, gender, performance, video history |
Using the structure of a feature film as its basic format, A First Quarter adopts the principles of nouvelle vague cinema. Simultaneous realities, altered flashbacks, and plays on time and space, are all components of the form and...
Collection: Early Video Art, Single Titles Tags: video history |
In 1973, Dan Sandin designed and built a comprehensive video instrument for artists, the Image Processor (IP), a modular, patch programmable, analog computer optimized for the manipulation of gray level information of multiple video inputs....
Collection: Early Video Art, Single Titles Tags: chicago art, film or videomaking, image processing, video history |
Presenting his bare torso to the camera, Nauman meticulously applies, and removes, layers of white and black pigment, to his face, arms, and chest. Beyond the link to body art, and the idea of treating the human body as artistic subject matter...
Collection: Early Video Art, Single Titles Tags: body, performance, video history |
For Example: Decorated is a talk show featuring art world personalities Britte Le Va, Peter Gordon, and James Sarkis. The show begins with Le Va reciting the credits; then she introduces herself, Soviet style—as in Do You Believe in...
Collection: Early Video Art, Single Titles Tags: performance, video history |
TVTV's inside view of the 1972 Republican National Convention made broadcast history. While network cameras focused on the orchestrated renomination of Richard Nixon, TVTV's rag-tag army of guerrilla television activists turned their cameras on...
Collection: Early Video Art, Single Titles Tags: documentary, history, media analysis, politics, video history |
The Videofreex conducted this interview with Fred Hampton, the Deputy Chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, in October 1969, just over a month before he was killed by the Chicago police.
Collection: Videofreex Archive, Early Video Art, Single Titles Tags: activism, african-american, crime or violence, death and dying, history, interview, race |
