Text by Kate Horsfield, Executive Director, Video Data Bank

Throughout her life, Lyn Blumenthal was concerned with and worked simultaneously on many ideas which centered on the need to develop a meaningful personal expression as a working artist in video, and to contribute to an understanding and analysis of cultural, political and art issues in which video and media play an important role. Sometimes these two forms of working remained separate but often they overlapped. One led to the founding and development of the Video Data bank, to participating on grant panels, writing articles and lecturing, and the other led to her personal and creative output. Her early sculpture, drawings, and video installations can be seen as interwoven fragments and progressive examples of a process that grew into the construction of her won video tapes and expanded into a political analysis of feminism through the What Does She Want series of video tapes.

I first met Lyn in Colorado in 1972. When we returned to Chicago we began meeting to converse in the afternoons. Both of us were working artists: Lyn made sculpture, I made drawings; but each of us felt a level of dissatisfaction with the development of the work we were doing. We were still searching, and the early feminist dialogue that was becoming a source of nourishment and a dynamic for change in women's lives become a force in trying to reach a higher level of personal self-definition.

Lyn was driving taxi and saving money to buy a Porta-pac. (a portable half inch open reel record and playback deck) When she finally gathered the money to make the purchase, I quickly became engaged with her in the video process. From the beginning, the commitment to feminist dialogue and the need to work from our own personal frustration as artists led us to a desire to examine the working patterns of older women artists.

Alternative video seemed the perfect tool to break through the prevailing cultural and mythical constructs of male creativity. We chose the video interview format to reveal a better understanding of the serious commitment and accomplishments in women's work. Lyn and I made six tapes on women between 1974-75. All of these tapes were made on half inch open reel tape, and unedited. The shooting format which we have used for all subsequent interview tapes was determined in the first interview made with Joan Mitchell---- single fixed camera, tight focus on subject, off camera interviewer. Lyn was behind the camera; I did the interviews. We felt that the ease and low-production demands of half-inch video were perfect for presenting the intimacy, and depth of an artist describing the development of her work. This was the beginning of a very long, very meaningful collaboration between us that lasted until her death in 1988.

After completing our graduate degrees at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1976, we wrote a proposal to oversee a very small collection of 125 videotapes called the Video Data Bank. This collection consisted of student works in video, documentation of lectures by the school's visiting artists. The original proposal stated:

In order for the Video Data Bank to operate as a full-range facility it needs to become someone's major focus. The way we conceptualize it at this point is that it requires more than the regular amount of energy that goes with whatever one assumes to be a "regular job." Assuming responsibility for the Data Bank has no connection with clock hours or even job title categories: what would you call us--teacher, artist, babysitter, janitor, curator, grant writer, technician, secretary? It has more to do with something someone loves.
— Lyn Blumenthal / Kate Horsfield March 31, 1976

In addition to assuming our new administrative responsibilities in the Video Data Bank, we continued to make interview tapes with women artists, but become more involved with the notion of expanding the Video Data Bank collection of interviews into a balanced public record that reflected the concepts, attitudes, and working styles of contemporary art and artists. The accumulated production of these tapes also let to their distribution ans educational tool for other younger artists. This collection of taped interviews developed into the ON Art and Artist Series and, in 1983, we organized another distribution collection called Video Tape Review. This second collection consists of experimental video work by artists and independent producers. Gradually, all of the distribution programs and methodologies currently employed in the Video Data Bank were put into place.

As Lyn became more focused on the growing demands of the Video Data Bank, she also began to identify more closely with video art rather than sculpture. She began producing her own tapes: Social Studies, Part 1: Horizontes; Social Studies, Part 2: The Academy; Arcade and Doublecross were all produced between 1983 and 1985.

Lyn had a unique method for constructing and editing video tapes which was somewhat incomprehensible to others but completely clear to herself. She built up her vision of the tape by shooting Polaroid SX-70 shots of each in and out point for the edit and then she constructed a paper cut with typed dialogue under each shot. She would line up the paper cut on the wall with push pins and adjust the images until she had the sequences right. Then she would take the paper cut to the in-line room for the post-production. This process reveals Lyn's charmed ability to abandon rules by abbreviating the tedious procedures of logging information, and refining the conceptual process by making a rough cut, in favor of following her own internal sense and vision.

In 1984, the Video Data Bank sponsored and developed a project called the Video Drive In. The purpose of the project was to create an innovative (and spectacular) venue for presenting independent video to a non-art based audience of persons from around the Chicago area. This project was a highly experimental one in which the Grant Park Bandshell was to be converted into a video drive-in (no cars) and independent video would be projected onto a giant outdoor screen for two nights. More than any other project, this one was emblematic of Lyn's grand scale sense of adventure--a quality that permeated everything she did. A thirty foot scaffolding structure was built, a huge 18' by 24' screen was designed for the project, 60,000 pounds of cement block were used to anchor the screen against the wind blowing off Lake Michigan. One-inch playback equipment was set up outdoors in the park and a GE Light Valve projector was flown in from the East Coast for the projection. All of these elements were brought together on the day of the projection and no one was sure that it would work. It rained during most of the day and the staff in the VDB was very nervous. But, at the last minute, the bad weather rolled off across the lake and people began to arrive for the big event. The project was a huge success--over 10,000 people came to the Drive In, most of them never having seen 'video art' before.

The curatorial process of selecting and compiling the two programs for the Drive In, The Science of Fiction/ The Fiction of Science initiated a new direction for Lyn. The Drive IN had demonstrated that there was an audience for experimental video work outside the parameters of the art world and she wanted to design a methodology for reaching this audience. The conceptual process of organizing these tapes gave her a larger, more comprehensive sense of how to produce a collection of videotapes chosen from different genres and styles of work, and structured into one thematic unit. She saw this as a potentially viable packaging concept that could extend video beyond the confines of the art world to individual users in the home market.

In the fall of 1985, she began work on the What Does She Want project, a series of 6 video anthologies released on VHS format which compiles many of the most important works by women in performance, film and video. WDSW was constructed as a distribution strategy to resist the art world's tendency to ghettoize women's work. As Adriene Jenik, assistant producer on the project stated: " One response to this structural resistance was the development of alternative venues of exhibition and distribution that strive to promote visual art by women exclusively in order to more effectively connect answers to an audience which was interested, even invested in, seeing artists give them a sense of themselves and their interests presented through the lens of the art world."

What Does She Want, completed shortly before Lyn's death in July, 1988, encompasses many of the issues she had struggled to define and chose as focus in her video work: the private versus the public persona; the meaning of personal identity and expression in a "media packaged world"; the construction of the 'self' in relation to sexuality; the fragmentation and re-construction of visual images. Lisa Steele describes Lyn's commitment to progressive art: "Always outspoken, often abrasive, she spoke up on behalf of content, focused political critique, feminism and the right of artists to make work with a 'message'."

Lyn was a very dedicated artist and worker; but she was hardly chained down by her serious dedication to work--she loved to have a good time, she had an outrageous presence--she was a 'grande dame' equally known for her high style of dress, shopping sprees and dinner parties. In her, the life force was at an extreme. Bruce Yonemoto describes her passing eloquently: "Her Image now magnifies as it moves from the world of the real to that of the dream."
— Kate Horsfield, Executive Director, Video Data Bank