“The measure of Sonnier’s color video tapes is not the extent to which he extends painterly values, though there is some continuity there, but the extent to which he defines the surface, space, and color of the material of video.”^[1] TV In and TV Out superimposes images shot from network television and shots from a studio performance. This is a prime example of Sonnier’s experiments with the formal properties of computer-generated video by using a Scanimate computer. This video lends itself to the desire of artists to exploit feedback and manipulate TV’s technical system.

^[1] Bruce Kurtz, “Video Is Being Invented,” Arts Magazine (Dec./Jan. 1973)

“I thought perhaps you’d like to see a demonstration of the new massage chair that we just got in. It — the reason for its  — it looks revolutionary, it doesn’t look really like a typical massage chair, and that’s because I think Mies van der Rohe had a part, or at least he was a consultant, to the firm that designed this…”. William Wegman opens the video short titled Massage Chair with this grand statement to describe what looks like an ordinary plastic chair. At first the artist’s head is cut from the frame, but he eventually sits down to “demonstrate” the extraordinary qualities of the chair. One of the works on Selected Works: Reel 3, produced during 1972-73, and re-mastered in 2005 when several newly available titles were added. Although this work does not feature his dog and video companion Man Ray, it is a humorous example of the artist’s penchant for skit parody, poking fun at television ads and infomercials.

John Baldessari has demonstrated a lasting interest in language and semantics, articulating these concerns through the use of puns, or the juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated images and words. He has defied formalist categories by working in a variety of media — films, video, print, photography, text, drawing — most commonly associated with Conceptual or Minimalist art. “In Baldessari’s wonderful Inventory, the artist presents to the camera for thirty minutes an accumulation of indiscriminate and not easily legible objects arranged in order of increasing size and accompanied by a deadpan description — only to have the sense of their relative size destroyed by the continual readjustment of the camera [in order to] keep them within the frame. Who can forget Adlai Stevenson’s solemn television demonstration of the ‘conclusive photographic evidence’ of the Cuban missile sites, discernible over the TV screen as only gray blurs?”^[1]

^[1] David Antin, “Video: The Distinctive Features of the Medium"

One of the founders of the Bay Area Conceptual Art movement in California, Paul Kos is recognized as a conceptual artist and early innovator of video art. Since the 1970s, Kos has produced a significant catalogue of video work; many of the works from his early period were made in collaboration with his then-wife, Marlene. In Lightning, we see Marlene inside a car with her back to the windshield and open road. She continually looks behind her, saying, "When I look for the lightning, it never strikes. When I look away, it does." Like Kos’s other works from this period, this video focuses on observation of natural phenomena. This work and others ask if observation changes the course of events, or if they would happen anyway.