The Electric Mirror: Reflecting on Video Art in the 1970s

"Benglis manipulates generations of video footage to confound our sense of time; she implies an infinite regression of time and space — Benglis making faces in front of a monitor of her making faces in front of a monitor of her... ad infinitum. The viewer retains a sense of the images sequentiality, although the sequence of creation is not revealed in a logical, orderly fashion, and is heavily obscured by the random layering and continual repetition of aural and visual components."

— Carrie Przybilla,"Synopses of Videotapes", Lynda Benglis: Dual Natures (Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 1991)

This title was in the original Castelli-Sonnabend video art collection.

In Sonnier’s video tape TV In and TV Out, two images are superimposed, one shot off network television and the other shot from a studio performance situation involving some of the materials and visual qualities of his sculptures. This live image is colorized by a device which adds color to a black and white image and in turn manipulates the color. Colorized color is more opaque and less three-dimensionally tactile than synthesized color, but it is tactile in its video scan-line texture.

“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.”

— Bruce Kurtz, “Video Is Being Invented", Arts Magazine (December/January 1973)

A reverse striptease, non-stop comedic monologue about shopping for clothes, while eating corn nuts. Dressing Up was inspired by the artist’s mother’s penchant for bargain hunting. Mogul produced Dressing Up as a student in the feminist art program at the California Institute of the Arts in 1973.

This now classic video was shown in Southland Video Anthology in 1975 at the Long Beach Museum of Art. Curated by David Ross, it was one of the first museum surveys of video art in the United States. Thirty years later Dressing Up has been exhibited internationally, and was exhibited at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, in 2008.

"On mother-daughter relationships and clothes that make the woman. Turning her barbed wit both inwards and outwards, this pioneering video artist reflects on women’s private and public lives."

— Josh Siegel, Curator, Museum of Modern Art, New York City

"One of the great things about Dressing Up is that it totally just undoes every notion of how in society at the time you might be expecting a woman to act, and then the fact that Mogul is naked eating corn nuts, which is the most unglamorous type of image, just puts it over the top."

— Glenn Phillips, Curator, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

"Susan Mogul's very funny video stories, in one of which (Dressing Up) she proceeds from disrobed to robed, reminiscing about the history of each item of clothing."

— Lucy Lippard, MS Magazine

Going Around In Circles continues Holt's interest in perception and point of view. A board with five circular holes is placed in front of the camera. The holes are covered and uncovered to reveal five people enacting a set of activities that involves walking between five spots and turning in circles. A discussion takes place between the artist and several of the "performers" which addresses the various physicalities of the action: the experience of being on the ground, watching the actions take place through the prop, and through the playback monitor, as well as notions of scale, and the chance happenings that take place within any system.

Copyright Holt/Smithson Foundation.

“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?”

— David Antin, “Video: The Distinctive Features of the Medium,” Video Art: An Anthology, eds. Ira Schneider and Beryl Korot (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: 1974)

This title was in the original Castelli-Sonnabend video art collection.

When I look for the lightning, it never strikes. When I look away, it does. Filmed inside a car, this tape focuses on observation of natural phenomena, presenting the obverse of the, "If a tree falls in the woods..." conundrum. Does observation change the course of events? Can you believe in things you don't see? In this experiment, the camera occupies a privileged position — showing the woman and what she sees, as well as what she cannot see.

This title was originally part of the the Castelli-Sonnabend video art collection.

This title is also available on Surveying the First Decade: Volume 1.

This title is also available on Sympathetic Vibrations: The Videoworks of Paul Kos.

Using highly-manipulated and over-processed images, Latham investigates the process of video as inherently fragmented. Weaving together various people’s impressions of the artist and her work, the work demonstrates important parallels between video, storytelling, and the formation of identity — all processes of active fabrication that blend “lies” and truth in the construction of a certain reality, history, or past. Labeling an image of herself talking as “her most recent explanation,” Latham addresses “the construction of her video personality” as an identity outside of herself.

This title is also available on Barbara Latham Videoworks: Volume 1.