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Text and Commentary

Beryl Korot

1977 00:29:44 United StatesB&WStereo16:9Video

Description

Text and Commentary is a work of several components. There are five finely woven weavings programmed with slight changes in pattern structure as you read from weave 1 to weave 5. Opposite these in the exhibition are five video monitors built into a wall.There are also five weavers’ notations of enlarged sections of each of the five weaves, and pictographic notations of the video portion of the work. All of these provide varying perspectives of virtually the same information but in a variety of scales, media, and contexts and translated into different systems of compositions.

Korot was one of the first to acknowledge the loom as the first computer on earth in that it programs pattern according to a numerical structure, and also that the loom, video and print communication technologies all encrypt information in lines, a link between the ancient and the modern.

The installation work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, NYC. VDB is pleased to offer a single-channel composite video of the five-channel video element of the artwork for educational use.

Accompanying this work are the drawings and video notations Korot created for the exhibition. A drawing is below and a PDF with the drawings and video notations is available here.

Text and Commentary drawing

About Beryl Korot

Beryl Korot is a pioneer of video art, and of multiple channel work in particular. By applying specific structures inherent to loom programming to the programming of multiple channels she brought the ancient and modern worlds of technology into conversation. This extended to a body of work on handwoven canvas in an original language based on the grid structure of woven cloth and to a series of paintings on canvas based on this language. She co-founded and edited Radical Software, the first publication to focus on the potentials of video as an art form (1970-74) and tool for social change.

More recently she has created drawings which combine ink, pencil, and digitized threads, as well as large scale tapestries” where threads are printed on paper and woven.

Two early multiple channel works—Dachau 1974 and Text and Commentary—have been installed in exhibitions on both the history of video art and textiles. Her works have been seen at the Whitney Museum (1980, 1993, 2000, 2002); the Kitchen, New York, NY (1975); Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, NY (1977); Documenta 6, Kassel, Germany (1977);  the John Weber Gallery, NYC (1986); the Köln and Düsseldorf Kunstvereins (1989 and 1994); the Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh, PA (1990); the Reina Sofia, Madrid, (1994); the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2010); bitforms gallery, New York, NY (2012/2018); the Whitworth Gallery, Manchester, England (2013); Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, Germany (2013); Art Basel, Basel, Switzerland (2014), the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (2014); Tate Modern, London, England (2014); the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (2015); Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, ICI Project 35, Moscow, Russia (2015/16), SFMOMA, San Francisco, CA (2016), Santa Fe Thoma Art House (2017), LOOP festival, Santa Agata Capella, Barcelona (2017), ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany (2017-18); Thinking Machines: Art and Design in the Computer Age, 1959–1989 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (2017-18); Documenta Politik und Kunst, Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin (2021/22); Core Memory, Newcomb Museum (2022); Key Operators, Kunstverein Munchen, Fall, 2024; Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2025), amongst others.

Two video/music collaborations with Steve ReichThe Cave (1993) and Three Tales (2002)—brought video installation art into a theatrical context and have been performed worldwide since 1993. Both works continue to be performed and were exhibited as video installations at venues including the Whitney Museum, NYC, NY (1993); the Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, (1994); the Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain (1994) , the Kunstverein, Düsseldorf, Germany (1994); Historisches Museum, Frankfurt, Germany (2000), ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany, 2008.