VIIDEI:O IINSTALL ATION CHARACTEI:RSTICS OF AN EXPANDING MEDIIUM
unique hybrid art forms that represent the dominant ideo installations, withhastheir multiple are century twentiethroots, taken in the historic art-making direction toward interdisciplinary boundary-crossing collaborations that connect artists to new ideas and practices, while integrating media technologies and systems into the art world. How can we begin to define these ephemeral, protean art forms that have become
telecommunications issues that were just beginning to be recognized by the general public in the late 1960s. There is no one "official" version of video art's history because of its international and heterogeneous nature as part of a larger set of histories. A primary set of histories that began to define video art took place in the 1960s when the technology was first introduced.
increasingly dominant artistic modes of expression? In this essay, I will first identify some of the significant cultural, conceptual, and
John Hanhardt, one of the first media arts curators in the United States, witnessed much of the early history and has written about
technological characteristics that define video installations; I will then examine three video installations by first-generation artists who
it extensively In 1988, he described how some of the major mid-twentieth century art movements contributed to the initial
helped define the medium.
emergence of video art:
The history of early video installations is imbedded in the larger histories of video as an art form. According to Michael Nash, "It was said a decade ago (by Bill Viola) that video art may have been the only art form to have a history before it had a history, and now its history is 'history' before we had a chance to mourn its passing."'
The potential of artists' video was first apparent in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the art object and its sources were
As an artistic genre, video has become increasingly visible and more
dance. All these movements rejected the notion of the heroic, existential artist-self portrayed in Abstract Expressionism.
predominant in the hyper-mediated world of the early twentyfirst century. Since video's emergence as a distinct technology and art form in the mid-1960s, artists-painters, sculptors, and poets-quickly found in it an expressive medium. Video is now an inexpensive, accessible image-making tool for artists, and many of today's artists working in the plastic and performing arts incorporate video into their dances, theatrical productions, musical performances, sculptural pieces, and multimedia installations.
being re-evaluated in the diverse movements of Pop, Fluxus, Happenings, Minimalism, lettrism, avant-garde film and the intertextual and multi-media programs of performances and
The metaphysics of the Action Painter's canvas was replaced by the matter-of-fact and everyday... One of the inescapable facts of daily life was the omnipresence of television. From the initial questioning in the early 1960s of the myth and power of television to the expansion of technology's potentials in the 1980s, artists have sought to question assumptions of art and 2 art-making. As Hanhardt explained, video art helped reshape and redefine the nature of art and art-makingin the last century through its conceptual links to larger cultural and technological histories, especially television, which had already begun to change people's perceptions of the world. This blending of aesthetic and technological forces emphasizes video art's unique legacy Video art also emerged out of a turbulent era defined by a larger set of radical social and political issues in the late 1960s.Just as Sony was marketing the Portapak video recorder in the mid-1960s, the political landscape in the U.S. was exploding with antiwar protests,
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counterculture be-ins, civil rights actions, and new theories of media introduced in the popular press from the writings of Marshall I-
McLuhan and others. As a result of these larger converging cultural, technological, and social forces, video is not only an art
Cc 14
From its beginnings, video technology used by artists represented a complex, multidimensional set of processes, interrogations, and oppositional practices that extended video beyond the traditional art world due to the ephemeral and technological nature of the final "product" of videotape and live transmission. Early video artists tackled a number of larger political, socioeconomic, and
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world phenomenon. As Marita Sturken explains, "This is a medium whose development embodies many dichotomies of Western culture, whose position at the axis of art, electronic technology, and telecommunications offers a problematic subject for historical 3
interpretation that has no direct antecedents."
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If video art is a problematic art form to define, video installations are even more ambiguous in terms of their historical roots and unique
establishment during the late 1950s and early 1960s. When video first became accessible to artists, it represented a way they could
characteristics. At their most basic, video installations are spatial and temporal art forms that can include the elements of audio and
defiantly work outside the traditional art world to explore video's
video/moving images, sculptural forms, and other visual static or
recording and altering real time; recording and transforming the flow of broadcast television; and creating a spatial or conceptual critical
moving elements situated and aesthetically constructed in a threedimensional space. They also lend themselves to larger cultural
distinctive non-art world features of time-based processes including
distance from the usual televisual and cinematic viewing experience.
and socioeconomic explorations. As Margaret Morse suggests in Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art (1991 ):
Both the representational and presentational aspects of video installations are grounded in the art world. The third aspect,
... exploring the materialization of the conceptual through all
perceptual, revolves around the "live" quality of video and links it
the various modes available to our heavily mediated society
to the counterculture movement that embraced Eastern and Native
is at the heart of the cultural function of video installation.
American religions, cybernetic systems theory, environmental awareness, and psychedelic explorations using mind-altering drugs
In that sense, the "video" in video installation stands for contemporary image-culture per se. Then, each installation is an experiment in the redesign of the apparatus that represents
for expanding consciousness. Video's unique phenomenon of
our culture to itself: a new disposition of machines that project
came close to simulating some of those subjective and technology-
the imagination onto the world and that store, recirculate, and
based processes. "Liveness" enabled artists to explore psychological
display images; and, a fresh orientation of the body in space 4 and a reformulation of visual and kinesthetic experience.
states of mind, levels of consciousness, interior vs. exterior realities,
"liveness," manifested in the ability to record and playback real time,
communication processes, and the body's multi-sensory relationship to both the technologically based media and natural environments.
Chrissie Iles, Whitney Museum of American Art's Anne & Joel Ehrenkranz Curator, elaborates on "a fresh orientation of the body
These perceptual explorations also link to the technological history
in space" when she describes an installation as "a hybrid work of
of cinema and the media of film and television. Hanhardt wrote
art which demands a critical distance (and) the physical presence
about this connection:
of the viewer to complete the work....
Critical distance enables
the viewer to move between immersion and contemplation so that
Video works exploring the artist's relationship to the world
he/she can both experience and analyze the work's intentions and
around him/her have proliferated since process and site-
contents. The viewer's physical presence is crucial because the
specific land art of the 1960s and 1970s dematerialized the art
elements of video installations are arranged by the artist as part of a larger gestalt in a complex cybernetic loop of technology and
object. Part of this response to a landscape/place derives from a unique property of the video medium-the property that
mind/body that form a conversational communication system of
allows an artist to see immediately the image that is recorded
sender (artist) and receiver (audience).
on videotape. This is unlike film celluloid-which must be processed before the image can be screened. The power of
Video installations encapsulate three approaches to art-making--
this essential, indeed central, capacity of video was to have
representational, presentational, and perceptual-which help to
a subtle and profound impact on how the medium itself was
define their protean form and content. Hanhardt described what he
employed. Even prerecorded video carries an immediacy
called the "expanded forms" of video installations as both the visual (representational) and performance (presentational) art forms of "collage" and "de-collage" that create an "intertextual" language,
born from its electronic nature and the almost mythological
including critiques of media's language. As he explained in 1990:
television's "golden age" of live telecast, continues today in the
connotations of video as a "live" medium. This mystique of "live" television, which began in the commercial sector during use of the home video camera recorder and player....'
The spectacular history of the expanded forms of video installation can be seen as an extension of the representational
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Three historical works by first-generation artists exemplify many
techniques of collage into the temporal and spatial dimensions
of the unique characteristics just described. In 1969 Howard
provided by video monitors placed in an intertextual dialogue with other materials.... The technique of de-collage in video
Wise, a wealthy New York City art dealer who was interested in art that incorporated "new" technologies such as kinetic and fight
installation also extends performance and multimedia into a
sculptures, organized the exhibition "TV as a Creative Medium"
critique of the social and ideological by deconstructing existing 6 constructions of communication technologies and industries.
in his gallery. Presenting the works of twelve artists, this seminal
The presentational aspects of video installations also foreground their connection to the larger cultural rebellion against the art
event in the history of video art explored a wide set of issues both FACING PAGE
Nam June Paik's "Participation TV" from the exhibition "TV as a Creative Medium" (1969); courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix
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within and outside the traditional art world. It was the first group
The installation consisted of a 3- x 3-foot wall of nine color TV
exhibition in the U.S. to identify and reify video as a new art form
monitors. Intercut with broadcast images, live images, captured from
and art-making tool. (Soon after the exhibition, Wise closed his
a camera hidden amid the monitors, were fed to the center screen,
gallery in order to fully support the emerging art form of video.
shifting to outer monitors in eight- and sixteen-second intervals. The work situated the viewer in a space where he/she felt firsthand
In 1971, he established the nonprofit organization Electronic Arts Intermix, which has grown into one of the major video art distributors in the world.) All the artists in "TV as a Creative Medium" explored the larger issues around the then-new concept of a "media environment," and especially the phenomenon of television. They presented ideas of how society consciously and unconsciously is shaped by the pervasive landscape of a manmade communications ecology where radio, telephones, and television are ubiquitous technologies in the home and workplace. The exhibition also expressed a utopian, McLuhanesque vision of a "global village" of instant communication and expression through the electronic medium of video/television that anticipated today's wireless world. These were revolutionary ideas signaling a new technological force in art-making practices that would change the very meaning of art. Sturken, in her 1984 article inAferivmage about Wise, describes this landmark show:
the simultaneity of time present and time past as a visceral response [It] effectively pointed to the diverse potential of a new art
to being "inside" the immaterial media space of network television,
form and social tool. Subsequently, the show became renowned for the inspiration it provided for many artists and future
which itself is a blend of multiple, simultaneous time periods.
advocates of video.... Theoretically, they variously saw video
artists' explorations of real and virtual spaces in installations that
as viewer participation, a spiritual and meditative experience,
demonstrate their early colonization of cyberspace:
Video art curator Kathy Rae Huffman has recently described video
a mirror, an electronic palette, a kinetic sculpture, or a cultural machine to be deconstructed. Ripe with ideas and armed with
In the earliest actual practice, video was used in the same way
a heady optimism about the future of communications, these
as surveillance devices are today: itwas employed to keep watch
artists used video as an information tool and as a means of
over and to observe reality... It was ... a valuable experience
gaining understanding and control of television, not solely as
that facilitated artists' understanding of electronic space,
an art form.8
memory and video's ability to document experience in real time.... This act-creating electronic territory and involving
Thus, this show signaled artists' connections to larger ideas and issues
the viewer in it as a physical entity-is a direct predecessor
found outside the art world such as the counterculture movement.
to contemporary, interactive multimedia art and immersive technology. Installation artists introduced strong concepts of
One of the key works in the show was "Wipe Cycle" (1969), created
both psychological and physiological territory, and advanced
by Ira Schneider, a filmmaker, and Frank Gillette, a painter. Gillette
an awareness of extended boundaries, as well as an electronic
was able to gain access to a Portapak video recorder through
ability to define space, time, and energy9
Paul Ryan, McLuhan's research assistant at his Center for Media U.'
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Understanding at Fordham University in the Bronx. "Wipe Cycle"
Another work in the Wise show, "Participation TV" (1969), was
is often mentioned in the historical writings about "TV as a Creative
created by Nam June Paik, a key figure in video art history. Paik
Medium" as the most successful and intriguing work in the show. It
was one of the first artists to take on the phenomenon of broadcast
represented the artists' view of video as "a cultural machine to be
television as both a sculptural icon and a powerful communications
deconstructed" and was one of the earliest uses of video surveillance in an artwork to incorporate the viewer directly into the real-time imagery of the piece. It was also one of the first video installations 16
to directly address the larger issues around communications media and their pervasiveness in a larger "media ecology" that blurred the boundaries between the body and the phenomenon of recorded (time past) and real time (time present) displayed on a TV screen.
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ABOVE
Ira Schneider and Frank Gillette's "Wipe Cycle" from the exhibition "TV as a Creative Medium" (1969); courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix FACING PAGE
Still from video/sound installation "Room for St. John of the Cross" (1983) by Bill Viola; photo by Kira Perov
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medium. Hanhardt wrote about Paik in his essay for The Luminous
and future tenses. Morse also distinguishes between two types of
Image video installation catalog in 1984:
video installations that present Time, the first type describing both "Wipe Cycle" and "Participation TV," which, she states:
The transformation of television into a post-modern art form and meaning of television. To Paik the popular perception of
explore the fit between images and the built environment.... Two types of video installation art can be differentiated by
television as only a mass commodity of entertainment, or as
tense. Closed-circuit video plays with "presence" .... Shifting
simply a radio with pictures, was shortsighted and he set out
back and forth between two and three dimensions, closed-
as an artist to both demystify and change it. As he expressed
circuit installations explore the fit between images and the
came about through Paik's understanding of the socialpresence
... television represented a new communications technology
built environment and the process of mediating identity and
of enormous potential and signaled the beginning of a post-
power. [Secondly, t]he recorded-video art installation can be
industrial age where manufacturing, the organization of
compared to the spectator wandering about on a stage.... That
society, and the making of art would be transformed.1
is, the technique for raising referent worlds to consciousness is not mimesis, but simulation.' 3
In "Participation T17" Paik worked with engineers to distort the live signals from several television cameras that were displayed on multiple
Morse's second type describes installations in the 1980s that attempted
monitors. The name "Participation TV" is an ironic comment on the actual one-way, non-participatory nature of broadcast television.
to create immersive architectural environments through the use of
Paik's revolutionary views about television and its relationship to
articulated cybernetic communication cycle of viewer and media
the artist and society came out of his training as a musician and his
technology beyond the single surveillance mode into more complex
active participation in the New York-based Fluxus movement, which
loops that included narratives and simulations of altered states of
Hanhardt describes as "anti-high art ... that resulted in events which highlighted the materiality of consumer culture.""I
consciousness. They also situated the viewer inside the work as an
large-screen cinematic video projection. They expanded the earlier-
active participant, connecting the body to a range of media-based phenomena that were potentially (and intentionally) transformative.
Out of this fertile environment of new ideas and technologically based art-making processes, Paik began to develop a new way of thinking about television and its role in society. Paik's "Participation TV" was one of many early approaches to making video/TV artworks that included the "TV Bra for Living Sculpture" (1969) series with cellist Charlotte Moorman, also seen for the first time at the Wise exhibit. Television's sculptural element is represented by the single TV monitor on a stand, with several video cameras focused to capture both a wide shot and the viewer's face as a close-up image on the screen. It is similar to "Wipe Cycle" because it uses a closedcircuit video surveillance system that posits the viewer as an active performer inside a live electronic image/playback loop where he/ she performs as both viewer and actor in real and televisual space. This almost visceral connection linking the physical human body in actual space to a real-time virtual representation on a video screen has become a defining characteristic of video installations. New media
"Room for St. John of the Cross" by Viola, first shown in 1983, indicates how video installations quickly expanded into separate,
critic Holly Willis elaborates in her recent book about digital cinema:
controllable spaces intended to be dramatic, immersive environments
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through the artful combination of sound, lighting, and the use of Video installation's focus on the body is not insignificant. The
multiple monitors and projected video images on walls or screens.
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relationship between the body and technology has grown
Viola's installations are designed to remove the audience from the
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increasingly complex over the last decade such that to speak of one
usual gallery experience of viewing multiple static visual artworks
is to speak of the other Body and machine become co-extensive,
in a large space. They give the viewer a more intense, theatrical
and yet the predominant trope for understanding the relationship
experience of entering a private space much like that of a movie
between the two tends to presuppose a desire to be rid of the body
or live theater. The darkened space is charged with narrative,
altogether, or to view technology as a prosthesis.Y'
multisensory elements that situate the viewer as an active participant inside an environment. As Viola has said, there is no "outside" to
These two video installations are also distinctive because they
the piece. Once viewers enter the dark space of the large room, they
represent the mutability of time in all its simultaneous past, present,
are enveloped by the work, which negates distancing or objectivity.
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17
In 1988, media art historian Deirdre Boyle wrote a detailed
with materials and methodologies not traditionally associated
description of the piece:
with the visual arts.... Marshall McLuhan was one of the key theorists writing in the early 1960s to address the impact that
Within a large room is a smaller room-a low hut that invokes
information technology would have on global culture. This
the cell in which the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic, who was imprisoned by the Catholic church and tortured, composed
formula predicts the shift from objective critique towards a new subjectivity which emphasizes uncertainty and brings both 5 artist and viewer together in a discursive environment.
his most profound mystical poetry. By enclosing his room within the larger room of the installation itself, Viola creates a dialectic between interior and exterior space. And through the
As early forms of installation art, video installations define a unique
metaphysics implicit in the geometry of opposites--inside and
set of characteristics and issues in contemporary art practice and
outside, being and non-being-Viola confers spatiality upon
discourse that are centered on the cybernetic processes of the body's
thought. The larger room is dark, except for one wall where a
real-time interactions with technology, the media environment, and alternative realities. Video installations can now be defined as
video projection screen emits a dim light as a camera dizzily tops. A roaring wind resounds in the space, and the viewer
hybrid art forms that were the first to introduce media technologies as legitimate art-making tools into the cloistered, privileged spaces
feels buffeted and menaced by all that is hostile .... But in the very center of this stormy negative space a warm light inside
of museums and art galleries. They also explore a wide range of phenomena outside the art world that connect human consciousness
the small hut glows through a window... The dialectical opposition between interior and exterior space reflects the
to new techniques involving video surveillance systems and the body
psychological reality of St.John's mystical experience ... 14
introduce a critical awareness of technology and the media
scans the bleak horizon of jagged unsurmountable mountain
located in simultaneous times and spaces. Finally, video installations
This installation is exemplary of video artists' early use of projected
environment as a pervasive landscape into art world discourse and demonstrate how media technologies continue to change the
video to create immersive, even transformative viewer experiences.
process of art-making and the very nature of art.
This close reading of three early video installations reveals
ROBIN OPPENHEIMER
is a PhD student in the School of InteractiveArts and Technology at Simon Fraser Universit in Vancouver
approaches to making art that are more about systems and process, interaction with the viewer, and subjective explorations
Convergence, Hypermedio, and NOTES 1. Michael oash,"Pinion After Television:Teehnocultmral theNew Media Arts Fmld" in Michael Renaoand ErikaSuderburg eut, Resolutions (Minneapalis: Art UniversiyofMinnesonaPres; 1995),382. Z John Hanhard; "77e Disourseof Landscape Widea From Fiaxurto Post-Mademnism," in William Judson, ed, American Landscape Video (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mnsenm of Art, 1988), 70. 3. Marita Siunken,"Paradavin theElolution of an Art Farm: and the Making of a Hisloy" in Doug Halland Sal!y Jo Fifef,edA,Illuminating Great Expeclationa Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art (San Francisco:Aperture/BAVC,1990), 106. 4. Margaret Morse "F•oeoInstallation Art. The Body the Image, theSpare in Betamen"in Illuminating Videc, Installation in the Eighties"in Chiissie Ilek, 153. 5. ChrissieIles, "Sins and Interpretation:Time-baosed Signs of the Times (OxfordoMuseum of ModernArt, 1990), 19. 6. Hanhardt, "De-collage/Collage: Xotes Towarda Reexamination of the Orighu of VideoArt" in Illuminating Video, 79. Z Hanhardt, Art," Afterimage 15hlone 1988, 64. 8. Saurken,"TVas a CreativeMedium:Howard WIueand VFdm Druckerg ed, 11, na 10 L7nne1984), 2._9. Katly Rae Huffnan, "VideoandArchitecture" in Tminothy Ars Electironica: Facing the Future (Cambridge, AM: MIT Pras, 1999), 138. 10. Hanhardt, "VideoArt Expanded Fornks Xotes toward a History" in Dorise Mignot, ed., The Luminous Image (Amsterdam: Stedel#k Munmeun1984), 57-8. IL Hanhardt4 'The Discourseof Landscape VideoArt From Fluxus to Post-Maderni.m " 73. 12. Holly Willis, New Digital Cinema: Reinventing the
and transformations than they are about art as object, image, or genre. Artists such as Viola were interested in exploring new ways of perceiving, experiencing, and making meaning with all our senses, while others such as Gillette, Paik, and Schneider explored the increasingly permeable membrane that separates what is now called "cyberspace." Video installation artists embraced change and fluidity, dialogue and communication systems, and subjective explorations of consciousness and reality as central to their artistic practices. These artists also tackled scientific concepts of time and space and intuitively recognized how technology transforms people into information by inserting them into the global flow of electronic impulses through the use of video cameras and screens capturing
2005), 76. 13. Morse, 157-8. 14.Deirdre Boyle, Moving Image (London andNew Fork- W4l#flower, "Bill Vioa'osPhenmnenology of the Soul" in Marilyn Zeitlin, ed, Bill Viola: Survey of a Decade (Houston: Contempera!y Arts Museum, 1988), 9-10. 15. VicolasDe Oliveira, Nicola O.YejAand Michael Petg,Installation Art in the New Millennium: The Empire of the Senses (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004), 13-14.
their images in real time. In InstallationArt in the New Millenium: The Empire of the Senses (2004), Nicolas De Oliveira defines the current state of installations that 0d
embrace video installations as part of larger, fluid forms that self-
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consciously push on their own boundaries as they connect artists to
1,8 I--
their audiences:
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Earlier attempts to define Installation art by medium alone failed because it is in the nature of the practice itself to
ERRATUM
challenge its own boundaries. This questioning process
In the feature article by Melinda Barlow in the January/February
constitutes a discourse which investigates the relationships
2007 issue, the photographs of Janie Geiser's installation "The
between the artist and the audience. Installation is therefore
Spider's Wheels" were taken by Geiser, not by Barlow,
defined by this process, something that has led artists to work
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TITLE: VIDEO INSTALLATION: CHARACTERISTICS OF AN EXPANDING MEDIUM SOURCE: Afterimage 34 no5 Mr/Ap 2007 PAGE(S): 14-18 The magazine publisher is the copyright holder of this article and it is reproduced with permission. Further reproduction of this article in violation of the copyright is prohibited. To contact the publisher: http://www.vsw.org/