Curadores do MOMA em Nova Iorque falam sobre video-arte

 

Nam June Paik - mini bio

 

90s video art exhibition in New York

Visiting Et al.’s Chinatown gallery feels a bit like entering a secret contemporary art clubhouse. Without any street-level signage, you have to know there’s an exhibition waiting for you through the door of Union Cleaners, down a narrow hallway and a set of wooden stairs. (Read more)

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Nam-June Paik Zen For Film Fluxus

Nam-June Paik Zen For Film Fluxus por burtonienne

Vito Acconci - Undertone 1972 (extract)

"In this early performance-based tape, Acconci sits and relates a masturbatory fantasy about a girl rubbing his legs under the table. Carrying on a rambling dialogue that shifts back and forth between the camera/spectator and himself, Acconci sexualizes the implicit contract between performer and viewer - the viewer serving as a voyeur who makes the performance possible by watching and completing the scene, believing the fantasy."

Bill Viola’s “The Space Between the Teeth” (1976)

Watching Bill Viola’s “The Space Between the Teeth” (1976), I feel as though the world is turning itself inside out. Nothing is destroyed by the process, just inverted. The large is compressed, the small is expanded. The outside becomes the inside, and the inside becomes the outside, pushed right up against the void.

(Read more)

Early Japanese video art (London, Sept. 22)

A BENEFIT FOR THE JAPANESE DISASTER RELIEF

DOORS 7:30PM, £5

Kinema Nippon is a series of fund-raising screenings that present curated programs of experimental films, video art, and Japanese classics, held in several international cities in collaboration with local film and art institutions. By presenting film and video work to celebrate the visionary cinema of Japan, Kinema Nippon mobilizes the moving image as a catalyst for cultural awareness and unity during this crucial time. All proceeds from the screenings will go to disaster relief efforts.

(Read more)

Semiotics of the Kitchen

Martha Rosler’s seminal 1975 performance tape remains one of the most powerful pieces of videoart, thanks to its simplicity and sheer intelligence. See it and learn.

Nam June Paik: Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii, 1995

Nam June Paik: Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii, 1995 - 49-channel closed circuit video installation, neon, steel and electronic components (Smithsonian)

Early Channel 4's video art

In early November 1982 a new television channel was launched in the UK that transformed British video art. Channel 4 was unlike the other three channels then available to UK audiences: two of these (BBC1, BBC2) were cast in a socially conservative and patriarchal mould of educating the public (an impulse little changed since the days of John Reith, the BBC's first Director-General in the 1920s), while the third (ITV) was a purely commercial enterprise. Channel 4 was established following a parliamentary bill that aimed to open up broadcasting to minority groups and, separately, to encourage independent experimental film and video production. Among the programmes created in this early experimental period was Stuart Marshall's Bright Eyes (1984), one of the first full-length documentaries to confront AIDS and the media hysteria surrounding it. (Early British video art)

Nam June Paik show at FACT, Liverpool, UK

"Oh wow," I exclaim. "Ooh-err." Lasers are scribbling fancy patterns across my eyeballs. Spiralling tunnels of pulsing colour, footling electronic geometries, zooming meteoric lines of light, all projected on to a translucent fabric cone that dangles from the ceiling of FACT in Liverpool. You can wander round the cone, watching the lasers inscribe their interminable abstract nonsense over its surface. Or lie on the floor under the cone and let the lights envelop you, spirals and circles pulsing towards your face." (Adrian Searle's review of Nam June Paik)

Dara Birnbaum at the Tate Modern

One of my favourite old-school video artists, Dara Birnbaum, will be at the Tate Modern on November 02. More info here +

GARY HILL, WALL PIECE

Since the first works that he created in the early 1970s, a large part of Gary Hill’s work has consisted of performances in which the artist acted either directly or through film recordings, mixing voice, words, various sounds emitted by him or proceeding from objects and equipment, thereby creating what to date is less a work of video art (although it belongs historically to this area) than a work of sound poetry or even of body poetry, since, on countless occasions, the artist’s body is involved in the pieces as matter and material.

In Wall Piece, Gary Hill repeatedly flings his own body against a wall while pronouncing each time some words which end up forming a complete text. His body is simultaneously matter and sound and visual material as well as an invisible shape that is hidden in the darkness in order to appear suddenly in a luminous flash. We do not know whether it is his body that produces the images that appear, or his voice that triggers the light, or the sound of his body against the wall that gives rise to this whole atmosphere. It is clear that an obvious link exists between the verbal, the vocal, the visual, and the corporeal, but after a while we realise that these elements lose focus and separate in order to recompose themselves and come apart again. The performance does not lie only in the installation that we are experiencing or in the film actions: it is also in our perception, which attempts to bring together what was swiftly disconnected and re-tie the thread of loose words. As in certain other works by Gary Hill, Wall Piece is a work that deals with dissociative perception and the way that we must associate the diverse elements of language, image and body in order for perception to exist.

Jacinto Lageira

Source

Tadeu Jungle pays video homage to Nam June Paik

Commissioned by state-run TV Cultura in Brazil, this video by Tadeu Jungle, a veteran of the Brazilian video arts scene, pays homage to videoart daddy, Nam June Paik.

REWIND PLAY at Tate Britain Lightbox from Friday 7 May - LUX Blog

An event not to be missed by vintage video art fans:

Rewind + Play: A Selection of Early British Video Art, Tate Britain Lightbox 7 May - 28 June 2010

(from the Lux website):

REWIND + PLAY presents a selection of key works from the first decade of artists’ video practice in the UK. Work of that period is characterised by self-reflexivity in the medium, by an investigation of the limits of the then-new technology and by opposition to the dominant video form of the time: broadcast television. With the notable exception of David Hall’s TV Interruptions, first shown unannounced on Scottish television in 1971, the works in this selection were made for gallery exhibition.

Before the advent of video projectors, work was produced and displayed using TV monitors, and the ‘box’ was recognised by some artists as an inevitable sculptural context that influenced the making and reading of their work. This was especially so in works which referenced television or were actually made for broadcast. Tamara Krikorian’s Vanitas (1977) and David Hall’s TV Interruptions (1971) are screened on a TV monitor for this reason.

Most of the work was produced or shown around two key exhibitions of the period – The Video Show at the Serpentine Gallery in May 1975 and a video installation show at the Tate Gallery in 1976 – and disseminated through the artist-run video distributor London Video Arts which was established in 1976.

This selection is drawn from the DVD publication Rewind + Play: An Anthology of Early British Video Art published in 2009 by LUX, the artists’ moving image agency, in association with REWIND: Artists’ video in the 70s and 80s. Available from the LUX Shop.

Projection:

In Two Minds (two-screen version), Kevin Atherton (1978, 25 min.); Circling, Peter Donebauer (1975, 12 min.); Kensington Gore, Catherine Elwes (1981, 15 min.); Time Spent, Judith Goddard (1981, 12 min.); Clapping Songs, Tina Keane (1979, 6 min.); Monitor, Stephen Partridge (1975, 6 min.)

Monitor:

TV Interruptions (7 TV Pieces), David Hall (1971, 23 min.); Vanitas, Tamara Krikorian (1977, 8 min.)

MoMA | Joan Jonas: Six Works

The legendary video artist gets a retrospective in New York: MoMA | Joan Jonas: Six Works

1980s video art

I stumbled upon these video collage pieces on YouTube and they have a lot of the stuff I love, mainly, TV material processed into visual essays. I couldn’t figure out who posted it, though ...

1984 series

Vito Acconci - Undertone 1972 (extract)

Vitor Acconci

Open Book (1974)