Video art was born subversive. It was a product of people whose goal it was to change America’s mind and direction. The instrument of power they chose to confront was broadcast television. The vehicle they chose was half-inch reel-to-reel videotape.
Many were educated in art and were at home in the realm of art and ideas about art. But most were clear that art just for itself was not the point.
They thought that interpreting video as an art like painting or sculpture radically diminished its potential. Video art was all very well. But if it meant limiting video to an art world audience, as painting and sculpture were, then video's power would be lost. "Don't bury us in the museums," David Cort, founder of the Videofreex, would say, "that will finish us off for sure."
Today most video art is seen as a gallery and museum practice, much like the other arts, but at its origins it was not so defined. Then, as now, the world of art was statistically minute. Today, it simulates a world of diversity, but sixty years ago the art world was perceived as a place where white male painters and sculptors were measured by their gallery contracts, sales, the attention of magazine and newspaper critics, and by presumed lonely dedication to their art.
From the beginning of video art practice with Paik and Vostell, to the artists who saw TV as a Creative Medium and Vision and Television, through the New York video collectives and those who worked with them, independent video art was seen as a homeopathic antidote, to television and to the excesses of a culture dominated for more than two decades by cold-war politics, proxy war, and the growth of a society based on corporate wealth and power.
Early video artists did everything you weren’t supposed to do with television, immediately reaching for the outer edges of the quirky medium they had invaded. They did long takes, they edited in the camera, or edited not at all, they explored possibilities inherent in temporal awareness and everyday dramas, shooting on the run with hand-held cameras. They would wire video decks, cameras and monitors together in odd configurations, creating unusual visual environments and information arrays.
And they asked why the only information order was the one then existing. Clearly there could be others, they thought, and they wondered what they could look like and how they could work. Paul Ryan’s Birth, Death and Cybernation, Gordon & Breach, 1973, contains a wealth of speculation on this, but, even earlier, contributors to the periodical Radical Software, begun by Raindance in 1970, raised questions and proposed answers to this insistent question.
There were big differences between the information environment of that day and the one that exists today. Today, with streaming TV and the Internet, ABC, CBS, and NBC are just three more contenders in the electromagnetic spectrum, big enough in their way but not the all-powerful shapers of opinion and purveyors of news they once were. In the sixties, when raster lines were replacing newsprint as America’s primary news source, Americans learned about the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam, the King and Kennedy assassinations, all the events of the world, filtered through the Big Three. While the networks were marginally different from each other in outlook and audience, they were exactly similar in avoiding challenges to their sponsors — and colleagues — in the corporate world.
There was another important part of the information order, though, the largest part, the audience, the listeners, viewers and readers. A large part of this was a white middle class America of middle managers, proprietors, union members, farmers, and others who had made a provisional success of post-war America. Many of these were WWII veterans and their families, beneficiaries of the GI Bill and the post war boom.
Already made nervous by the nuclear potential of cold war politics, and horrified by the wave of political murders, urban riots, and social unrest that marked the sixties, they watched as events they had not dreamt of piled up before them. Fearful of change, bewildered by the demands being made of them from blacks, Hispanics, women, students, anti-war activists, hippies, gays, poor people in general, and unsure how to best defend their eroding economic status, they watched as the Viet Nam war, that they did not understand, slowly devoured their young men. They were entirely on the receiving end, with no opportunity for input except possibly, a letter to the editor of their local newspaper, or a phone call from a polling bureau.
The educational system, at all levels, was in ferment. Young men with military service in Viet Nam to look forward to when they graduated from high school or college, and female undergraduates, with what amounted to second-class citizenship awaiting, were ready to believe that their educational system was channeling them into a life of conformity and service to a dangerous status quo. Some students and teachers questioned their role in that project and began to lead their students in intellectual revolt. Video played a helping role as college liberal arts departments turned their attention to media studies and media literacy. The spread of portapak video into the universities, libraries, and into the alternate media centers that also sprang up during the seventies, had enduring consequences, engendering new generations of video artists, many of whom found their way into the rapidly changing art world. In time, they claimed a large part of it. A visit to any of the large art festivals — Biennales, Documentas, and the like — will bear that out. Digitalization and quality projection helped to make this happen, but the urge to use these tools came before their arrival. Not all of these artists’ works share the motivations of the early video artists, but some do, and it is still possible to say that continuity exists.
But, just as important, the universities and alternate media centers also gave birth to a new generation of video activists ambitious to develop programming for public television. These activists developed programs on themes of feminism, gay rights, civil rights, and other issues, and, as the seventies rolled into the eighties, the growing American participation in horrors of the wars in Central America. They met with some success, often against the sharp reaction of America’s conservative establishment. Many of these activists found their way into the rapidly expanding television industry made possible by the growth of cable and satellite broadcasting, bringing with them some of the values and techniques they learned back in the portapak era.
The early video people of the sixties and early seventies pioneered the boundary between art, science, journalism, and philosophy, and between art and public communication of all types. They refreshed art by bringing to it a new set of tools, a new set of ideas, and programmatically interactive environments; and refreshed electronic media of all kinds by proposing a broad new range of choices.
Today there are even more choices. Personal computers and digitalization, the Internet and the world it has opened have, for some, created a place to stand, a place from which to continue to exert leverage on the world order of the day. This was our dream of sixty years ago.
And among many of us from that time the hope, and conviction, yet exists that our project is still ongoing, and that it will be accomplished by creative and bold young people implementing new media as they arise.
DG/end