videodrome : column 1

Civilian: So, you make, um, video art?

Artist: Yeah.

Civilian: What kind of videos do you make?

Artist: Well, its art and its video. Sortof like paintings, but they move. Its animation-based, not narrative, but sometimes there are people in them, so its not, well, ambient ...

Civilian: (long pause) Um ...

Artist: They're kindof like poems.

Civilian: (looks at watch)

Artist: How's your job treating you?

Frank Zappa nailed it. He was talking about music, of course, but talking about art is like dancing about architecture. I make art-video. I've had many versions of the above conversation. When I say words like 'non-narrative' or 'ambient', I know I've jumped the shark. The person I'm speaking with starts to get thousand-yard stare and the fidgits signalling please, God, give me a change of subject.

Video is difficult as an art medium because of its nature. One can make an object of video art, and show that, and then document the exhibition with video. One can then recompress that video to put it behind a screen, on the internet. So, where does the actual art live: in the moment of production? in the first exhibition? in the moment of documentation? in its re-exhibition as documentation on the internet?

This is complicated by the fact that video is used most often to produce our main form of entertainment and information, the content streamed to your television. Not to mention pornography's preference of VHS driving the industry's adoption of that standard in the early 80's. And, youTube, the place where you, too, can upload video of your dog shitting, if you want.

How can something so mundane be used to make art? Well, that's driven by what the user wants to do with it. Tells us alot about ourselves, huh?

OK, back to the high-art part of the conversation.

Any work of art truly exists only in the moment in which it is being percieved by an audience. As a matrix of information, it remains inert until it is percieved. Each touch of eye, or the smell of an installation, exists only when a human is having a sensory relationship with that art object. For truly, information exists in the world, and art exists as information, but only as information until a perceiver comes along and gives that latent information meaning.

If I make a painting, I am putting pigment prepared in some way (carried in water, carried in oil, carried in egg, carried in glue) on a surface to which it adheres. It is only pigment. It is information that the eye carries into the mind of the viewer. The mind arranges color into shape, imagination creates story.

Painting has this rich history for artists to learn and refer to. Older than the written documents that historicize human behavior, the Lascaux cave paintings tell a story memorized by art history 101 students every fall and spring. Thousands of years of paintings are studied, understood, referred to, discarded, argued, recontextualized, by painters working with the Tradition of Painting.

Now, with a computer, or a camera and some tape, I make that arrangement of color, shape, line, form, exist on multiple paintings in motion over time. What does that mean? What happens to the still frame? What is the threshold of frames per second that creates the illusion of movement over time?

And when did this start - Edison, yes, a hundred years ago? Artist-made film -- Dali? Cornell's Rose Hobart? And video, when did artists get their hands on video equipment to even start thinking about it, playing with it - the late 1950's, early 1960's?

This is what I mean when I write, video is the medium of no history. Somebody my dad's age was making the first video art by playing with signal in the late 50s. I can't remember that person's name in the offhand way I can point at Lascaux and walk throught the arguments for Modernity in painting. David vs. Manet? What about Cezanne's plasticity of form in still life?

Paintings own the museums. We've been having those arguments since 1950. Hand me the Alex Bag DVD, would you? Or, tell me what you thought of the last Bill Viola installation you saw.

Film and video have incredible authority for the illusions we know them to be. 24 or 30 frames per second, the information carried in those pictures to televisions, to movie screens, make phantoms that we take to be real. How many times have I overheard heated discussions of characters realized only in the phenomena of sense perception of the mind. Carrie and Mr. Big. Those ladies from Wisteria lane. Old episodes of the Twilight Zone.

Are we talking about the stories told in video (Twilight Zone episodes, ER, the news) or the medium itself (projected light and shadow, frame rate, pixillation quality, signal)? People tend to collapse the two. Does anyone think about how the stuff is made, really? How the screening room is not in the art gallery, the movie theater, but instead, the imagination in which 24 frames, or 29.97 frames, are fused into movement, suspending disbelief?

This is our magic, this is our witchcraft, the boxes in our houses that tell us stories from little discs, the screens we sit in the dark and watch and react to. Where is the art object, if there is no painting on the wall?

In that moment of fusion. In the tripped trigger of the viewer's imagination.

Wait, I'm sorry, I got a little abstract there. Back to Pittsburgh, where artists are producing interesting work for audiences all over the place. I could unpack a litany of artists working in video in and around these parts, but it will be more interesting, I think, for you to meet them in this space as we have conversations about video, art, process, production, audience, and meaning.

 

 

Jessica M. Fenlon is an artist and writer living in Pittsburgh, PA. Her most recent video work, Spoiled Heat, plays at the June 10 Film Kitchen at Pittsburgh Filmmakers; her last installation was shown in February 2008 at Massachusetts College of Art. She received her MFA in Studio Art practice from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston & Tufts University in 2002, BFA University of Wisconsin-Madison 1999.

She also designed this website.