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‘Video needs art history
like a TV set needs a plinth’, session
convened by Anthony Auerbach
for the College Art Association
Annual Conference, Dallas, Texas, 23 February
2008. This session acknowledged video as a disputed,
unstable field and called for
a cross-disciplinary discussion of contemporary
video practice and interpretation: As the traditional
public space of art is increasingly intersected
by its own video-mediations — on
TV, online, by information and
advertising screens, by video
surveillance and the public’s
own portable devices — the challenges
to established relations of representation
become clear. For artists, video
provides no security of artistic
identity and no reliable means of instructing
audiences how to look. For institutions, video
offers new means of communicating with audiences
and monitoring visitors’ behaviour,
but threatens the basic fiction
of the museum: that culture exists
independently of its reproduction.
For art historians, video offers
no surface for inspection, nor
necessarily any depth. Meanwhile,
everyday viewers are highly discriminating interpreters,
continuously decoding the claims of rival channels
and multitudes of screens. While the power of
this technology to propagate
norms is far from exhausted, video practice
continually escapes disciplinary boundaries.
Anthony Auerbach’s introduction to the session and the session programme follow.
I’d like to open this
session by suggesting what I
think is at stake in the proposition, ‘Video
needs art history like a TV set
needs a plinth’. It will
be down to the speakers and our
respondent to interpret it more
concretely, if partially. The
aim of the session is to open
up the territory, but without
universalising it. We should
be prepared to pursue video beyond
the disciplinary boundaries of
art (or art history), not necessarily
to recapture it for art (or art
history), but to chart the relationships
and dependencies between video
practice, video as art-practice,
and the practices of everyday
life, in which we must include
not only the everyday production
and consumption of moving images,
but also the ways in which the
technologies and habits of video
shape subjectivity, identity
and sexuality; experience, perception
and knowledge.
‘Video needs art history
like a TV set needs a plinth’ is
an ironic statement in so far
as each half of it tells the
truth about the other. That also
makes it a truism. Cleaving an
assertion in two, however, has
the effect of dilating it, suspending
for it a moment, as if pressing
pause and thus raising the possibilities
of review and of play — of
affirmation or contradiction;
reconciliation or critique. The
idea of this session is to use
this pause, this interruption
of the flow, to examine some
of the intersections which could
disclose what I would call the
relations of representation mediated
by video.
In addition to the four speakers
named on the programme I am very
pleased that Jan Hein Hoogstad
has agreed to take the role of
respondent and I trust will help
stimulate and sharpen the discussion
which I would like to open with
you before the session is over.
Angela Harutyunyan’s paper ‘The
Real and/as Representation: TV,
Video and Contemporary Armenian
Art’ examines the meaning
of video art in the context of
the transition from Soviet conditions
to those of independent artistic
production in an independent
Armenia. Whereas formerly, the
self-styled avant-garde had mounted
an underground defence of bourgeois
art against Soviet socialist
realism, the collapse of the
communist regime left artists
exposed to the full force of
global capitalism. The new situation
promised not only international
recognition and the technical
means of achieving it in the
form of consumer electronics,
but also a refuge for a beleaguered
artistic identity.
One might point out — and
it could have been the subject
of another paper — that
by the 1990s, the utopian-narcissistic
drive which had motivated pioneer
video artists and activists in
the United States in the 1970s
was all but exhausted. Those
aspirations, at the time associated
with the left, and supposing
some kind of resistance to the
mass-production (as Chomsky would
say) of consent by monopolistic
media corporations — those
aspirations have, by now been
absorbed into to user-generated
content phenomenon being promoted
by today’s most powerful
advertising and media corporations.
Naima Lowe’s ‘Pushing
Porno’s Buttons: Spectator
Pleasures in Hard-Core Narrative
Pornography’ switches channels
to consider the subject of video
as an active spectator, whose
paradoxically private participation
in mass culture (i.e. the porn
industry) is reflected, and occasionally
mocked, in the narrative premises
of the porn movies themselves.
Here the question is whether
the reflexive devices normally
regarded as the hallmarks of
art — even critical art — are
in fact endemic in video and
indeed in pornography.
Sönke Hallmann — a
theorist with no particular allegiance
to art history — and Karolin
Meunier — an artist whose
performances and video works
frequently puzzle over the debts,
complications and redundancies
which burden and give form to
the communication of identity
and intention — these two
have woven their presentations
together to consider video and
the notion of reading, in particular
the time of reading. Their presentations
hint at a way of reading video
as video, that is to say, hesitating
to apply the patterns of reading
inherited from the reception
of literature, painting or cinema.
Following the presentations we
will hear Jan Hein Hoogstad’s
response which will lead us into
an open discussion (so, please
save your questions and comments).
Jan Hein is a philosopher and
media-theorist with particular
interests in popular culture,
in particular US American Black
music, media technologies and
the figure of the intellectual — which
in his view is as likely to be
an artifact as a person.
A similar line of argument would
suggest that the figure of the
artist is also something produced
rather than necessarily the autonomous
producer of the art work. Accordingly,
the proposal for the session
calls attention to a relationship
between the institutional, disciplinary
and ideological (i.e. cultural)
recognition of a practice — read
art history — and its spatial,
social and concrete supports — that’s
the plinth.
Predictably, the way video tends
to treated in the field of art
is modelled on the way art works
in general are treated. Some
transcendental or essential content
is supposed to be transmitted
by the work even as the object
(the painting, sculpture, text
etc.) is venerated, not to say
fetishised. Even without the
burden of art’s higher
claims, video tends to be regarded
principally as a transmission
medium — with timeshift,
of course — and the emphasis
is on fidelity and transparency:
the reality show. Video appears
to fulfil the promise held out
by the Albertian picture of being
a window on the world, but to
the exclusion of art. Video combines
optics as compelling as those
of a camera obscura, with the
consuming subjectivity of the
bourgeois interior that Walter
Benjamin described as a box in
the theatre of the world.
As we speak today, the box is
beginning to look archaic. The
sculptural potential of the cathode
ray tube set is currently being
revoked by the flat screen, the
biggest consumer electronics
bonanza of all time. The after-image
image of the box is preserved
for the moment in the pleonastic
term ‘flat screen’ which
contains a homage to screens
that were not flat. Nam June
Paik, one of the first to exploit
the potential of the TV set as
sculpture — and its archaic
qualities — famously said ‘I
make technology ridiculous’.
At what point does video return
the compliment to art?
The following papers were heard:
Video Art and the Politics of Representation
in Contemporary Armenian Art
Angela Harutyunyan
Pushing Porno’s Buttons: Spectator Pleasures
in Hard-Core Narrative Pornography
Naima N. Lowe
Reading Video
Sönke Hallmann
Video as Reading
Karolin Meunier
Images
Nam June Paik, Reclining Buddha, 1994, 2 colour televisions, 2 Pioneer laser disk players, 2 original Paik laser discs, found object Buddha, 20 x 24 x 14 ins
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return: On video
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