Video - Resisting Definition
Jackie Hatfield
The research objective of REWIND is to build a picture of the first two decades of video art in the UK, stemming from the testimony of individual artists, and in some cases facilitators of artworks; and through evaluation and review of artworks, exhibitions and events, and interrogation of the contextual philosophies, polemics, and material languages. Importantly the initial list of artists for interview chosen by the research team and the Advisory Panel represents a wide-ranging picture of practice. Selection is informed by the initial research questions and provenance of artworks and related critical writing, and acknowledges that whilst there may be themes, patterns and categories evolving from the unfolding history, artists’ endeavour was an individual part of a whole international movement, and the history of video art in the UK did not take one path.
During the first year of REWIND, the research methodology has been based upon a broad spectrum of research questions, and review of contemporaneous critical writing, artworks, key exhibitions and events: What video artworks were produced during 70s and 80s? Who produced these works? What critical, artistic or social issues were of most concern to the artists of the period? Which artworks should be prioritised for the expensive process of archiving and detailed documentation? Which artists, exhibitions and works are the most cited in interviews and in the literature of the time? Which have retained their status in the critical and teaching environments?
A start point for the initial investigation was chronology, 1968 being the first loosely documented date when video became available to artists in the UK. From this date we could map the contribution of individual artists across their careers and evaluate which were the first to explore the then new technology, acknowledging that they may have been sporadic in their use of it, or advocated its use through various actions or a mixture of routes, for example through text, publications or institutional reports; or through the gallery system or within the Art Schools, through artistic process or output. It was important at this early stage of the research to begin with wide parameters for the study of British video art, that is, we were not focussing on establishing a list of artists who had worked solely with video. I say this to reiterate the fact that artists who gravitated towards video came to it from other mediums and disciplines and in so doing laid open video’s intertextualities, resisting traditional definitions or material specificity. In moving-image terms video technology incarnated within a post-modern shift, whereby more than half a century after the event, artistic ideas conceptualised early in the twentieth century were actually made manifest, that is, for the first time since the Futurists wrote their manifestos and proclaimed the demise of the autonomous artwork.
Any survey of innovation in art practice since the late 1960’s might automatically include video as a key aspect of the experimental process. At this time, with no fixed art world history video’s malleability and conceptual open-endedness enabled many possibilities. An international tribe of late twentieth century artists rejected the assumption that visual art should be an object oriented art, and recognised that video could be an art form of the experiential, whereby physically the trace could be recorded as a continuous signal, rather than as with film, an individual frame. Post-photo electronic, video is also a latent image of the unseeable, and like sound or performance, an art of space and time. However, although the term ‘video art’connotes an analogue era and an apparent fixed-ness, its material specificities are in flux. As such it necessitates continual theoretical or philosophical review; the polemics are open to change; so that video is and always has been a technology of combination, and in its current guise, a chameleon-like extant property in the continuing history of digital ‘new’ media. A philosophy based upon ‘video’ materiality per se therefore would be built upon shifting-sands, and this has similar complexities to that of digital forms, whereby individual works and technological combinations might defy material classification. The practical history of experimental video therefore typifies the formulation of post-material paradigms. While artists devoted purely to the conceptual material of video have been rare and there could be many themes or categorisations for video art works from 1970 to date, similar to the digital, the technology itself resists definition on the basis of analysis of its material constituents per se. In the late 1960s to 70s, it was the apparatus of videotape, which was a definable object, i.e. a portapak, a monitor, the conduit of broadcast, but ultimately, video is a stuff of concept, and a challenge to medium specific rhetoric; a perceptual thing - post-material moving-image. Furthermore, changeability has always been the ground-breaking aspect of video art, and its potential for amalgamation with other art forms and contexts, whether performance, dance, sculpture, as theatre, television, or computer. Accordingly there are complexities within the practical history, which resist simple cataloguing.
Pioneers of what might be better described as experimental electronic media, traversed and transgressed the exhibition contexts of gallery (white cube), cinema theatre (black space), and television broadcast, and working across various mediums and languages, their artworks were often an amalgamation of media or materials, for example: video, film, photography, sculpture, performance, or sound. This period of technological innovation, and the plasticity of video technology in the exhibition context, enabled artists to explore and make manifest some of the radical art concerns of the twentieth century, incorporating the sculptural, painterly, cinematic and interactive, towards a total art i.e. gesamtkuntswerk. The works were often inherently political in questioning the status of the art object and the roles of the artist, viewer, and art market, contextualised as they were outside exhibition norms of commercial galleries, as site related, cinema theatre or television broadcast. Individual artists’ experiment with video was diverse and expansive, and since around 1968 a vast body of experimental work has been produced. Yet the earlier contribution of British artists to the international video art scene remains unsung in the UK, the range of discourses and ambitions largely unwritten and undocumented, the artworks in danger of being lost. The lack of widely available critical writing and specific artist authored historical narratives for experimental video might be the reason for this (a notable recent exception is Catherine Elwes, Video Art, A Guided Tour, 2005) but possibly also the implication from the contemporary writing that artists during this early production period were pre-occupied with material specificity and fixed within a late modernist oriented philosophical loop, or were focussed on the televisual or on critiquing TV culture.
Whilst it is true to say that some artists were dealing with the shared languages of television and video, or took advantage of the broadcast context whilst it offered one of the few funding streams available during the 1980s, it would be truly limiting to assume that concerns of the televisual (either the material or dissemination) dominated a twenty-year period of this wide-ranging and complex art history. A survey of early artists’ debates and practices show various decodings of video, from David Hall’s conceptual and material analyses; Stuart Marshall’s pluralistic philosophies and timely critiques incorporating the social political; writings of the artist Cate Elwes around feminist aesthetics and women in art; and Mick Hartney’s summaries of the history in LVA’s 1984 catalogue and Undercut; to its inherent analysis within specific artworks such as TV Interruptions (David Hall, 1971), Almost Out (Jayne Parker, 1985) or Dialogue for Two Players (Stephen Partridge, 1984).
Even a cursory study of the practice would uncover the extraordinary diverse approaches within British video art: sculptural installation by David Hall, Tina Keane, Stephen Partridge and Tony Sinden; video as a conceptual medium seen in David Hall’s television interventions in particular, and in artworks throughout his career or as an integral aspect of process visible in some of the works of Susan Hiller; the diaristic and ethnographic video of Ian Breakwell or autobiographic video by Daniel Reeves or Steve Hawley; site related in works by Madelon Hooykass and Elsa Stansfield; the landscapes of Tamara Krikorian; in the performative installations of David Critchley, Mona Hatoum, Kate Meynell, or Mike Stubbs; single screen scratch video experiments of The Duvet Brothers or George Barber; experiment with material, colour, abstraction, and spectacle, expanded cinema structures and temporalities in works by Malcolm Le Grice or Stephen Littman, and David Larcher’s electronic image alchemy; the video synthesiser innovations of Peter Donebauer with the ‘Videokalos’; social political documentary by John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins and Sue Hall or Darcey Lange; issues of representation, identity gender, sexuality and cultural or racial diasporas in the works of Cate Elwes, Isaac Julien, Keith Piper and Stuart Marshall. A list such as this could not begin to fully account for twenty years of practice, and analysis of the history hitherto unwritten, of the philosophies and dialogue oriented around this particular non-inert technology, would need the space of volumes to do it justice. This selection is only a snapshot to demonstrate the richness of genres, and since they are elusive by nature, to illustrate the difficulty of grouping video artworks by characteristics or themes. The bottom line is that classification should ultimately depend on analysis of individual artists’ experiment rather than around the ontology of a specific technology.
For this reason, aiming for a wider understanding of the artworks, and to reflect the diversity of artistic processes, REWIND’s research methodology of interviewing around twelve selected artists per year is especially important. These semi-structured video interviews focus on the artists as the source of remembrance, bearing individual witness to the contextual events around their distinctive practices. In this way, we can uncover the under-explored aspects of the history, making visible the artists, their artworks, and philosophies and processes.
By re-assembling a picture of British video art from the start point of empirical research, this complex and multifarious history that has incorporated many disciplines crafts and philosophies becomes tangible, the interviews and artworks evidence the fact that artists were exploring the many materialities and related languages of video and art practices. Anyway, I like to consider that this history is liquid and amorphous; and that artists have dipped in and out of processes that incorporated the chameleon-like electronic moving image that is video. Though for the purpose of narrativising the history and describing particular artworks, processes or synergies, or for illustrating contemporary polemics, themes might ensue i.e. technological experiment; installation; sculpture; the televisual; gender; sexuality; performance; documentary; autobiography etc; although at this stage there is a focus on the excavation of philosophies, and study of production contexts. We can begin to identify some of the key contexts around which video experiment and related philosophies evolved and have started to map some of the collective concerns emanating from these: Art Schools; Galleries (often aligned to the Art Schools; or outside the commercial gallery system i.e 2B Butlers Wharf; Basement Group; AIR; ACME) and Key Exhibitions (i.e. Gallery House; Biddick Farm; Video Show; VideoPositive) and events (i.e. conferences); Workshops and Collectives that supported artists work (i.e. Arts Lab/IRAT/TVX/Fantasy Factory; LVA); Broadcast Television (concentrating on key producers such as Anna Ridley; and later John Wyver); and the publications across which the critical writing was spread (Studio International; Screen; AND; Variant etc). Funding was obviously crucial to the continuation of electronic moving image experiment, as it was with film, and analysis of how funding aided video art production and dissemination in the UK will be a valuable area of further study. Julia Knight and Dr Peter Thomas of the University of Luton are undertaking important research on the distribution of independent film and video during the 1980’s and ‘90’s.
One practical outcome of REWIND will be the archive and the on-line database centred on the artists’ interviews and a survey of their practice including related images and ephemera. Over one hundred and fifty artworks will be adopted into the programme, and digitally re-mastered and lodged in the national deposit of the Scottish Screen Archive, to build a picture of early British Video Art and reflect the breadth of practice across this period. To maintain the integrity of the artworks we will source the optimum available tape and make a digital copy with minimal intervention: for example, a ½” reel to reel master tape from 1976 might be un-playable due to its deteriorated condition, but there may be a U-matic copy from 1977 which is in good condition, therefore we would re-master the U-matic. With selected expanded work we will be copying each individual channel and the documentation tapes where they exist, and the provenance of each artwork, whether expanded or single screen, will be shown through stills, texts, and ephemera. REWIND’s soft-launch show will take place at Dundee Contemporary Art in April 2006 with the re-staging of early installations and the launch of the on-line database. Archives such as this and collections like the artists’ study collection at Central St Martin’s led by David Curtis and Professor Malcolm Le Grice, are invaluable resources for future research and will ensure that the endeavour of the artists whose conceptual essences and artistic currencies were of transience and the ephemeral, will resonate through time.
Bio:
Dr Jackie Hatfield is an artist and writer who makes expanded and participatory
cinema. Editor of Anthology of Experimental Film and Video to
be published in Winter 2005 by John Libbey, she has also contributed essays
and co-edited two critical books around women’s use of technology in
art practice, Desire by Design and Digital Desires, and published
articles concentrating on expanded cinema and other under-explored histories
of experimental film and video. She organised the major retrospective
of artists moving-image from the late 1960’s to date, Experiments
in Moving Image in London 2004 with Stephen Littman at the University
of Westminster’s ‘Old’ Lumiere Cinema, Regent St.