The notions of mixing also began to appear in experimental television productions produced in Europe with what, it has been suggested, was the first artist s production on TV: Otto Piene and Aldo Tambellini’s Black Gate Cologne, broadcast on the German TV network, WDR Cologne, in January 1969. [22] But it is Barzyk’s WGBH production The Medium is the Medium (1969) with works by Allan Kaprow, Otto Piene, Aldo Tambellini, James Seawright, Thomas Tadlock and Nam June Paik, [23] and subsequent work by Paik, particularly Global Groove (1974), [24] - broadcast on the New York public broadcasting station WNET - that stand out as the most important early broadcasts of video art.

It was the implications of television s rapid montage in news and advertising broadcast, and McLuhan’s reflection on it in his Understanding Media, [25] and The Medium is the Massage, [26] that provided the analytical basis for much of the video art of the late 1960s and early 1970s. This is obvious from the names, and even more so from the production style, of Barzyk’s The Medium is the Medium and Paik’s Global Groove. In Understanding Media McLuhan spelt out the cool nature of television versus the hot medium of the cinema, [27] a difference that he described as being its level of definition. The cinema is high definition; television (even the so-called high-definition digital television of the early 21st century) is a low definition form.[28] The film image as presented is complete, each frame gives the viewer everything they need as one single product, whereas the TV image scanned onto the viewer requires one’s involvement in depth and the accumulation of information over time, i.e., as process, for its completion.

The Medium is the Massage [29] was McLuhan’s follow-up and demonstration of his argument. It is a very cool book demonstrating the cool nature of television in the hot form of the book. The notion of the hot and the cool is effectively a matter of information content in the sense of Shannon information, or bits-per-unit of time or space, which is independent of meaning. [30] Information as meaning flows from Shannon s definition but requires a stronger footing as developed by Donald MacKay when he described it as being a function of selective activity (a la Shannon) that had some sort of function or use (i.e., meaning) for the selector. [31]

Paik set the stage for video-tape as an artist’s medium when, in October 1965 and now living in New York, he recorded Pope Paul VI's motorcade through New York using a newly acquired Sony portable video recorder. This could only have been the semi-portable CV-2000 [32] that came with a TV receiver in a combined case (the TCV-2010, which had two handles on the case so that it could be carried by one or two people, but not over the shoulder) and a camera in a separate package. As this was a 110volt AC (mains) recorder it could only have been used to shoot from, say, a window overlooking the street along which the Pope’s motorcade was travelling. The mythology that it was a portapak that Paik used is probably incorrect since Sony's first portapak, the Video Rover (DV-2400), was only released in Japan and the U.S. in 1967. [33] The work, called Electronic Television and Video Tape Recorder, was Paik’s first personal use of videotape and after that recording (later that evening), he would then have had to transport the portable recorder by taxi (thus the mythical idea that it was recorded from a taxi) to the Cafe au GoGo in Bleecker St, Greenwich Village, where he could plug it in to the mains to play back the video that evening, the 4th October, 1965. [34]

He subsequently wrote a short manifesto, Electronic Video Recorder, in which he predicted much of what was to come both in videotape use and in manipulation of the video signal, thus set[ting] up video as the art medium of the near future&rdquo and predict[ing] the onset of an era dominated by electronic art. [35]

Fig. 3: Text of Paik's Electronic Video Recorder for his Cafe au GOGO event on Bleecker St, Manhatten

In Electronic Video Recorder Paik says

......In my
video-taped electro vision, not only you see your picture instantaneously and find out
what kind of bad habits you have, but you see yourself deformed in 12 ways, which only electronic ways can do.

*It is the historical necessity, if there is a historical necessity in history,
that a new decade of electronic television should follow to the past decade
of electronic music

**Variability & Indeterminism is underdeveloped in optical art as parameter.
Sex is underdeveloped in music.

***As collage technic replaced oil-paint, the cathode ray tube will replace
the canvass.

****Someday artists will work with capacitors, resistors & semi-conductors as
they work today with brushes, violins and junk. [36]

The primary point to make about Paik’s work is that he set up the guidelines. In one sense or another Paik tried out just about everything that it was possible to do with video, though there remained plenty of room for many other experimenters in all the possible streams of video art to follow on. This is not to say that any subsequent work was merely derivative, it is simply that Paik provided a wonderfully diverse and unpredictable launching pad for his contemporaries and video artists of later generations.

Video art has always engaged two activities:

1. The deconstruction of the role of television in the setting of meanings and agendas in daily life. Video extracted itself from television and refused to make the material of television. It saw itself as the primary critical and subverting reflection on television, making programmes that covered ideas and events that TV wouldn’t cover, covering them in ways that TV couldn’t and generating new styles of image that the engineering attitudes of TV couldn’t possibly accept because they were too far outside the parameters of the rules of broadcasting, and

2. The redevelopment of the visual image in areas where we had hardly been able to look before, i.e., the manipulated or synthetic image. The technology of the times, particularly the analogue computer and its descendent the audio synthesiser, could be applied to the televisual image and thus the magic (the capacity to carry meaning and the kinds of meanings carried) behind the image could be subverted. That is, the illusion could be broken.

And it has done this in two primary ways:

1. Through videotape production and its display on one or more TV monitors. The typology of the results of these video production processes is diverse, consisting in video that emulates broadcast television, either satirically or as documentary, and video that utilises non-standard forms, particularly those that might be thought of as synthetic. One of the longer term products of this latter approach is the video music clip, but other forms include video in dance and other forms of video that align themselves with electronic music. [It is the synthetic work that is of most interest to me here.]

2. Through installations in which the video system itself becomes an object of art and the audience may also become essential to its operation.

Fig. 4: Nam June Paik's TV Buddha during installation at the Art Gallery of NSW, March 1976.
[Photograph and installation by Stephen Jones]

So ultimately, it is Paik, more than any other video artist, who gave video art a functional grounding. While video art also became narrative and documentation, it’s most important shift was into the use of the electronics of the medium and its means, to produce wildly different kinds of images, whether on a single screen in an installation of screens. He also legitimatised video art as an institutionally (read Art Gallery) accepteble form.

PREV

Return to CONTENTS

NEXT