From Performance to Video/Electronic/Film-based Art

"The artist is a visionary about life. Only he can create disorder and still get away with it. Only he can use technology to its fullest capacity. The artists have to use

technology because technology is becoming inseparable from lives."

– Billy Klüver

http://www.zakros.com/projects/eat/index.html In 1966, Swedish engineer Billy Klüver founded E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology) with Robert Rauschenberg, Fred Waldhauer, and Robert Whitman.

(below) Robert Rauschenberg and Billy Klüver, Soundings, 1968, audience claps and makes lights go on and off behind plexiglass panels. Ludwig Museum, Cologne

Joseph Beuys, Siberian Symphony, FESTUM FLUXORUM FLUXUS, 1963, Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal, Germany

George Maciunas (Lithuanian-American, 1931–1978) Fluxus Manifesto, 1963

Yoko Ono (Japan, b. 1933) Cut Piece, performance, 1964 (Japan) and (right)1965 (NYC,Carnegie Hall)

Shigeko Kubota (American b. Japan, 1937, married to Nam June Paik) Vagina Painting,performance, July 4th, 1965, New York City, Perpetual Fluxus Festival, (red paint on white paper, paint brush attached to crotch of underpants)

Nam June Paik (American, b. Seoul, Korea, 1932 - 2006)Zen for Head, Fluxus performance, 1962

Nam June Paik, 1961 Fluxus Festival of New Music, Weisbaden, German

Nam June Paik and John Cage in Marcel Duchamp and John Cage still from performance video by Shigeko Kubota, 1972

Nam June Paik, (left) Zen for TV, 1963(right) TV Buddha, 1974

Marshall McLuhan Understanding Media, first published in 1964

The period after World War-II in the US is considered the final birth of television.  The explosion of sets into the American marketplace occurred in 1948-1949.

Paik (left) began interfering with television imagesin the early 1960s; (right) TV Magnet, 1965

“Some day artists will work with capacitors, resistors and semi-conductors as they work today with brushes, violins and junk.” Paik

Nam June Paik, (left) TV Bra for Living Sculpture, 1969(right) Opera Sextronique with Charlotte Moorman (US 1931-1991), 1969

(left) Mooreman, Paik, Joseph Beuys, Fluxus Action, 1966; (left) with Yoko Ono and John Lennon (1971); (right, below) Moorman performing Paik's Concerto for TV Cello

and Videotapes (1971) at Galeria Bonino, New York, November 23, 1971

http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/global-grove/video/1/

Nam June Paik, Global Groove, 1974; Paik in studio of WGBH, which broadcast Global Groove

'This is a glimpse of a video landscape of tomorrow when you will be able to switch on any TV station on the earth and TV guides will be as fat as the Manhattan telephone book.'

- Paik

Paik, Video Fish, 1975, Three channel video installation with aquariums, water, 45 live Japanese fish, Pompidou Center (Paris) collection, 7 of 15 monitors

Nam June Paik, Video Flag, (1985-1996)70 video monitors, 4 laser disc players, computer, timers, electrical devices, wood and

metal housing on rubber wheels, 94 3/8 x 139 3/4 x 47 3/4 in.

Nam June Paik in collaboration with Norman Ballard, Paul Garrin, David Hartnett, and Stephen Vitiello, Modulation in Sync, 2000. Three-channel video and stereo sound

installation with 100 monitors, seven projectors, two lasers, water, mirrors, projection screens, and metal structure, variable dimensions. Paik retrospective, Guggenheim NYC

Video performance: Bruce Nauman, Stamping in the Studio, 1968,

60 minutes (excerpt, 5 minutes)

From: Rewind: Video Art and Alternative Media in the United States 1968-1980Media N 6494.V53 S97 1995

Program 2: “Investigations of the Phenomenal World: Space, Sound, and Light”

Video performance: 1977

Martha Rosler, Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained38 minutes

“I did my best to interrupt voyeurism by having a long shot – a stationary shot that fatigues the viewer and diminishes aspects of the character’s presence on

the screen. It becomes boring to look at something without camera mobility and without reaction shots. (Rosler, 1981)

From: Rewind: Video Art and Alternative Media in the United States 1968-1980Media N 6494.V53 S97 1995

Program 4: Gendered Confrontations

Video performance: 1978

Nam June Paik, Merce by Merce by Paik28 minutes

A tribute to choreographer Merce Cunningham and artist Marcel DuchampVideo was choreographed for 2-D monitor screen by Cunningham. Audio

includes voices of John Cage and Jasper Johns. Part 2 is by Paik and Shigeko Kubota and includes montage-interview with Marcel Duchamp and meeting

between Cunningham and Leo Castelli.

“I think I understand time better than the video artists who came from painting-sculpture. Music is the manipulation of time. All music forms have different structures and buildup. As painters understand abstract space, I understand

abstract time. Nam June Paik, 1974

From: Rewind: Video Art and Alternative Media in the United States 1968-1980Media N 6494.V53 S97 1995

Program 5: Performance of Video-Imaging Tools

Doug Aitken (California b.1968) Sleepwalkers, Jan-Feb, 2007, 8 projections on MoMA NYC exterior walls http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJaTjc3TMyo

Laurie Anderson (US b. 1947)Duets on Ice, street performance in New York City and Genoa, Italy, 1973-4, playing Bach while wearing ice skates embedded in ice. When ice melted the performance ended.

Laurie Anderson, Performance United States Part II, 1980The Orpheum, New York; (right) album covers United States I-IV, 1984

Laurie Anderson, United States Part I, 1980, Orpheum TheaterMultiple disjunctive narratives. Voice through the harmonizer shifts from “voice of

authority (deep, masculine) to female (her own). The woman repeatedly asks “Hello, excuse me, can you tell me where I am?” The response is “You can read the signs.”

(below right) Poster from Anderson’s The End of the Moon, 2005, performance(top) at NASA as the agency’s first artist-in-residence, 2004

Hatoum, Light at the End, 1989, London, iron frame and six electric heating elements

Mona Hatoum (b. 1952) Palestinian-Lebanese based in London (right) video still from So Much I Want to Say, 1983

Mona Hatoum, still from Measures of Distance, 15-minute video, 1988

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x31gw4_measures-of-distance-mona-hatoum_creation

Pipilotti Rist, I’m not the girl who misses much, 1986http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsC8FKNE8fg

Pipilotti Rist (Swiss b. 1963) "Ever is all over" video installation (two overlapping projections), 1997

Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2007

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4559201253275818259#

Pipilotti Rist, Selfless In The Bath Of Lava, 1994, audio video installation (video still) PS1 Long Island City, New York. Tiny screen under the floorboards near the entrance

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89vgdELbVyQPipilotti Rist: Pour Your Body Out, video/audio installation at MoMA NYC 2008

Tania Bruguera (b. 1968 Havana, Cuba) Poetic Justice, 2002-2003, video Installation, used tea bags, 8 one-second selection from several international historic newsreels, 8 LCD screens, 8 DVD discs, 8 DVD players | 62.33' x 6.2' x 11.8'

Tania Bruguera, Poetic Justice (details), 2002-2003, video Installation

Shirin Neshat, Iranian based in New York – 2 photographs from 1994 Women of Allah series; right: Allegiance with Wakefulness, ink on photograph of artist’s feet with feminist Farsi poetry.

Shirin Neshat, still from The Shadow under the Web, film transferred to DVD and projected as installation, 1997. Neshat synthesizes new image technology; Iranian, American, and European film aesthetics; the poetry, music and songs of her homeland, and the global fusion sounds of Phillip Glass. Two years after producing this work she was declared an enemy of the Iranian state.

“Leaving has offered me incredible personal development, a sense of independence that I don't think I would have had. But there's also a great sense of isolation. And I've permanently lost a complete sense of center. I can never call any place home. I will forever be in a state of in-between.”

- Neshat, 2000