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Video Art in Flux
On the television screen, out of the grey pre-dawn static, black and white grains coalesce into stable forms. White sheets are spread on the ground, wares deposited, and the market-day commences. In flipbook-like stop motion, crowds and channels of people flow and merge like sand through the neck of a glass, telling off the minutes of the day, accompanied by an unceasing pattern of mechanical clatters - clickety-click clickety-click clickety-click - like an invisible, tireless typewriter. But the movements of the picture are uneven, the cuts jerky, and the video edited to follow exactly the ticking rhythm. This is the Polish artist Józef Robakowski's 1970 video “The Market,” ( 4:21 ), and as it progresses, the swarm increases to fill the screen entirely as its movements are tied to the modulations of the accompaniment. Now a hammered dactyl, then troche, then the original quartus paeon, that Morse-coded “V” which starts off Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. As night falls, individuals become abstract grains again, fading into a jittery void. When the end comes it is startling for its abruptness, as if the hypnotically patterned video had run into a wall of blankness and silence. I am watching this video in the third floor of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts as part of the E-flux Video Rental (EVR), a project by Anton Vidokle and Julieta Aranda, showing at Harvard from February 8 to April 13. Vidokle and Aranda are both artists and together run E-flux, or the Electronic Flux Corporation, an influential online newsletter and information bureau for the art world. EVR is an installation piece with a library of over 600 video works, an artistic version of your corner video rental shop. It lies behind an imposingly heavy door in the Sert Gallery: a small room lined with rows of video cassettes, each cased in a uniformly designed white jacket, nestled on understated aluminum shelves just an inch narrower than width of the tapes. Videos can be checked out for two days with a free membership or watched in the Carpenter Center . The project started in New York in 2004, out of a small storefront on Ludlow Street in Chinatown , and has since traveled widely, from Miami to Berlin to Seoul , among others. The project grows with every new installation as local artists are invited to contribute work. The Carpenter Center is the EVR's last stop. When you first come to EVR, you must apply for a membership. All that means is showing an ID and getting a rental card, which is carefully typed out on a three by five index card on a sleek, bright-red typewriter, each charactered lever striking with beautiful, obsolete, precision. Each cassette box also has an index card in it, and the renter's name is typed in when it is taken out, crossed off in pencil when returned. One of the most popular titles is “An artist who cannot speak English is not an artist,” (2003, 5:00 ) by the Kosovan artist Jakup Ferri, and its index card is half full of typed names. Ferri, young and ingenuous, delivers a long monologue to the camera in what tries to be English, is almost English, but is not English. He tries to communicate, but though the words sound familiar they become fractured and devolve into gibberish, the granules of sound jittering into a patterned nonsense reminiscent of Robakowski's work. Even though the medium is less than half a century old, the precise origins of video art are as garbled and difficult to pin down as Ferri's attempt at communication. The sanctified father of video art is Nam June Paik, a South Korean who studied music in Japan and Germany before moving to New York . Paik, who died last year, was inspired by John Cage and closely aligned with Fluxus and the associated reexamination of cultural standards, began by experimenting with televisions as sculptural objects (essentially bricks which showed pictures) to using television as intermediary for video. Paik's work moved from abstract images created by magnetic distortion of cathode rays to creating short videos with the Sony Portapak, introduced in 1967 as the first portable video camera. Though the Portapak was not available until two years later, it is still said that one October afternoon in 1965, Paik, having just purchased a new Portapak, was stuck in traffic caused by the pope's visit and decided to shoot tape from out the cab's window. Later, he showed it to some friends at a Greenwich village cafe. This was not the caméra-stylo or the cinéma-vérité of the handheld, jump-cut, French new wave, nor was the camera used as an artist's brush. Rather, video became a medium in its own right. Now, however, the video camera is on the verge of obsolescence. Using the moving image in art didn't start with Paik—the Dadas and Surrealists were known for their use of experimental film decades before—and of course won't end with the decline of VHS, but the E-flux video project showcases a particular analog medium in peculiar tension with its own imminent demise. Soon, videocassettes will seem as anachronistic as Edison 's wax cylinders. I spoke by telephone with Vidokle and Aranda, who are both now based in Berlin , about video art and EVR. The vagaries of international calls made each session seem as if we were on opposite ends of a long, empty hall, the voices sounding clear but distant and slightly echoed.
Harvard Advocate : Often video art is seen essentially as an installation piece in a museum or gallery devoted to projecting the video. Though the viewing process here is entirely different, your project is also an installation. What sort of aesthetic choices guided the look of the project?
Julieta Aranda : I like more to talk about it as a sculpture, and it is a very conscious choice of words. I am thinking in terms of spatial sculpture, the materials for the sculpture itself are the videotapes. The materials are quite abstract: it's the tapes. Of course there are conscious aesthetic choices. There is the typewriter, this cumbersome thing, there is this video player, there is the design elements, but I do not think that they by themselves make the work. For me it is the situation. What I am thinking about sculpting is a sense of circulation, a sense of fallibility, this idea of dispersion. … Anton Vidokle : Well, yes, but this is not an installation in sense of some kind of aesthetics, it's more of a very pragmatic, very practical solution. The piece is very open in the sense that people are allowed to take artworks home, you know watch them in their own sort of environment. So there's a lot of openness to the project. And to make that possible you have to have a kind of structure. That's what the installation, the specific visual choices are about, trying to deal with the fact that people are taking parts of this exhibition home every day, so it is basically disappearing in front of you, and there is a need to kind of maintain a of form within that. So this is a paradoxical thing, on the one hand we are trying to create a very open way of distribution and circulation for the works, but on the other hand to keep this as a coherent project, to keep this together for a long period of time like three years, it requires a certain kind of a very specific look, and certain kind of a very specific installation. … HA : In a way, you are turning the paradigm of artistic consumption on its head. This project moves the viewing frame from the public sphere to the private sphere. How do you think this changes the viewer's experience of the art?
JA : That I think that is for the viewer to answer, I cannot answer for the viewer. I can only answer in a very pragmatic way only, which is to say it is probably good in the sense that a lot of times people don't have the time to sit through a lot of these, so by being able to take it home they may find the time to sit through a 45 minute video. But that is a pragmatic answer. Maybe there is a relationship of intimacy. For me in a way it is something very nice to think that when somebody is taking one of those videos home, whether they find it so dreadful and boring that they fall asleep to it, or they are cooking as it plays in the background, the project itself is moving to that location. It not only operates in this small confined space where it happens to be at the time, but it actually moves much more in a community. … AV : Public/private is such a complex distinction. The history of video art is quite amazing, it starts with very, very utopian aspirations, but what really attracted artists to this medium was that there is no medium, that it could circulate throughout society, that there would always be multiple copies of works. That is video by definition—you know television—it is in every home, there is no authentic original of it. Its really kind of strange that at the time it wasn't really, and I'm talking about late 60s early 70s when the cultural community was interested in big international shows, video was not really accepted as a medium. It wasn't perceived to be art. It was corrupted by television, by media, by all of that. So paradoxically now, when this changes, video becomes a very respected genre, as respected as sculpture, painting or installation, and the very center of this medium, which is its multiplicity, its circulation, stops because artists produce it only in very small editions, maybe three four copies of a specific video work which nobody really has access to besides collectors, galleries, and major, major shows. So when we ran the project in New York, for the public, it was actually people who took video classes at universities or art schools because they are trying to learn video and they have very little access to the materials since films and videos are so restricted. … HA : How does the participatory aspect of the project impact this idea of circulation?
JA : We are not asking people to do anything for us, we are not asking people to do anything that we would be aware of. Now, for all I know people could take the video tapes home and use them to prop a table rather than put them on the VCR. It's really something that for me has a lot to do with circulation. I guess in a sense it touches on consumption, but it is one step before, circulation is always this untangible enabler between production and consumption. So, if you want to stop the process before it becomes consumption and display the circulation as an aesthetic act, that is where I would want to position this work. … HA : This is a “video rental” and not a “video library.” At the same time, there is a high degree of pedagogical benefit from showing videos that would otherwise be entirely unavailable. Does this distinction get at an element of commercialization?
JA : I don't like to think about positioning myself against the market or a commercial thing. It is in the back of our heads, but it is not one of the main things that propelled the project. The name video rental is really coming from the fact that video stores are always called video rental stores. It is not about creating a resource or educating people, it is about playing with circulation. Something that was very interesting for us, and for me personally, was to think of this not to think of this as an existing archive, but to create an archive that has the potential for being open, that does not become a system of exclusion, that actually is system of circulation. I like to think in terms of Jorge Louis Borges, the idea that if the video rental would continue for another 3,000 years, everything in the world that has ever been produced would enter that. Something that is very interesting for me is to make an open archive. … VA : Somebody in Europe tried to rename the project the Videotheque and we weren't happy with that because we wanted to use a very specific term. This is very subjective, it addresses first and foremost our interests as artists, and sometimes it's very lucky that it also corresponds with the interest of the public, the audience, the community, and then everybody is happy and it is a wonderful situation, but the impulse to start a new project, for me it comes a very selfish place of my personal interests, my personal thoughts, not as a kind of service for the benefit of a community or a society or anything like that. I don't think that self-interest is always in contrast to social interest. Quite often, they do correspond. It is very useful for a lot of people who are interested in video art, for people to see things that otherwise would take an impossible amount of time of traveling over the world to see. … HA : How does this project relate to YouTube and modern online culture?
JA : When we started this thing, YouTube did not exist yet. I see YouTube as more akin to bloopers, blopers, how do you call those things? More like “Comedy in America ,” than anything that is seriously arts related. I would like to think that this is an archive of video art of a certain quality. I don't want to see a video of, I don't know, my neighbor's child's fifth birthday. … HA : It seems that the active incorporation of the viewer plays a large part in the project.
AV : That's one of the things that's very important to me, and maybe because E-flux started on the internet, and the time when we started there was always the question of interactivity and it was a very banal conversation about interactivity. Like clicking on the mouse or something, that maybe somehow really affected this desire to make cultural projects that involves the audience in a way that exhibitions don't. Online you have a simplified, a reduced version of reality. What you see on the screen is not what the screen represents. There is a graphic interface which is by definition not the real thing, so it's quite tricky. It's beyond photography, beyond more objective genres where you are actually looking at physical particles of light heating the diaphragm of the camera, so there is a kind of recorded sexuality to it. But that's not quite the problem. The problem is with this genre, people start talking about cyber art, like trying to absorb those new artistic forms, and it's already called Duscampian, it is already interdisciplinary, with all sorts of mediums. Nobody is only a sculptor. They also work maybe with video and also with photography, and probably do performance as well. … HA : How are you planning to end this project? Already, VHS is becoming an obsolete technology. Also, why did you choose VHS as a format and not DVD?
JA : It is difficult to end it. It has this problem that the moment we end it, the archive becomes closed. I like its potential as an eternal project, but I would not want to do that. It is very interesting to witness the end of a technology. For VHS, there is the sound, of the fast forward, the rewind, all those things, that for me is embedded on the situation which I am appropriating. A lot of the work we are showing has been lent by an artist, but it also has commercial value. Not only is it interesting for me personally to play with a dying technology, and to watch it die as the product moves along, but also, that's on the one hand, on the other hand, we want to be able to let people take the videos home without affecting the commercial value of the piece. I would not want to think that by letting these videos out, I am potentially making an artist lose money, because most artists don't make much money. We tried to take into consideration how uneasy an artist would be about people taking their work home. To have their work floating around and whatnot, so we gave them the choice to have their work play at the space and not be taken out. Only one person decided to have his work play only at the space and not be taken home, and eventually he changed his mind as well. … AV : When we started, a lot of people still had VHS players, so the technology that we use makes this project possible. There are a couple of reasons why we use VHS. One of them is practical, you know the worry of the artists who actually gave us the work, that the work can circulate so freely brings up all sorts of copyright issues. We were able to deal with this by suggesting a VHS format. When you copy a VHS you lose resolution each time, so copyright issues are just not an issue at all. But what has happened was just in the last couple of years VHS completely sort of has disappeared, and now even artists don't have VHS players in their homes, so the thing cannot function unless we rent not only tapes but also VHS players, at which point it becomes too complicated. It's best to stop at this point. For us what is really important is that VHS gave us the possibility to do this project without getting into the copyright issues. There were worries from artists that their work will be stolen somehow. A number of years ago the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris wanted to organize something of this nature—maybe not a traveling project, but some section of their museum—and artists did not want to cooperate. That never happened, they didn't get the cooperation of the artists. We were lucky with VHS. Of course, there is also something very interesting of the notice of obsolescence. You know a lot of artists and theorists talk about it all the time, and actually during the obsolescence you see a reflection of the early optimism when the format originated, and you can see it also through a filter of irony of its own decline. It's a very enlightening moment, this moment of obsolescence, because you see very clearly what it set out to do, where it failed or outlived itself, where it did not fulfill, and what it still can offer. So it is actually a very beautiful time to look at something.
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