Video Triumphs in the Galleries

by Brian Frye


Probably the highest profile art-star of the late nineties, Matthew Barney was recently the subject of an at least half-serious encomium in Harpers magazine, dubbing him the finest exponent of artistic onanism, at least since Caravaggio. Stars of any kind tend to burn brightly and fast, and the tendency of many hot-shot artists to turn to the essential medium of celebrity—the movies—is hardly unexpected: think Julian Schnabel, Cindy Sherman, and Richard Longo. But Barney has done his predecessors one step better. Rather than simply declare himself a film director at the height of his career, he built his reputation on the strength of his Cremaster series, a group of feature-length film/videos roughly resembling Jean Cocteau via Busby Berkeley. A nifty trick to be sure, but the question remains: since when did moviemaking become the stuff of art galleries?

While video is hardly new to the gallery scene, its recent success certainly is. In the mid-seventies, New York galleries like Castelli-Sonnabend showed videos and films by artists like Vito Acconci and Richard Serra, but made few sales and eventually abandoned the project. Today, galleries are successfully selling tapes by the same artists Castelli was hawking 25 years ago. Chrissie Iles, curator of film and video at the Whitney Museum of American Art, called Castelli a "visionary" and chalked up the failure of his experiment to the fact that collectors in the seventies simply weren’t ready to purchase artworks in ephemeral media like film and video.

What’s more, advances in video technology have dramatically changed the face of video art. In the seventies, video equipment was crude, clumsy, and expensive. Editing was difficult, picture quality was middling at best, and video projectors were crummy and prohibitively expensive. Tapes were almost always shown on monitors, and duration—the one thing that video was really good at—became a key element of most tapes. One of Castelli’s biggest obstacles was no doubt the simple intractability of the medium itself.

Today, cheap and high-quality digital cameras and video projectors make video not only affordable but seductive. Videos are almost always projected and treated as installations, and monitors have acquired a bad rap. In deference to the demands of the gallery setting, most artists have abandoned—or at least modulated—the interest in duration that so dominated video art in the ’70s, turning to loops and installation.

And yet, many of the most successful artists are showing long, linear tapes, which work in both galleries and traditional movie theaters. Barney’s Cremaster films have shown in both galleries and traditional movie theaters like Film Forum in New York City. The Whitney’s Iles believes that artists like Barney, Sharon Lockhart, and Shirin Neshat owe their success to their attention to the plastic qualities of film and video, like cinematography, art direction, and composition. Not only has the absolute quality of the image improved since the days of the portapak, but artists have a newfound appreciation for production values, which has prompted many artists to turn to film, despite its frustrating liabilities. Barney goes so far as to transfer his tapes to 35mm for exhibition, and several New York galleries, like Richard Zwirner and Marian Goodman, recently showed very sophisticated 35mm film installations.

Of course, artists who choose to show in galleries have to reconcile themselves to a less focused audience—gallery-goers are free to come and go as they please. But many artists have learned to accept both kinds of viewers—those who watch only a fragment of their tapes, and those with the patience to stay for awhile. While this might be a compromise, it’s mitigated by the prospect of unprecedented financial success.

hile the gallery model for selling film and video work is very different from the standard film distribution model, it really isn’t all that unfamiliar. Much like limited edition prints, photographs, and artists books, galleries sell films and videos in limited editions (often three), with the artist retaining one copy called an "artist’s proof." In a gesture to installation, the purchase price sometimes includes video hardware, and artists almost always include specific presentation instructions, but this often amounts to no more than the proper size of the room and wall the tape is to be projected on.

Rosalie Benitez of the Barbara Gladstone Gallery (which represents artists Matthew Barney, Vito Acconci, Rosemarie Trockel, Shirin Neshat, and Gary Hill, among others) described the standard procedure for selling video art as follows: "Single-channel works are editioned and certificated. In the case of a sale, a specific edition number is sold to a client—i.e., edition number 6 of 10 of a particular work would be clearly indicated on the work itself, as with any multiple edition artwork, and certificated accordingly. Obviously, and following copyright laws, a work may not be reproduced or in any way duplicated by the owner."

The model is not perfectly transferable. Unlike editioned work in photography or etching, for instance, where a collector clearly purchases a physical object, it is not entirely clear whether a collector of video art purchases a videotape or its contents. This question would be an academic, were it not for the fact that videotapes are fragile and become entirely useless—and presumably valueless—when the tape is damaged.

Museums and galleries have only recently begun to address the problems inherent to collecting unstable media like film and video. For example, a collector recently donated a limited edition of two films by Walter de Maria to the Whitney Museum, which have faded entirely to red and can no longer be shown. As the original negative of the film is now missing, the artwork is effectively lost. Unlike other editioned media, in which the value of the object depends upon the disposal of the master materials after striking an artificial number of copies, the longevity of a film or video depends upon the preservation of masters, as the works themselves degrade in presentation.

Iles proposed a model for the sale of videos and films that would resemble the one developed for minimal art and sculpture. Like a collector of Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings, which consist of a set of instructions that anyone can execute, or Dan Flavin’s light sculptures, which consist of carefully placed florescent light fixtures, the collector of video art would purchase not a physical tape but a certificate conferring the right to strike a copy from the master as necessary.

But this revolution has its discontents. In their tape Untitled #29.95, recently released by the Internet prank brokers ®™ark, the anonymous Video Aktivists present a blistering and intermittently humorous critique of what they consider video in service of big money. Tracing the history of video art from the conceptual and performance artists of the sixties and seventies through the activist video of the eighties and early nineties, Untitled #29.95 contends that turning a video into a saleable commodity perverts its egalitarian essence. The tape ends with clips from recent videos by Matthew Barney (Cremaster) and Lucy Gunning (The Horse Impressionists and Climbing Around My Room), taped surreptitiously in the galleries where they were exhibited, their asking prices—ranging from $25,000 to $300,000—prominently displayed. In the spirit of Robin Hood, ®™ark [www.rtmark.com] generously offers to sell full-length bootleg versions of these tapes for the comparatively reasonable price of $29.95.

But nonprofit distributors are already doing much the same thing. Even artists lucky enough to have gallery representation don’t eschew the traditional film and video distribution models entirely, often distributing their tapes through nonprofit organizations like Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI). "Since EAI is a nonprofit, we don’t deal with editioned tapes; the primary issue for us is access," says Galen Joseph-Hunter, EAI’s digital media coordinator. While the rental price EAI charges for a tape—$50-$75—is a fraction of what galleries charge to purchase editioned versions, they maintain cordial relations, even passing tapes back and forth. Artist Alix Pearlstein believes that rather than placing a premium on scarcity, collectors ought to think of the reproducible nature of film and video as a strength. According to Pearlstein, distribution helps, rather than hurts gallery owners and collectors as "the more a piece becomes a part of people’s shared experience, the more valuable it becomes."

So what of ®™ark’s critique? On a gut level, it’s sympathetic, but unfortunately glosses over the hard economic questions at stake. There’s nothing inegalitarian about artists selling their work at market value. And there’s no need to liberate these tapes from wealthy people, as anyone can see them for free in galleries and museums, or rent them inexpensively through nonprofit distributors. Ultimately, selling experimental film and video through a gallery might offer another option to artists who have depended for years on unpredictable, beleaguered bureaucracies for funding. For all the good that organizations like the NEA, NYSCA, and the Rockefeller Foundation do, few artists can depend on them. And as detestable as the market can be, many wouldn’t mind seeing a few of those IPO dollars trickle down into the pockets of some film- and videomakers.

Brian Frye is a filmmaker, curator, and freelance writer
currently living in New York City.