VIDEO ART: STAYIN' ALIVE
CYNTHIA CHRIS
Afterimage Volume 27, number 5
Just over three years ago, I wrote an essay for Afterimage on current trends in artists’ video ( "Video Art: Dead or Alive?," Afterimage 24, no. 3). It seemed that during the late 1980s and early 1990s many videomakers, programmers, grant-providers and media librarians had managed changes in the financial climate of the art world, public and private philanthropy and university budgets by turning away from single-channel video as an obscure and unprofitable art form. Still, rumors of the death of video art were greatly exaggerated. On the contrary, a look at a flurry of critical attention to video art, and to the recent use of video by artists, suggested that it was under close scrutiny and evolving in response to a complex set of aesthetic interests, technological developments and restructured opportunities for exhibition.
As the twentieth
century draws to a close, video is alive and kicking, even commonplace, in the
art world in the form of multi-media installations and interactive projects in
both physical and virtual space. Analog, digital and HDTV formats and the
convergence of film and video technologies have only just begun to transform
all aspects of independent feature filmmaking, from visual texture to
budgeting. Countless artists and media activists working in narrative,
experimental, documentary and hybrid forms continue to use video as their
primary medium, showing their work in dozens of festivals accepting both film
and video, and in ostensibly video-only festivals such as L.A.
Freewaves, the Dallas Video Festival, the Worldwide Video
Festival in The Hague and the New York Video Festival, whose
publicity materials for their July 1999 festival claimed that "video is now .
. . an almost classical notion." Long-time video curator David A. Ross (now
director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art [SFMOMA]) can confidently
state that "a whole new generation of artists now uses video like a pencil, as
John Baldessari predicted."1
Indeed, both
established and emerging artists who use video are exhibiting, accumulating
press coverage and winning prestigious awards in unprecedented numbers. A
handful of artists with decades of experience working primarily in video have
been graced with retrospectives (e.g., Antonio Muntadas at the Biblioteca Luis
Angel Arango in Bogotá in 1999; Tony Oursler at the Williams College Museum of
Art and the new Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, both in
Massachusetts, in 1999; Bill Viola at six museums in the United States and
Europe from 1997 to 2000; Bruce and Norman Yonemoto at the Japanese American
National Museum in Los Angeles in 1999 [see Afterimage 27, no. 3]; and
"Martha Rosler: Positions in the Life World," a retrospective honoring
Rosler’s influential works in various media including video, which originated
at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, England in 1999 and travelled to several
international venues before its scheduled installation at the New Museum of
Contemporary Art in New York City in June 2000 [see Afterimage 27, no.
1]). While these exhibitions have surveyed both new and old work by well-known
artists, video from the 1970s has also resurfaced in venues varying from
historical exhibitions such as "Reel Work: Artists’ Film and Video of the
1970s" at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, in 1996 to single-channel
sidebars in exhibitions of otherwise new work. For example, the Cheim &
Read Gallery in New York City showed Female Sensibility (1973) by Lynda
Benglis alongside an exhibition of her new sculpture in 1998. Similarly, the
same year, the Geffen Contemporary at The Museum of Contemporary Art-Los
Angeles (MOCA-LA) complemented an installation of Richard Serra’s recent
sculptures with selections from his earlier work in film and video such as
Television Delivers People (1973, with Carlotta Fay Schoolman) and
Boomerang (1974, with Nancy Holt).
Not all of the
current frenzy surrounding artists’ video focuses on its origins and
originators. Video by younger artists–at least in the form of
installations–has been embraced wholeheartedly by galleries, museums, the art
press and even some private collectors. Perhaps it was clear that video was
not dead when Artforum, its editorial finger characteristically on the
pulse of the latest trend, used a frame from Alex Bag’s incisive performance
video Fall ’95 (1995) on its January 1996 cover. Since then, video has
taken center stage with such pervasiveness that a comprehensive survey of the
trend would constitute quite a lengthy list; a few examples may be
sufficiently emblematic. Jessica Bronson’s video installations earned her the
Emerging Artist Award bestowed by MOCA-LA and Citibank in 1998 (the award
includes a one-person exhibition at MOCA). In 1999 Sam Taylor-Wood, a 1998
Turner Prize finalist, produced a major video installation for the Hirshhorn
Museum in Washington, D.C. Taylor-Wood is one of several members of the
much-heralded generation known as the Young British Artists to use video in
her work; others include 1999 Turner Prize winner Steve McQueen, who also
works in film, and collaborators Jane and Louise Wilson, whose installations
are shot on film and projected as video (see Afterimage 27, no. 3).
Several generations of artists contributed video installations to the 1999
Venice Biennale (Doug Aitken, Christian Marclay, Shirin Neshat, the late
Dieter Roth and Rosemarie Trockel, among others); reviews by the New York
Times’s Michael Kimmelman and other critics dwelt on the prominence of the
medium in the show. The Dia Center for the Arts in New York City exhibited new
video installations by Stan Douglas and Douglas Gordon in 1999-2000; Gordon’s
work in video garnered the Turner Prize in 1996 and the Guggenheim Museum’s
Hugo Boss Prize in 1998. At least a quarter of the 40 artists–including Neshat
and the Wilsons–chosen for the 1999-2000 Carnegie International at the
Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh used video in some aspect of their work.
Late in 1999 SFMOMA mounted "Seeing Time: Selections from the Pamela and
Richard Kramlich Collection of Media Art," from a collection believed to be
the largest private collection of its kind.2 Unfortunately, the cluttered,
cacophonous exhibition design failed to account for the fact that media art
often provides auditory as well as visual experiences, allowing soundtracks
from nearby pieces to compete and even drown out one another. Video art even
has greatest hits, one of which is Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s endlessly
clever The Way Things Go (1987), where household items bump and combust
their way along a 100-foot-long Rube Goldberg-style contraption. Originally,
Sonnebend Gallery sold the tape in a limited, signed edition for $300 to $400
per VHS copy; an unlimited edition is currently available from First Run
Features Home Video for $19.95.
Despite the undeniable pervasiveness of artists’ video, not everyone is thrilled with its increasing integration into the commercial art market, and some of the attendant consequences regarding form and content. Defenders of single-channel video art have thrown down the gauntlet, accusing the art market of having made room for certain types of video in galleries, museums and private collections with no less than outright chicanery. These anonymous, self-described video activists have made their accusations in a 15-minute video called Untitled #29.95: A Video About Video (1999), which is alternately polemical, nostalgic, caustic and hilarious. The tape offers not only an encapsulated history of artists’ video but also a gentle scolding of the latest generation of artists who use video and a searing critique of the machinations of the art market that has made some of them stars. Further, it launches what it calls "The Great Video Art Give Away," folding clips from a number of recent pricey, limited-edition artists’ videos into the tape, and offering to sell bootleg copies of a few select works in their entirety at the "reasonable cost of $29.95." In short, Untitled #29.95 puts its makers’ theory into practice: if video is by nature a medium meant to be mechanically reproduced and widely distributed, then one must necessarily seize control of the medium by sabotaging the market for high-priced limited edition videos with low-cost, endlessly reproducible bootlegs.
Aptly, Untitled #29.95 is distributed independently by its makers at the eponymous price of $29.95 through the Web site of the anonymous artists’ collective known as ®tmark whose stated mission is "anticorporate sabotage." Private donors fund ®tmark’s wide-ranging projects, which are typified by brainy, subversive logic and humor, and considered complete only when they have caught the attention of the mainstream press. Among its best known activities was a 1996 collaboration with the Barbie Liberation Organization, which switched voiceboxes in talking G.I. Joes and Barbie dolls, returning them to store shelves to upset the gender-specific expectations of consumers. A recent project carries to its logical conclusion the long legal legacy of granting to corporations the same rights (if fewer of the responsibilities) as individuals: it offers a $2000 reward to any U.S. court that imprisons a corporation under the "three strikes" law, and adds a bonus to the court that sentences a corporation to death. Another project, HQ2O, offers for sale elegant bottles of water said to be pilfered from the water coolers of various Silicon Valley companies and labeled to identify the specific high-tech source. While ®tmark did not create or fund Untitled #29.95, the collective provides information on the project on its extensive Web site.3
Covering all tracks that might reveal the identity or identities of those responsible, Untitled #29.95’s creepy narration is provided not by a human voice, but apparently by one of the quasi-female voices that Mac users can select to speechify alerts and read text aloud. There is no original footage; all imagery consists of appropriated–and uncredited–snippets from video art tapes, the majority of which are easily recognized by anyone familiar with the medium as, for all practical purposes, selections from the video art canon. All footage is shot off of television screens, adding flicker, video noise and skewed angles that frame the image as found, constantly reminding the viewer that the imagery is appropriated. This strategy may assuage the discomfort some may feel about Untitled #29.95’s brazen violation of a widely honored if unwritten and ambiguous rule that it is acceptable to appropriate from commercial mass media, but not from another independent mediamaker. Consistent with the tape’s essayistic structure and tone, these clips serve a purpose more akin to quotation than to the recontextualizing, deconstructive gestures that are characteristic of many appropriative video art tapes. At the same time, the unauthorized use of footage from artists’ videos underscores the difficulty of protecting copyrighted material produced in easily reproducible media and reanimates long-ranging and thorny debates on the matter.
Of course, most of
the video art used in Untitled #29.95 is considered exemplary of
extraordinary innovation in form or content–at least in the case of video art
from its earliest years into the 1980s. These clips constitute the backdrop
for a contentious history of artists’ video, comprised of three basic
sections, each corresponding roughly to a period of the medium’s history. The
first covers the late 1960s through the 1970s; the middle section encompasses
the 1980s and early 1990s; and the final section takes artists’ video of the
1990s to task. Gutsy analysis and a sharp sense of irony more than compensate
for a forgivable tendency to gloss over the actual complexity of that history,
and any lack of subtlety is easily attributable to the constraint of
brevity.
"Our story begins," the cyber-narrator intones haltingly, "in 1965 when Sony corporation introduced the first portable video cameras into the U.S. Artists and hippie activists were the first to use video to challenge the authority of the mass media and the materialism of the art world. It was the Sixties. You know." Thus in one stroke, Untitled #29.95 links the histories of activist and fine art video, an analytical tactic that treats the former–for example, the work of collectives such as Top Value Television–and the latter–for example, Bruce Nauman’s Stamping in the Studio (1968) or Joan Jonas’s Vertical Roll (1972)–as related critiques of, respectively, the hegemonic function of the mass media, and the tendency toward commodification and depoliticization in market-driven art practices. Arguing that in the 1960s and early 1970s artists experimented with video (and performance and other ephemeral media) as a means of escape from the materialism of the art world, the narrator notes (pointing a finger specifically at Leo Castelli Gallery) that dealers responded to this rebelliousness by trying to commodify video. At the time, attempts to publish tapes in limited editions were by and large unsuccessful. While dealers were trying to eviscerate from video one of its most basic characteristics–its capacity to be cheaply and easily duplicated and widely distributed–others sought to exploit these very qualities: "feminists, grassroots collectives and artists were using video as a tool of cultural intervention."
The middle section of the tape applauds those artists and activists who used video to tackle political and social issues. It also acknowledges that many of the individual artists and the media art centers who exhibited and disseminated this work benefited tremendously from public funding during what may have been the most creative and productive period for single-channel video art, even though much of this output was overlooked by art critics, dealers and curators. Consequently, Untitled #29.95 suggests that Congressional decimation of the National Endowment for the Arts, motivated by disapproval of works with controversial content, paved the way for the return of video, at least in its commodified forms, to the gallery and to formal and ostensibly apolitical content in the mid-1990s. Noting that the art press rallied quickly around video’s "move back into the galleries," the narrator laments a piece written in early 1998 by New York Times art critic Roberta Smith. Without so much as a shred of evidence that the art world had been besieged by a preponderance of "bad video art," Smith confidently proclaimed that "the incidence of good video art is on the rise."4 Even more carelessly, Smith noted the debt of the new generation of artists using video in the mid- to late-1990s to video artists of the early 1970s, but completely ignored the years in between. Untitled #29.95 challenges Smith’s amnesia with a montage of images from the overlooked time period, calling it "an entire decade of incredible video production around race, class, gender, sexuality, media, politics and power," gleefully spanning the era from Joan Braderman’s Joan Does Dynasty (1986) and John Greyson’s The ADS Epidemic (1987), to Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied (1989), to Sadie Benning’s Jollies (1990) and Suzie Silver’s A Spy (Hester Reeve Does the Doors) (1992).
Turning its
attention to what Smith’s article called "the art of the moment," Untitled
#29.95 makes its transition into its third and final section with a list
of recently acclaimed artists’ videos and their prices, beginning with one of
the most stunning: "Stan Douglas, Overture, $150,000, limited edition
of two." The narrator proclaims, "Like Robin Hood and so many others
throughout history, I have learned that it sometimes takes a wrong to make a
right," and announces that bootleg copies of certain limited-edition artists’
videos can be purchased through the ®tmark Web site for the "reasonable cost
of $29.95," rather than gallery prices in the thousands and tens of thousands.
Untitled #29.95 defends these acts of piracy with great dry wit.
Against clips from Lucy Gunning’s The Horse Impressionists (1994) (in
which young women in public places prance, stomp and whinny before the
camera), the narrator implores, "Why should only wealthy people have access to
the important ideas in art?"
Untitled #29.95 is far from the first manifesto to make a set of claims about the nature of video. Nor is it the first manifesto of its type to sacrifice subtlety for rhetorical force. The conflation of the histories of media art and media activism oversimplifies the complexities of these practices, which have indeed overlapped at certain moments, but at least as often have taken place in distinctively situated conditions of production, distribution and reception. Likewise, the tape’s preoccupation with the proliferation of limited-edition video installations in the 1990s overlooks the persistent use of video by activists–in youth empowerment, human rights and prison issues movements, among others. Some of the first artists, critics and curators involved in the medium wrote energetically about its potential, from an array of perspectives and with a variety of goals, both at odds and in harmony with the views of the makers of Untitled #29.95. Their efforts can be loosely categorized as technological and formal (often intertwined), aesthetic or political. Each category could yield numerous examples, but space permits reference to only a few exemplary texts.
In 1975, for a catalog published to accompany a landmark survey of video’s first decade, David Antin described the essential qualities of video as primarily formal and deriving from technological and economic conditions of production. Noting that television and video "seemed to combine the photographic reproduction capabilities of the camera, the motion capabilities of film, and the instantaneous transmission properties of the telephone," Antin argued that these features are ideals or aspirations rather than achievements for at least two reasons.5 First, the relationship of an image to the "reality" it is meant to reproduce is tenuous at best. Second, televisual instantaneity, in live transmission and true interactivity, has been underexploited by both mass and experimental media.
Antin also attempted to distinguish the mass medium of television from the artistic medium of video by comparing their respective use of time as a formal quality determined by, on one hand, the political economy of the mass media and, on the other, the absence of standardized broadcast units or exhibition conditions for video art. The need of the television industry to offer regularly scheduled programs in order to draw viewer attention to the advertisements of the multiple sponsors encourages temporal segmentation. Television programs are confined for the most part to hour and half-hour blocks interrupted by commercial breaks, which are in turn packaged in 15-, 30- or 60-second units. However, artists’ video, unbound by corporate-sponsored broadcast schedules, "ends whenever its intention is accomplished,"6 whether its duration is a few seconds, an hour or much longer.7
Unconvinced of the democratic nature of the medium, Antin was careful to iterate that the "social relation between ‘sending and receiving’ . . . is profoundly unequal." This imbalance of power between transmitter and viewer "is not inherent in the technology, [but] it has become so normative for the medium that it forms the all pervasive and invisible background of all video." Antin admits that this inequality is "not so dramatically manifested in most art work video" but remains formidable. Simply put, "Choice [of both form and content] is in the hands of the sender."8
In contrast to manifestos that have focused on the technological capacities of video, those that I am calling "aesthetic" have tended to focus on the legitimacy of video as an art form. Nam June Paik distributed what was likely the very first text on the subject at his October 4, 1965 screening at Café à Go-Go in New York City of some footage of Pope Paul VI’s motorcade made using a portable Sony 1/2-inch open reel videotape recorder. According to legend, Paik shot the footage earlier that same day, immediately after purchasing the equipment, which was said to have been part of the very first shipment of Portapaks to reach the U.S. consumer market. The manifesto, known simply as "Electronic Video Recorder," predicted that "As collage technic replaced oil-paint, the cathode-ray tube will replace the canvas. . . . Someday artists will work with capacitors, resistors & semi-conductors as they work today with brushes, violins & junk."9
Echoing Paik a decade later, John Baldessari claimed at the 1974 "Open Circuits" conference at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City that "for there to be progress in TV, the medium must be as neutral as a pencil. Just one more tool in the artists’ toolbox, by which we can implement our ideas, our visions, our concerns."10 In retrospect, it may seem naive for Baldessari to have argued that any medium could be thoroughly disentangled from the political, social or economic conditions of its production or consumption. Twenty-five years later, when video is thoroughly diffused throughout consumer culture and the art market, Baldessari’s statement became startlingly ironic when trotted out again in 1999 in response to a journalist’s query regarding the staying power of "new genre" art movements such as video and installation: "Video won’t happen," Baldessari said, "until artists use it the way they use a pencil."11 One wonders just how pervasive video must become to be considered a medium that is "happening." At the same time, Baldessari’s fighting words of 1974 contain an anti-essentialist message that remains as timely as ever. Perhaps the desire for the potential neutrality of materials is simply a protest against any kind of mandate that video or any other medium must do this or that and must never do the proverbial other thing. Thus Baldessari’s oft-quoted text is more anti-manifesto than prescription for any particular set of technological, formal, political or social intentions.
Still others have posited video as a means of attaining social or political goals. Untitled #29.95’s insistence that "video was meant to be a democratic medium" aligns it most closely with this perspective, although one must immediately wonder exactly who meant for video to be a democratic medium, when many of the first generation of video artists were involved in Castelli’s early attempts to distribute their works as limited-edition art objects. As recently as early 1999, Ross identified the "essential quality of video" as its "ability to create a network outside the art world, to generate a true and valuable, nutritive relationship with an audience."12 Ross acknowledged that artists with radical intentions lacked sufficient resources to exploit this potential, and, unfortunately, he left unclear just exactly what would constitute "a true and valuable, nutritive relationship with an audience," as well as how audiences and artists might define such a relationship.
While Antin and many other scholars, ranging from Bertolt Brecht to Herb Schiller (and, frequently, Ross himself), have cautioned that no medium of communication can be considered democratic so long as it is structured on any scale by a one-way flow of information, Ross’s thwarted vision for video seems here to have centered on the presence of multiple voices and modes of production within available avenues for distribution. He also charges video artists with the responsibility of extending themselves and their work outside conventional "art world" ivory towers, and, like Untitled #29.95, predicates realization of video’s democratic potential on its accessibility to audiences. But "accessibility" cannot be defined only as widespread dissemination over the air or in sales of low-cost cassettes, as it also raises a new panoply of questions regarding the relevancy of content and the comprehensibility of form. For example, Untitled #29.95 casts the latest wave of artists’ video as so narrowly based on a set of solipsistic, even trivial concerns (as in Gunning’s Climbing Around My Room [1993] and The Horse Impressionists) and so formally codified, even decorative (citing Matthew Barney’s Cremaster V [1997]), as to constitute a sort of Emperor’s new clothes–touted despite their lack of substance.
Of course, Ross’s views are not entirely consistent with those of the makers of Untitled #29.95. One of Ross’s ideals for video was its "radical potential," which he believes was never realized. In contrast, Untitled #29.95 most emphatically praises video art concerned, critically or playfully, with social issues, and takes the critical, curatorial and commercial apparatus that failed to embrace this content to task. It bears noting that this is not the first time that such a criticism has been leveled. For example, in her 1981 Art in America review of the Whitney Biennial’s film and video selections Ann-Sargent Wooster bristled over its "complete omission of documentary and political work . . . [and] conservative, tip-of-the-iceberg sampling of activity on two important artistic fronts."13
Smith’s 1998 proclamation regarding the return of video was not a singular distortion of the history of the medium. In fact, newspaper art critics have so regularly described video art as the Comeback Kid that it would be hard to discern when video art was on the outs for more than the period of time between one Whitney Biennial and the next. Consider the following revivalist language, culled from a 15-year span. In 1983, Grace Glueck, writing for the New York Times, claimed that video art was "coming into its own."14 Six years later, David Sterritt noted in the Christian Science Monitor that video art was gaining in "legitimacy" as an art form,15 and Andy Grundberg wrote in the New York Times that video was "energizing . . . Cinderella-like."16 In 1992, the New York Times’s Caryn James showed her bias toward film but admitted that video was a praiseworthy "pretender to the throne."17 In 1995, Alexandra Peers of the Wall Street Journal called video "the field of choice for a new generation of artists"18 and Chuck Hagen of the New York Times wrote that video was "on a roll."19 Almost a year to the day prior to her noted 1998 essay, Smith described new video as "vital and fresh . . . [Its] resurgence is hardly surprising."20 Kimmelman recently touted Barney as "the most crucial" and "most important" artist of his generation, without making much of a case for such a claim beyond Barney’s mastery of trendy installation strategies and a high-production-value approach to video, the "hot technology" of the 1990s–as well as, Kimmelman wrote, his "Yale connections and model good looks."21
These critics may be content to ride roughshod over contemporary art history, discovering and rediscovering fragments of a wholly vibrant medium at conveniently newsworthy intervals. By failing to incorporate some sense of the history of video art into their knowledge about the visual arts in general, they have refused to grant much-deserved credit to the scope of the medium’s broad reach toward new content and new forms. Their omissions, of course, do not negate the efforts of dozens of artists, critics, scholars and historians–Deirdre Boyle, Dee Dee Halleck, Chris Hill, Laura Kipnis, Margaret Morse, Jeffrey Skoller, Chris Straayer, Marita Sturken, Erika Suderburg, Maria Troy, Patricia R. Zimmermann and others too numerous to mention–whose writings on artists’ video and alternative media regularly grace the pages of this journal and other specialized media publications. However, the marginal status of video art that cannot–or refuses to–pass into the commercial art market in the form of legitimized limited editions or quasi-sculptural installation, is perpetuated by critics ignorant of the medium’s rollicking history and infinitely variable potential, by curators and exhibition designers who consign video to an out-of-the-way corner, or by editors who leave the video portion of an exhibition out of its catalog entirely. The anonymous video activists responsible for Untitled #29.95 have had enough of such posturing divisions and recapitulations of tired aesthetic hierarchies. Their work may tweak the noses of those currently basking in video’s feverishly fashionable moment, but more than simply a burst of bravado, Untitled #29.95 is an earnest, even desperate contribution to ongoing investigations of the parameters of this art medium at the beginning of the new millennium.22
CYNTHIA CHRIS is a frequent contributor to Afterimage. She is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego.
NOTES
1. David A. Ross, "Foreward: A Feeling for the Things Themselves," in Kira Perov, ed., Bill Viola (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art and Paris: Flammarion, 1997), p. 19.
2. The Kramliches’ unique collection has been frequently invoked in discussions about the integration of video into the fine art market that have tended to focus on the difficulty of protecting limited editions from pirating which might dilute their market value. See Alexandra Peers, "Hot Video Art Leaves Most Collectors Cold," Wall Street Journal (April 11, 1995), pp. B1-2, and Marina Isola, "An Uncertain Market for Video Art," New York Times (February 15, 1998), Sec. 2, p. 38.
3. To order Untitled #29.95 e-mail untitled2995@rtmark.com or visit www.@rtmark.com, and follow links from "History" to "Ongoing Projects" to Untitled #29.95.
4. Roberta Smith, "The Art of the Moment, Here to Stay," New York Times (February 15, 1998), Sec. 2, p. 37.
5. David Antin, "Video: The Distinctive Features of the Medium," in Sarah Williams, ed., Video Art (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1975), p. 61. The exhibition originated at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia under the direction of Suzanne Delahunty and traveled to The Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, all in 1975.
6. Antin, p. 63.
7. Antin’s comparisons of TV and video editing conventions and their relationship to the producers’ access to high- or low-budget equipment have faded a bit more than his other claims in relevance to more contemporary work due to rapid innovation in both analog and digital technology and the absorption of avant-garde tactics by the mass media.
8. Antin, pp. 59-60.
9. Quoted in Edith Decker-Phillips, Paik Video (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Arts, 1998), p. 147.
10. John Baldessari, "TV (1) Is Like a Pencil and (2) Won’t Bite Your Leg," in Douglas Davis and Allison Simmons, eds., The New Television: A Public/Private Art (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1977), p. 110.
11. Deborah Solomon, "How to Succeed in Art," New York Times Magazine (June 27, 1999), p. 41.
12. From transcription of lecture by David Ross at San Jose State University, March 2, 1999 (see full text at switch.sjsu.edu/web/ross.html). Ross made this comment while lecturing on the subject "Art and the Age of the Digital," lamenting video art’s failure to fulfill its "radical promise," and looking hopefully to the new media of "net.art."
13. Ann-Sargent Wooster, "Flicks and Tapes," Art in America (May 1981), p. 123.
14. Grace Glueck, "Video Comes Into Its Own at the Whitney Biennial," New York Times (April 24, 1983), Sec. 2, pp. 33 and 36.
15. David Sterritt, "Film and Video: A Promising Future for Independents? Whitney Biennial Proves Celluloid and Tape Can Coexist," Christian Science Monitor (June 28, 1989), p. 11.
16. Andy Grundberg, "Video Is Making Waves in the Art World," New York Times (November 17, 1989), pp. C1 and C34.
17. Caryn James, "To Praise Video, Not to Bury It," New York Times (October 2, 1992), pp. C1 and C30.
18 Peers, p. B1.
19. Chuck Hagen, "Back in Fashion, Video Installations," New York Times (July 11, 1995), pp. C13 and C15.
20. Roberta Smith, "The Resurging Video, Reclaimed and Reoriented," New York Times (February 21, 1997), p. C28.
21. The works in Barney’s "Cremaster" series were shot on HDTV and transferred to 35mm film for theatrical screenings, and released in limited editions on laserdisk. Michael Kimmelman, "The Importance of Matthew Barney," New York Times Magazine (October 10, 1999), pp. 62-69.
22. The author thanks Matthew Hincman for a timely reading.