Is this the End of Video Art?
The ‘end’ of a medium is an ongoing subject of discussion in art. We have the ‘end of art’ thesis, and the 1980s heard many claims about the ‘end of painting’ only to see painting be revived. Whether it is taken literally or rhetorically, the ‘end’ thesis is a good way to ponder the relevance of a medium to the now. In an age dominated by the moving image, it might still be useful to ask what the relevance of video art is.
One conclusion is that video has its ‘ends’ built into it from the start: video has no fixed origin and with digital technology, no fixed end. It was a video that arguably ‘ended’ painting and maybe sculpture. In other words, video is a process that transforms everything into a cinematic surface, destabilizing (‘ending’) all traditional artistic media.
Installation of Rachel Rose's video Lake Valley (2017) at the Venice Biennale. Courtesy of Gavin Brown's Enterprise and the artist.
Overview
Video as an art form has undergone several significant changes in less than a decade, both in evolutions internal to it, and in its reception. It is now common to tout its normative use and to say that it’s completely melded into art practice.
Most contemporary artists have dabbled in it in one way or another, or surely at least have entertained the prospect. In short, the antagonism to it has gone. It has been allowed easy access into the academy, into the gallery, and into the retinas of its receivers. Video is no longer subversive, unusual, titillatory, and, for good or bad, no more irritating than any other art form.
And we now have an acknowledged older generation of video artists here and abroad. We have begun to muse upon a tradition, devise theories on areas of practice, and forecast developments. But in some ways, it has been the slippery nature of video art about something resembling homogeneous discourse that has been its virtue and consolation.
The Institutionalization of Video Art
On the other hand, to say that the institutionalization of video art means it is no longer critically edgy is maybe a bit extreme, since video art has always craved this acceptance, and it has almost always been enshrined within the haven of architecture – be it a humble house or a big gallery.
Even at its most voluble, provocative, or shrill, video remains an art that is never independent in how that painting can be to the extent that it can recoil into itself with non-objective abstraction.
Video is mimetic, allusive, multivalent, multitextual and, crucially, is subservient to the technological interface. Just as video tends to shun static non-objectivity toward content (but not necessarily narrative), it must always in some de facto fashion dignify the mechanisms (electricity, artificial light and so on) that bring it into being.
Even when projected outdoors, video art's ideal destiny, its formal imaginary if you wish, has perhaps always been the cool, dry chamber where it can be contemplated in and for itself, unmolested and without foreign interference.
But the transition of video art into the mainstream has allowed access into much more profound thought, namely, that video art has always courted its end. Its end is internal to it – the end of video art that we are witnessing is the fulfilment of its destiny as a medium and a safeguard of its endurance.
After Postmodernism
Without too much notice, the transition away from Postmodernism occurred around the turn of the millennium, to be replaced by the admittedly weak, Ersatz term of ‘contemporary’. Since every present is contemporary to itself, this is perhaps the ultimate revenge of how Postmodernism plays with linear time and spatial boundaries.
In other words, Postmodernism, as we well know, discredited Modernism’s emphasis on the chain-effect of time, and sought to make thought more relative, thus destabilizing historical objectivity and making truth subject to the contexts and intentions of the present.
Bill Viola Stations (detail). 1994. Museum of Modern Art. New York, Gift of The Bohen Foundation in honor of Richard E. Oldenburg, 1997
As we now have inherited the view from Postmodern thought, history is always being rewritten. It reflects the modalities of the writer and his or her culture more than anything primarily actual. What is actual is how the present actualizes itself with the tools at its disposal; in this case, the anecdotes received from the past.
According to this way of thinking, history can’t be streamlined: beneath its shaky narratives lurks a chaos of expediencies and happenstances. As we know, the contemporary in art is a diffuse moment, an eternal return whose future is indeterminate. Or, put another way, it exposes the notion that the future has always been that way.
The ’Contemporary’ of Contemporary art can’t be taken at face value
Or it is a term that awaits something better. The Contemporary, the title for what is with us now is a tautology that can’t but be taken at face value. It is a stand-in term, a semantic interregnum, which is blandly incontestable by being so simplistic.
The formula is uninspiring: things are what they are until they cease to be so and something else comes along. The Contemporary in art, then, once it makes that shift from adjective to noun, is latently anticipatory. By contrast, Postmodernism is largely retrospective.
Where I’m going with these ideas with regard to video art hopefully become a little clearer.
The period, or era, of Postmodernism – even if Postmodernism was entirely resistant to itself as a period since it advocated itself as ‘always already’, as embedded within events as Heidegger’s Dasein or as spatially convoluted as the mixed etymology of post (after) and modo (before) – was preoccupied with its own self-definition and thereby the excitement of its own uncertainty.
Let's revisit the theory circulated in the late 70s to the early 90s, from Fredric Jameson to Ihab Hassan to Jean-François Lyotard. One learns that it was very much preoccupied with diagnosing and justifying the present. They made their public careers on asking and answering the question, 'What is Postmodernism'? Once the 'now' is, as it were, theoretically dispatched, and no longer an item of study, it is consigned to the pastor at least for art, since it is defined by the dynamism of its practice as much as by its reception.
Diana Thater, A Runaway World, 2017 installed in Diana Thater: A Runaway World at The Mistake Room, Los Angeles, 2017. Commissioned by The Mistake Room, Los Angeles. (Courtesy Diana Thater. Photo by Fredrik Nilsen. Courtesy David Zwirner)
Consistent with this logic, once an idea lives with us comfortably instead of enjoying (enduring) a state of antagonism, relay, immobility, and flux, then it is, for all intents and purposes, 'dead'. This, I would like to contend, is the status of video.
New Media
This can be argued on at least two counts, the first I have just outlined, which has to do with it having, like Postmodernism, bedded down as a discourse. The second has to do with the changing definition of New Media, which has replaced Postmodernism as the predominant term of contestation.
The big difference between New Media has with its predecessor is that whereas the former was/is a periodizing term, New Media is a descriptor that distinguishes between 'old' (present-day theory is fond of putting scare quotes around this word), or at least standard Beaux-Arts media such as painting and sculpture.
As with the birth of all such terms, they are both arbitrary and governed by the need to fill a void. Although often hasty and loose in their coinage, its casual proliferation coupled with academic buttressing confers on such terms the dignity of accepted usage.
The curious thing about New Media is that what it refers to is not as straightforward as, say, painting (although Conceptualism did plenty to muddy these waters as well). With the evolution of New Media, the definition is changing, something that causes some mild anxiety within the academy halls. From this perspective, as a term, New Media’s relationship with video art has been something of a Hollywood marriage: on-again, off-again, finally estranged.
As a rule, New Media refers to art or art-related practices, including design-driven in some way by a computer. The big difference between new and traditional media is that new media is generated by an interface and requires an interface (the same or another or both) to read it, to make it manifest.
By contrast, the paint and brush or the charcoal or hands in the clay are separate from the object's display and are wholly divorced from the way the final work is seen.
During the time when video was making the transition from analogue to digital in the mid-90s, and due to its more mainstream adoption by artists due to the increasing affordability of cameras, data storage, and editing software, video art was, in the mid-1990s wholeheartedly listed as belonging to New Media.
In the 1990s, for non-specialists, it was still seen as an artistic other. But this now all past tense.
Although in some languages video can still feature under technologically auspicious rubrics – for example, multimédia in French or Medienkunst in German – it is now very much its own separate genre and field. It is now formally separate from program-generated art forms that are response–related, forms that are continually changing according to direct stimuli, whether that be from the verbiage within Internet art or audience interaction or alterations within a textual field (a field that has been encoded to make it legible by an interface), be it anything from the stock market to a living microorganism. Video art has left the building.
Death isn’t Erasure
However, as some may immediately assume, the death of a medium does not spell the erasure of that medium. Years back, I wrote an article, 'What's the point of painting these days?’ (Art Monthly Australia, November 2002) I suggested that painting was no longer the primary mainstream artistic discourse. Its endurance as a medium and a practice was primarily due to its status as a commodity. It is so secret that its claim to uniqueness made it more desirable than wholly reproducible media such as photography and video. With citable exceptions, this is still the case.
I advocated the ‘raku status’ of painting: aesthetically speaking, nothing about it should be discredited. The medium has an intrinsic status in the realm of beauty and expression; it is, indeed indissociable from the general conception of visual art as a whole, and its indexicality (the way something enshrines the trace of the human touch or mark) makes it, like raku pottery, aesthetically necessary, and indispensable.
But whether the kind of indexicality—the importance given to touch—that painting has is relevant to today’s world is altogether arguable, and requires a debate of its own.
This article, which seemed to be pretty sensible and rock-solid in its ordinary sense, was met with a flurry of anger, some fair and others hostile and defensive, heaving itself out of the straightjacket with cosmic urgency. (Heaven forbid we should lose our grip on tradition, however that may conveniently be defined.)
A Divided Self I and a Divided Self II. 1996. By Douglas Gordon. Via Artspace
What was conveniently missed was the sly ending note about the tenacity of painting, and its genuinely winning, Mephistophelian ability to recreate itself and insinuate itself into new models and ideas.
The End of Painting (Again)
In his essay on the end of painting (’Painting: The Task of Mourning’), Yve-Alain Bois turns to Derrida’s critique of those who pronounce upon closure – as I am doing here – with the singularly perverse assumption that there can be overriding frameworks to something’s closure even while it continues to exist.
What is clearly at stake is the form of an idea, a medium, a style after its proclaimed death. We must also look at the voice or voices of those who draw a line in the sand, and the authority they claim to draw on. Bois draws particular attention to the arbitrariness with which such finalities are invoked.
Thus, ‘Derrida’s proviso, each time, means that in each instance one must examine the tone of the apocalyptic discourse: its claim to be the pure revelation of truth, and the last word about the end’.
The end of painting as Bois describes it is characterized in terms of the moribund aims of Modernism, particularly in how abstract painting was/is no longer seen to be capable of fulfilling the same kind of purpose that was named within the Modernist charter.
With the exhaustion of the Modernism's prescriptions and objectives, painting was/is condemned – or liberated – into a vast wasteland whose priority of faith is determined more according to personal intentions than external agendas. The mania and mourning that Bois sees as preoccupying the painting (he is looking back on the 1980s) will, in his view, ultimately pass at which point painting will re-emerge calm and triumphant in all its glory.
Bois concludes with the following words:
Let us say that the desire for painting remains and that this desire is not entirely programmed or subsumed by the market. This desire is the sole factor of a future possibility of painting, that is of nonpathological mourning. At any rate, as observed by Robert Musil …, if some painting is still to come, if painters are still to come, they will not come from where we expect them to.
One is now tempted to add that, as irony would have it, the ‘painter to come’ is ‘unexpectedly’ the embodied in the video artist.
This may sound like idle glibness or perversity on my part, but allow me to return to the discussion about the (albeit still debated) distinction between New Media and video art. Both are now computer-generated, and both involve some degree of movement in their effects.
But with video art, the movement is internal not only to the frame but according to how long the track lasts, while in New Media (the New Media that have ceased to renew video art's membership) the movement comes from both within and without – the mobility of the former is still representational. In contrast, the mobility of the latter is a co-efficient of external forces.
Hence the image within video art is contained, enframed, as opposed to New Media whose containment is defined to the interface and the manner of its variation according to its order and frequency of response. Formally at least, one is a closed entity, the other mutable and open. Seen from this very particular perspective, video begins to join hands with painting.
Video Art Begins With/Alongside Television
This consideration is not to forget video’s genesis within television, but we must not also forget that the birth of television, curiously enough, came about just when interest in painting began to dwindle; when painting as a sacred institution for harnessing the image – representational or unconscious – was began to be brought into question in a way that well and truly surpassed the challenges brought to it by photography. (The Postmodern condition for painting is that this inviolability is always present but exists as an after-image, or is always slightly out of focus.)
From about the 1950s onward, the gaze ceased to rove randomly about the room as would formerly occur when listening to a story, a conversation, or the radio, and it became locked on to one single point. Fetishised and internalized within the operations of domestic interaction, video replaced the hearth as the locus toward which domestic furniture became orientated.
In a relatively recent essay, 'The Image in the Age of Video'. Boris Groys comments on recent video artists' effort to combat how global media subjugates the image to the narrative. It is a reasonable thesis and one that has been around since at least McLuhan.
Mass media turns still and moving images into props or illustrative by-lines to convey a much more intricate narrative message. He asks, ‘How does one suspend the motion of a video by turning its narrative into an image?’. Groys states that his inquiry is not directed at the kinds of visually austere or non-narrative videos typified by Warhol’s film Empire State Building. Instead, it has to do with how narrative is recomposed and concentrated as in the manner of history painting.
Such video artists
turn the narratives into images with a technique reminiscent of that used for similar ends by Peter Breughel or Nicholas Poussin, namely expanding the scope of attention and artistic representation. As a result, many details, events, and objects included in the visual space have no direct relevance to the main narrative. They would be omitted by a political reporter covering the same political and artistic event. Suddenly, therefore, space instead of time begins to play the central role. The main narrative gets lost in the seemingly irrelevant technical details, landscape views, objects, and voices. And precisely this de-centering of the narrative perspective turns video into an image, for instance, video-time into space.
This is not a simplification on the part of the medium of video but rather a diffusion, a wider dispersal of details whose reference is more material and aesthetic than theoretical or legible.
The medium's dialogic capacity is portrayed in interval form and proceeds from an indeterminate series of fragments as opposed to an overarching story external to the images. As Groys asserts, ‘one can assert that the main cultural function of video as a medium has always been to re-establish the image’s central position by giving the spectator the means to stop the flow of filmic images’.
As opposed to an externalization of things as components to events, this internalization of its components back to a quasi-essential quiddity is what constitutes video's claim to indexicality that makes it rival painting. After all, it was painting that showed us that the sensation of touch could occur through the eye, that the sensory and indeed the erotic is, if not necessarily retinal, is cerebral.
The Problem of Originality
Yet one factor dogging this comparison is that of originality. Painting has never had a problem with originality in its material sense, while video is always haunted by its own haunting: it is always a shadow, a copy of itself. But that is the not the end of it: granted, from a material point of view painting is its beginning and end: from the material point of view it is unique, which safeguards it to some degree security as a commodity – but its history harries it, the shadow lurks from above.
Painting is overshadowed by its dominance as a medium. Its present-day afterlife is in how it must negotiate the past encountered as cliché, and the present, which, as a relatively new phenomenon, now includes media other than itself, especially digital media.
By contrast, in its early stages, painting’s confrontation with photography was once-sided, since at its inception photography openly sided with painting and announced its subservience to it and by enlisting in functions formerly reserved for painting, so that painting eventually began to respond to how reflected on photography's usurpation. Either photography is the lesser art, or it shares the basic pictorial structures established by panting.
When we turn to video art, however, painting remains ontologically original yet is epistemically troubled. Video is unconcerned with the epistemic originality since it is by nature, inception and evolution, intertextual.
Video’s ends, therefore, are first in its movement from peripheral – read alternative, experimental – medium to a central one; second in it being scrapped by New Media or at least being conferred the honorary status of progenitorship, third in becoming the rival to painting at a time in the 1990s when painting was, metaphorically at least, ‘dead’.
Video: the New Parasitic Medium
As I have already suggested, video art did not exactly take over from painting. Rather, it supplanted painting as the most parasitic medium. Painting's supposed demise was signalled, celebrated, diagnosed, what you will, once it had begun to be fully declarative about the ploys of appropriation.
The most historically rich art forms, painting could never help but be a series of semiotic layers, conscious or otherwise. During the 1980s, when appropriation and 'homage' became more aggressive, painting began to reflect on its relationship to film, which is a complex tissue of intertexts. Video's beginnings in the late 1960s were seen as inferior to film since its outcomes were invariably shorter, less rounded, not as ambitious and of lower pictorial quality.
Its history brings together many trajectories: narrative film, structural film, television, performance, and installation. Even though it may seem today to have had a history, history will always be shaped differently according to culture, critical trajectory, and the all-evasive perspective.
Video: the Paradoxical Art Form
Video’s rise as a so-called mainstream medium only exposes its inner nature of having no inner nature, as being a shadow made of multiple historical units. John Conomos rightly calls video 'a paradoxical art form' for how it comprises both Modernist and Postmodernist elements, melding them indeed in a way that is heedless of the precepts of both.
He attributes its acceptance into the gallery and into everyday art discourse when it left the television screen and became projected onto the wall, which caused it to fill space and take on what is considered more sculptural characteristics. It was video’s ability to be perceived using the vocabulary of the traditional media of painting and sculpture (and film if that can be called traditional as well), that was instrumental in its knack of drawing from these media, and, perhaps of thwarting them.
And as Conomos argues, video’s expansion and proliferation has expanded not only the definition of these media but has also caused a redefinition of film. Video and film now noticeably occupy a common field. But it was video that caused this rupture, not film.
The various folds and changes that Conomos describes in favourable terms can, and as he implies as well, be read an alteration, a morphing, of video art away from itself. Here the concept of 'itself' is to be understood according to how artistic Modernism, from a Greenbergian perspective, and maybe also even a Minimalist one, reintegrated the Kantian noumenon within the phenomenon, thing-in-itself vs thing-as-appearance, made possible through sight and touch.
Being a medium that involves representation and movement makes video highly synaesthesic and resistant to Modernism's sensory reductionism at its most severe. When confined to the televisual unit, video could be defined according to its anecdotal association with a box-like piece of furniture.
Once freed from the box, it enters open space. Its exit from circumscriptions makes it a key avatar in what Rosalind Krauss has famously called ‘The Post-Medium Condition’.
Reprising and revising this thesis, Rosalind Krauss has more recently coined the term, 'technical support', a term that I find more agreeable and more workable as an artist that ‘Post-Medium’.
She states:
Suppose the traditional medium is supported by a physical substance (and practised by a specialized guild). In that case, the term 'technical support', in distinction, refers to contemporary commercial vehicles, such as cars or television, which contemporary artists exploit, in recognition of the contemporary obsolescence of the traditional mediums, as well as acknowledging their obligation to wrest from the support a new set of aesthetic conventions to which their works can then reflexively gesture, should they want to join those works to the canon of Modernism.
Video's status, its nature, is a device rather than a medium solidly grounded in a history, no matter how many such histories remain to be written. Video is vehicular in film, but what video has over film is that it can cross from filmic languages to painterly ones and displayed in pseudo-sculptural ways.
This informality is in-formal – that is video's main strength, and the way it can be either occasional or deliberate, anecdotal and scripted, immediate and staged, and that it is the vehicle for a much bigger set of sign systems beyond itself. It can never just be itself. Even recently, with the change to HD and the standardization of widescreen away, from 4:3 aspect ratio, we sense that there are many more changes – ends – to come.
The End of Video = the End within Video
The end of video is, therefore, better thought of as the end within video, the end in video, attributable to the renegotiations it has forced and to the arguable notion that, excepting the banal historical point of the invention of Betamax tapes and so on, it has no fixed epistemic origin.
Expanding on Conomos’ observation that video art is a paradoxical medium, we might go so far as to say that video lives on by destroying other art forms, achieved because its liveliness occurs in the shadows and echoes of other media and of itself.
Unlike painting, video art has nothing to mourn because its so-called tradition has crystallized in forty or so years instead of millennia and because it has had multiple births; it appeared gradually and is ontologically indeterminate.
Video is comfortable to live in the shadow. This is not just because physically video requires darkness to be seen, but also because in its processes, its manifestation, its vagrant histories and its references, it lives on, always as a facsimile, an exile to itself, ventriloquizing, a spectre.
