YOU CAN SEE IT, BUT YOU CAN'T HANG IT THE WALL

YOU CAN SEE IT, BUT YOU CAN'T HANG IT THE WALL

FEATURES

ROB PATTERSON

If I were to say to you "video art," you might just say, "Huh?"

After all, in our video-inundated world, there's very little that's artful about the most common video forms— things like All My Children, Calvin Klein commercials, Ms. Pac-Man, Facts Of Life, Duran Duran posing anywhere on the planet, and anything hawked by George Plimpton, for o quick sampling.

For all the informational potential OT video, it largely remains an entertainment medium with a commercial thrust. And that's despite what PBS may suggest of their programming, or the fact that you may feel leave It To Beaver is one of our great cultural events. But that isn't to say that what's art—and what's video art to boot—can't be entertaining or have o certain commercial appeal.

The coming of the video age has brought about artists who are employing television and video as working tools and subjects. There's a good chance you may well have already seen video art, or at least its residual effects, and not even known it. It crops up in varied places—in museums, as one would hope, but also in pop cultural outlets like MTV, USA Network's Night Flight, maybe your local rock video club—and you've no doubt felt its repercussions in the looks and style of television itself. But if the notion of "video art" still sounds enticing but...a bit oc/d, don't expect any easy answer as to what it is.

Video art will be the entertainment of the future.

In Search Of Video Art It's not hard to find video art in New

York—there are museum collections, centers, artists and showings galore— but when you find it, it remains an elusively defined medium. For instance, the New York rock club Donceterio, as part of its "supermarket of style" attitude toward events, recently screened a video program of art tapes selected as part of the 1 7th Annual Independent Filmmakers' Exposition, put on by the Brooklyn Arts and Culture Association. The patrons, mainly young adult rock V rollers, seemed somewhat interested yet also confused by just what they were seeing. And for good reason.

The program's first few highlights were anything but similar: 15 minutes of colorized, abstract multi-images by Shalom Gorewitz, the leader in that area; a documentary-interview tape with two suburban sisters who talx about their favorite pastime, bowling; a Warholian study of a ferry slip which slowly explores the subtle changes in light and shadow; a disjunctive 1 7-minute "war fantasy"; and finally, a masterpiece—"Song Of The Street Of The Singing Children," by Californian Kenn Beckmann, a fiveminute visual and aural symphony coordinating the quirks of barnyard poultry with a scintillating keyboard track by pianist "Blue" Gene Tyranny. It was as musical and amusing and thought-provoking os the best song, show, portrait, sculpture I've ever seen. That, I said to myself, is video art. But so was everything else.

"There really isn't a definition," says Lori Zippay of Electronic Media Intermix. They're a non-profit organization that maintains a collection of, says she, "tapes covering a wide range, from early pioneer archival halfinch black and white guerilla video, like the Ant Farm and Guerilla TV, which was very anti-television and anticommercial, to the early conceptual work from the art world, which one can definitely see os art tapes, because they have nothing to do with television. We have documentary tapes; there is work strictly done with computers, synthesized, abstract images? humorous tapes; topes experimenting with a new narrative,tapes strictly done for the fun of it... There's so many different types of tapes In our catalog that are still somehow defined as video art." But she explains that Intermix, who lease tapes to cultural institutions, TV and private individuals, like to keep their definition broad. fThere are also video environments, installations and sculptures, exploring TV and space as well as time and image.)

"We like to think that it's work that's experimental in nature, that's creative, that falls outside the realm of commercial television, though it could be shown on commercial television, but is not made with that in mind. Work that..." she pauses, "has an independence."

One of the most independent and exciting figures in video art is John Sanborn, a New York artist whose work with fellow artist Kit Fitzgerald has explored a multitude of styles within the video art world. He reinforces Zippay's notion of intent. "I like to think of it as the difference between work that is mode commercially and work that is made for completely different reasons—for the sake of creating something new." Yet Sanborn—who no doubt is an artist—has work that's been shown on both public and cable TV, and isn't sitting in some artist's garret as he explains this, but in one of New York's most sophisticated and highpriced video editing facilities,

Ed Steinberg is a commercial videomaker who creates tapes for bands like the Bongos, Polyrock and Tom Verlaine through his Soft Focus Productions, and distributes music tapes to clubs, record stores and schools via Rock America, his video pool. His definition of "what is video art" betrays some of his feisty, independent businessman's cynicism.

"f have music videos I've done that have been shown at the Kitchen [a New York art space and center], in a retrospective at the Whitney Museum, at the Pompidou Center in Paris and other museums in Europe. I don't consider them to be video art, but they are considered that...there are people thinking it's art. It tickled me, but, fine...I get the $25,000.

"Where is the cut-off point between art and a good commercial clip? I don't do video art pieces; 1 don't moke video art. But I do things like image processing, which video artists do.

"Look at something like the Talking Heads video, Once In A Lifetime. Is that art? I consider it art, but it's really a commecial promo clip. Genius Or Love... Is that art? It wasn't intended as art; it was intended as a promo clip.

"As an ex-art student, I look at the intention. If you do something intended to be art, it's art, within rather wide parameters. But then there are guys who do industrial work, like Bob Giraldi who does the Pepsi commercials; who do visual things that are far more sophisticated than your Soho video artist ever imagined."

So again, wnat is video art? Is it amazing, thrilling new images, or is it anything outside the ken of commercial TV? Or is it an attempt to create a whole new means of expression?

A Little History Video art, as it is, effectively started when the Sony Porta-Pak put the tools of video within the grasp of the average person during the late '60s. The Porta-Pak and Sony's half-inch black and white line of recorders, editing decks, cameras and outboard effects equipment meant that, for a few thousand dollars, you could have a crude but effective home studio to make your own tapes. Two groups seemed to seize the potential of it— artists already working in a variety of mediums, from canvas to sculpture to performance, and political and hilosophical radicals. The output from oth was often too polemical, overwrought, and downright boring.

But from the art world come one visionary, Korean Nam June Paik, who certainly created one unforgettable image in his 1973 G/oba/ Groove tape—cellist Charlotte Moorman playing Paik's "TV cello," an instrument with video monitors hung over her nude breasts. The implications in that image challenges what you may think about TV, sound and music, and any number of other notions. With that work and his many other tapes and video environments, Paik became known as "The Grand Dada Of Video Art" for his vigorous exploration of the potential of video to change how we see and perceive things.

The other persistent image from the early days of video art is the Ant Farm's "Media Burn," a political statement of sorts documenting the driving of a futurized Cadillac through a burning wall of TV sets, commenting on the relationship of America's addiction to television and automobiles. Where Paik set out to create, the Ant Farm set out to destroy—in this case, TV's communicative bond.

Since then, video artists covering the range explained above by Zippay have—with varying success—toyed, explored and played with the notion of television and its technical and emotional potential. Meanwhile, in the commercial world, the cable boom has created a glut of outlets for new programming, and the home video revolution has put TV even more squarely into the lives and minds of America. But shall ever the twain meet, and will the video art become something, like the other art mediums. that modern America will know and appreciate?

Can America appreciate video art?

The Art Of Video

One way video art's effects are felt by the public are in video graphics and effects—the high-tech combinations of images, split-screens, manipulated images, which is what many people think is video art, Such image making and manipulating devices are utilized by certain video artists to sometimes astonishing ends, but such devices also fashion some of the most visually boag/ing commercials you will see.

Tne night I visit Teletronics in Manhattan, John Sanborn and Dean Winkler (a fellow video artist) are, well, playing...sort of, with the possibilities of a just-installed device: the ADO or Ampex Digital Optics, the first computerized video component that can place, turn and flip images in a 3-D spatial plane. The piece they plan to apply it to is a Philip Glass work, specially edited, called "Act Three" from his new LP The Photographer.

Winkler, who is also Teletronic's''Mr. Wizard,"—and designed their editing facilities, says about such devices as the ADO (which was in part designed by one of his college roommates): "They build these boxes, then we give them the reasons to build them." Tonight, that means manipulating little globes of geometric patterns they affectionately call "Jizz Balls," which, with gracefully coordinated rhythm, form, pulse, spin and dance to the strides of the Glass piece. The patterns, strangely enough, were simply cut from paper and taped; then they were colored, multiplied and formed into balls electronically. Sanborn has to chuckle as he sits in the multi-million dollar facility, explaining, "The funny thing is, it's all made of nothing, just bits of paper."

But what Sanborn and Winkler make from bits of paper and electric energy often ends up being adapted by the smarter commercial and industrial videomakers. One instrument in the studio—the Quontel—is an image manipulator that Sanborn and Winkler used in their video for Adrian Belew's "Big Electric Cat," (shown on MTV), literally making big electric cats glide down the screen into □ hallway in almost 3-D perspective. Quantel uses that as a demo reel showing the machine's capabilities. "We find that rather amusing," observes Sanborn,perhaps a bit sarcastically.

Sanborn's work has won him numerous critical accolades, various grants, including one from WNET,

New York, to create video art for the channel, and even now a burgeoning reputation as a fine, exciting maker of promotional clips such as "Cat" and King Crimson's "Heartbeat." While his work does enter the commercial realm, he still feels he is creating, in some way, art.

"What 1 do and why l do it are very much linked, I'm not just trying to do a job and do it right. It's kind of an investigation—to try to do something different, try to create new visual images, a new visual language. That is my job. I don't advertise in a trade magazine that I do something different so I can sell you car wax. The fact that I do something different is what I do, what I need to do, and why I keep doing it."

But with video clips, he feels he gets "a very deliberate cross between tne two. I'm trying to straddle the fence.

It's tough to explain how or why, it's a subtle sense...but for instance, Dean and I co-own the "Big Electric Cat" piece with Island Records. It's not work for hire. The fact that it does appear in the commercial zone is part of that crossover. I made it because I wanted to make it, but I'm aided in getting it made by that commercial atmosphere.

"What I have in common with other television is that I'm interested in the audience. They're interested in selling soap and numbers; sometimes in cable there's a real desire to reach the audience. I'm selling the ideas and images and the imaging process and how the imaging process is in collaboration with the ideas. The things like the clips are vehicles to prove my point, and at the same time get something that'll work for them."

And the commercial world is aware of the contributions Sanborn and Winkler can make, which is one reason why Teletronics lets them work in the studios during off-time (and at the same time, Nexus, another N.Y facility, has a similar arrangement with Nam June Paik), But how much of the original work will still reach the public?

Video Art & The Future While the technical outlook for video art is bright and flashy, Intermix's Lori Zippay sees a dark cloud as public funds supporting non-commercial video are cut. More and more colleges and museums are collecting and studying video art, and while it hasn't hit the three big networks, it has infiltrated the video culture.

The cable show Night Plight has a video art feature, ana New York's Ritz has a giant video screen over its dance floor that occasionally shows some stunning and artful Images. Says llene Staples, one of the club's video directors, "the mere size of the screen gets a lot of video artists interested in having us play their stuff," although she finds much of it lacking, including the dazzling special effects work she often gets. "It's like the Joshua light Show o million times over, but in the end it gets boring."

TLhe technical outlook is bright and flashy.

But with genuinely good pieces, they are often able to coordinate them to the music, "which is a great way of taking a mainstream audience, and showing them things they won't see otherwise. And they don't have to stop c/oncing, too." But, alas, such outlets might be lost as companies start selling aa time on the club screens.

The conjunction of music and video has always brought to the best concepts to video art all the way from Paik's TV Cello, to one of his latest pieces, O/ymp/c /maaes, with a Mitch Ryder "Devil With The Blue Dress On" audio background, Sanborn sees the relationship in interesting terms,

"If you like a piece of music and you are involved with a piece of music on a certain level, you internalize it; it becomes part of your life, in a way, and you want to hear it again ana again. The externalization of that is | "humming." The same thing doesn't | really happen with pictures.

'c "But there's images that people do T identify and lock into—that one picture 1 of the South Vietnamese soldier | shooting the Viet Cong in the head; j everyone thinks they have a picture of * the Titanic sinking, with the ship going down and the lifeboats, even though there's no real pictures of it. That touches the raw nerve that music is always trying to deal with.

"What I'm interested in is a series of pictures linked with music—or sound in order, which is basically what we think of as music, that you must see again, that you can internalize in a similar kind of way. So the only thing I can think of is, what is visual humming? What are the keys to visual humming? How can I produce that effect and get that response and desire going on in people?"

"Antarctica," a Sanborn/Fitzgerald "on-going piece," explores that in collaboration with N.Y. musicians like David Van Tieghem, Peter Gordon, Jill Kroesen, and Rhys Chatham. One piece,"Ear To The Ground", is a simple enough video, following Van Tieghem around the street as he drums with mallets on the sidewalk, lightpoles, etc. But the image and the musical content are unforgettable, and a new music and language is found in the piece.

While many might feel that video art may be the sort of medium that will remain in that left-field real art always occupies, Sanborn feels that the future of TV is in the new language that video art is creating. "The stuff on MTV right now is almost at a critical mass level. I know little kids who do not like the stuff at all; they know how to identify a dumb picture."

After the burnout, Sanborn sees the successful use of the video medium as "a new synthesis of a series of things—sound, image, technical capabilities—that will be the entertainment of the future." So if you're looking for a brave new world, turn on your set and open your eyes. (For further information about Electronics Art Intermix's tope services, write: 84 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 1001 f; specia/ thanks to Merle Ginsberg for her help on this article.)