Synopses & Reviews
Illuminating Video is the most comprehensive collection of essays on video art, as well as an essential text for the general reader interested in new visual forms. It is a significant resource for anyone who is involved in new media, video art, art history, or contemporary social theory.
The volume offers insights by several prominent artists in the field as well as revealing and instructive writings by both scholars and critics. It illustrates the complex, heterogeneous nature of video, and highlights its strong ties to the visual arts and social theory. While providing an essential critical context for understanding video's role as art, these writings show that video is at the forefront of contemporary cultural and aesthetic discourse. Using a wide range of strategies, from the poetic to the reconstructive, these essays provide a long-overdue academic-friendly context in which to evaluate video as art and its subsequent impact on social and cultural behavior.
Editors Hall and Fifer have organized the book into five sections that address the varied aspects of video. From essays investigating the construction of a history of video; to articles on the relation(s) of video to other media, fine art, and culture; to pieces specifically created by leading video artists for this publication; Illuminating Video has much to offer any student or scholar of video production or aestheics.
Synopsis
This book is an insightful evaluation of video art since its early beginnings, examining its theoretical, aesthetic and social implications.
About the Author
Doug Hall is an artist who as been working in video and related media since 1970. His work has been shown at major museums in North America and Europe, and is included in public and private collections. He is chair of the department of performance/video at the San Francisco Art Institute, where he has been a faculty member since 1980.
Sally Jo Fifer has a Bachelor of Arts in art history from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Master's in communication from Stanford University. She is Executive Director of the Bay Area Video Coalition, a national arts/technology access and training center, helping artists produce programming ranging from video and installation art to performing-arts documentation.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface, David Bolt
Foreword, David A. Ross
Introduction: Complexities of an Art Form, Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer
Histories
Video: Shedding the Utopian Moment, Martha Rosler
A Brief History of American Documentary Video, Deirdre Boyle
Dé-collage/Collage: Notes Toward a Reexamination of the Origins of Video Art, John G. Hanhardt
Video Art: What's TV Got To Do With It?, Kathy Rae Huffman
And if the Right Hand did not know What the Left Hand is doing, Gary Hill
Paradox in the Evolution of an Art Form: Great Expectations and the Making of a History, Marita Sturken
Furniture/Sculpture/Architecture
Television, Furniture, and Sculpture: The Room with the American View, Vito Acconci
Performance, Video, and Trouble in the Home, Kathy O'Dell
Video Installation Art: The Body, the Image, and the Space-in-Between, Margaret Morse
Video in Relation to Architecture, Dan Graham
The Rio Experience: Video's New Architecture Meets Corporate Sponsorship, Dara Birnbaum
The Art of The Possible, Francesc Torres
Mobility, As American as . . . , Chip Lord
Aligning The Museum Reaction Piece, Howard Fried
Audience/Reception: Access/Control
The Feminism Factor: Video and its Relation to Feminism, Martha Gever
The Medium Is the Mess . . . age, Bruce and Norman Yonemoto
This Is Not a Paradox, Judith Barry
f0The Wild Things on the Banks of the Free Flow, Dee Dee Halleck
The Fantasy Beyond Control, Lynn Hershman
Reach Out and Touch Someone: The Romance of Interactivity, Ann-Sargent Wooster
Ethnicity, Politics, and Poetics: Latinos and Media Art, Coco Fusco
Behind the Image, Muntadas
Interventions of the Present: Three Interactive Videodiscs, 1981-90, Peter d'Agostino
Syntax and Genre
The Cultural Logic of Video, Maureen Turim
The Smell of Turpentine, Juan Downey
The Importance of Being Ernie: Taking a Close Look (and Listen), Bruce Ferguson
Untitled, Joan Jonas
Audience Culture and the Video Screen, Norman M. Klein
Significant Others: Social Documentary as Personal Portraiture in Women's Video of the 1985, Christine Tamblyn
Telling Stories
Video Writing, Raymond Bellour
Appropriation of Contemporary Reality: An Anecdote, Tony Labat
Directions/Questions: Approaching a Future Mythology, Rita Myers
Light and Death, Mary Lucier
The New Epistemic Space, Woody Vasulka
Three Tapes by Steina, Steina
Video Black—The Mortality of the Image, Bill Viola
Phototropic, Tony Oursler
Notes
Contributors
Selected Bibliography
Videography and Video Index
Picture Credits
Index