“Video Art, A Guided Tour” by Catherine Elwes
Catherine Elwes begins her book by stating that video has become the “default medium” of the 21st century. Video has come a long way since it was the primitive new technology of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Elwes has lived and breathed this history as a performance and video artist and more recently as a Reader of Moving Image Arts at the University of the Arts in London, England. This book is designed to put contemporary video art into its historical context, to reclaim a history obscured by three decades of breathtaking technological advances, and to remind us that many artists have turned to popular culture, and away from art history, for their sense of direction and mission. Elwes points out too that an embrace of celebrity culture, combined with information overload, has taken its toll.
At the core of this book are hundreds of brief, concise descriptions of British, American and Canadian works in video. While this is mainly a British survey, it is a simultaneous, intercontinental history involving video from many countries. Elwes clearly loves to watch video and her analytical and descriptive skills are exceptional. Having seen most of the Canadian and American tapes cited, I can vouch for the accuracy and tone of her descriptions. One gains insight through these descriptions as they form a complex index of ideas and an extensive record of artistic performance. It is fascinating to see how similar works emerge in different places and times. National and regional differences are highlighted as waves of video recordings are chronicled. Canadians are well represented and treated with the utmost respect. Michael Snow and Jubal Brown are examined as influential structuralists. Colin Campbell, Vera Frankel and Lisa Steele are heralded for their innovations with narrative forms. John Greyson and Mike Hoolbloom are favourably compared with the legendary gay British activist/artist Stuart Marshall. Inuit Zacharias Kunuk is praised as an essential non-Western artist. Elwes is particularly fascinated by the ubiquitous use of voiceover by Canadian artists, especially when the voice is that of a woman issuing the “personal as political” praxis of feminism.
While this book is truly comprehensive in its coverage of video art history, Elwes’s retrospective analysis of how women have used the medium is particularly succinct and important, considering today’s common tendencies to use digital video as an abstract, plastic medium. We are reminded that there was a time when video’s instant replay and intimate nature finally embraced volumes of long-repressed feminist issues. Elwes brings to life the urgency of feminist work in the 1970s, and she also marches through an historical index of how the female body was exposed, measured, withdrawn, multiplied and ultimately reclaimed by women. Concise, fast-moving descriptions of key works by Martha Rosler, Carolee Schneemann, Mona Hatoum, Jayne Parker, Linda Montano and many others are woven into a string of recorded actions that far exceed rhetorical argument. One of the major insights in this book is that video is the quintessential medium of postmodernity, an era marked by the necessary return of content to the balance of aesthetics. This struggle between content and form continues today, and Elwes argues that content is making a comeback.
This history is also necessarily a technological history, and video’s struggle to become something distinctly other than television is well chronicled. Early gear, the Portapaks and U-matic editing decks, is remembered with genuine love. If there ever was a case for artists authoring their own histories, this book is it. Reading, there were times when I could recall the way a specific piece of equipment actually smelled when it was overheated after a lengthy editing session. The very real differences between analogue and digital are contemplated in depth. The merits of monitors versus projectors are weighed. Digital cinema is considered as a possible end to video as a discrete medium. The contemporary potential of on-line streaming of digital video is explored from alternating utopian and dystopian perspectives. Surveillance is given the nervous respect it commands. And then there is the issue of copyright, or copy left. Appropriation is seen as a two-way street, with artists borrowing heavily from television and cinema in decades of recombinant work, and then, of course, television and advertising absorbing the wholesale innovations of artists in gulp after stylish gulp. Elwes points out that artists were way out in front with reality programming, but she is also very clear in stating that Reality TV has colonized the personal-and how much more problematic can that be for artists?
Throughout this volume Elwes introduces the theory that runs parallel to the action, sometimes speculating that theory is in the driver’s seat. Roland Barthes’s argument (in his influential Image, Music, Text, 1977) that the meaning of a text or image lay as much with the viewer as with the creation takes a prominent place in this book. This perceived shift of power to the audience leads Elwes to wonder if an “unconscious fear of becoming eclipsed by the newly emancipated viewer may have been responsible for the widespread practice of the artist becoming the subject of her/his own work.” The influence of Benjamin, Baudrillard, Foucault, Lacan and McLuhan is also felt.
Elwes recovers the considerable, remarkable history of artistic achievement only recently obscured by the blinding light of ultra-hot projectors and the delicious sensuality of plasma screens. This book goes a long way toward revealing the deep structure beneath the liquid, shimmering surface of today’s video art. ■
Video Art, A Guided Tour by Catherine Elwes (with a foreword by Shirin Neshat), London, New York: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd., 2005. Softcover, 212 pp, $36.95.
Tom Sherman is an artist and writer whose interdisciplinary work has been exhibited internationally, including shows at the National Gallery of Canada, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Musee d’art contemporain and the Museum of Modern Art. In 2003 he was awarded the Canada Council’s Bell Canada Award for excellence in video art. He is a professor in the Department of Transmedia at Syracuse University in New York.