VIDEO ART
Introduction
Video became an excitingly immediate medium for artists after its introduction in the
early 1960s. The expensive technology, which had been available prior only within
the corporate broadcasting arena, experienced an advent when Sony first created
an economical consumer piece of equipment that allowed everyday people
access to vast new possibilities in documentation. Understandably, this produced
huge interest for the more experimental artists of the time, especially those involved
with concurrent movements in Conceptual art, Performance and experimental film.
It provided a cheap way of recording and representation through a dynamic new
avenue, shattering an art world where forms such as painting, photography, and
sculpture had been the long-held norm. This expanded the potential of individual
creative voice and challenged artists to stretch toward new plateaus in their
careers. It has also birthed an unmistakable population of artists who may never
have entered the fine art field if stifled by the constraints of utilizing traditional
mediums. With warp speed over the last half century, video has become accessible
by the populous, spawning a continual evolution of its use; we live in an age where
even your everyday smartphone has the ability to create high caliber works of art
through the use of an ever increasing assortment of applications.
We now consider Video art to be a valid means of artistic creation with its own set of
conventions and history. Taking a variety of forms - from gallery installations and
sculptures that incorporate television sets, projectors, or computer peripherals to
recordings of performance art to works created specifically to be encountered via
distribution on tape, DVD or digital file - video is now considered in rank equal to
other mediums. It is considered a genre rather than a movement in the traditional
sense and is not to be confused with theatrical cinema, or artists' (or experimental)
film. Although the mediums may sometimes appear interchangeable, their different
origins cause art historians to consider them distinct from each other. So popular a
medium, many art schools now offer video as a specialized art major.
Key Ideas
With the introduction of the television set in the second half of the twentieth century,
people gained a new all-consuming pastime. Many artists of the era used video to
make works that highlighted what they saw as TV's encroaching and progressively
insidious power by producing parodies of advertising and television programs. They
pointed provocative fingers at the way society had become (passively) entranced
with television or had succumbed to its seductive illusions. By co-opting the
1
technologies of this medium, artists brought their own perspectives to the table,
rounding out the brave new world of broadcasting ability to include creative,
idiosyncratic, and individualized contributions.
Some artists have used video to make us think more critically about, and oftentimes
look to dissect, Hollywood film conventions. By eschewing the typical templates of
formulaic narration, or by presenting intensely personal and taboo subjects on
screen as works of art, or by jostling our ideas about how a film should look and feel,
these artists use the canvas borrowed from the cinema to eradicate preconceived
ideas of what is suitable, palatable, or focus-group-friendly.
Looking beyond video's recording capabilities, many artists use it as a medium for its
intrinsic properties with work that mimics more traditional forms of art like painting,
sculpture, collage, or abstraction. This might emerge as a series of blurred, spliced
scenes composed as a visual image. It may take the shape of a recording of
performance meant as a reflection on movement or the perception of space. It
may consist of actual video equipment and its output as objects in a work. Finally, it
may be a work that could not exist without the video component such as art pieces
that utilize video signals, distortion and dissonance, or other audiovisual
manipulations.
Because Video art was radically new for its time, some artists who were trying to
push limits in contemporary society felt video an ideal format for their own work. This
can be seen in the Feminist art movement in which many women, who hoped to
distance and distinguish themselves from their male artist forebears, chose the
medium for its newness, its sense of progression, and its opportunities that had not
been widely tapped or established yet. We saw this politically, too, as many artists
with a cause began using video as a means to spread their message. It appeared
socially as well, as many people working to expose or spread important,
underexposed information, felt the medium was conducive to both grass roots
affordability and yet very broad distribution capabilities.
Beginnings
Although artists have been creating moving images in some form since the early
20th century, the first works to be widely labeled as 'Video art' are from the 1960s.
The first nationalities to pick up on the Portapak as an artistic tool - and therefore
those who made the earliest pieces of Video art - were, unsurprisingly, from those
countries where it first became commercially available (the US and the UK were the
early practitioners).
Nam June Paik - 'The Father Of Video Art'
In the same way that the 'father of conceptual art' Marcel Duchamp had declared
an ordinary urinal to be a work of art when he created his first and most infamous
readymade in 1917, the 'father of Video art' Nam June Paik first established video as
a credible artistic medium in 1965, when he claimed his footage of the Pope's visit to
2
New York to be a serious artwork. When Korean-American Fluxus artist Nam June
Paik, glimpsed the pontiff by chance while sitting in traffic, he recorded it on his
Portapak, and presented the grainy, barely edited result later that evening at a
screening at the Cafe A Go Go in Greenwich Village (though some art historians
have disputed Paik's claim that it was indeed the Portapak that he used, asserting
that Sony did not release it until 1968.) What is not disputed is that this work, along
with Paik's 1963 Fluxus exhibition at Galerie Parnass in Paris - where he showed his first
reworked television sculptures - were some of the first pieces of art made using the
newly accessible medium of video.
After his seminal 1965 screening, Paik wrote a short manifesto encouraging artists
and activists to use video as a tool for empowerment to fight back against the
establishment, especially what he called 'one-way' broadcast television companies
- a utopian mission he would continue to pursue throughout his long career. He also
predicted that 'as collage replaced oil paint, the cathode ray tube will replace the
canvas' He would go on to pioneer the use of broadcast, video installation, live
events, and artists' screenings, all of which are modes practiced by artists today.
Broader Adoption of Video
It was in the 1970s that many of the key figures in Video art started to make their
most important works. Many of these early practitioners were, like Paik, eager to
explore the impermanent and transient qualities of the medium. It was adopted
notably early by American artists such as John Baldessari, Joan Jonas, and Bruce
Nauman to further their conceptualagendas. In the UK, David Hall campaigned
vigorously for video to be accepted as a valid art form and wrote widely about it as
a medium, as well as producing important works of his own.
An interest in video as a tool for activism arose in the 1970s as well. It allowed for
documentation, which to some activists offered an opportunity to prove the
injustices they sought to change; or, it allowed for a presentation of their message in
a boldly, undeniable way. A powerful example of this was Videofreex's Davidson's
Jail Tape (1971). After getting arrested at the 1971 May Day events in Washington
D.C., a Videofreex member films rarely seen raw footage of his ride on the bus to jail,
his detainment in the cell, and an up close and personal look at the inmates.
Technology Dictating Art
As technologies such as color television, special effects, thermal imaging, consumer
electronics, surveillance cameras and video projection were introduced and
developed, their impact was seen in the work of video artists. The toolkit available in
the 1980s became immeasurably larger than the prior decade and allowed artists to
produce more spectacular works. Laurie Anderson often played with voice
distortion, most memorably when she created The Clone, a digitally altered male
version of herself. Bill Viola became known for his use of extreme slow motion. Gary
Hill would go on to experiment widely with electronic sound and language, creating
his own "electronic linguistics."
3
Additionally, some of the most prominent experimental filmmakers became intrigued
with video and later developed highly regarded Video art practices that sat
alongside and were informed by their cinema-based work. Chris Marker, for
example, made a number of well-known pieces of Video art in the 1990s,
including Zapping Zones (1992), featuring a mixture of his previous film and television
works in an immersive gallery installation, and an interactive 'multimedia memoire'
on CD-ROM called Immemory in 1998.
Concepts and Styles
Video allowed artists from various movements to expand their existing toolkit and
get their diverse ideas across in an unprecedentedly immediate way. Video's
portability and ease of use allowed practitioners to record their actions or
performances in a way previously unimaginable. These artists all used video to
produce extraordinarily direct and personal artworks that hadn't been possible with
any other medium. Thus, the innovation of the technology equaled an evolution in
artistic possibility.
The Power of Television
The growing popularity of broadcast television had a strong influence on early Video
art practitioners in particular. Artists such as Wolf Vostell and Martha Rosler sought to
highlight what they saw as TV's progressively insidious power by producing parodies
of advertising and television programs. Some feminists used video to showcase
society's sexism via popular culture. Dara Birnbaum, for instance, often
deconstructed popular television programs, like Wonder Woman, with key female
characters, which she then compiled as moving visual images that questioned
stereotype and objectification. Still others, like Nam June Paik and Brian Hoey,
challenged viewers to think about their own passive role in television's domination by
using live video feeds in their installations to reflect audience images back at
themselves. Paik was also inspired by the question of how television and its
relationship to modern technology vis-a-vis contemporary man might affect the
profound and the spiritual vis-a-vis ancient man. His work Buddha Watching
TV (1974-1997) became a twenty-three year meditation on this question; a stone
head of a Buddha contemplating a television set reflective of Paik's sentiment. Many
of these works represented a desire by artists to morph the television experience into
a redefined impetus of focusing on the unique, the personal, the political and the
non-commercial.
Defying Film Conventions
When Video art was in its birthing stages, film had already been widely established
as a credible means of entertainment, a medium for telling stories, and a
widespread, mainstream choice in encountering the multitude of human
4
experience, once removed from self. But artists working with video were quick to
give themselves permission to ignore Hollywood's conventions, even ignore rules of
narration, and to experiment with presenting moving pictures and sound according
to their own terms. This meant work that defied expected notions of plot or
character establishment, but instead put forth pictures (sometimes with sound) that
denoted an artist's emotion, statement, or snapshot). In some cases, Video offered
no real explanation, but was intended merely for the viewer to experience a feeling,
reflect on a theme, or get a glimpse into the artist's mind, as chaotic or calm that
might be. With no tight weave from beginning to end, these works were impact-
established and went against everything film was supposed to mean. In some way,
this defiance can be said about almost all Video artists from the 1960s through now -
in particular, Andy Warhol slashed cinema's ideas of presenting long stories in
condensed spaces by producing videos such as Andy Warhol's Sleep, (1971) which
is nothing more than an hours long glimpse at a sleeping man. And, in Joan
Jonas' Vertical Roll (1972), we find a gradual unfolding of the self portrait of the artist
through random images of her body interspersed with other objects and elements -
a distinctly non-narrative collage, radical in its non-linearity or logical make-up.
Video as Medium
Video is an electronic signal that can be manipulated, distorted, amplified, and
transformed. For many video artists, an interest in video for these inherent qualities
was akin to an abstract painter's interest in oils, brushes, shapes, and structure. Some
artists produced works that played with the medium itself and as technologies have
improved, the opportunities in using video for its material qualities have also vastly
evolved. A prominent example in this category is artist Peer Bode, who has been
enacting this type of mechanical collaboration since the '70s. In his Flute with Shift,
(1979) we see an image on screen of a man playing the flute, which shifts in
brightness according to the controlled analog synthesizer parameter of the live flute
sounds. Video Free America Founder Skip Sweeney was known for installations that
played with video feedback, abstract image processing, and synthesis. Bill Viola has
always regularly tweaked video to achieve multi-layered effects in ways that visually
collude with his investigations into spirituality, humanity, the body's place within the
context of space, experience and time, and other probes into our existence.
Installation Art
The early works of Paik and Vostell that presented televisions as sculptural elements
laid the foundation for later 'video installation' works. Contemporary Video art shown
in a gallery can be classified as either 'single-channel' (one screen) or 'installation'
works (those that are designed specifically to be projected into an exhibition space,
potentially with more than one image and including additional components such as
props or sculpture.) Artists such as Gary Hill, Bill Viola, and Joan Jonas are considered
pioneers of video installation as an art form, taking full advantage of the
architectural features in a gallery, for example, to fully involve their work within the
5
space. Again, the development of display technologies has had a huge impact on
the kind of work being produced. US artist Peter Campus, for example, projected
viewers' own images onto their shadows in his 1974 work Shadow Projection, while
multimedia artist Tony Oursler started making his immersive environments featuring
projections of faces onto sculptures in the early 1980s.
Video Recordings of Events and Performances
Video also became an invaluable tool for artists such as Paik, the Viennese
Actionists, Robert Smithson, and Marina Abramovic to make a permanent record of
their live art events. This type of Video art is more about preserving a piece for
perpetuity than a work in its own right, though some pieces (such as Robert
Smithson's Spiral Jetty (1970)) are often installed and shown in galleries as artworks
rather than mere documentation. Four of Abramovic's performances at the Galerie
Mike Steiner in Berlin from 1975-76 can be found online. Each of the events made
history and are written about widely, yet their impact surely may have been diffused
had they not continued to exist in video form for future generations to witness as an
important historical part of the performance genre. Similarly, with Vito
Acconci's Sounding Board (1970) performance in which he lay naked on a pair of
speakers to virtually feel the music pulsate through his body while a collaborator
massaged him in accordance with the beats. What makes these pieces of Video art
so important is that they reach not only audiences in the years in which they were
spawned, but they continue to be seen by future generations on such mass-
accessible means as YouTube and social media, remaining important remnants of
the overall art canon.
Later Developments
Nam June Paik's early prediction on the dominance of video has become, at least
partially, true. Although Video art has by no means replaced the more traditional
mediums in the contemporary art world, it has become an exhaustive field which
certainly complements them.
Contemporary Video art practices continue to expand in both form and content,
allowing artists to experiment with new ideas and new technologies. The growth of
high definition digital video over the last decade, for example, has enabled artists to
produce work of expanded clarity. The humorous mock-documentaries of American
performance artist Alex Bag, complex animations of British Ed Atkins and French artist
Laure Provoust's detailed projections are all made to an extremely high production
value far removed from the grainy, scratchy videos made in the 1960s. This
technology is now available through a wide proliferation of intuitive and DIY
software programs easily adaptable across computers, tablets, cameras,
smartphones and the Internet. This has opened the context of how and where art
can be shown as well.
6
Today's video artists build upon inspiration from early Video art pioneers yet bring an
enhanced knowledge of the constantly transforming technology to the table. Some
examples are more true to video's origin much like the large, highly atmospheric
projections of French artist Phillippe Parreno, or the ever more elaborate,
architecturally-scaled video installations of Swiss Pipilotti Rist - both of whom use
modern projectors and special effects to push the medium in ever more visually
impressive and conceptually complex directions. One can find hints of Warhol's love
of real time footage with doses of the video collagist in Christian Marclay's The
Clock (2010), which ran for 24 hours and featured a mash up of images of clocks
from iconic movie scenes. Additionally, Andrew Thomas Huang gained worldwide
attention in 2007 with his video Doll Face; a critique on the influence television has
on our self-image. Ryan Trecartin is noted for bringing a gay male angle to Video art
by interjecting oftentimes garishly presented stereotypes into otherwise normative
images and video clips.
Some video artists tote signs of the post-millennial age with cutting edge video
works. Revolutionary post-Internet artist, Cory Archangel's most famous piece Super
Mario Clouds(2002) featured hacked, pixelated images of the popular video game
sailing across blue skies on a website, which can still be seen on YouTube. Although
the original launch of the piece took place in a gallery on various screens of
different heights and sizes to create a fully immersive experience, the online video is
now all that remains. Incredibly smart British artist Hannah Black usually sources
online imagery by typing in search terms to find pieces that will eventually inform her
themed collage videos. In her piece My Bodies (2014), she Googled "CEO" and
"executive" to compile images of white men upon which she overlaid audio tracks of
black recording artists such as Rihanna. As more video artists look to the Internet as a
platform, and the current methodology continues to morph toward the use of
webcams, virtual reality, and interactive animation, the field that has consistently
burgeoned like a self-feeding mushroom, will no doubt continue to expound upon
itself at a rapid pace.
Important Art and Artists of Video Art
Sun In Your Head - Television Décollage (1963)
Artist: Wolf Vostell
For Sun In Your Head - Television Décollage, German artist Wolf Vostell distorted and
played with various single frames that he'd sourced from film and television of the
time (such as a smiling woman; words such as "Silence Please! Genius At Work!" or an
embracing couple, for example). The resulting piece is a fast-paced, flickering mish-
mash of televisual images that veer from flashing, abstracted shapes to
recognizable forms. The work was shown as part of Vostell's nine-part 'happening' - 9
Decollagen - which took place in Wuppertal, Germany in 1963. As no video
playback technology was available at the time, Vostell recorded the images from a
television set using a film camera, allowing him to edit the piece and play it back on
7
a projector.
With its highly experimental technique and subversive form, Sun In Your Head was
one of the first works to examine the possibilities of television as a medium in its own
right. It employs his innovative use of the decollage technique, first associated with
the French Nouveau Realisme movement who used the term to describe their
ripping, erasing, and reworking of Parisian posters to create new information. Vostell
used it to refer to the re-mixing and layering of image and sound he employed to
create a new artistic language in his Video art. A pioneer of the European branches
of the Fluxus and Happening movements, Vostell is considered one of the most
influential early Video artists - he was also the first to use a television as an object in
an artwork in 1958.
Sleep (1963)
Artist: Andy Warhol
In Sleep, Andy Warhol filmed his close friend and occasional lover John Giorno
sleeping for five hours and twenty minutes. The piece's length means few people
have watched it from beginning to end (two of the nine people who attended its
premiere at The Gramercy Theater in New York left during its opening hour), and it is
considered one of the first and most important works of durational art. Sleep looks at
themes of intimacy, repetition, and duration, and is one of the first examples of what
Warhol called his 'anti-films', in which he used hugely long, single takes to record his
everyday experience and that of his friends. Although Sleep is a film rather than a
video, Warhol's use of the camera, in which he just switched it on and walked away,
make it stylistically much closer to art then film since he is clearly looking to bash
Hollywood's conventions of narrative and the strategic manipulation of real time
through editing.
The artist's use of such epic duration has been exceptionally influential, inspiring
many contemporary film and video artists working today. Sam Taylor-Wood's hour-
long film of David Beckham sleeping in 2004 directly referenced Warhol's piece.
Christian Marclay's 24 hour-long epic Clock and Douglas Gordon's slowed version of
Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece, 24 Hour Psycho, were also made in the same
tradition.
TV Cello (1964)
Artist: Nam June Paik
Fluxus artist Nam June Pak was one of the first artists to break the barriers between
art and technology. TV Cello is a seminal example, specifically created for use in
performance by the avant-garde cellist Charlotte Moorman. The work consisted of
three television sets piled on top of each other, all showing different moving images -
a film of Moorman performing live, a collaged video of other cellists and an
intercepted broadcast feed. Ingeniously, the whole sculpture was also a fully
8
operational cello, designed to be played with a bow to create a series of raw,
electronic notes that reverberated through the space.
By appropriating the domestic television set as an art object in this way, Paik
became one of the first artists to establish video as a serious artistic medium. By
taking the television out of its normal setting and using it in such subversive
performances, he wanted to question its increasingly dominant role in shaping
public opinion.
Art Make-Up (1967-8)
Artist: Bruce Nauman
Art Make-Up consists of a series of four films set in Nauman's studio in which the artist
slowly and ritualistically applies individual layers of color - white in the first, then pink,
green and finally black - to his naked torso. The title refers simultaneously to the
substance the artist is using, to the idea that he is "making himself up" for the viewer,
and to the question "What is an artist made of?". Nauman was exploring the
boundaries between disguise, masquerade, and reality by presenting these four
versions of himself, none of which can be said to be the 'real' Bruce Nauman. Each
ten-minute section was originally intended to show on four separate screens on the
walls of one square room, with the viewer never witnessing the artist without a
colored mask.
Bruce Nauman was one of the first video artists to work with the single take, fixed-
camera technique that's demonstrated in Art Make-Up - a method in which the
scene is shot from one perspective in one sitting. This created a sense of authenticity
to the work, which, in its refusal of editing or fluctuating shots, allowed for a denial of
the normal cinematic fluff-and-preen convention, an important distinction to many
of these artists. These artists looked to the new medium to document and extend
ideas around live performance - an approach that would influence generations of
artists, including the so-called 'father of Chinese Video art' Zhang Peili and
contemporary US conceptual artist Martine Syms. Along with his groundbreaking use
of video to push the possibilities of art making to new limits, the work is also a prime
example of Nauman's use of his own body as a tool for artistic exploration.
Facing A Family (1971)
Artist: Valie Export
In Facing A Family, Austrian feminist performance artist Valie Export filmed a family
watching the camera as if it was a television set in their living room. Labeled a 'TV
action' by the artist, the footage lasts for almost five minutes, during which time the
viewer becomes more aware of the piece's mirror-like quality and the passing of
time - it is as if the viewer and the family are gazing at each other.
The work was originally broadcast on Austrian television in 1971, ironically viewed by
9
a large portion of the country's TV-consuming families. Export wanted viewers to
reflect on the passive role they took on while being entertained, and to think about
how we construe the contents of our television screen (fantasy versus reality). It was
considered especially pioneering at the time, produced just as TV was becoming
ever more dominant in lives of the public and concerns were being voiced about its
increasing power.
Vertical Roll (1972)
Artist: Joan Jonas
Named after a type of television malfunction, Vertical Roll is a disrupted recording of
Joan Jonas rehearsing for a performance in her studio as her masked alter ego,
Organic Honey. As the image on the screen constantly rolls to a steady rhythm
(which Jonas/Honey taps out, first with a spoon then a length of wood), we see
various parts of the performer's body - her masked face; her wheeling legs; her
rotating, corset-clad torso; and a shadow of her hand holding the spoon. All are shot
from a dizzying variety of angles, abstracting many of the body parts so they appear
strange and unfamiliar. Jonas also plays with and moves around the video's frame
throughout the piece, highlighting the difference between her live activity and its
videoed portrayal.
Vertical Roll is a prime example of Jonas's seminal video works of the 1970s that
theatrically explored ideas of female identity. She often used her alter ego to
investigate notions of masquerade and femininity, producing an elusive and
disjointed self-portrait using what was, in the 1970s, a new and cutting-edge
medium. She is considered a key figure in the history of both Performance and Video
art, and has been enormously influential on many contemporary artists who use their
bodies in performance to explore what it is to be female today, including Video
artists Sarah Lasley and Amber Hawk Swanson.
Teaching A Plant The Alphabet (1972)
Artist: John Baldessari
Conceptual art pioneer John Baldessari made Teaching A Plant The Alphabet in
direct response to Fluxus artist Joseph Beuys's innovative 1965 performance How To
Explain Pictures To A Dead Hare. Described by Baldessari as "a perverse exercise in
futility", the Portapak video consists of the artist's hand showing educational
flashcards of the alphabet to a clearly unresponsive potted plant, repeating each
letter slowly and deliberately, as if tutoring a small child. Like much of his work, the
piece is full of irony and subtle humor, using everyday objects and a seemingly
mundane task to explore broader philosophical concerns. In this case, those
concerns are structuralist theories of the 1970s that presented language as a series
of signs. Baldessari was also influenced by books published by members of the hippie
movement, which encouraged people to communicate with their plants.
10
Teaching A Plant The Alphabet is one of the best-known examples of Baldessari's
artistic exploration of ideas around language, dealt with using his characteristic
sense of humor and offering a fresh, original perspective on what he called the
'pedantic' and uncompromisingly serious conceptual art of the day. The use of
video allowed him to further his already quite established conceptual agenda by
utilizing a brave new form to expand his ideas from a static space to a live one.
Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975)
Artist: Martha Rosler
In Semiotics of the Kitchen the artist walks into a kitchen, dons an apron, and
proceeds to vocally identify kitchen objects in alphabetical order: a for apron, b for
bowl, c for chopper, d for dish, etc. As she goes down the roster, she quickly
demonstrates each object's use. For the last few letters u through z she simply makes
the shape of the letter with broad sweeping gestures of her arms while holding a
utensil in each hand. There is a violent force in the manner in which Rosler presents
many of the objects, such as slamming down the meat tenderizer or jabbing
violently with the ice pick, which contradicts society's image of the happy
homemaker in a decidedly passive-aggressive fashion.
This work is an important example of how early Feminist artists co-opted the video
medium to establish themselves as important new voices disembodied from the
male art canon and its many years of more traditional artwork.
The Reflecting Pool (1977 - 9)
Artist: Bill Viola
The first in a series of tapes with the same name, The Reflecting Pool shows a man
(Viola) approaching an artificial pool in the middle of a dense forest. As we hear
trees rustling, water flowing and an airplane flying overhead, the man leaps into the
air as if to jump into the pool, then remains frozen in mid-air, his image gradually
fading into the foliage behind him. Eventually, he emerges from the pool as if reborn
- Viola has said that he was portraying "the emergence of the individual into the
natural world, a kind of baptism." He also used a simple masking effect to split the
frame so that the human action above the water wasn't always reflected in it,
turning the pool into a metaphor for the mystic and separating its strange world from
the real one in the other half of the screen, while ensuring they remained united by
the televisual frame.
This work marks the beginning of Viola's innovative use of special effects to explore
notions of transcendence and spirituality. He wanted to use a medium that had
previously been regarded as embodying the literal to explore invisible phenomena
and examine the gap between the seen and the unseen. In subject as well as
technique, Viola is seen as one of the most important artists working in video from
the 1970s to the present day. His works have proved hugely influential on other,
11
younger artists working in epic and immersive film and video such as Cremaster
Cycle creator Matthew Barney, and Swiss video installation artist Pipilotti Rist.
Why Do Things Get In A Muddle (Come On Petunia) (1984)
Artist: Gary Hill
In Why Do Things Get In A Muddle, Gary Hill constructs his own, twisted version of the
classic literary nonsense story Alice In Wonderland. Hill had become fascinated with
the concept of entropy - a term that refers to gradual descent into disorder - and
wanted to explore it using video and sound. Most of the piece was performed and
recorded backwards, including the exchange between the two characters (a
childish woman called Cathy and her father), before being reversed again in the
editing process. Their resulting confusing conversation about confusion itself was
inspired by theoretician Gregory Bateson's definition of a 'metalogue', as quoted in
the work's opening sequence: "When a conversation between people mirrors the
problems themselves."
At thirty minutes long, this was the first video piece for which Hill wrote a full
screenplay. Why Do Things Get In A Muddle was considered groundbreaking in its
open, experimental approach to movement, sound and words, as well as the artist's
inventive use of editing techniques to make a conceptual point. Contemporary
artists who stretch the medium in similarly innovative ways include British artist Ed
Atkins, who uses moving image, bodies and text in his subversive video installations.
The work of US multimedia artist Adam Pendleton engages with language and
meaning in ways that also owe a clear debt to Hill.
12
