From Performance to Video Art

Marshall McLuhan Understanding Media, first published in 1964

The period after World War-II in the US is considered

the final birth of television.  The explosion of
sets into the American marketplace occurred in
1948-1949.
Robert Rauschenberg, Soundings, 1968, a 36 by 8 foot voice responsive
object. Nine 8 ft high units, 3 layers deep of plexiglass panels, outer panels
silvered. Visitor is reflected and the sounds she makes activate unique sounds
from Soundings.
 Video performance:
Bruce Nauman, Stamping in the Studio, 1968,
60 minutes (excerpt, 5 minutes)
http://www.virtual-circuit.org/art_cinema/Nauman/Nauman/Stamping.html

From: Rewind: Video Art and Alternative Media in the United States 1968-1980
Media N 6494.V53 S97 1995

Program 2: “Investigations of the Phenomenal World: Space, Sound, and Light”

 Video performance: 1977

Martha Rosler, Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained

38 minutes

“I did my best to interrupt voyeurism by having a long shot – a stationary shot

that fatigues the viewer and diminishes aspects of the character’s presence on
the screen. It becomes boring to look at something without camera mobility
and without reaction shots. (Rosler, 1981)

http://artfem.tv/id;11/action;showpage/page_type;video/page_id;vital_statistics_
of_a_citizen_simply_obtained_by_martha_rosler_flv/

From: Rewind: Video Art and Alternative Media in the United States 1968-1980
Media N 6494.V53 S97 1995

Program 4: Gendered Confrontations

Joseph Beuys, Siberian Symphony: First Movement, FESTUM FLUXORUM FLUXUS,
performed February 1963 at the Düsseldorf Art Academy where Beuys was Professor of
Monumental Sculpture
George Maciunas
(Lithuanian-American
(1931–1978) Fluxus
Manifesto, 1963
Yoko Ono (Japan, b. 1933) Cut Piece, performance, 1964 (Japan)
and (right)1965 (NYC,Carnegie Hall)
Shigeko Kubota (American b. Japan, 1937, married to Nam June Paik) Vagina Painting,
performance, July 4th, 1965, New York City, Perpetual Fluxus Festival, (red paint on
white paper, paint brush attached to crotch of underpants)
Nam June Paik, 1961 Fluxus Festival of New Music, Weisbaden, German
Nam June Paik (American, b. Seoul, Korea, 1932 - 2006)
Zen for Head, Fluxus performance, 1962
Nam June Paik and John Cage in Marcel Duchamp and John Cage
still from performance video by Shigeko Kubota, 1972
Paik, (left) Zen for TV, 1963
(right) TV Buddha, 1974
 Paik (left) began interfering with television images
in the early 1960s; (right) TV Magnet, 1965

“Some day artists will work with capacitors, resistors and semi-conductors
as they work today with brushes, violins and junk.” Paik
(left) Mooreman, Paik, Joseph Beuys, Fluxus Action, 1966; (left) with Yoko Ono and
John Lennon (1971); (right, below) Moorman performing Paik's Concerto for TV Cello
and Videotapes (1971) at Galeria Bonino, New York, November 23, 1971
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/global-grove/video/1/

Nam June Paik,

Global Groove, 1974;
Paik in studio of
WGBH, which
broadcast Global
Groove

'This is a glimpse of a
video landscape of
tomorrow when
you will be able to
switch on any TV
station on the earth and
TV guides will be as fat
as the Manhattan
telephone book.'
- Paik
 Nam June Paik, Video Fish, 1975, Three channel video installation with
aquariums, water, 45 live Japanese fish, Pompidou Center (Paris) collection, 7 of 15
monitors
 Paik, Video Flag, (1985-1996)
70 video monitors, 4 laser disc players, computer, timers, electrical devices, wood and
metal housing on rubber wheels, 94 3/8 x 139 3/4 x 47 3/4 in.
 Nam June Paik in collaboration with Norman Ballard, Paul Garrin, David Hartnett, and
Stephen Vitiello, Modulation in Sync, 2000. Three-channel video and stereo sound
installation with 100 monitors, seven projectors, two lasers, water, mirrors, projection
screens, and metal structure, variable dimensions. Paik retrospective, Guggenheim NYC
Fashion Avenue from Nam June Paik's Suite 212 series, on Seoul Square Media Canvas,
2011. For current exhibition, Mediascape, à pas de Nam June Paik, video series is
projected every night onto the huge screen 256 feet high and 325 feet wide: 42,000 LEDs
 Laurie Anderson (US b. 1947)
Duets on Ice, performance in
New York City and Genoa, Italy,
1973-4, playing Bach while
wearing ice skates embedded in
ice. When ice melted the
performance ended.

Compare Edouard Manet

The Old Musician, 1862, artist
as wanderer, rag picker
 Laurie Anderson, Performance United States Part II, 1980
The Orpheum, New York; (right) album covers United States I-IV, 1984
 Laurie Anderson, United States Part I, 1980, Orpheum Theater
Multiple disjunctive narratives. Voice through the harmonizer shifts from “voice of
authority (deep, masculine) to female (her own). The woman repeatedly asks “Hello,
excuse me, can you tell me where I am?” The response is “You can read the signs.”
Anderson’s United States Part I opens with her modified voice-of-authority reading:

A certain American religious sect has been looking at conditions of

the world during the Flood. According to their calculations, during
the Flood the winds, tides and currents were in an overall
southeasterly direction. This would mean that in order for Noah's
Ark to have ended up on Mount Ararat, it would have to have started
out several thousand miles to the west. This would then locate pre-
Flood civilization somewhere in the area of Upstate New York, and
the Garden of Eden roughly in New York City.

Now, in order to get from one place to another, something must

move. No one in New York remembers moving, and there are no
traces of Biblical history in the Upstate New York area. So we are
led to the only available conclusion in this time warp, and that is that
the Ark has simply not left yet.
(below right) Poster from Anderson’s The End of the Moon, 2005, BAM performance
(top) at NASA as the agency’s first artist-in-residence, 2004
Doug Aitken, Sleepwalkers, Jan-Feb, 2007, 8 projections on MoMA NYC exterior walls
(Youtube.com trailer) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJaTjc3TMyo
Mona Hatoum (b.1952, Beirut, Lebanon)
Palestinian parents were exiled to Lebanon
in 1948 with the establishment of the
Israeli state. During a visit to London in
1975, civil war broke out in Lebanon and
Hatoum was forced to stay in London.
Hatoum identifies as Palestinian and is
based in London.
(right) video still from So Much I Want to
Say, 1983

“I was completely taken in by

Minimal and Conceptual Art when I
was on my first degree course.
Going to University afterwards ….
when I got into the area of
installation and object making, I
wouldn't say I went back to a
minimal aesthetic as such, it was
more a kind of reductive approach.”
Hatoum, Light at the End, 1989, London,
iron frame and six electric heating elements
Mona Hatoum, still from Measures of Distance, 15-minute video, 1988. Letters written
by Hatoum's mother in Beirut to her daughter in London appear as Arabic text moving
over the screen and are read aloud in English by Hatoum.
On a visit to Lebanon, Hatoum filmed her mother in the shower. She taped
her mother talking to her about her own feelings, her sexuality, her husband’s
objections to Hatoum’s art, including this film.
Shirin Neshat (b. 1957, Iranian, based in New York – 2 images from the 1994 Women of
Allah series; right: Allegiance with Wakefulness, ink on photograph of artist’s feet with
calligraphy - Persian poetry about themes such as exile, diaspora, identity, femininity
and martyrdom.
Shirin Neshat, still from The Shadow under the Web, film transferred to DVD and
projected as installation, 1997. Neshat synthesizes new image technology; Iranian,
American, and European film aesthetics; the poetry, music and songs of her homeland,
and the global fusion sounds of Phillip Glass. Two years after producing this work she
was declared an enemy of the Iranian state.
“Leaving has offered me incredible personal development, a sense of independence that
I don't think I would have had. But there's also a great sense of isolation. And I've
permanently lost a complete sense of center. I can never call any place home. I will
forever be in a state of in-between.”
- Neshat, 2000
Kimsooja (b. 1957, South Korea) BFA (1980) and MA (1984) from Hong-Ik
University, Seoul
Kimsooja is the 2013 Venice Biennale artist for the Korean Pavillion. Her
installation will be titled:To Breathe: Bottari

Below: stills from video, Needle Woman (1999-present) On six screens laid out in
a rectangle, the artist shows herself filmed from behind, standing in the middle of
cosmopolitan city centers including New York, Delhi, Shanghai and Tokyo,

http://www.art21.org/videos/segment-kimsooja-in-systems

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Spes0Uk8btY