The history of video art has tended to be told through a narrow lens, one that understands video as a single, coherent medium, or as defined by a single political project: an opposition to broadcast television. This thesis proposes instead to look at “actually existing video”, a methodology adapted from music scholar Benjamin Piekut that looks at the concrete variety of forms that video took at particular moments and in particular places, and in the hands of particular people. Such an approach does not seek to predetermine what video is, but rather insists on video’s heterogeneity.
This thesis applies this methodology by outlining the contours of what I call, following critic Jud Yalkut, “the alternative video network”. This network was an open-ended assemblage of people, instruments, practices and shared ideas that, in the 1960s and early 1970s, embraced video as a means of engaging with the politics of technology. It included the New York-based figures Nam June Paik, Woody and Steina Vasulka, Aldo Tambellini, Juan Downey and the Raindance collective (especially Paul Ryan, Frank Gillette, Michael Shamberg, Beryl Korot and Phyllis Gershuny), and a contingent from the West Coast and Canada including the collectives T.R. Uthco, Ant Farm, Image Bank and General Idea. Its ideas and practices were circulated at places like The Kitchen in New York and the Everson Museum in Syracuse (under the guidance of curators James Harithas and David Ross), and in the publications Radical Software (edited by Korot and Gershuny) and FILE (edited by General Idea).
Ultimately, I argue that this network, which assembles a variety of different art histories, and social and theoretical concerns, was unified by a shared engagement with the central problem of Cold War US discourse: how to integrate humans with the new electronic technologies that proliferated in the US in the wake of World War Two. The alternative video network analyzed the dominant solutions to this problem, and offered their own alternatives.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:columbia.edu/oai:academiccommons.columbia.edu:10.7916/2v3b-4s67 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Croggon, Nicholas |
| Source Sets | Columbia University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Theses |
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