| Chapter Introduction: | Introduction |
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document only still images in broken stages), provided a useful and important function for artists within the period. As a result, from the mid-to-late 1960s, many artists began to use video as their main medium for expression. Many of these artists would employ the TV set as a way to present their work.
Video Art: Early Artists and the TV Set
From the early days of video art, the idea of the domesticity of the TV set had featured as a central proponent. Early video art experiments would be employed to critique television and other institutionalised structures. As pointed out, video art's irrefutable attraction and conceptualisation for artists from the beginning (which served to rearticulate aesthetic practice for artists throughout its formative period) had emanated from its function as a new technology seen to be ideally suited for recording/capturing the cultural imperatives of the time. In its functioning role as a reproductive tool for mass communication early video was seen as a way to counter the stereotypical and biased imagery proliferating in television and the mass media's representation (particularly television's) of the current issues which were employed as spectacle which artists saw as being designed to divert public attention from the real issues at hand. The undiversified, biased, and systematic presentation, or “monopolisation”, of these “images masked as legitimate culture” had, for these artists, resulted in the desensitisation, diversion, conditioning, and “lulling” of the populace into a false consciousness through the propagation of certain various stereotypes. Therefore, it was no surprise that early video artists were themselves preoccupied with television. But the difference between television and video art was that from the early days of video, artists had filmed themselves and/or others as part of the investigation of “…new meanings of time and identity or to create new definitions of space and perception in a gallery setting”.70 This had compelled them to create an alternative to television.
From the beginning, audience participation would be included in the experiment. By contrast with television, video art would position artist and/or audience at the centre.71 In 1959, Paik and Vostell initiated the