| Chapter Introduction: | Introduction |
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Overall, along with Paik, many other artists employing video art highlighted the monitor's domestic origins, which recreated home interiors in the gallery. Due to its presentation on TV monitors, from early on video art was known as “participation TV”; this was because video art was not clearly separable from television and the television screen as an all- pervasive symbol of contemporary mass culture. Polemical from the outset, Paik had stated in relation to video's purpose, “Television has been attacking us all our lives, now we can attack it back”.79
Video Art: The Collectives
This book will not examine the formative influence of video collectives during the active period of video art. Whilst I acknowledge their importance, any reasonable, reflective discussion is not possible within the scope of this book. Video collectives proliferated across the world during the period from 1960 to 1990. A number of these would be highly influential to the breadth of video art and effectively alter the practices of major funding bodies, television production and broadcasting, higher education in the arts, as well as the exhibition and acquisition policies of those art institutions which are the focus for my book. There are elements which do illuminate latter discussions, however, and these will be briefly discussed here.
From the beginning, the spirit and purpose behind early video art, or “participation TV”, would manifest in the early video collectives. These groups have almost been written out of video art's history due to video's “museumisation”; that is, its imbrication within the institutionalised museum paradigm. Video Collectives in the United States had included Ant Farm, Global Village, Optic Nerve, People's Video Theatre, Raindance, Video Free America, and Videofreex. These were “encouraged…to enter the communication process, to become in a sense, co-producers of the communication product”.80
In 1969, in Great Britain, “Hoppy” Hopkins founded TVX within the auspices of the Robert Street Arts Lab, which had been set up in London to encourage artists and filmmakers to produce videos. In addition, the London Filmmakers Cooperative (LFMC), an artist-led collective, would