| Chapter Introduction: | Introduction |
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Video Art: Origins
While historians have attempted to situate video art's origins at an earlier date, its often iconoclastic expression is actually forty years old, with its origins formed within a time of political unrest, protests, activation, agitation, dissidence, alternative aesthetic practices, and a search to find a sense of community.37 As such, the endeavour to enunciate live video work from which many artists would construct their own symbolic lexicon would be formed in the mid 1960s.38 The complex narrative of video art formed from this time would represent—within art's history—an important historical rupture.39 Central to this would be the location of New York. As Mayer states,
Technically speaking, video's origins would arise out of U.S. Army surveillance during the Vietnam War in the early 1960s.41 The visible unification of the form had also existed in broadcast television—a medium whose defining properties of dispersion, fragmentation, and commercialism had been increasingly subject to political pressures, resulting in bias.42
Although at first existing as an experimental form, the technological innovation of the video medium helped furnish a more accessible, affordable, and practicable format than film. The foundations of a new form of logic and “realism” had steadily increased and evolved, leading to its own specialised framework and a ceaseless variation that had signalled its ability for video to be both an art and an information-based form of communication.
For filmmakers from the 1960s, an attractive feature of video art had been that it was less expensive and more versatile than film. For many, video was seen as “…another means to distribute information and a new