| Chapter Introduction: | Introduction |
|
|
has a “liveliness” that is direct and immediate. Unlike the visitor to a video art installation, the spectator of a film is divided from the field to be observed, and the machinery which is used, to obscure the processes of illusionistic formation. Although the experience of video art as installation within the art museum has been conceptualised as “theatrical”, it is distinct from other forms of art which assume a neutral spatial presence for the viewer. For Popper, “The difference between the cinema and video with respect to the spatial factor largely involves the field of projection”.20 As such, cinema viewing necessitates a confined “two-dimensional” process of exchange between audience and film on the screen. By contrast, video, when presented, possesses a “three dimensional” presence containing sculptural properties, which often facilitate a varied and disassociative, or autonomous, position for the spectator.21
From its early obscurity as an underground and marginalised medium, video art as a new way of producing images would become ubiquitous by the 1990s. The omnipresence and enshrining in today's society of video art and its associative meanings is substantially reflected and evidenced by the fact that, as a distinctive form of communication or expression, it has been employed by artists globally as a “personal medium” of nearly every nationality as a way to increase their data of experience. As such, for us today, a history of the art museum's relation to video art needs to be written in order to form an understanding of its relatively brief period as a distinct creative form. From its origins in the 1960s, until around the mid-to-late 1990s, video art's presence and coexistence with other moving image media (such as film) would reflect and celebrate culture as a whole, overtaking other approaches to fine art practice via the moving image.22 Within this short life span, video art would exist as a gauge of the zeitgeist.23 Within this period, it would exemplify and reveal an enormous amount of technological change. Hence, as an art form and formulated sensory experience, it would straddle the fence between art and technology to become a commodity, which would “…evoke the equivalent of decades of development in such diverse media as photography and painting”.24 I believe that an examination of the relationship between video art and the museum is unique. The procedural influence of MoMA would largely determine the institutional relation towards one of contemporary art's most interesting forms. In order to attempt to evaluate an analysis of video art, one that outlines its relation with the art institution, three crucial aspects would need to be defined. Firstly, by video art's “technological history”, that is, the medium's relationship with technology; secondly, by its relationship with the art institutions; finally, a significant aspect is that of the corporate sponsorship of video art exhibitions, which would provide major institutions with an incentive and facility to propagate, “museify”, and legitimate video art as an