OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Fri Nov 30 2012, NEWGEN Introduction One way to write music: study Duchamp (John Cage)1 Video art is often considered a visual genre. And yet when analogue video became commercially available in 1965, it was welcomed not only as a visual technology, but also as a creative medium able to record and play back sound and moving images at the same time. While musicians and artists have long sought conceptual interaction, the materials available have restricted practical realisation and few examples of such communication exist. Previous audio-visual practices, such as lantern shows, music theatre, opera, synaesthetic experimentation, early direct film, and so on, were intermedial primarily at the level of reception. The electromagnetic basis of early video technology, on the other hand, gave rise to sound and image that shared a linked material channel. This channel enabled audio and visual elements to be recorded and transmitted simultaneously, allowing a level of synergy rarely before possible. Such synergy was particularly alluring to those interested in the ways in which art and music could fragment and recombine to produce new intermedial spaces. With the new medium, artists were able to include sound in their work in order to push the boundaries of current creative concerns. But video also presented composers with the opportunity to visualise their music. In fact, many of the earliest video artists began their careers as musicians: Nam June Paik was an experimental composer, Steina Vasulka, a classical violinist, Robert Cahen trained in electro-acoustic composition, and Tony Conrad was a member of the Theatre of Eternal Music. These influential musicians ensured that early video developed into a highly musical genre. The musicality of video was not simply due to the specificities of its hardware, however. When placed within the broader cultural and artistic climate of experimentation and inclusivity of the ’60s, the technological simultaneity of video encouraged expansive and interactive performance situations that challenged conventional methods of art and music consumption. Paik, Vasulka, Conrad, 1 01_Rogers_Intro.indd 1 11/30/2012 9:06:01 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Fri Nov 30 2012, NEWGEN 2 SOUNDING THE GALLERY and others used their knowledge of noise making and noise collecting to broaden visual art into process-driven image-and-soundscapes via the live manipulation, processing, feedback, delay, and mirroring of the video signal. The improvisatory, interactive, and often performative result gradually coalesced into a genre that not only expanded the boundaries of visual art and its exhibition, but also those of music composition and performance. When video’s synergy was presented live via a closed-circuit feed, everything within the performance space could fold into a manipulated audio-visual environment that engendered a new mode of active spectatorship. Using the early technology, artists and composers could invite visitors into the heart of their work, allowing them to dictate the structure, audio-visuality, and trajectory of the video environment. With this in mind, it becomes clear that to locate the rise of video within the visual arts is extremely reductive: at a material level, the technology was able simultaneously to digest and project music and image; when received, this interactive duality produced an intermedial performance space that drew together music, sculpture, architecture, drama, and film. By challenging the configuration of art and music venues and expanding the possibilities for audience engagement, early video performance, alive with interdisciplinary potential, vibrated in the space between artists, composers, performers, and visitors. Video’s rare ability to fuse music and image at an intermedial level led many to consider the medium as a new art form, one that had no easily identifiable lineage and thus appeared to be free from historical baggage. But this was a false assumption. Examination of creative practice during the twentieth century reveals that many composers were experimenting with spatialising their sounds, while the inclusion of time into the static arts was becoming a prevalent form of experimentation. Rather than creating a new art form without a history, video’s intermedial capabilities allowed these two disciplines to come together, acting as a conduit that enabled the fusion and manipulation of pre-existing practice. The technology was new, in other words; but the creative uses to which it was put, were not. During the “first wave” of audio-visual work, which began in New York City in 1965, video can be read as a facilitator rather than a genre, a technology that enabled music and art finally to join forces. Video, then, produced a unique moment in audio-visual history: able to create both image and sound concurrently, the new technology instigated the birth of the artist-composer and process-driven, interactive intermediality. For this reason, it makes more sense to refer to the genre as “video art-music,” a term that better acknowledges the audio-visuality of the medium and the double capabilities of many of its practitioners. The beginning of the twenty-first century is the perfect time to attempt a historical recontextualisation of video art-music. Whereas paint has been used creatively for thousands of years, the rise and fall of video as an artistic material took place within only forty. The format, with its easily operable, inexpensive, reusable design, did not become available until the mid-1960s and thus is approaching its first half-century. The opportunity to make use of the new equipment was first 01_Rogers_Intro.indd 2 11/30/2012 9:06:02 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Fri Nov 30 2012, NEWGEN I n t rodu ct ion 3 explored by the so-called “father of video art” Korean-born Nam June Paik: in October of 1965, he travelled through New York City with a portable video camera (the Portapak) in a journey that kick-started an explosive revolution in art and music circles.2 But although the video format quickly became one of the most innovative creative materials of the twentieth century, by 1995, the magnetic technology was already being superseded by the more resilient and reliable DVD system, with its longer playback capability and higher definition output. Only eight years later, DVDs were the preferred technology for weekly film rentals in America and today video is as obsolete as audiotape, with new films no longer released on the format and replacement cassettes for camcorders and home recording units increasingly hard to come by.3 In what appears to be an even faster turnover, the DVD format is beginning to be pushed aside by Microsoft’s High Definition DVD and Sony’s Blu-ray technology (launched commercially in late 2007). It is clear to see that the development of artistic material has attained an unprecedented velocity, in which formats are developed and discarded in the blink of a historical eye. In terms of its technical rise and fall, then, analogue video can be considered a closed genre. As the digital age marks the demise of its usage, we are faced with an epoch that is almost already complete, a phenomenon rarely encountered before in the visual and sonic arts. In one sense, however, this closure is a false one. Artist-composers, such as Bill Viola, may have swapped their material preference from magnetic to digital formats, but the fundamental aesthetic aspects of video have been retained. In fact, the shift between formats has been so seamless that moving-image work continues to be collected under the term “video art,” despite the obvious technological inaccuracy. While it is true, then, that analogue video technology is now redundant in terms of recording and playback, the implications of audiovisual fusion that it enabled are still thriving. Many contemporary video practitioners, for instance, continue to embrace the audio-visuality of the digital medium and take charge of both image and sound: Sabrina Pena identifies herself as both “avant-garde composer” and “video artist,” while Kathy Hinde prefers the term “interdisciplinary artist” to describe her video work with music and image.4 The equipment may have evolved, then, but aspects of its technological basis and the opportunities for synthesis it affords continue to inform the new digital age. Although occupying a comparatively tiny segment of visual and music histories, the various forms of video work have had a significant impact on the arts. The Turner Prize was won by video artists in 1996 (Douglas Gordon), 1997 (Gillian Wearing), and 1999 (Steve McQueen), for instance, while the Hugo Boss Prize, a biennial international award administered by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, frequently awards first place to moving-image artists.5 As further recognition of video’s integral and evolving position within the art canon, London’s Tate Modern has recently completed phase one of its £215 million extension that will be dedicated to live art, video work, and installation: “[t]he world has changed rapidly over the last ten years, particularly in 01_Rogers_Intro.indd 3 11/30/2012 9:06:02 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Fri Nov 30 2012, NEWGEN 4 SOUNDING THE GALLERY how we use technology. Tate Modern needs to respond to new developments,” explains the published proposal outlining the changes.6 While contemporary video artist-composers, such as Pena and Hinde, continue to work with the audiovisual possibilities of the medium, composers, music directors, and concert venue managers have demonstrated an interest in including these ‘new developments’ in their work with increasing frequency: The Cave, Steve Reich’s collaborative project with video-artist wife Beryl Korot, a multiscreen, vocal-instrumental video opera (1993) and Viola’s partnership with Peter Sellars for a production of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde (2005) are two of the most publicised examples of video practice being closely combined with music composition and performance. The use of video as part of an opera’s staging has also become increasingly common: Katie Mitchell’s production of Mozart’s Idomeneo (June 2010) at the English National Opera, for instance, made use of video projections (by Fifty Nine Productions) to depict seascapes and landscapes, while Jocelyn Pook’s Ingerland (2010), part of the OperaShots programme at London’s Royal Opera House, included videoed images of football supporters (fig. i.1).7 Concert halls and opera houses are embracing video technology in a number of other ways: the San Francisco Opera has installed several high-definition video screens (known as “OperaVision”), for instance, to provide full and close-up shots of the stage for those occupying restricted-view seats; the Royal Opera House recently bought Opus Arte, a video production and distribution company to release and market film versions of its productions; and New York’s Metropolitan Opera has begun to simulcast its performances in cinemas to those unable to Figure i.1 Jocelyn Pook, still from OperaShots production of Ingerland at Royal Opera House 2 (2009). Photo by John Lloyd Davies. 01_Rogers_Intro.indd 4 11/30/2012 9:06:02 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Fri Nov 30 2012, NEWGEN I n t rodu ct ion 5 acquire, or afford, its theatre tickets.8 Since the dramatic rise of MTV in the late 1980s, the addition of moving image to music has become common practice for gigging bands, with U2 blazing the trail on their 1992–93 Zoo TV Tour, a massive, multimedia stadium production that mixed prerecorded visual footage, live television broadcast, and on-site VJing. It is clear to see that video work, routinely collected by major art galleries and frequently included in music performance, now forms a popular and well-respected genre: it is difficult to imagine anything different. But such recognition was not always forthcoming and critical and institutional acceptance was hard-won. While it is important to note that many artists and composers working with video were actively opposed to institutionalisation and that, in some sense, the achievement of video in reaching into the heart of art and music establishments signals the loss of its early radical attitude, there are nevertheless a number of important issues that arise from the early combination of music and image.9 The arrival of creative video work challenged the sanctity of music and art spaces by undermining conventions of listening and viewing already under threat from a radically evolving sociocultural context in the early 1960s, in light of contested civil rights, anti-war sentiments, feminism, and the anticommodity aesthetic. Rather than focusing on a single object (a painting, sculpture, or fresco) or a piece of music, video artists and composers were concerned with the movement, relationship, and sound existing between a number of elements.10 As a mixture of moving image, sculpture, music, and sound, video work challenged both the neutrality of the gallery space and its viewing procedures or, rather, it revealed the neutrality to be an illusion, in three ways. First, a work could activate its surroundings by incorporating both performance space and the people within it into its composition. Second, the use of moving images placed the element of time into a space conventionally filled with static objects and, in so doing, presented the exhibition-goer with a dimension usually reserved for the concert hall or theatre. Finally, and yet most radically, video, as an audiovisual medium, introduced sound and music into the gallery environment, a space normally occupied by silent works. Expanding into the gallery space spatially, temporally, and aurally, then, video works required a radical re-evaluation of art exhibition practice (in terms of exhibition, curation, preservation, funding, and patterns of audience engagement) and, to take one step further, the defining parameters of art itself. As a component of the concert hall, video was similarly hampered by aesthetic, financial, and practical concerns. Amid fears that the inclusion of image would detract from musical contemplation and appreciation were the difficulties of installing video screens and cameras in auditoriums created for live performance, problems only recently being confronted, as the San Francisco Opera’s new inclusions demonstrate. As a result of such challenges, video art-music was the recipient of tough aesthetic discrimination and was forced to occupy new, audiovisual spaces. These spaces are central to this book. The particular form of process-orientated synchronicity enabled by early analogue video gave rise to new ideas about music, 01_Rogers_Intro.indd 5 11/30/2012 9:06:02 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Fri Nov 30 2012, NEWGEN 6 SOUNDING THE GALLERY art, and the possibilities for communal modes of creativity. During the 1940s, theories of architecture, mass media, and literature were reformulated according to physical and social spaces by László Moholy-Nagy and Siegfried Giedion, Clement Greenberg and Joseph Frank respectively: Giedion, for example, postulated “space” rather than structure or material as the real architectural medium.11 We can treat video in a similar way, by investigating around the edge of art and music in order to explore not the video forms themselves, but rather the changing nature of the spaces in which they exist. Shifting the focus thus from object to spatial process promotes a contextual audio-visual engagement with early video work, while at the same time re-articulating the ways in which sound and image can communicate with each other. Such a theoretical relocation encourages a more syncretic approach to the medium by treating it as the nervous system of audiovisual interaction. Once decentred, early video can be read as a rich and diverse network of interactions, a hub of influences that lie, only thinly veiled, beneath the medium’s appearance of novelty. Outlining their theory of remediation, Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin propose an understanding of digital media predicated on a process of constant and progressive re-iteration: Digital visual media can best be understood through the ways in which they honor, rival, and revise linear-perspective painting, photography, film, television, and print. No medium today, and certainly no single media event, seems to do its cultural work in isolation from other media, any more than it works in isolation from other social and economic forces. What is new about new media comes from the particular ways in which they refashion older media and the ways in which older media refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media.12 According to the authors, remediation operates via the self-reflexive and visible inclusion of “older media” into new work, a continuous refashioning that enables digital media to acknowledge and evolve from a diverse range of predecessors. Although all media are involved in the remediation process, digital technologies have become increasingly adept at erasing their perceptible influences, with computers operating like a “media-integrating machine” (Yvonne Spielmann), able to incorporate earlier forms with little or no obvious separation or fissure.13 In older media, however, the process is clearly discernable. In early video work, preexisting audiovisual articulations, such as broadcast television are constantly (and often explicitly) included and revoiced, a reuse of the prevailing cultural climate foregrounded through the grainy images that such transmission produces. But remediation need not be restricted to visual reconfiguration: it can also be used to understand video’s double, audio-visual constitution. The inclusion of sound and music into video’s mixture was a natural extension from Fluxus, 01_Rogers_Intro.indd 6 11/30/2012 9:06:03 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Fri Nov 30 2012, NEWGEN I n t rodu ct ion 7 where artists had begun to unfold their work through time in Happenings and so on: simultaneously, composers both within the group and beyond were acquiring heightened awareness of the spatial possibilities of music first explored during the Renaissance. Just as artists were starting to investigate the temporal dimension of their work, musicians began to respond to performance spaces in new ways, creating art and music that overflowed, each into the realm of the other. Set against a historical backdrop of intense experimentation that ranged from the conceptual work of Duchamp and the performance-based practices of Allan Kaprow on the art side, to the spatialised soundworlds of Stockhausen and the aleatoric procedures of John Cage in the arena of music, video technology provided a new means to expand—and remediate—several strands of traditional practice. Early video work rests, Janus-faced, at the intersection of these two spatially expanding disciplines. As the segregation between art forms became porous, the deeply embedded conventions of musical performance and art display became vulnerable, even fragile. Video could probe the boundaires between private and public spaces, combine mental and physical spatialities, and move the static arts into a temporal arena. It demanded a rethink of the traditional gallery environment, while also giving rise to alternative audiovisual performance/exhibition spaces that continue to operate today. So it is a mistake to assume that video has no continuity with the past: rather, it harbours a double past. Arrival at the “new” genre is achieved neither by progressing in any one direction, nor by developing a particular form. Instead, early video enabled the disciplines of art and music to disband and recombine in new and hitherto unprecedented configurations. It follows that, once context is taken into account, music and art in the twentieth century cannot coherently be discussed as individual disciplines, but rather encourage a more lateral history, or spatial sensibility, that moves fluidly through the space between them. In order to go some way towards such a revaluation, this book traces two intertwined genealogies for early video art-music: one audio, the other visual. The video work that emerged in 1965 is revisited from a number of angles which, when combined, form a complicated, but by no means exhaustive, set of parameters that enabled music and art practices to expand into video work. To achieve this, I follow the lead of early video artist-musicians by using video technology as a conduit into several other areas of discourse. While the proliferation of disciplines and ideas that this creates is exciting, it has been necessary to delimit the discussion in other ways. My focus here lies in work created and performed in America during the 1960s and early 1970s; the time when video, which still required separate technologies for recording and playback, was used mainly as a live component of multimedia events. There are several reasons for this. During the first years of video work, many of the main protagonists were either American or alighted on US soil for political or artistic reasons. The Portapak, available in America in 1965, was only introduced into the 01_Rogers_Intro.indd 7 11/30/2012 9:06:03 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Fri Nov 30 2012, NEWGEN 8 SOUNDING THE GALLERY European market around 1970. British video practitioner David Hall recalls the subsequent blossoming of video work across the Atlantic: Some experimentation occurred with a few artists (including myself) and community groups around 1970, but I think the significant moment was when I made ten unannounced TV Interruptions transmitted by Scottish television in 1971. It has been claimed by writers that “these works have come to be regarded as the first example of British artists’ television and as an equally formative moment in British video art.”14 The globalisation of video work happened quickly around the turn of the decade and the medium was put to creative use by Hall in England, VALIE EXPORT in Austria, Ulrike Rosenbach in Germany, and Robert Cahen in France, amongst others. Woody Vasulka (who emigrated to America from his native Czechoslovakia in the 1960s) understands video’s rapid integration into the international art scene as the direct result of technological development: “With tape, new networks of distribution were quickly established. Video became truly international. It was easy to duplicate, mail and view.”15 Because this study is contextual and situates early video work within its wider artistic and musical communities, it has been necessary also to engage with the local cultural, social, and political environments (specifically that of New York City), which had a profound influence on the ways in which video pieces were configured: as Joan Jonas puts it; “Video as we used it was personal, and the personal was political.”16 As we have seen, the earliest examples of video art-music were found in America: but as my discussion progresses into the early 1970s, I have kept this geographical focus in order to navigate between the personal and the political, despite several strong voices from other countries joining the conversation. At the same time, however, we must recognise that early video cannot be described as representing a purely American sensibility as it has been infused with multinational voices from the outset. Although hailing from Korea, for instance, Paik came to New York City via the German Rhineland, where he spent the years between 1958 and 1963. It was here that he first met John Cage and began his transition from musician—via actions—to media artist-composer. “My life began one evening in August 1958 in Darmstadt. 1957 was 1 BC (Before Cage)”17 Paik’s connection to the experimental creative scenes in New York City during the 1960s encouraged him to treat video as a powerful and subversive tool for intervention. After its first road trip with Paik, the medium was readily integrated into the actions and interactive events of other artists. And it was here, in the real-time, experiential mobilisation of a live audience, that video’s audio-visuality most clearly arose. The refreshed spatial interaction facilitated by the technology locates video art-music at the intermedial intersection between visual and audio disciplines. As a result, although single-channel, installational, and sculptural video is considered alongside video documentary and work for broadcast 01_Rogers_Intro.indd 8 11/30/2012 9:06:03 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Fri Nov 30 2012, NEWGEN I n t rodu ct ion 9 television, my discussion centres primarily on video-in-performance between 1965 and 1971. For the same reasons, I remain particularly interested in those practitioners responsible for germinating (or at least setting into motion) both the images and the sounds that underpinned their performances, even though it was not uncommon for early video makers to visualise prerecorded music that may have been composed or performed by someone else. Following my call for a terminological change from video art to video art-music, I have chosen to refer to these audio-visual facilitators as “artist-composers.” While I acknowledge that these designations—one who creates images; another who works with sounds, often in advance of exhibition/performance—can be problematic, I would like to recontextualise them within a refreshed discourse; to re-imagine each title as a fluid, expansive, and increasingly interchangeable designation. With this in mind, artist-composer is intended to suggest not simply a combination of interests, but rather a continuous creative experience that arises in the present tense. Sounding the Gallery, then, decentres video and considers several different ways of locating the video medium and its artist-composers during its early years. The book is based on the belief that the linked nature of sound and image in the video signal was deeply significant to early video artist-composers, as it elicited a spatial form of engagement that gave rise to new relationships between art/music practices and their audiences. Chapter 1 sets out the technological specificities that enabled the rise of the audiovisual composer during the 1960s. With reference to the theoretical work of Gene Youngblood, André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion, and Yvonne Spielmann, the medium is situated within the expansive multimedia culture of the decade, and its intermedial qualities are considered alongside several video artist-composer biographies. Rethinking the material qualities of art and music helps to unpack the hypothesis that video is an audiovisual art form, which represents the coming together of two separate but related histories during the twentieth century. The second chapter goes back in time in order to trace the different ways in which music and image have interacted in the past. With reference to the theories of Gotthold Lessing, Daniel Albright, Richard Leppert, and Nicholas Cook, the consideration of visual music, audible art, audiovisual instruments, colour-sound synaesthesia, and experimental film demonstrates that video does, in fact, have a long and fruitful lineage and should thus be understood as a facilitator for intermedial discourse rather than a brand new genre. With this audiovisual narrative in mind, the third chapter offers a comparative history of the consonant spaces that enabled such intermedial merging. The theories of Moholy-Nagy, Giedion, and Greenberg provide a useful starting point for an investigation into the expanding notions of art and music and the liberation from traditional viewing and listening procedures that such expansion entails. Drawing on the work of Christopher Small and Brian O’Doherty, a brief history of the conventions of exhibition and display, viewing procedures and audience behaviour in the gallery is compared with an overview of concert hall customs and the aesthetics of listening. This comparative 01_Rogers_Intro.indd 9 11/30/2012 9:06:03 PM OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Fri Nov 30 2012, NEWGEN 10 SOUNDING THE GALLERY study is contextualised by an overview of mixed media performance (music, happenings, conceptual art, performance art, site-specific installations, and so on), with particular reference to their places and methods of display, exhibition, and/ or performance. Here I argue that space, architecture, the reconfiguration of gallery and performance venues, as well as issues of audience engagement are vital to an understanding of video as a sonic, as well as a visual, medium. Chapter 4 positions the rise of video art-music within these audiovisual and spatial genealogies. Identifying points of contact between musicians and artists during the 1960s and 1970s, this section situates the early years of video within their sociocultural context. In light of the reception and aesthetic problems (even resistance) encountered when bringing sound and the moving image into the gallery, the alternative performance/exhibition spaces sought by video artist-musicians are charted in order to produce a comprehensive outline of early video work. These four chapters, then, provide alternative audiovisual histories for video art-music and its performance/exhibition spaces and outline the arenas inhabited by early video practitioners. The final chapter combines the multiple genealogies of audio-visuality and spatial expansion to posit a theory of the “nondiegetic” image. I theorise that the genre developed stylistic traits more akin to listening than viewing; and as a result, new forms of engagement were demanded of visitors to galleries and concert halls.Using film music discourse as a starting point, this section discusses the blurred boundaries between art and life and the consequent dismantling of exhibition containment in multimedia video work. Immersion, interaction, performative action, and the expanded consciousness of the mirrored and closed-feed environment are explored through the performance and surveillance videos of Joan Jonas, Bruce Nauman, Peter Campus, and Dan Graham. These ideas are then used to inform a reading of Paik’s collaboration with Charlotte Moorman, with particular attention given to their Concerto for TV Cello (1971). This examination leads to consideration of the active dialogue now possible between audience, art work, and exhibition/performance space. Building from this discussion, early video is considered in relation to film space and the aesthetics of audio-visual realism. The Epilogue then brings us back to the present day, tracing the various lines of influence that early video has had, not only on recent video work and gallery evolution, but also on the development of gaming, audio-visual apps, and contemporary modes of music consumption. 01_Rogers_Intro.indd 10 11/30/2012 9:06:03 PM