AFTERIMAGE/October 1983

IT'S THE THOUGHT THAT COUNTS

CATHERINE LORD

Video as Attitude
Joan Jonas/He Saw Her Burning; Allan Kaprow/Untitled; Bill
Beirne/Extras: Street Performance for an Audience En-
closed; Juan Downey/Signage; Dieter Froese/Not a Model
for Big Brother's Spy-Cycle; Robert Gaylor/Suspension of
Disbelief/10:00 p.m.; Gary Hill/Primarily Speaking; Rita
Myers/In the Planet of the Eye, Second Stage: The Eye of the
Beast Is Red; Bruce Nauman/Untitled; Michael Smith/Mike's
Dressing Room; Francesc Torres/Jean's Lost Notebook;
Steina and Woody Vasulka/The West; and Bill Viola/Room
forSt. John of the Cross.
at the Musem of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, N.M . and the University
Art Museum, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque
May 13-June 26

If a single word sums up this project, it's ambition . While it's

one thing to do a large video installation in New York, it's
another in New Mexico . There, the chutzpah needed to com-
mandeer two museums and a respectable amount of equip-
ment is not routine, and press and audience support minimal.
That "Video as Attitude" happened at all is due mainly to two
people : Steina Vasulka and Patrick Clancy . The former,
when offered a one-person show at the Albuquerque
Museum of Fine Arts, recommended instead a group show of
contemporary video; the latter not only served as the exhibi-
tion's theoretician and curator, but as its fundraiser and tech-
nician .
Ambition, however, applies not only to the material cir-
cumstances of "Video as Attitude" but to the theoretical chal- Installation view of Not a Model forBig Brother's Spy-Cycle, by Dieter Froese.
lenge Clancy intended by the project. The rhetoric invoked to
support most video installation work seems designed to re- man-made environment and aid deconstructive strategies .' ing their own temporal-spatial reality, and thus challenging
fute a notion of video art as a single-channel, broadcastable the primacy of the notion of point of view, reflects varying
(well, potentially) medium . This rhetoric most often replaces The above suggests expectations that far surpass those usu- sophistication in sculpture (as opposed to video) and varying
picture-plane modernism with a me-too conception of ally applied to artists using video, but it raises what I think is a commitments to site-specific (or at least site-adaptable)
sculpture-i .e ., if sculpture is about deploying objects in central issue: if Clancy's analysis of video's potential takes work.
space, monitors are eligible . This project seems aimed not so squarely into account the social omnipotenceof media repre- In terms of making the viewer a part of the event, and put-
much at unleashing the potential of video technology, or even
sentations, can one expect thesame of video artists, who like ting a particular gallery space to good use, Dieter Froese's
sculpture, as at liberating a few more exhibition and funding their peers in other genres, were bred to hold artmaking Not a Model for Big Brother's Spy-Cycle was probably the
categories for videomakers who would otherwise fall penni- dearer than cultural analysis or critique? (This observation is most successful work in the exhibition . Insinuation was the
less between guidelines . Clancy's ambitions certainly tran- intended in a basic sociological sense: "video art" is a very re- strategy . At a rather awkward social juncture of lobby and
scend this level of critique, and transcend as well the easy re- cent creation ; despite the deluge of utopian agitprop produc- stairs in Albuquerque's University Art Museum, a classic of
futation of another recuperation of video-as a modernist ed in the last 20 years about democratic communications bland-but-big architecture, Not a Model . . . edged into one's
medium defined by its identity as a series of electronic sig- technology, those who practice video as an alternative to awareness as disconnected monitors and cameras obtruding
nals . television generally define themselves as "artists," not any- into supposedly neutral space. In the midstof discrete, trans-
What Clancy wanted to present, basically, is implied but thing so prosaic as communications workers.) portable units of video art, it wasn't entirely clear when,
not summarized in the phrase "video as attitude ." He wanted But there is a second major issue raised by this show and where, or even whether Froese's piece had started. That Not
to show a group of works that would refute the inscription of Clancy's suggestion that being within the "reality" of a video a Model . . . was a loop of real and dummy cameras, real and
modernist tenets upon video-not only by virtue of their installation constitutes "a significant contribution toward a dummy monitors, and real-time and prerecorded tapes be-
sculptural attributes, but by implicating the viewer in a rethink- new definition of sculpture." Videoart is becoming an increas- came clear. only as one tracked the work down the stairs to
ing of the notion of point of view and of phenomenological ex- ingly specialized practice, even though its tradition (which in- find a maze of cardboard cameras panning crazilyon plinths
perience . Pointing to the ways in which images structurereal-
cludes many of the artists in this show) is still identified with an and, dangling from the ceiling, wire mesh monitors, the
ity in our media culture, Clancy writes : interdisciplinary approach . How, then, does the work in shadows of the functional products with which they were in-
"Video as Attitude" relate to contemporary sculpture, which termixed . Heading back up the stairs to seethe imageof what
It [TV, urban architecture and advertising] has accustomed us to the has, as an outgrowth of its particular history, taken on related one had just traversed, and to complete the loop, one en-
instantaneous reading of rapidly intercut information lacking a cohe- countered two channels of prerecorded images of surveil-
sive, overall context other than that of commercial manipulation . In problems of cultural space.
the fabricated, artificial environment, signs and images become sig- lance. The set-up was hapless victim and invisible inquisitor,
nifiers which, taken apart and reframed, replace natural space as an the script, an often comic Joe-McCarthy-meets-the-striving-
organizing principle or context for experiencing the world. . . . As a conversation :
tool, video is capable of simultaneously displaying many kinds of sig- So what, then, of the work in this show?-or thesetwo shows '80s-artist
nifiers, such as image, language, sound, text, color and realtime which, ignoring geography, I'm going to lump together . The Q: Do you speak Russian?
events in a synoptic manner .The various tropes of videosuch as key- generations, practices, and intentions of the artists included A: No.
ing, matting, and synthesized processes allow for a transformation of
thought and language into new dimensions which can simulate the vary considerably, though many of them see video as just one Q: Do you engage in art politics?
tool in a repertoire that includes books, sound, and perfor- A: No.
Q: Do you engage in art for the masses?
mance. Only a few, I suspect, would admit in public that their A: I do my best.
CATHERINE LORD is the Dean of the School of Artand Design at the business was deconstructing cultural signifiers. Of those who
California Institute of the Arts . might, that some were more successful than others in creat- In the refusal to be limited by museum space, and in the

Installation views of Not a Model for Big Brother's Spy-Cycle, by Dieter Froese.
10 AFTERIMAGE/October 1983

Rainier, with brilliant blue sky, white snow, and green grass in
the foreground . On the soundtrack, only audible if one put
one's head entirely inside (in an act of voyeurism forcibly
combined with prayer), one heard St. John's poetry in rapid,
soft Spanish. The result was a construction of an image of
sanity, peace, and freedom that, as in the poetry of St . John,
is an entirely private choice .
If the four artists I've discussed well used, or refused, a
given space, others employed video to induce quite differ-
ently self-referencing in space and time . Three of these art-
ists-Rita Myers, Francesc Torres, and Robert Gaylor-
placed monitors in constructions intended as artifacts in a
classic sculptural sense. (I've got to say here, not so paren-
thetically, that I think there has evolved adistinct type of video
installation . This genre sets itself the problem of deploying
black plastic high-tech objects on, around, or under materials
and forms that carry their own meaning without making the
combination look silly. For example, if you want to superim-
pose a sequence of imagery on a static construction that can-
not symbolically incorporate the monitor as a three-dimen-
sional object, you've got the job of burying the depth of the
monitor-which is just not a flat screen . The solution is often
a featureless plywood architecture harnessed simultane-
ously to the cause of symbolism and concealing all but the
face of the monitor. Just as this can produce a forced effect in
the work of Lauren Ewing and Mary Lucier, to take two exam-
ples, it creates difficulties in the work of Rita Myers.)
Myers has increasingly focused on articulating a private,
mystical narrative. Her contribution to "Video as Attitude"was
one of three sketches for a projected piece which-at 6,500
square feet and a running time of 4'/2 hours-will make Nam
June Paik's extravaganzas pale as monumental video
Installation view of Room for St. John of the Cross, by Bill Viola . sculpture . The whole piece-a tiered black (plywood?)
doughnut of about a 50-foot radius, with detached houses at
the points of the quadrant-is to reflect in its shape and in the
way meaning was assigned to the objects which comprise was mounted on the ceiling at the head of the corridor, per- videotapes it contains a cosmology based on Hopi creation
basic recording equipment, Bill Beirne's Extras: Street Per- force incorporated the approaching viewer's receding back . myths, Kabbalist theory, and the Tarot. Shown in Albuquer-
formance for an Audience Enclosed served as the counter- The second camera, mounted on the ceiling just inside the que was in the Planet of the Eye-Second Stage: The Eye of
part to NotaModel . . . at Santa Fe's Museum of Fine Arts. As room, was aimed at the suspended table and chair in such a the Beast Is Red. Its bulk consisted of a circular black pit,
Beime explains his intentions, "I have become particularly in- way as to render it rightside up-even though itwas apparen- perhaps 12 feet across and three deep, filled with gravel .
terested in exploring and exploiting that aspect of behavior tly shot from "below"-on the second monitor, which was Above rotated a black, elongated tower. In the pit, Myers
which attributes significance to gesture beyond that which is placed on the table at a 90 angle to the first and thus could buried four monitors, screens bizarrely flush with the gravel .
obviously true ." not be seen from the corridor . The real conundrum, if you're On the monitors, which were spaced far enough apartso that
Spatially, Extras had three parts: first, a room inside the still with me, came after realizing that the second monitor it- one could not readily discern a structure in the rotating imag-
museum, containing newspaper clippings mounted on the self was upside down . That this sort of cerebral concep- ery and soundtrack, appeared a sequence of Myers's familiar
wall, a camera pointed at the viewers, and a monitor; second, tualism wooed viewers to decode camera representations of icons: a woman's face, perhaps in pain, perhaps in joy; a lad-
that corner of the plaza outside the museum covered by a space was evidenced by dusty footprints on the wall at strate- der; houses with varying numbers of windows, sometimes
camera pointing out from a second-story museum office ; gic points-the better, I suppose, to do the contortions with a door, sometimes without; and sand .
third, a daily, live transmission of the intercut results to Al- needed to turn one's head upside down when squeezed be- In this incarnation, however, Myers's project seemed like
buquerque. Structurally, Extras was based on a specific hind a table in a small room . an epic gone wrong. Neither sound nor text nor lighting nor
method of attributing significance to everday, anonymous, Bill Viola's Room for St. John of the Cross used a skillfully appearance gave The Eye of the Beast a compelling pre-
and-for all practical purposes-unreadable gestures . The perverse strategy to lure the viewer into participation. The in- sence in the space allotted . This was disappointing, the more
actions selected occurred by chance, or were orchestrated, stallation was, it should be said, an inescapable act of ag- so because Myer's work (I'm thinking of her installations, not
both within the room and on the plaza. Themethod of assign- gression from outside, since the booming, wave-like noises her tapes) can lure even chary rationalists into mysticism.
ing meaning-or sparking the desire to assign meaning- of the audio dominated the entire Santa Fe gallery space. To Worse, in the context of an exhibition which was implicitly a
began with aseries of enigmatic newspaperclippings, paired get physically inside the piece, one went down a black cor- retrospective of video installation and performance, the fail-
with descriptions of a simple action . For example, a letter to ridor to a large, high-ceilinged room that had also been ure in execution of this piece made the idea of video based on
the editor of the Santa Fe newspaper from a man who had de- painted black. In this dark room, the sound was even louder a personal world-or rather, a system of signs based on a
cided to make public his antipathy to modern art ("I've never and emanated from a huge black and white projection high on feminine mythology-much weaker than it ought to have
seen anything by Picasso or O'Keefe [sic] that didn't look like one wall-jerky, hand-held shots of mountains taken from a been .
the product of a fourth grader with limited time") was coupled moving car that read as black shapes coiling and twisting, im- Francesc Torres, like Myers, has concentrated his atten-
with this description : "A man walks across the plaza and de- ages of flying uncontrolled . Underneath this, and its flickering tion on thedisplay of a personalized mythology based on cul-
cides not to go to the museum ." A short clipping about a man gray light, was a rectangle of tungsten-the window of room tural referents, at once denying and reaffirming the arbitrary
who stole a watch in aSanta Fe gallery, butoptedto leavethe roughly the same size as the one in which the Spanish mystic nature of decoding information received . Jean's Lost
high-priced paintings on exhibition, was linked to the follow- St. John of the Cross had been imprisoned and tortured in Notebook, like many of Torres's works, incorporated material
ing scene: "A young man stops another and asks, 'Hey, you 1577, a room too small to stand upright or lie down . There, St . garnered in Spain, where Torres was born . The metaphor
want to buy this?' He takes a watch from an envelope as he John had written most of his poetry. that structured Notebook was the T-shaped stone monu-
speaks." One could look into Viola's room only by kneeling, one ments, or taulas, found in archeological sites on the island of
Every weekday lunchhour these and similarly unremark- viewer at a time, on the floor outside. Inside, the dirt-floored Menorca. Represented initially by a series of lithographs on
able scenes were enacted by 12 extras amidst the unwitting room contained a wooden table and chair, and a glass of the wall, they were echoed in the museum by huge plywood
bystanders in the plaza and in the museum room . (One of the water and a pitcher. Also, there was the other half of the replicas painted red, yellow, and green-arendering of stone
nicest things about this piece was the cheerfully pragmatic video, a very small monitor with the only color in the entire in- rubble so modernistically schematic as to constitute its oppo-
choice of time : it vastly increased the crowd in the plaza, stallation on its screen-a perfect and static image of Mt . site . Propped here and there about this "rubble" were six
downtown Santa Fe's major hangout for those who can't re-
treat to airconditioned adobe condos, and gave the program- Top left : installation view of Extra : Street Performance for an Audience Enclosed, by Bill Beirne . Below left : frame enlargement from Extra .
Right : installation view of Untitled, by Bruce Nauman .
med extras, most of whom had other jobs, a chance to partici-
pate in an artwork scheduled during museum hours.) The
performance was shown, with prerecorded cut-ins of Beirne's
voice reading scene descriptions, on the monitor in the
museum. This room thus became the privileged site forInter-
preting and structuring what could have been chance
events-indeed, for deciding, thanks to Beirne's voice, that
anything at all out of the ordinary was happening. That these
events were viewed by a camera was half their significance;
that chance could alter the narrative reading one would infer
from the clippings further altered their significance . (What, to
take the hot-watch sequence, if a stray tourist took up the
extra on the offer? Or what if a van parked in the "wrong"
place and rendered the entire event merely an auditory as-
sertion?)
Bieme's use of random events and his alteration of thecon-
ventional boundaries of an artwork are hardly new tech-
niques. Nevertheless, Extras succeeded in the specific aim of
causing the viewer to attribute significance to whatever fell
within the range of a surveillance camera, and to read not
only the imagery being shown but the process of constructing
it as imagery.
This was also true of Bruce Nauman's Untitled, which used
a passageway leading to a small room as a site . True to form,
Nauman set up the piece so that the viewer's entry at once
activated and completed the work . A perceptual puzzle, it in-
volved two live cameras, two monitors, and a physical mirror-
image situation in the small room. There, atable and chair on
the floor were replicated by a table and chair bolted, upside
down, to the ceiling. Looking down the corridor from the en-
trance, one saw first an overview of what appeared to be the
whole set-up, which, since the camera which fed the monitor
 AFTERIMAGE/October 1983 11

moniturs . As in The Eye of the Beast Is Red, it was impossible

to see them all at once ; unlike Myers, however, Torres man-
aged to combine successfully the improbability of megalithic
children's blocks with monitors balanced at crazy angles in
odd corners. As one circled the construction, one traversed a
loop of imagery-moving at different rhythms, marked by dif-
ferent kinds of camerawork-that included the following ; the
Menorcan taula intercut with the Empire State Building,
punctuated by the character-generated word "RECUR-
RENCE" ; a hand gently brushing dirt off a shard, punctuated
by the words "MEMORY" and "REPRESSION" ; various
scenes of implied or stated violence-NORAD, Franco,
Nixon, Pinochet, bombings, book burnings, plane crashes-
punctuated by the word "OBLITERATION" ; and caressing,
obsessive close-ups of rocks and landscape in Menorca in-
tercut with a hand stacking a taula from children's blocks,
punctuated by the words "MANIPULATION"and "PLAY ." The
sound, issuing from a speaker above the installation itself,
was comprised of a constant chatter of planes, jackhammers,
and children screaming-just loud enough to dominate, not
loud enough to overwhelm.
The idea, said Torres, was "to articulate a primal metaphor
for the individual's conditioned needs to explore and learn
and the whole human species' conditioned need to manipu-
late and control its natural as well as cultural and an-
thropological environments even at the risk of destroying
them ." The articulation of that metaphor, I think, did not really
reside in the installation as object . Rather, it lay in the pa-
tience and care that Torres managed to induce in those view-
ers who made the rounds of Jean's Lost Notebook, zigzag-
ging from one monitor (and one story) to another, retracing
their steps, putting the fragments together for themselves . Top left : installation view of The Eye of theBeastIs Red, by Rita Myers.Below left : installation view of The West, by Steina and WoodyVasulka.
That these actions became somewhat habitual, if irrelevant, Top right: installation view of Signage, by Juan Downey . Bottom right: installation view of Suspension of -Disbelief/10:00 p.m., by Robert
under a soundtrack of manic destruction which edged in and Gaylor.
out of consciousness is further testimony to his success in
making the viewer's experience of the work complete the in- sound. Signage might as well have been an ordinary single- ily Speaking, The West is just as demanding in the precision
tention in defining the form of the work . channel tape . The material, organized to oppose perception of the Vasulkas use of video and sound to generate a
While Torres's art basically affirms the potential for indi- to sign systems, was all the things usually said about Down- phenomenological experience of space.
vidual understanding, if not its probability, Robert Gaylor's ey's work : beautifully shot, fluidly edited, and occasionally Austerely minimal in conception, the piece used a circle of
Suspension of Disbelief/10 :00 p.m. managed to make the witty. Nevertheless, the pellucid colors, the plays on motion six monitors suspended at eye level in a darkened room,thus
mathematical analysis of media conventions involve a quasi- versus stillness, the simultaneous views of different phases mitigating all aspects of the standard carpeted museum room
religious leap of faith. What one saw was four miniature of a given event, the mirror-image panning, never coalesced but size and emptiness. The eerie tones of the audiotrack,
(white plywood) suburban houses, little picket fences and all; to form anything more than bewildering, academic footnotes low-frequency sound reproduced at a high amplification,
each picture window emanated a familiar blue-gray glow. on the general topic of signs and culture. heightened the emptiness by surrounding theviewer sitting in
What one heard, thanks to a random selection from a Zelog/8 In contrast, Gary Hill's Primarily Speaking, though not his the center of the circle of monitors, watching the imagery from
microcomputer, was split-second snatches of audio from the latest installation, remains for me an extraordinary subver- below . On the screens-generally used as three pairs in this
four network broadcasts available in Albuquerque. The pos- sion of the premise assumed by most video installation art- two-channel work-the structure invoked circles (the Vasul-
sibilities in tabulating and displaying the results of such a ists-i .e ., that visual phenomena are the key to structuring kas' mirrored, rotating globe), as well as mirror imagery.
computer sampling are manifold . However, the physical de- spatial experience . The work consists of two walls (plywood ; Using highly saturated reds, pinks, and blues (the color man-
coration Gaylor used to house his idea seemed totally un- however, they do nothing but hold the monitors at eye level ipulation hardly seemed to intrude on the "natural" appear-
necessary-a slick way to evoke the volume and mediocrity andthe viewer tooclose for comfort) about arms length apart, ance of the landscape), the imagery was in constant, stately
of what the media aims at the proverbial masses without re- each housing a bank of four screens. It was impossible to motion : from the spinning mirrored sphere reflecting a blue
ally confronting the implications of entertainment . (The same take in all the rapid-fire, close-up imagery at once, only possi- sky against the red New Mexico land to the Anasazi's Casa
can be said of Michael Smith, whose installation, Mike's ble to apprehend that both the editing and the rate of the im- Rinconada in Chaco Canyon, where the camera probed, in
Dressing Room, an "authentic" living room transposed to an agery flashing along the screens was dictated by the audio. parallel but off-sync images, the passages of the ruin ; from
art setting, relies on the dubious hypothesis that if everytidbit That is Hill's mocking, persistent voice reading the text upon superimposed reverse pans over mesas to the mirrored
of personal life were converted into public broadcast material, which Primarily Speaking is based, giving an effect some- sphere reflecting, and framed by, the giant silver dishes of
the result would be a complete undermining of the media thing like a sociopath poet recently converted to Wittgenstein . New Mexico's VLA (Very Large Array) radio-telescope sys-
manipulation we all love to hate .) ("I'm your monkey business. I can never really touch you. I tem, which itself, of course, turns slowly to scan the sky.
The three remaining works in "Video as Attitude"-all of can only leave word . Still, there's not much separating us .") In its representation notjust of "landscape," but of efforts to
them also portable installation units-tackled the issues of The outcome was a spatial experience created by lan- mark that landscape, to plot points in that landscape against
constructing space and signification in an explicit but under- guage-specifically, self-perpetuating linguistic plays that the system of moving space-a process in which the indi-
stated way. The least convincing was Juan Downey's Sign- conflate emotional intimacy with the material facts of video vidual is necessarily the focal point-The West served as an
age. (However, given Downey's tendency to re-edit and re- presentation . The experience is reinforced by the presence uncanny embodiment of Clancy's thesis . It elegantly demon-
edit before going on to anotherproject, my hunch is that Sign- and form of the flashing imagery, but it is not created by it : as strated how imagery and sound, pared down to the barest
age will become an entirely different affair.) His most recent Hill once said, the piece would be archetypically the same if possible elements, could constitute a complex mapping of
project, the three-cha;tnel piece contains footage shot in redone with entirely different footage.3 space and time .
Chile, Egypt, and New York, and consisted of a pyramid con- Steina and Woody Vasulka's The West used video
structed from three monitors, with a speaker placed on top. (Steina's) and sound (Woody's) to address and replicate the
The localized stack of equipment, appropriate as it was to a vast, arid, clear Southwestern landscape as a site for the I hope I've suggested partial answers to my questions about
mediation on things like Egypt and systems of perspective, making of signs: ceremonial Indian dwellings, the arrays of video installation's relationship to contemporary sculpture,
gave the feeling of defaulting entirely on any consideration of scientific instruments New Mexico hosts, even artworks . and made it clearthat some installations, though they may in-
space-two- or three-dimensional, structured by imagery or Though more conventionally reliant on imagery than Primar- volve extraordinary technical feats, are quite conservative in
their reliance on a notion of sculpture as form. Video's relation
both to the cultural use of technology and to its own poten-
Installation view of Jean's Lost Notebook, by Francesc Torres. tial-as a genre-in deconstructing the fabricated environ-
ment that has purportedly replaced "nature" as reality is enor-
mously complex . My educated guess is that it's wishful think-
ing to expect video artiststo take on the project of cultural de-
construction . Just as telling as the fact that there were no
politically directed works in the show is the fact that in the
works which attempted to deal directly with social issues
(Gaylor, Myers, Torres, Downey, Smith) the analysis was
weak, sometimes to the point of escapism .
However, as Clancy argues, video is probably more suited
than just about anything else to the project of questioning the
phenomenological experience of the modem environment
and to involving the viewer actively in the process, to appro-
priating the codes of both media and art in order to expose
them . One problem, it seemsto me, is that as the use of video
is increasingly institutionalized as `video art," theoptions nar-
row considerably . If the field of sculpture was considerably
enlarged by the advent of video, what's coming to be defined
as the sculptural use of video preempts many of the other in-
carnations that lend the art a certain power-documentary,
narrative, even the strategic use of a broadcast function . In a
related situation, photography paid a heavy price to win the
label of art, but then, history is usually inclined to repeat itself .

NOTES
1 . Patrick Clancy, Video as Attitude, n.p. Unless otherwise noted, all
quotes in this article are taken from the catalogue.
2. There are two artists who participated in this exhibition whosework
I can't review . I was not in New Mexico for the performances by
Joan Jonas and Allan Kaprow.
3. Lucinda Furlong, "A Manner of Speaking : An Interview with Gary
Hill," Afterimage, Vol. 10, No . 8 (March 1983), p. 14 .