Video Art - History of Video Art

History of Video Art

In 1958 Wolf Vostell becomes the first artist who incorporates a television set into one of his works. The installation Black Room Cycle. Transmigracion 1-3, 1958, are also early works with incorpareted television. In 1963 Wolf Vostell exhibited the installation 6 TV Dé-coll/age at the Smolin Gallery in New York. Also in 1963 Wolf Vostell made the video Sun in your head.

Nam June Paik had his first exhibition with manipulated TV in 1963 at the Gallery Parnass in Wuppertal. Video art is often said to have begun when Nam June Paik used his new Sony Portapak to shoot footage of Pope Paul VI's procession through New York City in the autumn of 1965. That same day, across town in a Greenwich Village cafe, Paik played the tapes and video art was born. The French artist Fred Forest has also used a Sony Portapak since 1967. Both these claims are however often rigorously disputed because the first Sony Portapak, the Videorover did not become commercially available until 1967, first in the US (Fred Forest does not contradict this, saying it was provided to him by the manufacturers) and that Andy Warhol is credited with showing underground video art mere weeks before Paik's papal procession screening, but here probably made on a pre-portable mains deck.

Prior to the introduction of this new technology, moving image production was only available to the consumer (or the artist for that matter) by way of eight or sixteen millimeter film, but did not provide the instant playback that video tape technologies offered. Consequently, many artists found video more appealing than film, even more so when the greater accessibility was coupled with technologies which could edit or modify the video image.

The two examples mentioned above both made use of "low tech tricks" to produce early video art works. Americans Peter Campus' Double Vision combined the video signals from two Sony Portapaks through an electronic mixer, resulting in a distorted and radically dissonant image and Jonas' Organic Honey's Vertical Roll involved recording previously recorded material as it was played back on a television — with the vertical hold setting intentionally in error.

The first multi-channel video art (using several monitors or screens) was Wipe Cycle by Ira Schneider and Frank Gillette. An installation of nine television screens, Wipe Cycle for the first time combined live images of gallery visitors, found footage from commercial television, and shots from pre-recorded tapes. The material was alternated from one monitor to the next in an elaborate choreography.

At the USA's San Jose State TV studios in 1970, Willoughby Sharp began the “Videoviews” series of videotaped dialogues with artists. The “Videoviews” series consists of Sharps’ dialogues with Bruce Nauman (1970), Joseph Beuys (1972), Vito Acconci (1973), Chris Burden (1973), Lowell Darling (1974), and Dennis Oppenheim (1974). Also in 1970, Sharp curated “Body Works,” an exhibition of video works by Vito Acconci, Terry Fox, Richard Serra, Keith Sonnier, Dennis Oppenheim and William Wegman which was presented at Tom Marioni's Museum of Conceptual Art, San Francisco, California.

Meanwhile in the UK David Hall's "TV Interruptions" (1971) were transmitted intentionally unannounced and uncredited on Scottish TV, the first artist interventions on British television.