46

On Collecting Media Art

EDITORIALPUBLIC 46:Christopher EamonAssociate Editor: Christine Davis

Managing Editor: Aleksandra KaminskaArt Reviews Editors: Dan Adler, Jim DrobnickCopy Editor: Eva Nesselroth-WoyzbunDesign: Associés LibresPrinting: Hignell Book Printing, Canada

PUBLIC ACCESS COLLECTIVEDan Adler, York UniversityKenneth R. Allan, University of LethbridgeChloë Brushwood Rose, York UniversityChristine Davis, TorontoJim Drobnick, OCAD UniversityCaitlin Fisher, York UniversitySaara Liinamaa, NSCAD UniversitySusan Lord, Queen’s UniversityScott Lyall, TorontoJanine Marchessault, York UniversityDorit Naaman, Queen’s UniversityDeborah Root, Toronto

EDITORIAL BOARDAriella Azoulay, Bar Ilan UniversityIan Balfour, York UniversityBruce Barber, NSCAD UniversityVikki Bell, Goldsmiths, University of London Simon Critchley, The New SchoolSean Cubitt, University of SouthamptonMichael Darroch, University of WindsorMaria Fusco, Goldsmiths, University of LondonMonika Kin Gagnon, Concordia UniversityPeggy Gale, TorontoJohn Greyson, York UniversityGareth James, University of British ColumbiaMichelle Kasprzak, AmsterdamNina Möntmann, The Royal Institute of ArtKirsty Robertson, University of Western OntarioNikos Papastergiadis, University of MelbourneKaryn Sandlos, The School of the Art Institute of ChicagoJohanne Sloan, Concordia UniversityImre Szeman, University of AlbertaDot Tuer, OCAD University

ADVISORY BOARDRon Burnett, Emily Carr University of Art + DesignDick Hebdige, University of California, Santa BarbaraArthur Kroker, University of VictoriaChip Lord, University of California, Santa CruzDannys Montes de Oca Moreda, HavanaKaja Silverman, University of PennsylvaniaMichael Snow, TorontoAneta Szylak, Wyspa Institute of ArtPeter Weibel, ZKMAkram Zaatari, Beirut

PUBLIC303 Goldfarb Centre for Fine ArtsYork University, 4700 Keele StToronto, ON M3J 1P3 Canadapublic@yorku.cawww.publicjournal.ca

Fall 2012 / Volume 23 Issue 46 Print ISSN 0845-4450Online ISSN: 2048-6928

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Content © 2012 Public Access and the authors andartists. Content may not be reproduced without theauthorization of Public Access, with the exceptionof brief passages for scholarly or review purposes.Any opinions suggested or expressed in the imagesand texts are those of their respective authors.

PUBLIC is a biannual magazine published by PublicAccess, a registered Canadian charity (# 13667 9743RR0001), in association with Intellect Ltd. It is fundedby the Canada Council for the Arts, the OntarioArts Council, York University, and our generousdonors. Every effort has been made to ascertainrights status and accurate caption information forall reproduced images. We apologize for omissionsor errors.

FRONT AND BACK COVER: Andy Warhol, The UndergroundSunday (Commercial for Schrafft's Restaurant), 1967. Colourvideotape transferred to 16mm colour film with sound, 1:00 min.Courtesy a private collection.

CONTENTS

5 PREFACE The Public Access Collective

PRIME MOVER Christopher Eamon

9 INTRODUCTION

13 EXHIBITION 1: Still/Moving

33 EXHIBITION 2: Prime Mover: Conceptualism in Motion

77 EXHIBITION 3: Rare Film and Audio Art

97 EXHIBITION 4: Real Time, Flux and Modernity

121 EXHIBITION 5: Cinema and its Others

162 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

163 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

REVIEWS

167 Jill Glessing Carol Condé and Karl Beveridge, Scene Otherwise

170 Lisa Myers Ahzhekewada [Let Us Look Back] – Revisioning the Indians of Canada Pavilion

173 Michael DiRisio Art & Multitude

175 Andrew Stooke One Day Sculpture and Locating the Producers

177 Yvonne Nowicka-Wright The Art-Architecture Complex

FOR OVER TWENTY YEARS, PUBLIC has sought to provide ground-breaking material at theintersection of culture, politics, and aesthetics. We have chosen to devote an entire issue to anunusual project that examines two phenomena of the late twentieth and early twenty-firstcenturies: the rise of the private museum and the crucial role of media art in responding to thetimes. Five exhibitions as imagined by Canadian critic and curator Christopher Eamon providecrucial insight into the history of the moving image, the interpretive potential of collecting, andthe dynamic response of artists to corporate media innovations. The seemingly contradictorypremise of curating a collection of what was previously considered an uncollectible medium withinthe framework of a private collection rather than a public institution forms the backbone of theproject. This issue, Prime Mover: On Collecting Media Art, exemplifies our commitment to publishwork that is risk-taking, speculative, and timely.

The Public Access Collective

5

PREFACE

Janet CardiffThe Forty Part Motet, 2001.

Boys Recording session

PRIME MOVER, AS IT IS PRESENTED HERE, is selection of five essays corresponding to fiveexhibitions of works from an influential private collection with which I was professionallyinvolved for more than ten years. These essays, along with a set of as yet unpublished extendedentries constitute, in a sense, a history of moving-image art starting from around 1900. At thesame time, it is a compendium of five imagined exhibition catalogues in a single volume, imag-ined so precisely because they are comprised of works acquired, in part, with the ideas presentedhere in mind. In the late 1990s, the collectors and their advisor at the time asked me to curatefive hypothetical exhibitions of works from the collection so that the architects for a building tohouse the collection could take this information into consideration during their initial designs.Later, these conceptual exhibitions began to take on a different role, that of armature for futureacquisitions, and serving as a prospective guide for ideas and proposals.

From the outset this publication was meant to be a resource for students of film and videoart, on the one hand, and for scholars investigating the history of collections on the other. Thecollection, one of the first in private hands to focus almost exclusively on time-based media, hasbeen the subject of a number of graduate theses and museum catalogues, but this publicationaims to bolster these efforts towards better understanding of a collection that has altered the fieldof media art. Media, or time-based, art had not been seriously collected before, not in depth byprivate collectors, and except for the small number of public institutions worldwide—those whichhad specific curatorial departments dedicated to the medium—much of the film and video instal-lation art shown at many museums was not actually collected by those institutions over the years;the work was considered by many to be uncollectable. The collectors’ commitment to the format once levelled that understanding, ending what had once been a resistant strategy for artistsopposing the limits of commodification. Since then, the existence of the collection has opened upnew approaches to curation, new practices of exhibition, and, yes, new models of resistance par-ticular to time-based media.

9

IntroductionCHRISTOPHER EAMON

Since the late 1980s, the period during which the collection was built, the media arts movedfrom the margin to the centre of institutional exhibition practices, especially at important large-scale survey exhibitions such as the Venice Biennial and Documenta. As the collection grew, itparalleled activity in the public sphere; it shaped, and was shaped by, the developments of time-based art in institutional settings, as well as by the passionate choices of its founders. In manyrespects, it also affected the development of the market for video art, which still lagged behindinstitutional practices and, more importantly, artistic developments in the field.

When the idea for this publication first arose, its impetus was based in part on a desire tocontribute insight to a poorly understood, still fairly marginal medium. Both the collection andthe works of art in it needed to be documented for their interrlated histories to be consolidated.As media art became more and more mainstream, yet never as central as, for instance, paintingor sculpture, which are commonly collected and exhibited as art—no questions asked—it becameimportant to place media art, and the ideas worked out in Conceptualism, in Pop art, and inappropriation art for instance, within the context of other artworks where similar ideas held swayin more traditional media. That is to say, in this volume, I attempt to enrich the history of time-based art by placing it back into the mainstream of art where it has always belonged; as any visualart practiced by artists for nearly 40 years, time-based art no longer needs to be treated as anancillary practice.

Although the five exhibitions imagined here evolved separately, they can be read as chaptersof a continuous story, or, alternatively, they can be read as different lenses through which onecan look at the history of media art itself, as a necessarily fragmentary history. In this book, forthe first time, the real-time video experiments of the 1970s are linked to the first actualités fromearly at the turn of the last century. Exhibition 2 explores the centrality of time-based work tothe conceptualism of the 1960s, for the roots of video art in performance art are today vastlyoverstated. Performance is only part of the story. In my writing I connect the roots of video art

10 INTRODUCTION CHRISTOPHER EAMON

IN 1998, I WAS ASKED to develop five possible exhibitions from a major private collection, aproject that eventually became the basis for this volume. At that time, Still/Moving was included;now, it is the only one of the original exhibition ideas to make it into this publication significantlyunaltered (although I have now added works the collection acquired since 1998). In the title,“Still-slash-Moving,” the forward slash marks an unstable boundary between the fixed andunfixed, an oscillation between the two—which is in some sense a condition of our modernity,just as it is at the heart of the ontology of the moving image. Contingency and the moving imagemutually reinforce each other in the experience of modernity. It is around the changing sense oftime, as exemplified by the cinema, that many of these discussions are centered, specifically withrespect to the status of the still (the not-moving), in relation to the still and yet also moving. Thisdilemma is often thought in cinema studies in relation to the pre-Socratic philosopher Zeno’s par-adoxical arguments on motion. For him, there is no “real” motion, which is to say that truth canonly be found in the immobile or fixed.

Indeed, the relation between the still and the moving is not evident. Received notions abouttime and cinema issue from assumptions such as the primacy of one state over the other, as inthe idea that motion is comprised of a series of now-moments, or by analogy that cinema isderived from photography.1 Another is that motion or time is divisible into distinct and regular“instants.” For theorists such as Mary Ann Doane, Christian Metz, and Gilles Deleuze, motion andflux in film still represent a wellspring of meaning, whereas those who have a stake in realismfind the still image, or photography, to be most pregnant with possibility. In actuality, these dis-tinctions can never be made cleanly. This exhibition includes works of art that explicitly or implic-itly exemplify the richness, for art, of the paradoxical coexistence of the moving and the still.

When Jeff Wall speaks of the photographic moment or the instant, which is a distinctlymodern notion, arising in photography at around the time of the mass availability of the first filmactualités, he is also speaking about a philosophy of the still in relation to the moving that hasnever been resolved, but which takes as its starting point ancient Greek philosophy, Kant,

13

EXHIBITION 1.

Still/Moving

Andy Warhol, Sleep (detail), 1966.

20 EXHIBITION 1 STILL/MOVING

21

Marcel BroodthaersBateau Tableau, 1973

80 colour slides, dimensions variable. © Estate of Marcel Broodthaers. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.

32 EXHIBITION 1 STILL/MOVING

FROM THE OUTSET, “Conceptualism” identifies an unstable practice. The phenomenon firstnamed by Fluxus composer Harry Flint as “concept art” in 1960—half a decade before ConceptualArt itself came into existence—is elucidated in Lucy Lippard’s definitive text, Six Years: TheDematerialization of the Art Object 1966-1972. It was already clear at the time of the book’s publica-tion in 1973 that Conceptual Art is a varied and diverse phenomenon proceeding, in Lippard’snarrative, not primarily from Duchamp (who places the emphasis almost entirely on “the idea”),but rather from Minimalism, which places the emphasis entirely on the visual. As Lippardexplains, Minimalism’s reduction of the visual paradoxically places the viewer in the position of“thinking about the artwork,” thus leading to Conceptual Art’s disavowal of the visual in favourof the ideal.1

Paradoxes and contradictions reside at the heart of Conceptualism: for instance, a repudia-tion of the visual in visual art, and a persistence in following a false opposition between optical-ity and the conceptual—all of which eventually led to a collapse of Conceptual Art in its strictestforms, as in the work of the British collaborative Art and Language. The latter collaborative groupembraced so much the original ideals of Concept Art, that it remain a construct of the mind, theirwork began to take the form only of language and to this degree was often reduced to philosoph-ical arguments. While American Joseph Kosuth was initially involved with Art and Language,many of his early works (such as “Chair”) were rejected by Art and Language as being far tooobject based, thus beginning a fatal schism among Conceptual Art’s founding artists, which in theUnited States included Lawrence Wiener, Robert Barry, and Sol LeWitt, among others. A debatelargely carried out in art magazines such as Studio International in the late 1960s led to the end ofArt and Language’s image-making practice. For them, the purity of the Conceptualism left noroom for the document, photograph or aesthetic remainder of any kind. For others, especiallythose named above, Conceptual Art was actually an heterogeneous practice from the beginning.It is particularly striking today that Michael Snow’s film classic Wavelength of 1966 is among thefirst examples of Conceptual Art cited in Lippard’s book. For many the history of video art is

33

EXHIBITION 2.

Prime Mover:Conceptualism in Motion

Jeff Wall, Untangling (detail), 1994.

Gary HillViewer, 1996

Five-channel colour video installation. Courtesy the artist.

Dan GrahamTudor Style House, Perth, 1985/Beauty Parlor, Palo Alto, 1978Two colour photographs on a single matte, 35 x 25 ! inches.

Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.

58 EXHIBITION 2 PRIME MOVER

59

Dan GrahamSection of New Homes, Vancouver, 1976/Tennis Lady, Palo Alto, 1978

Two colour photographs on a single matte, 35 x 25 ! inches. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.

THIS SELECTION OF FILM and audio works from this private collection presents an opportu-nity to view works from the 1960s and 1970s by international artists better known for their workin other media. It offers a glimpse into a period when artistic experimentation with the movingimage was at an historical peak. While some of the works presented here dovetail with perform-ance-based practices central to the earliest film and video productions, many of them are onlynow finding acceptance as art within the broader field of visual arts. This begs the question aboutthe historical status, or for lack of a better term, the positioning of “film art” or the moving imagein art. Many of the pioneers in filmmaking as an art form did not consider themselves artists, buttoday are finding a far greater acceptance in the art world. In this arena, the contributions ofartists like Tony Conrad, Yvonne Rainer, Marcel Broodthaers, and Andy Warhol are beginning tobe acknowledged as newer generations of artists learn more about their work made outside theframe of the visual arts.

In the United States, many of the practices in time-based media of the 1960s and 1970s are,or were characterized by, intensive interdisciplinarity. Much of this activity occurred in andaround the Judson Church in New York City, which as a site of creative production has achievednear-mythic status. Little remains to suggest the degree of influence then exerted by the looselyaffiliated group around Judson—performers, artist, poets, and musicians—on their colleaguesand audiences in the 1960s, but in the past decade several film restorations have been under-taken. Focused on the body, the immaterial, and the everyday, the choreography of YvonneRainer, Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, and other founding members of the Judson Dance Theatrecan be considered a bridge between the everyday-ness of Pop and later key art movements of the1960s. However, little but photographs remains of most of their performances.

Rainer’s earliest films are works of art in their own right. Hand Movie (1968), for instance, con-sists of a close-up of a hand performing choreographed scratching and bending of fingers. RichardSerra credits it as the inspiration for his own Hand Catching Lead (1968), the first in a series of handfilms he was to make that year. Rainer’s early performance-based films, however, are arguably

77

EXHIBITION 3.

Rare Film and Audio Art

Marcel Broodthaers, Une Discussion Inaugurale, 1968.

Yvonne RainerTrio Film, 1968

16mm black-and-white, 13:00 min. Cinematographer: Phill Niblock. Courtesy the artist.

89

90 EXHIBITION 3 RARE FILM AND AUDIO ART

Yvonne RainerContinuous Project Altered Daily, 1970

16mm black-and-white, 10:00 min. Courtesy the artist.

96 EXHIBITION 4 REAL TIME, FLUX AND MODERNITY

THE HISTORY OF MODERNITY has been characterized by substantial increases in speed, flux,and the shocks that emanate from them. They have been substantial enough to register acrossdiverse fields of arts and sciences as a seismic shift in the experience and knowability of time.Cinema, at its birth, participated in this shift at the outset end of the nineteenth century by botheffecting and thematizing these changes. Since the movie camera is indeed a machine, it carriedwith it the representability of a regularized or abstract time. With its new and overwhelmingability to “capture” chance events or the unforeseen detail, cinema became a prime example ofthe technical and social developments contributing to the historical rupture that is the modernitywe inhabit today. While modernity’s rapid urbanization and industrialization, along with itsinstrumentalization of time, coexist with the birth of cinema in the late nineteenth century, theearliest artistic uses of the television or video camera in the 1950s and 1960s can be said to havefurther participated in redoubling the effect of contingency and chance, long after cinema’s turn tonarrative effectively closed off its potential for revealing the unforeseen or uncontrollable. Indeed,by articulating the relationship between video art’s attachment to closed circuit video in particular,and early film’s embrace of the contingent, the histories of film and video are brought together.

Early in the postwar period, new areas in electronic composition and literature participatedin a somewhat Utopian drive to embrace the contingent and its potential for alternate sources ofsignification. John Cage in music and Bryon Gysin in his poetry Cut-Ups of the 1950s come tomind, as does the adoption of the Cut-Up by William Burroughs. Contingency enters the culturalsphere under a variety of guises, including the ancient Eastern philosophy of Buddhism, but theresults are similar; the embrace of contingency in life and art are seen to have an upending effecton systems of knowledge and regularity generally assumed as a given by mid-century.

Body Art, Performance Art, and other Fluxus- and Happenings-inspired practices provide thebasis for much video art of the late 1960s and 1970s. An overlooked event in this complicatedhistory is the fusion of new electronic media with the philosophical underpinnings of chance andopenness. In no other artist’s work is this more splendidly exemplified than that of Nam June

97

EXHIBITION 4.

Real Time, Flux andModernity

Lee Friedlander, Nashville, 1963, Silver gelatin print, 8 x 10 inches. Courtesy the artist and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

110 EXHIBITION 4 REAL TIME, FLUX AND MODERNITY

Robert AdamsUntitled, c. 1973

Vintage silver gelatin print, 6 x 6 inches. Courtesy the artist and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

111

Joel MeyerowitzUntitled (New Jersey), 1965

Vintage silver gelatin print, 7 3/16 x 9 9/16 inches. © Joel Meyerowitz.

THE CINEMA’S INFLUENCE in modern times has been shown to have made a deep impact onart-making from its inception. A broad approach to cinema’s impact on art could not be made ina single exhibition. Very good, focused exhibitions of this kind have already taken place, whichincluded early twentieth century works of art, specifically modern painting in relation to earlycinema.1 Others have traced both the close and more tenuous connections between the art of thepost-war era and the dominant industrialized cinema we know today.2

This exhibition does not focus on ground covered in these examples. Examined here is theconfluence of factors from the late 1980s onward, including the re-emergence in the 1990s of thefilm/video installation. Whereas television was the main source and subject of much video art ofthe late 1970s and 1980s, the so-called “cinematic” became a key influence on video in the late1980s and 1990s. In the 1990s, the art scene seemed to be working through “video-ized” exper-iments in Structuralist cinema, and through rule-based and endurance works in video art, engag-ing here and there with narrative or Hollywood cinema. That is, contemporary practices appearedto cycle, seemingly unwittingly, through all previous tropes forgotten at the time. Concomitantwith the rise of video art since the late 1990s, ever-more complex, ever-more expensively pro-duced spectacles of video art appeared, seemingly themselves products of a dominant industry,leaving content or at times concepts at the far end of a long shot.

This exhibition brings together engagements with cinema in this period that do not confuseart with the entertainment industry, but rather investigate, interrogate, and otherwise experimentwith its forms. While not specifically about all of cinema’s alternative practices—which could be atome on its own, even if limited to experimental cinema from the 1920s to present—an inferenceof cinema’s alternate forms cannot be altogether left out of discussions on this topic. Indeed, in anexhibition claiming to approach video art or visual art’s engagement with “Cinema,” it would begross oversight to assume that other forms of alternate or “paracinematic” practices in the past cen-tury are irrelevant to what supposedly “belongs” to visual art’s context. When it comes to mediainitially not conceived as tools for visual artists, omitting such histories only weakens the practice

121

EXHIBITION 5.

Cinema and its Others

Matthew Barney, Cremaster 3 (detail), 2001.

138 EXHIBITION 5 CINEMA AND ITS OTHERS

Billy Name****(Four Stars): Andy, Ondine, Geldzahler’s Apartment, 1967

Vintage silver gelatin print, 4 ! x 7 " inches.

139

Billy Name****(Four Stars): Ultra’s Apartment, 1967

Vintage silver gelatin print, 9 ! x 13 ! inches.

148 EXHIBITION 5 CINEMA AND ITS OTHERS

Matthew BarneyCremaster 1, 1995-1996

35mm film print, mixed media, silk-screened video disc in acrylic vitrine, 40:30 min. Photo: Michael James O’Brien. © 1995 Matthew Barney, Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels.

149

Matthew BarneyCremaster 5, 1997

35mm film print, mixed media, screen-printed laser disc in acrylic vitrine, 54:30 min. Photo: Michael James O’Brien. © 1997 Matthew Barney, Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels.

Stan DouglasTelevision Spots, 1987-1988

Musical Vendor (30 sec.), Spectated Man (30 sec.), Sneeze (15 sec), Male Naysayer (10 sec.), Female Naysayer (15 sec.), Lit Lot (15 sec.), My Attention (37 sec.), Answering Machine (30 sec.),

No Problem (15 sec.), Funny Bus (15 sec.), Box Office (30 sec.), Slap Happy (30 sec.). Twelve videos, twelve black-and-white photographs with text plate, 7 x 9 inches (each image), 7 x 9 inches

(each text plate). Courtesy the artist.

154 EXHIBITION 5 CINEMA AND ITS OTHERS

Stan DouglasMonodramas, 1991

As Is (60 sec.), Eye on You (60 sec.), Encampment (60 sec.), I’m Not Gary (60 sec.), Up (30 sec.), Disagree (30 sec.), Stadium (30 sec.), Guilty I (60 sec.), Guilty II (60 sec.), Guilty III (60 sec.).

Ten videos, ten silver print photographs with text, 10 x 19 inches each. Courtesy the artist.

155

165

REVIEWS

167

EXHIBITION REVIEW: JILL GLESSING Ryerson University, Toronto

Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge, Scene Otherwise TORONTO FREE GALLERY19 January – 26 February 2012

COLLABORATIVE ARTISTS-ACTIVISTS Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge have spent most oftheir lives waging a representational battle against inequitable social structures and they havedone so mostly within the separated spaces of labour unions and artist-run centres. Despite thehistoric tension between these realms, the artists have “always tried to engage the political andthe art world in equal measure.”1 But, these sectors are now coming together on the streets inprotest of corporate profits and austerity budgets. It is perhaps this expanded political conscious-ness that has fuelled the formal and thematic exuberance apparent in the artists’ recent exhibi-tion, Scene Otherwise.

Condé and Beveridge developed as artists in the competitive, commercial New York artworld of the 1970s, when Minimalism and Conceptual Art were fracturing under radical culturalcritique. Joining such groups as Art and Language, and the Ad Hoc Women’s Art Committee,who protested the Whitney Museum of American Art’s preference for male artists, they strayedfrom their minimalist sculpture practice. Rejecting the primacy of the New York art scene, theyreturned to Toronto. In the Art Gallery of Ontario exhibition It’s Still Privileged Art (1976), theyunveiled their new relation to art production. Working collaboratively rather than individually,

Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge, The Plague (detail) (2009). Photo: Courtesy the artists.