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Video: The Aesthetics ofNarcissism

It was a commonplace of criticism in the 1960s that a strict applicationof symmetry allowed a painter to point to the center of the canvasand, thus in doing, to invoke the internal structure of the picture-object.

Thus pointing to the center was made to serve as one of the manyblocks in that intricately constructed arch by which the criticism of thelast decade sought to connect art to ethics through the aesthetics of

acknowledgement But what does it mean to point to the centerof a TV screen?

So opens Rosalind Krausss seminal text. Seminalas term has perhaps become almost

anodyne, such is its grave misuse and overuse, nevertheless in this essay Krauss seeds and

births the most significant thoughts on the nature of video.

This essay remains eternally prescient, even its footnotes and asides bear bitter fruit. Re-reading in haste I was struck by Krausss awareness of the disservice done to art by the

mass media and artists involvement within it an issue, nay fact, so crucial,

unfathomable and impossible today.

I do wish to make one connection here. And that is between theinstitution of a self formed by video feedback and the real situation thatexists in the art world from which the makers of video to come. In thelast fifteen years that the world has been deeply and disastrouslyaffected by its relation to mass media. That an artists work bepublished, reproduced and disseminated through the media hasbecome, for the generation that has matured in the course of the last

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decade, virtually the only means of verifying its existence as art. Thedemand for instant replay in the media in fact the creation of the workthat literally does not exist outside of that replay, as in true conceptualart and its nether side, body art finds its obvious correlative in anaesthetic mode by which the self is created through the electronic

device of feedback.

Thirty years later, caught in a complex mediatized, electronic web, we remain woefully

lacking in our understanding of our own pathologies, systems of projection and modes of

identification defined by the technologies to which we are bound. Depending on how youfeel the disaster is the defining current or aqua vita in which we now flow.

Krauss recognises the medium of video as primarily psychological and in referencing

artists use of their own bodies within their work, equates video as a bracketing of the bodybetween camera and monitor. She speaks of a sustained tautology from a plane of vision

to the eyes of a projected double on the screen/monitor/mirror.

She draws our attention to the meanings of the word medium as a human receiver and

sender of messages while recognising as crucial, videos capacity to record and transmit at

the same time and goes on to cite key works which confront the properties and essence ofthe medium in a critical way exploring self-encapsulation and a collapsed present.

She makes us understand that the relation to the mirror image concerns the vanquishing of

separateness, attempts to erase the difference between subject and object, while

acknowledging the separation on which this desire is founded.

She says this and much, much more and hersayingcontinues to seed across time.

READ IT.

THEN READ IT AGAIN.

Despite what I have said regarding texts not read I am forevermore grateful for having

encountered The Aesthetics of Narcissism.

In my secret world, which I occupy from time to time as a Great Tyrant of Manners, Ethicsand Aesthetics all literate art students will be required to read this essay. For those who

are illiterate or blind I will read it out-loud myself.

Those who do not succumb will be sentenced to hard labour in the mirror demolition depot;

a highly unpleasant form of work since one must do this manually and the daily quota is

high. One must shatter ones self-image a thousand times per day.