Video Art (Chapter 2. Part 2)

Video Art and the Conceptual Body pt. 2

Key notes from chapter

The second half of this chapter focuses primarily on female performance/ video artists as well as a few male artists working in similar fashions.

As artists further explored the possibilities of video, many found it quite useful for documenting performance pieces. The video camera also began to interact with performances such is the case with the work of Charles Atlas who created "mediadance." This type of dance takes advantage of the camera and integrates it into the work in order to change the standard perception of the recorded performance.

The amount of artists working with installation based video art increased at this time. This media gave them the opportunity to further develop ideas and present them in more controlled situations.

Excerpts

"Rist juxtaposes the narrative of a smartly dressed young woman walking down the street holding a peculiar looking flower-tipped stick on one screen with fluidly filmed shots of a country garden on the other. The two videos, blending into one another across the corner of two walls, are only four minutes long, but Rist puts them on a continuously running loop that suggests a seamless repetition of her compelling (and funny) central image: the woman, in her blue chiffon dress and red shoes, suddenly wielding that strange looking flower, now revealed to be a metal club, and smashing car windows as she skips (in slow motion) down the street with a delighted grin on her face." on Pipilotti Rist's Ever is over All '97

"The pervasive emphasis on Performance in contemporary video is undeniable. The 2001 Venice Biennale, heralded by some, deplored by others, as 'the Video Biennale,' contained a plethora of video installations, most of them performative by nature. ...Performative influences will only grow stronger as artists of our era continue to concentrate on ideas more than materials. Materials are in service to ideas, which... makes materials, even video, secondary concerns in the practice of art."

Artist to further investigate

Pipilotti Rist