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Video/Art: The First Fifty Years
If you read one book on video, make it this 2020 memoir by Barbara London, a former MoMA curator who was an early supporter of the medium. When video shook up the art world in the 1960s, life was more affordable and art was less professionalized. London tells hilarious, era-defining stories about downtown New York, at a time when artists “passed cameras around like joints.” She shows how chance encounters can come to form canons, such as the time she first met a charming man named Nam June Paik, who would become the so-called “father of video art,” on a city bus. She also explains how MoMA came to own many of the medium’s greatest hits after she lobbied tirelessly from her office, a former utility closet, and convinced the museum to pick up masterpieces for prices as low as $250.
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Broadcasting: EAI at ICA
There would be no history of video art without Electronic Arts Intermix. In 1971 the New York–based organization pioneered infrastructure to support video artists whose work didn’t make sense in traditional galleries. They set up distribution and lending agreements, and housed a legendary editing suite where countless masterpieces were finished. This catalogue for a 2018 exhibition about EAI at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia testifies to the important work the organization does to archive and preserve video works—which often means constantly updating them to new formats as old ones become obsolete.
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Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art
Showing videos in museums is often awkward. The sounds from one work can bleed into another, and the seating, if it exists, is often uncomfortable. Art historian Andrew V. Uroskie writes in his 2014 book that these clunky displays stem from something deeper: Usually, we watch moving images hoping to be transported somewhere else, but in museums, we’re after physical encounters with objects in front of us. Uroskie traces this tension back to artists like Alexander Calder, who flummoxed curators when he made mobile artworks. The epilogue of this essential prehistory considers the enduring “homelessness” of moving image artworks—suited to different settings but to no single one of them ideally—which has hindered some video artists and benefited others.
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Video Art
When curator Michael Rush wrote his influential history of the medium in 2003, he told it like it really happened. It’s common to hear Nam June Paik described as “the father of video art,” with no mention of his wife, Shigeko Kubota, an artist and curator who gave Paik ideas and even made some of his works. Rush describes their careers as “intertwined,” an example of the kind of close-knit community that video artists have often enjoyed. When John Baldessari attended “Open Circuits,” a landmark video art conference, in 1974, he commented that he felt like an outsider at a religious convention. Rush’s history is written in that vein, which is to say it’s written lovingly. He was a friend of many of the artists he discusses, and you can feel his excitement leaping off the page.
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After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation
When NFTs sparked debates about what it means to “own” immaterial artworks that are easy to reproduce, video art enthusiasts wondered if everyone had been struck by amnesia. In her 2017 book, scholar Erika Balsom details how video artists—and the institutions supporting them—have grappled with related questions of ownership for decades. They’ve tried rental models, editions sold on the art market, mass-market DVDs, and showing works online, in both official and bootlegged forms. Balsom makes a case for how the easy shareability enabled by digital technology has at once inspired dreams of utopian accessibility and a crisis of authenticity.
The Five Most Essential Books About Video Art
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