Video Art: A Guided Tour

Catherine Elwes1850435464

Video art dominates the international art world to such an extent that its heady days on the radical fringes are sometimes overlooked – often unknown. This book is an essential and highly entertaining guide to video art and its history. Elwes, herself a pioneer of early video, traces the story from the weighty Portapak equipment of the ’60s and ’70s to today’s digital technology, from early experiments in “real time” to the “new narrative” movement of the 1980s. She also examines video’s love-hate relationship with television, from its literal destruction in “scratch” video to its apparent absorption into the mainstream with works commissioned by Channel Four. Throughout its forty-year history, video has been allied to self-portraiture, landscape, painting and sculpture and has been co-opted as a political tool. Artists discussed include amongst many others Nam June Paik, Nan Hoover, The Duvet Brothers, Dara Birnbaum, Bill Viola, Pipilloti Rist, David Hall, Stuart Marshall, Shirin Neshat, Smith & Stewart, Steve McQueen and Sam Taylor-Wood.

---

Table of contents :
EEn……Page 1
Video Art, A Guided Tour……Page 2
Copyright Info……Page 6
TOC……Page 7
Illustrations……Page 8
Foreword……Page 11
Acknowledgements……Page 13
1 – Introduction – From the Margins to the Mainstream……Page 15
2 – The Modernist Inheritance – Tampering with the Technology, and Other Interferences……Page 35
3 – Disrupting the Content – Feminism……Page 51
4 – Masculinities – Class, Gay and Racial Equality……Page 73
5 – Language – Its Deconstruction and the UK Scene……Page 90
6 – Television Spoofs and Scratch – Parody and Other Forms of Sincere Flattery……Page 110
7 – Video Art on Television……Page 131
8 – Video Sculpture……Page 155
9 – The 1990s and the New Millennium……Page 172
Notes……Page 208
Bibliography……Page 219
Index and Videography……Page 222