Sturken Marita Paradox in the Evolution of an Art Form Summary

Mary Lucier installing Wilderness (1986).

• Picture show and Video

Uncovering the Secret History of Video Art at the Carnegie

In many ways, the story of video at Carnegie Museum of Art is the story of curator Bill Judson. Taking over from Sally Dixon, who founded the department in 1970, Judson directed the Department of Movie and Video from 1975 to 2003. While continuing to champion film as an fine art course, he deliberately turned the section's attention and resources to the burgeoning field of video art. While video artists had shown work at CMOA before, the early 1980s saw the birth of 3 new initiatives: (one) a rash of striking large-calibration sculptural video installations; (two) the brandish of single-channel work in a dedicated video gallery for the very first time; and (3) live performance involving video featuring artists such as Laurie Anderson, Joan Jonas, and Ulrike Rosenbach. Asked "whether performance art was part of his curatorial responsibleness" forth with film and video, Judson responded, "If it moves, it's mine."¹

The history of video art at CMOA lies housed in its all-encompassing annal of messages, diagrams, memos, drafts, grant applications, photos, slides, films, videos, catalogues, journals, and books. From its very beginnings, the section'south key mission has been to make its holdings attainable to scholars and researchers. My time there in April 2022 revealed not but the official history of innovative video programming at CMOA but also a treasure trove of ephemera that describes its "secret history." These documents convey excitement, the occasional controversy, and day-to-day frustration over the technological constraints of early video, sometimes with hilarious frankness.

Bill Judson in 1991. Photograph: Robert Ruschak.

For case, video creative person James Byrne wrote to Judson about problems with installation. Byrne planned to evidence a number of works at CMOA, including the elegant …This Fountain Is a Field of Burn down… (1982) with its seven monitors suspended nigh the courtyard's glass walls:

I hope things are going ameliorate than when I talked to yous final.… I take thought over the possibility of not hanging the monitors and I adopt to exercise something entirely different if the monitors cannot be hung.… I [also] promise your controversy with the male genitals is resolved.^two

Letters such equally this raise questions. Which artwork had sparked the problem with male genitals? Could it take something to exercise with concern over the public's response to viewing said genitals on-screen? Or could it have something to do with the configuration of Byrne'due south Phase (1981), which Newsweek described every bit a "marvelous dangling diamond of four television sets … which continually repeat each other similar the angled mirrors in a kaleidoscope"?³

James Byrne, Phase (1981), at CMOA.

A Public History of Video Fine art

The public history of video at CMOA is impressive. In seven brusk years, between 1981 and 1988, Judson and the department exhibited seven one-person video installations, and caused many of them for its collection in an intentional gambit to raise the status of video art inside the museum. In add-on to Byrne'south "marvelous dangling diamond" of television sets, a visitor to the museum would accept encountered video installations such as Steina Vasulka'south 360-degree mirrored Allvision globe (1982–83) in all its sculptural glory, with its circumvoluted cameras transmitting whatever they caught alive onto monitors. He or she might have come beyond Francesc Torres's Tough Limo (1983) video installation with its model military tank and live iguanas; Mary Lucier's cute Ohio at Giverny (1983) with its lush, layered images arcing across seven monitors; Dara Birnbaum'due south wall-spanning Volition-o'-the Wisp (1985); and Pecker Viola's The Slumber of Reason (1988), with its images of placidity dreamers and room-filling triple projections of "burning buildings, fierce dogs, a forest at dark."^four

Steina Vasulka, Allvision (1976), at CMOA.

Between 1980 and 2003, CMOA's Department of Moving picture and Video, similar other forwards-looking programs at art institutions around the state, enthusiastically embraced both single-channel video art and installations, bringing in traveling video shows such as Video/Tv set: Humor/Comedy (1982), New Video: Japan (1986), and Art of Music Video (1990). Furthermore, CMOA's offset major home-grown shows of video installation, curated past Judson, fabricated a number of important interventions in how video art should be displayed in the museum.

Equipment set-up for American Landscape Video: The Electronic Grove (1988).

For example, the thematic American Mural Video: The Electronic Grove (1988) focused on multichannel installation-based piece of work that responded to a range of influences, including "the 'wasteland' of commercial boob tube,"^v  satellite views of globe from space, digging, and the long tradition of landscape painting. Bringing together works past Doug Hall, Mary Lucier, Bill Viola, Steina Vasulka, Frank Gillette, and Rita Myers, Judson focused on large-scale video installation in relation to the broader history of mural art, "rather than," every bit he wrote, "once once more treating video as a perpetually 'new' medium of undifferentiated, diverse" single-aqueduct piece of work.^half-dozen

Steina Vasulka, The Westward (1983). Installation view fromAmerican Landscape Video: The Electronic Grove (1988).

Too, in Points of Departure: Origins of Video Art (1991), Judson made the considered decision to exhibit of import early video works in the context of each artist's larger art practise amid a developing ready of creative concerns, whether through painting, traditional sculpture, photography, or other vehicles of expression. Intervening in what he saw equally a widespread curatorial emphasis on video's singularity and medium specificity, Judson sought to make connections beyond the private oeuvres of Beryl Korot, Peter Campus, William Wegman, and Bruce Nauman. For instance, he brought together Korot's examinations of the patterns and gaps inherent to language across her video weavings in Dachau 1974 (1974), her gridded paintings such equally Etty's Rosetta (1985–86), and her explorations of woven textiles. Similarly, the testify explored Nauman's interest in mapping language, paradigm, and the human body through video installations such as Live-Taped Video Corridor (1969), the absorbing dual-channel Skillful Boy Bad Male child (1985), and prints such as I Learned Helplessness from Rats (1970).

Bruce Nauman, Live/Taped Video Corridor (1969). Installation view fromPoints of Departure: Origins in Video (1990).

A Private History of Video Art

Yet, as late every bit 1978, just over a decade before these of import video exhibitions took identify, the archives reveal that many at CMOA expressed doubtfulness as to whether video was even an fine art form. In that location was no video equipment for exhibition in the museum throughout the 1970s, pregnant that video artists visiting Pittsburgh, while advertised in the museum's motion-picture show listings, needed to show their tapes somewhere else. Some artists, such as Robert Brook (1974), exhibited at Pittsburgh Filmmakers, run by longtime managing director Robert Haller; others, such as Amy Greenwald (1979), used the University of Pittsburgh'due south Hillman Library. As one diligent meeting minutes-taker at CMOA reported at the fourth dimension: "To a question well-nigh the utilise of video tape in museum programs, Mr. Judson said some museums have tried it as an art form in its own right."^vii

A showing of Steina Vasulka's video work at Pittsburgh Filmmakers, 1976.

Although many historians of video art accept asserted that critics and museums claimed video as a new form of art from its origins in the mid-1960s,⁸  CMOA's archives propose that in practise in that location might have been continued dubiety nearly the artistic status of video into the 1980s. This can be seen in an anecdote from Judson's writing about Buky Schwartz's Summer 1981 (1981), a piece that examined human and video perspective via an assortment of mirrors, video cameras, and monitors carefully arranged amid an array of massive logs. In his 1992 volume on Schwartz, Judson tells a story nearly their offset see in 1981, when in preparation for installing the piece, the ii men "rented a chain saw and a dump truck and prepare out to collect a tree. Nosotros felled a Sycamore, cutting information technology into almost two dozen logs, each roughly two to four feet long, and brought the pieces back to the museum."⁹  The perplexed installation crew back at CMOA was unsure as to whether, "as art handlers, this truckload of freshly cutting logs savage within their domain."^ten  While the story focuses on the issue of whether logs were ultimately firewood or art, I wonder if the coiffure'southward uncertainty might likewise point to the newness of this kind of video installation piece of work for a museum staff used to setting up more traditional—and contained—works of painting and sculpture. Such a moment makes u.s.a. realize how strange the now taken-for-granted installation of video and objects might accept seemed, fifty-fifty as tardily as the early on 1980s.

A monitor view of Buky Schwartz installingSummertime 1981 (1981) at CMOA.

A few years after, a 1985 mission argument for the department written past Judson makes a example for the legitimacy of film and video at the museum, arguing that the primary purpose of the department was to "promote the understanding of film and video as fine art forms, and of film and video makers as artists," on par with more traditional arts. While I initially took this to be addressing a demand to educate the museum-going public, other documents fabricated it clear that this was an ongoing trouble amidst museum staff.

For all the department's many accomplishments over its first decade, CMOA'southward archive suggests that there was a felt struggle for its legitimacy inside the museum. In 1991, a memo from Judson to various Carnegie Museum departments insisted that the Department of Moving picture and Video was indeed an actual curatorial department, and "Not," every bit it stated, "an Audio-Visual Service Section!!" Emily Davis, senior enquiry associate for CMOA's Time-Based Media Drove, suggests that this was due in function to the department's status as an early adopter of both video and computer technology.^xi  This meant that the department tended to exist called upon for technical assist just a petty likewise often, turning Judson into, as he signed off with a wink, an "A.V. Grinch."

From the outside, even so, this uncertainty about video'southward status would non have been visible. In improver to the appearance of groundbreaking video installations, 1981 saw a newly established Video Exhibition Room. For the first time in its history, the museum had a dedicated gallery space for the (near) continuous brandish of single-channel video, mostly, every bit Judson described, "from the tardily 1960s and the 1970s, the outset decade of video art."¹²  Judson intended for the video gallery to place single-channel video art on par with both video installations and more traditional art forms. As he wrote in 1985, "The Video Gallery shares space with the exhibition of the permanent collection of modern painting, thereby reinforcing the museum'south position that video is an integral aspect of contemporary art."¹³

Technical instructions for a Lonnie Graham work at CMOA.

However painting and sculpture did non have the same technical issues that video fine art suffered. Throughout the 1980s, video had all the same to take hold of up to the conditions of its gallery brandish. In the Video Exhibition Room, single-channel piece of work played "with only brief pauses for the record to rewind," as 1 technical memo explicitly directed. Other memos give detailed instructions to museum guards on the proper rewinding and restarting of synced multidevice video installations. Every bit Judson wrote in a series of meticulous technical notes to the guards charged with maintaining Birnbaum's three coordinated video decks for Will-o'-the-Wisp (A Deceitful Goal): "Every hr, after the carmine lights on the machines are off … Push all three 'play' buttons at the aforementioned time."¹⁴  Clearly, the continuous automatic display of video, which nosotros now take for granted, was non that continuous or automated—to which I'm sure many a museum guard could attest.

The Ongoing History of Video Fine art at CMOA

As one of the many video installations that Judson caused for CMOA's drove, Birnbaum's Volition-o'-the-Wisp offers insights into the ongoing history of video art at the museum.

Birnbaum produced the work, a fellow member of her expansive Damnation of Faust series, for CMOA's sunlight-filled foyer equally function of the 1985 Carnegie International, a major art exhibition held regularly in Pittsburgh since 1896. She conceived it every bit a triptych, with iii video monitors set at varying heights and depths into a colorful floating wall constructed in front of the museum'southward walls. Ane of the monitors would be flush with the floating wall, while the other two would protrude from the surface, held with supporting brackets. Viii transparent photo panels would fan across the floating wall, forming an enormous and somewhat abstract image of a woman's face amid leafage. Behind the floating wall would lie the speakers and those pesky video decks, with their demand for regular omnipresence.

Dara Birnbaum, Volition-o'-the-Wisp (1985), on display at CMOA.

Like every slice in CMOA's collection, Volition-o'-the-Wisp has an "object file," a folder that contains all the information nearly how it should be set upwards and how it should expect, besides equally every bit of paper continued to it. This is the annal where curators and installers go when they want to remount a piece, often decades afterward it was originally exhibited. Volition-o'-the-Wisp'southward object file reveals the complicated nature of the original installation, much of which had to exist arranged long distance via letters and phone calls; as ane bewildered staffer wrote, "I do wish Beak Judson were around to agree her paw."¹⁵  Of course, given the technical constraints and multiple parts associated with most video installation art, this situation was far from unique. Two years later, when Volition-o'-the-Wisp was remounted for the American Landscape Video prove, these instructions must take been fresh in memory. So, after these two successful outings, the installation went into deep storage.

Later decades out of commission, there would undoubtedly be a number of challenges to remounting Will-o'-the-Wisp, as notes from both 2006 and 2022 reveal. First, any effort to reinstall the slice would involve rebuilding the special floating wall, a task that would add together both expense and labor. Related to this is the consequence of converting the bulky monitors prepare within the floating wall to mod flat-screens; this would radically alter the aspect ratio, and apartment-screens would non beetle into the infinite every bit initially intended. In addition, as CMOA archivist Davis notes in her 2022 study, while the photo panels were found to exist in pretty good shape despite their time in storage, they would need to be reprinted earlier any remount.¹⁶  This would prove a difficult chore given that the re-create negatives for the image were nowhere to be constitute! There was, all the same, an answer: digital scans could be made from documentation of the original installation, enlarged, and reprinted.

Detail of Dara Birnbaum, Will-o'-the-Wisp (1985).

Technically, many other things had changed in those twenty-five-plus years during which Will-o'-the-Wisp lay disassembled. While most of the original equipment was found in storage, including speakers, monitors, and playback equipment, much of it was outdated. Thankfully, as Davis writes, technicians were able to migrate the original content of the video to 3 new sixty-minute master loops with video documentation about how they should be synced. This was a large chore, but 1 that CMOA accomplished without likewise much trouble. Instead, it was the loss of a seemingly insignificant series of hardware-store components that would prove surprisingly inconvenient. Namely, the L brackets used to hold the original protruding monitors away from the wall were nowhere to exist found and would likely accept to be manufactured artisanally—by hand—from scratch.

Birnbaum's Will-o'-the-Wisp has yet to be re-mounted at CMOA. This narrative of what it takes to reinstall the piece is only one history of a singular video installation. Only it speaks to a set of of import concerns as video art reaches its thirty-seventh year at CMOA. Each and every historical video installation we see today has its own surreptitious history.

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1. William Judson, "Operation Art at the Carnegie," Carnegie Mag, September–Oct 1986, 26. ↵
2. James Byrne to Bill Judson, June ii, 1982. Serial fv001/001/003/001, Box B005, Section of Film and Video Archive, Carnegie Museum of Fine art, Pittsburgh, PA (future cited as Film and Video Annal). ↵
3. Newsweek, February 23, 1981, cited in an undated document on Byrne's Phase. Series fv001/001/003/001, Box B005, Film and Video Archive. ↵
4. "The Slumber of Reason: Narrative," http://collection.cmoa.org/CollectionDetail.aspx?item=1026526. ↵
5. John Hanhardt, "The Discourse of Landscape Video Art: From Fluxus to Post-Modernism," in American Mural Video: The Electronic Grove (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Museum of Art, 1988), 61. ↵
6. William Judson, "Introduction," in American Landscape Video, 22. ↵
7. Minutes for December 7, 1978, meeting from Nancy Meyers to Bill Judson, December 21, 1978. Serial fv001/001/001/001, Box B001, Moving picture and Video Annal. Emphasis mine. ↵
8. For example, come across Dierdre Boyle, "A Brief History of American Documentary Video," in Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art, ed. Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer (New York: Aperture Foundation/Bay Area Video Coalition, 1990), 51-70. Also, Marita Sturken, "Paradox in the Evolution of an Art Form: Great Expectations and the Making of a History," in Hall and Fifer, Illuminating Video, 101-21. ↵
9. Bill Judson, "Foreword," in Buky Schwartz: Videoconstructions, ed. Nib Judson (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Museum of Art, 1992), 9. ↵
10. Ibid. ↵
11. Conversation with Emily Davis at Carnegie Museum of Art, April xiii, 2017. ↵
12. Bill Judson, "Video Gallery for Single-Channel Works," 1985. Serial fv001/001/007, Box B004, Film and Video Annal. ↵
13. Ibid. ↵
14. Memo from Bill Judson to Tim Wilkinson, July 25, 1986. Object file for Damnation of Faust: Volition-o'-the-Wisp (A Deceitful Goal), 86.7.A–.D, Flick and Video Archive. ↵
15. Staff memo regarding August 30, 1985, conversation with Dara Birnbaum to Barbara L. Phillips, Marcia L. Thompson, Geralyn Huxley, and Bill Judson, September vi, 1985. Artist file for Dara Birnbaum, Series fv001/001/003/001, Box B002, Film and Video Archive. ↵
16. The information in this paragraph and the next comes from Emily Davis'south 2022 Preservation Notes on Dara Birnbaum's Will-o'-the Wisp (1985). Object file for Damnation of Faust: Will-o'-the-Wisp (A Mendacious Goal), 86.vii.A–.D, Film and Video Archive. ↵

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Source: https://storyboard.cmoa.org/2018/01/uncovering-the-secret-history-of-video-art-at-the-carnegie/

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