The Modernist Inheritance by Catherine Elwes

The Modernist Inheritance



The Modernist Inheritance
Tampering with Technology and Other Interferences

The author explores the context by which video art emerged. By the 1960’s video, a new moving images format, became one of the most interesting media for diverse artists to explore. Since the beginning, video was defined by “the modernist aesthetic concerns” (p.21) that characterized post-war American and European painting.

What happened to painting and sculpture?

Artists were beginning to have less interest in the “qualities” of traditional materials, and less interest in the transformation of painting. By the 1950’s a modernist emphasis emerged on “surface, texture and the optical effect” (p.21) and the “truth to material". The materials weren’t required to represent something other than itself; they were simply to show its essence and its transcendence. Modernist art promoted an inclination of pure thought connected with “self-contemplation”. American post-war artists in particular received recognition for the production of art pieces in which the pure material was the subject. For example, Carl Andre showed an installation of bricks forming a platform, Donald Judd created metal boxes, and Richard Serra made steel slab installations in public spaces. Outside of the pure essence of the material, any visible intervention of the artist was censured, and with this traditional fine arts showed its possible annihilation.

The pure essence of material, as a signifier, defined modernism at that time and was the frame in which video emerged. In the beginning there was a preoccupation with process, lighting, filming, developing, printing, editing, and finally projecting. All the processes of creating a video were present and were revealed in the image. Video was considered as non-representational-however artists like Nam June Paik worked with video as something that represented the material by creating machines that interfered with their own technical process. Artists didn’t have access to the image directly without destroying the camera and turning the signal off.

The author refers to Marcel Duchamp, and his success in convincing a1917 public that his urinal was art, as an antecedent in the linguistic research of conceptual art. Conceptual artists could focus on a representational system that put order in objects and people and defined its value. In addition, conceptual artists demonstrated how these classifications were translated to the sphere of art and showed a cultural classification of what was considered art or not. Through their own practice conceptual artists focused on the displacement of the relationship between material and meaning. However the author points out that some artists used an absurd juxtaposition of materials and refers to the work of Meret Oppenheim who in 1930 created a furry teacup, or the enormous Mickey Mouse created by the American Claes Oldenburg. According to the author in conceptual art language became the axis, replacing the art object by “complicated and incomprehensible theoretical propositions” (p.23).

The production of video represented an interaction with a set of processes and machines defined by the artist’s or producer’s concerns. The image was produced through different machines, at a distance, however, according to the author, early video technology offered different ways of intervention. Video artists were interested in the exploration of malfunction, and problems of the technology to expand its knowledge about the “medium’s expressive potential” (p.24).

The Specificities of the Medium

As an introduction to this section the author refers to the French artist Cesar who created a piece in which he placed a set of televisions on the top of a pedestal and threatened them with a gun, as the first “assault” on television and portable video. Little by little the understanding of television and video gave more opportunity for artists to intervene and alter the image at the point of reception. Other artists with more technical expertise were able to dissemble the camera to alter it or improve it.

Television

In the first television sets, the image was scanned in a “vidicom” tube, which was a glass tube containing phosphor. In this tube an image was scanned - in 525 lines in the United State, and 625 lines in Europe. The scanner was activated by an electron gun, which bombarded the phosphor with electrons in a controlled rhythm. To create an image in the monitor, first of all the electron beam scanned the image and then the rhythm of the lines in the monitor moving 24 frames per second.

The first television set was in black and white and had a mono system sound. In comparatively with its weakness, the television offered visual content capable of holding the collective attention of viewers. The social response to the television was important, and soon become the substitution for many family activities, establishing its new social role. This substitution of family interaction for “bland narratives and establishment views of broadcasters” was the first element of exploration for artist. The author refers to the German artist Wolf Vostell, who in 1962 proposed several actions like changing the channel so fast that was impossible to see it, or burying it or eating it for dinner. With these actions the artist tried to smash the negative narrative of television. In one Nam June Paik, the artist used magnets to distort the television image. He also pursued the John Cage’s same idea silence and chance, and in one piece exposed the audience to their own breathing sounds. June Paik reduced the image of the television as a simple line of light. In its installation “In Moon is the Oldest TV” (1965), the artist modified the scanner so that the light on the monitor was reduced as a simple circle imitating the shape of the moon. In further versions of this installation the artist used magnets to distort the shape of the circle. In each of the twelve monitors the moon was re-shaped to represent the different stages of the moon.

Since the beginning, artists have been interested in intervening technology in ways of improving it or in a ways of improvising it to obtain specific results. Since the 1950 artists like Ben Laposky produced visual abstractions, using the distortion of sound waves with a “deflector plates attached to an oscilloscope” (p.26). The oscilloscope used the same principles as the television, and was susceptible to magnetic interference. By 1963 Nam June Paik used the same technology to create a hybrid machine. He created this set by adapting the output of a radio into a television. The amount of light was controlled by the level of volume.

Camera

The camera was the subject to all kinds of interventions by artists. The curiosity and the immense interest to discover the inside of the medium, took an artist like Douglas Davis to bury, smash, and finally throw it out of the window filming its own process of destruction. According to the author this basic form of “torture” were signs of the understanding of the internal workings of a camera. In 1975 the artist Mary Lucier created the piece “Dawn Burn” in which the artist exposed the camera to the direct sun creating a nice work about sunrise, but as a consequence, destroying the camera. In 1975 the German artist Jochen Gerz created the piece “Prometheus”, in which he reflected direct sun light into the lens using a mirror. The image was consumed by burn marks made by the sun. The author points out that with the concentrated use of light, these pieces revel weak spots in the technology.

Camera to Monitor, Video Feedback

The author refers to artists like Bill and Louise Etra and Ben Tatti, as artists interested in video feedback. They pointed the camera directly to the monitor, creating a “closed-circuit manifestation of the video process” (p.28). The author defined this as an endless process of re-feeds itself with itself, a “self-contemplation” (p.28). The video feedback was defined as a deconstructive device, or a result of the hallucinations of the consumption of LSD. The feedback attracted interest for its “ability to dramatize the imaging function of the camera as well as the perceptual processes of the artist.” (p. 28)

Sound Feedback

To exemplify sound feedback the author refers to the artist Richard Serra, who created the piece “Boomerang” in 1974. In this piece he used a delay in the relation between speaking and the image of the woman speaking, at the same time, through headphones. For the participant, Nancy Holt, video was the source and destination of the speech. The speaker became conscious of the processes by which thoughts were formed. Holt described the experience, “I am surrounded by Me, my mind surrounds me, goes out into the world, then comes back inside me . . . no escape.”(p. 29)

Sync Sound

Richard Serra used the anti-synchronization of sound to represent the destruction of what should be an understandable communication system. The American artist Bruce Newman created a piece in which the face of the artist in the image is upside-down. He said the same term over and over until he finally caught the movement of the mouth, creating synchronization. By the end of the 1960’s it was technically possible to create these effects, thanks to small technical advances in Portapacks.

Years later, the American Artist Gary Hill, in his piece “Why do things get in a muddle? (1984) made the image run in the opposite direction to the sound, creating confusion, even when the movie was played backwards.

Further Malfunctions

One of the most famous modernist videos used a television technical problem, and used it as an important resource in this work. The television sets, in the beginning, presented a problem of losing the synchronization and moving from frame to frame. The vertical and horizontal buttons were really helpful in synchronizing the image again. The artist Joan Jonas adjusted the vertical button to create an effect. In 1972 she created, "Vertical Roll" a video about herself slamming, rhythmically, a table with her hand, and synchronizing it with the vertical line scrolling over the image. The action seemed that her hand was pushing the vertical line of the frame. It looked like the impossible was happening, reversing the immateriality of the video image by climbing inside the technology and touching a physical component.

Feminist Art Theory. Politics in Practice. Video Technology and the Feminine (1992)

Feminism-Art-Theory

Hilary Robinson

In the chapter Politics and Practice, section on Video Technology and the Feminine, Nell Tenhaaf describes how women artists, since the 60’s, have been using technology which was originally considered masculine, and how they have appropriated it for themselves to create their own space out of the sexism of art history and practices in which they were marginalized. The author states that the use of technology offers a great opportunity for women artists to develop a visual discourse.

Willing Machines/Bachelor Machines

The author refers to Friedrich Nietzsche’s postulation of the masculine will, which is the central force of technology in the modernist era. The will of power is wound together with concepts of duality, the machine as masculine, and submission as feminine. The author explores Nietzsche’s definition of will: as a guide for the body to a determined desire, the will to power. She then compares the will with the machine. “Will has replaced reason as the highest mental faculty…Modern thinking ego is characterized by the I-will and, I-can.” (p.378) This idea has created a metaphor of modernity in which the body as a source of desire is separate from the mind as defined as will. The philosophy of the will determines the male body as subject to technological power, and a focus in the future. The base of the will is the duality of masculine dominance and feminine submission, and this duality determines the technology arena. The strong gender differences, as well as the will to power, frames the male controlled progress through technology development.

The author compares the “bachelor machine” with “Nietzsche’s willing machine which determine by will and desire” (p.379). She defines the bachelor machine as the result of desire turning into it self, and refers to Marcel Duchamp’s Le Grand Verre, and explains that both represent masculine bachelors and feminine brides as opposites. The bachelor machine represents masculine desire through the machine or technology. Le Grand Verre represents, according to Robinson, the absence of the body and the feminine. The author refers to several cases through history in which the bachelor machine became a signifier for different interpretative systems like the Einsteinian clock. Michael Serres determines the bachelor machine as a representation of the history of machines, however now the bachelor machine has moved into the informational state. The authors refer to Jean-Francois Lyotard who declares that “the growth of power, and its self-legitimization, are now taking the route of data storage and accessibility, and the operability of information.” (p. 380) The bachelor machine is delineating a ”mythical technological framework”(p.380) in which the male defines his self as the creator of it. The author refers to the difference between the bachelor machine and the willing machine, and she points out that the feminine is more present in the former.

Robinson states that both represent “male self-representation”(p.380), and they play the role of the god-creator. The product of these machines (literary machine, social machine, etc.) is going to be a part of the machine itself. As different from men, which has a presence as subject, a woman is not able to speak for herself; the feminine in the era of biotechnology is absent.

The author wonders “. . .how women can turn herself in the technological order,” (p.380) and refers to the proposition of Luce Irigaray of the creation of the autoeroticism engine in her interpretation of the female body parts. She states that autoeroticism is a site of empowerment for woman, and she explains that when a woman touches herself, she establishes a position in which she clams her soul, and the essence of herself. However, Irigaray brings up the fear of many for biological determinism, as well as sexuality as a definer of being female. Irigaray states that the theory about the body is important because “every part of the body confronts a set of social meanings” (p.381). Autoeroticism is presented as out of the context of the bachelor machine’s sexual frame.

Threshold

The author describes metaphorically the television monitor as something alive, as the frame of change from dark to light. She compares the cinema with the screen as the connector between the subject and the camera. This can be the bachelor machine - but an electronic one. The monitor is like a double-sided mirror: one side emits light and the other reflects an image. On one side we have the subject, which in the cinema is the spectator, and “the male gaze situating the subject within the dominance of the phallic”(p.383).

The author describes the insides of the television, as well as the video monitor. The electron bean hits a curve covered with phosphor. This action produces light, then with the shot of a negative electron from the back of the monitor, its passes through the neck to the tube faced by a positive voltage. Outside the images is discharged. Here the author brings a reference to Irrigaray.

Body Parts

The author points out the fact that many women artists developed her visual discourses using video, opening a space for the expression of female desire. The author then describes the video work of different artists, like Kate Craig’s Delicate Issues (1979), and she describes it as a powerful piece about body, technology and power. This is a piece about the female body, in which the use of in-focus, and out-of-focus, as well as the closeness of the camera, creates an effect of unidentifiable parts of the body. At certain moments, the work uses dramatic contrasts, and abrupt close focus on details like hair, skin, and eyes. The use of a breathing sound gives an effect of intimacy/closeness, and at the same time frames the different parts of the body expressing autoerotic pleasure.

Marshalore’s trop(e)isme (1980) shows the artist, again, as the subject. The artist puts her fingers into her vagina taking some menstrual blood out and then covers parts of her face with it. She then takes a cigarette and smokes it with satisfaction. In this piece the artist tries to state a taboo, and at the same time tries to break it. The use of video allows women artists to express an important part of the “absent subjectivity that characterizes postmodernism” (p.385). The author points out that this position has been an important point of attention for women artists working in the new media. “Women artist have been developing important work in the theorization and practice”(p.385)

The author writes that the use of technological media as a language of the female body is complicated because the body is absorbed by the ideology of the “idealized body”. The body’s fragmentation is questioned in the development of technology, when it can be replaced by the bionic body, and this shows how society has been controlled by the technological media.
By the end the author refers to the limitation imposed by the debate about essentialism, and according to her this debate doesn’t assert any difference. Here, she refers to women of color.