Art Journal articles from December 1995

Art Journal archives from December 1995

Sadie Benning or the secret annex. (video artist)
December 22, 1995... Sadie Benning is one of the handful of North American independent video producers of the last ten years to have attracted sustained critical notice outside the circuits typically open to noncommercially minded media artists. She is fully aware...

Bill Viola: allegories in subjective perception. (video artists)
December 22, 1995... I was making my way in search of adventures, fully armed as a knight should be, when I came upon a road leading off to the right into a thick forest. The road there was very bad, full of briars and thorns. In spite of the trouble and...

Sacred contingencies: the digital deconstructions of Raphael Montanez Ortiz. (video artist)
December 22, 1995... Like his recent deconstructionist videos, which appropriate and manipulate brief passages from Hollywood movies, Raphael Montanez Ortiz's career produces a revealing stutter within the historiography of the American avant-garde. Beginning in...

The old and the new: Nam June Paik. (video artist and sculptor)
December 22, 1995... In 1993 for the Venice Biennale, Nam June Paik initially proposed to title his exhibition in the German Pavilion Electronic Super Highway: "Bill Clinton stole my idea!" His brash claim comes from a 1974 document commissioned by the Rockefeller...

To end and begin again: the work of Victor Masayesva, Jr. (video artist)
December 22, 1995... From his earliest involvement with media production in the 1980s, Hopi video- and filmmaker Victor Masayesva, Jr., has displayed a complex sensibility and a strong sense of community-based purpose. Living in the Hopi community of Hotevilla,...

The architecture of image and sound: dwelling in the work of Mary Lucier. (multimedia artists)
December 22, 1995... When asked five years ago to describe her early work in the genre of multimedia, Mary Lucier remarked. "I think multimedia was not a genre at all, but was a process of searching, and to be a multimedia artist meant that you were really looking...

Imaging community: video in the installation work of Pepon Osorio.
December 22, 1995... Pepon Osorio is a mixed-media artist whose work is grounded in Latino popular culture. He was born in Santurce, Puerto Rico, in 1955, and moved to the South Bronx, New York, in 1975. From approximately 1982 to 1987, his work approached Puerto...

Shu Lea Cheang's genre-bending affirmations. (video artist)
December 22, 1995... Only three years ago arts advocates were breathing a sigh of relief at Bill Clinton's victory over George Bush. Although Democratic support in Congress for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) had diminished in the wake of the political...

Marlon Riggs: the subjective position of documentary video.
December 22, 1995... It is probably true that, in the United States at least, the museum is the cultural institution that has been most directly challenged by the video art of the last thirty years. From the early installations of Nam June Paik and Peter Campus,...

When the crowd rustles the tiger roars. (independent television company Paper Tiger)
December 22, 1995... Paper Tiger has been successfully clawing away at the mass media for nearly fifteen years. Taking strategic advantage of that very small, very ragged tear in the unitary U.S. broadcast system known as public access, the Paper Tiger collective...

Is the site right? (video art)
December 22, 1995... In considering video art presentation in museums, and in particular at the Whitney Museum of American Art, a number of questions and issues are raised. By including video art in the Whitney Biennial Exhibitions, the museum's survey of...

High wire, no safety net. (video art)
December 22, 1995... It is rare when you can draw a line around a thing and call it a history. Often obstructions, like cloudy recollection and unanticipated complexity, rise up to impair your efforts. The history of video art is a special case because it exists...

Report from the Bay Area Video coalition.
December 22, 1995... The challenge of preserving video is a fundamental issue for the media arts field. Currently we are in danger of losing video art and experimental video created by the first makers. Video from the late 1960s and early 1970s documents culture,...

Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Video.
December 22, 1995... As though . . . the simulation of real life were not part of real life! - Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc., 1977 During the murder trial of O. J. Simpson, witnesses regularly testified that they were able to recall the precise times of past...

Still Life in Real Time: Theory after Television.
December 22, 1995... As though . . . the simulation of real life were not part of real life! - Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc., 1977 During the murder trial of O. J. Simpson, witnesses regularly testified that they were able to recall the precise times of past...

Video Culture: A Critical Investigation.
December 22, 1995... The anthology - one of the finest inventions of literacy - is now having its life extended into the internet, where many homepages function as collections of favorite nodes. Some say that the Bible was the first anthology and that the higher...

Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art.
December 22, 1995... The anthology - one of the finest inventions of literacy - is now having its life extended into the internet, where many homepages function as collections of favorite nodes. Some say that the Bible was the first anthology and that the higher...