Prompt: For each readings (3 total in the course) you will be responsible for responding to questions posed by the instructor. Pick two questions out of the three listed. Each question response should be approximately one paragraph. Reading responses are due by the in-class discussion. These responses will help guide our in-class conversations on the readings.
1) How does time-based art in the 20th-Century question the long tradition of painting as the privileged medium of representation?
2) Why was Marcel Duchamp’s approach to art so groundbreaking?
3) How were/are artists experimentally approaching art? Give an example from the reading.
Choose two questions to answer
New Media in Art
Second edition
26
7
i l lustrations, 124 in color
� Thames&. Hudson world of art
To Nikos Stangos, in memoriam
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank numerous colleagues who have shared their
breadth of knowledge with me over several years, including
Chrissie lies, Christine van Assche, Lori Zippay, Galen Joseph
Hunter, Berta Sichel, John Hanhardt, Magda Sa won, Dominique
Nahas, Barbara London and so many artists, to name a few, Vito
Acconci, Carolee Schneemann, Martha Rosier, Michal Rovner,
Douglas Gordon, Gary Hill, Thomas Hirschhorn, Grahame
Weinbren. Special thanks to my editors at the New York Times,
Annette Grant, and Art in America, Betsy Baker; to Electronic Arts
Intermix, to Julia MacKenzie and the staff at Thames & Hudson,
especially editor Andrew Brown. Thanks as well to AI Sabatini,
Bill Castellino, and Lily.
1-3. (title page) Pipilotti Rist,
three stills from I’m not the Girl Who Misses Much, 1 986.
© 199
9
and 2005 Thames & Hudson Ltd , London
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and
retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
First published in 1999 in paperback in the United States of America by
Thames & Hudson Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 101
10
thamesandhudsonusa.com
Second edition 2005
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 20031089
27
I S B N -13: 978-0 -500-20378-1
I S B N-10: 0 -500-20378-4
The first edition of this book was published under the title
New Media in Late 20th-Century Art.
Designed by John Morgan
Typeset by Omnific
Printed and bound in Singapore by C.S. Graphics
4. Richard Prince,
My Best, 1996.
Words and paint have appeared
on canvases since the early part
of the twentieth century, but what
is not immediately apparent in
this painting by Richard Prince is
that the bundles of intertwining
lines took shape in his computer
and were then silk-screened onto
the canvas.
Introduction
One of the characteristic perceptions of twentieth-century art was
its persistent tendency to question the long tradition of painting
as the privileged medium of representation. Early in the century
Braque’s and Picasso’s determination to incorporate everyday
material in their paintings, such as newsprint, tablecloth fringe,
or rope, was expressive of their struggle to extend the content
of the canvas beyond paint. This ‘struggle with the canvas’
pointed the way for scores of twentieth-century artists, from the
Russians Malevich and Tatlin, to Pollock at mid-century, to a
painter such as Richard Prince (b. 1949) whose abstractions take
shape in a computer before they are painted onto the canvas.
Abstraction, Surrealism, and Conceptualism, to name but a few
twentieth-century forms, all participated in a profound questioning
of traditional painting.
This perception, while apt in some ways, is too generalized
and does not tell us enough about the breadth of practices intro
duced in the last century. Another characterization of the period
focuses on the ‘experimental’ nature of its art: artists bursting
from the shells of painting and sculpture in a huge variety of ways
and incorporating new materials into their work; paintings affixed
with readymade objects or fragments of objects representing
everyday life; shifts in focus away from ‘objective’ representation
to personal expression; uses of new technological media to render
meaning and new ideas of time and space. ‘All art is experimental,’
US film and video critic Gene Youngblood wrote, ‘or it isn’t art.’
The speed with which the twentieth century created an elec
tronically linked planet is reflected in the swift expansion of art
practices beyond traditional painting and sculpture to an almost
frantic inclusion of everyday things into the arena of art. Anything
that can be parsed as a subject or a noun has probably been includ
ed in a work of art somewhere by someone. This inclusiveness
bespeaks a central preoccupation of the contemporary artist, which
is to find the best possible means of making a personal statement in
art. Following a complex psychological path laid down by Nietzsche
and Freud that places the subject at the center of history, art, too
has become entwined with ‘the personal’. This view, championed
by, among others, Marcel Duchamp, put the artist at the very
core of the artistic enterprise in a new way. No longer under the
7
gravitational pull of the canvas, the artist was free to express any
concept through whatever means possible. This concept can relate
to the history of art, to the politics of the day, or to the politics of
the self The manner in which expression is conveyed and the
means used to achieve it have led to such a proliferation of materi
als that one critic, Arthur Dan to, has declared ‘the end of art’ as we
have known it. ‘It came to an end,’ he writes, ‘when art, as it were,
recognized that there was no special way a work of art had to be.’
The final avant-garde of the twentieth century was that art
that engaged the most enduring revolution of a century of revolu
tions: the technological revolution. Initiated by inventions outside
the world of art, technology-based art (encompassing a range of
practices from photography to film to video to virtual reality, and
much else in between) has directed art into areas once dominated
by engineers and technicians.
Curiously, while new technology itself involves a plenitude
of machines, wires, and dense mathematical and physical com
ponents, the art that has been born from the art-and-technology
marriage is perhaps the most ephemeral art of all: the art of time.
A photograph is said to capture and preserve a moment of time; an
image created inside a computer resides in no place or time at all.
Images, scanned into a computer, then edited, montaged, erased,
or scrambled, can seem to collapse the normal barriers of past,
present, and future.
Of all the new materials introduced into art since the mid
twentieth century, this book will explore the dominant trends in
media and performance, video art, video installation and digital
art, including photographic manipulations, virtual reality and
other interactive forms. Not daunted by technological change,
artists who employ these new media see themselves as part of the
change and want to participate in it. They are excited by the possi-
8
5. Etienne-Jules Marey,
Gymnast Jumping over
a Chair, 1883.
bilities of technology, not alienated by them. Film and television
have informed their everyday experience, but unlike those who
pursue commercialized uses of technologies, these artists seek to
make personal statements without regard for the commodity
value of what they do. Like other artists who work in paint or wood
or steel, these artists explore, and often subvert, both the critical
and technological potentials of the new media. That technological
advances have come from some of the artists who have probed the
uses of media in their work is itself an interesting by-product.
While the use of new media in art does have a history, it is not easi
ly delineated. This history has yet to be written, largely because it
is always developing. This does not mean that we cannot attempt
a history, or at least a synthesis of different approaches to this his
tory; for it is art history’s duty to suggest links and point the way
toward historical understanding, even within the confines of what
must be a limited overview.
The simplest way to trace a history of new media in art would
be through the development of the technology itself (from, say,
Marey and Muybridge in photography, to Edison and the Lumiere
brothers in film, and so on) but then all we would have is a timeline
similar to the one devoted to the development of aviation. While
certain key artists and movements in twentieth-century art pre
sent themselves as precursors to artists who work in technologi
cal media (what branch of contemporary art, for example, would
not claim Marcel Duchamp as a predecessor?) with this art no
straightforward linear narrative is possible. Not only are we still
in the midst of the story, the story itself began and continues with
simultaneous activities among different kinds of artists in sepa
rate parts of the world. For these reasons a thematic approach
seems more appropriate than a strictly chronological one.
9
6. Eadweard Muybridge,
Descending Stairs and Turning
Around from the series Animal
Locomotion, 1884-85.
11
7. Eadweard Muybridge,
La Nature: Studies in Animal
. Locomotion, 1878.
Time Art
After the mid- 1960s, as critic and curator Anne-Marie Duguet has
said, ‘Time emerged not only as a recurrent theme but also as a
constituent parameter of the very nature of an art work.’ With the
emergence of performances, events, Happenings, installations,
then videos, the temporality of the art form was central. Currently,
computer-based interactive art supplies and requires a suspension
of time as the viewer enters into a contract with the machine that
inaugurates and sustains the art action.
The story of media art is inextricably linked to developments
in photography throughout the century. Time and memory, both
personal and historical, are the substance of photography; and
with the still and moving image, artists and amateurs were intro
duced to a new way of visualizing time. Representation clearly
involves space (the space occupied by the object represented and
the space of the painting or sculpture itself; the placement of
the image, etc.); but less clear is time, and this is where the
revolution wrought by photography and its now bigger cousin,
moving photography, film, assumes its place of importance. With
photography, humans began to participate in the manipulation of
time itself: capturing it, reconfiguring it, and creating variations
on it with time lapses, fast forward, slow motion, and all those
other time-related phrases which are proper to the art and science
of photography.
The French philosopher Henri Bergson’s ( 1859- 1941) study
of ‘time’ strongly influenced artists of all stripes: photographers,
painters, writers, choreographers, videographers. Bergson placed
time at the center of metaphysics; for him, reality consisted of flux,
essentially the movement of time. ‘The essence of time is that it
goes by,’ he wrote in his immensely influential book, Matter and
Memory ( 1896). ‘What I call “my present” has one foot in my past,
and another in the future.’ These notions were seized upon by
artists and critics, and throughout the Western world even popu
lar magazines would discuss Be•·gson’s notions of time because
they addressed a universal hunger tor understanding. For artists,
who had always been fascinated with the body in space and time, he
became a muse who championed the interaction between intuition
and perception. Ironically, potent as his ideas were for artists,
Bergson disdained the introduction of technology into the arts,
believing that the pure perception allowed by intuition, unaided by
machines, was what mattered.
From the beginnings of photography, however, art and
technology co-existed in an essential bond that has benefitted
/2
8. Giacomo Balla, Dynamism
of a Dog on a Leash,
19
12.
Balla creates the i l lusion of
motion th rough a series of
min ute, radiating diagonals.
both for more than one hundred years. Etienne-Jules Marey
( 183(}- 1904 ), a scientist and physician whose tenure at the College
de France overlapped with Bergson’s in the early 1900s, and
Eadweard Muybridge ( 183(}-1904), an artist, were the pioneers
of instantaneous photography, or ‘chronophotography,’ which
had a profound effect on artists, from Futurists, especially
Giacomo Balla, to Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, and
mid-century avant-garde filmmakers like Hollis Frampton and
Stan Brakhage. Seurat, Degas and many other artists were also
taken with the camera’s ability to capture successive movement
in still frames, but their interest was not directly obvious in
their canvases. Artists like the Futurists who propounded a
mechanistic aesthetic embraced photographic technology and
applied it to their painting. Towards mid-century, as we shall
see, it was the technological advances in film and video that
were adopted by artists to create what we know now as multi
media art.
14
Muybridge’s 1878 photographs of horses in motion were the
first to capture what looked like the actual, discrete sequence of
motion. Muybridge devised the means of portraying the speed of a
horse’s running by the action of several cameras (in this case,
twelve) set up in a row and arranged to go off in sequence as the
horse ran by. He attached a piece of string to the shutter and
extended it across the horse’s path. As the horse ran in front of
Muybridge’s cameras the shutters were released by the horse’s
movements over the string, each making an image at 1/200th of a
second. The resulting images, when placed next to each other,
showed the horse in what appeared to be continuous rapid move
ment. Muybridge went on to use as many as twenty-four cameras
in his attempts to perfect the capturing of motion. The results of
his efforts comprise the eleven-volume Studies in Animal Locomotion
( 1888). Initially, his photographs were intended as adjuncts to sci
entific studies, but quickly they were adopted by artists in their
studies of human and animal motion.
In 19 1 1, the Futurist Carlo Carra depicted motion in Funeral
if the Anarchist Galli and in 1912 Giacomo Balla pain ted the extra
ordinary Dynamism if a Dog on a Leash. Umberto Boccioni, like
them, turned to photographic studies to learn how the portrayal of
movement is realized through repetition. His Dynamism if a Cyclist
( 19 13) offers proof of the drama in dynamic sequencing of images.
Marcel Duchamp’ s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 ( 19 12),
one of the most controversial paintings of its time, took direct
inspiration from several of Muybridge’s studies, perhaps especial
ly Ascending and Descending Stairs ( 1884-85), in which a woman
can be seen carrying a water bucket up, then down, the stairs.
Film and Avant-Garde Cinema I
As revolutionary as these ‘studies in time’ may have appeared,
another means of capturing movement was evolving across the
Atlantic that would mark the emergence of one of the major artis
tic influences of the twentieth century: cinema. Both popular and
avant-garde cinema of the early century were to have a profound
impact on media art of the mid-century.
Cinema was developed in the laboratories of American inven
tor Thomas Edison ( 1847- 1931) who assigned his assistant
William Kennedy Laurie Dickson ( 186()-1935) to use the phono
graph as a model for making moving images that could be watched
through a viewer. In 1890, Dickson made a moving image camera
called the Kinetograph, followed a year later by the Kinetoscope
viewer. By 1895, several innovators, starting with the Lumiere
15
10
9. (above) Eadweard Muybridge,
Ascending and Descending Stairs
from the series Animal
Locomotion, 1884-85.
‘”‘
10. (right) Marcel Duchamp,
Nude Descending a Staircase,
No.2, 1912.
Duchamp abstracted Muybridge’s
studies in motion in his own explorations
of time and the fourth dimension.
brothers, had projected filmed images onto screens for a
paying public. In quick succession, Frenchman George Melies
(1861-1938), often referred to as ‘the first screen artist,’ intro
duced dissolves, time-lapse photography, and artful lighting (the
essence of cinematography) in films such as Cinderella ( 1899) and
The Dreyfus Affair (1899). Looking very much like an out-take
from a 1950s science fiction film, Melies’s A Trzp to the Moon, 1902,
shows a ‘rocket’ landing in the eye of the ‘man in the moon.’ In
1903, Edwin S. Porter from Edison’s lab made The Great Train
Robbery in which editing techniques were used for the first time to
establish continuity and to create narrative tension.
The art of film attracted several practitioners right away who
made lasting contributions to the form. As early as 1915, the
American D. W Griffith ( 187 5-1948) made his epic The Birth if the
Nation followed only a year later by Intolerance, an interweaving of
four narratives exposing the dangers of hypocrisy throughout
history. Other early directors whose work is still referenced by
artists in international cinema would include Frenchmen Louis
Feuillade and Abel Gance (1889-1981), the Germans F. W
Murnau (1888-1931) and Fritz Lang (189(}-197G), the Swede
Victor Sjostrom, the British-born Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977)
and the Russian Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948).
Eisenstein’s work is a clear product of the dynamic interplay
between art, technology and life during the Soviet avant-garde
period (roughly from 1915 to 1932). He represented a new type of
media artist who had training in mathematics, engineering and
art, and was for several years in his youth a theater designer with
Russian avant-garde director Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940).
Eisenstein, expressing his links to Constructivism and Cubism,
perfected the techniques of cinematic montage (initiated by D. W
Griffith), which enabled him to manipulate emotional responses
through the vibrant processes of film editing. Eisenstein sought
new ways of seeing which would parallel the new world image
under Marxism. His art has clearly outlived the political struggle
that nurtured it. Film critic Stanley Kaufman, writing about The
Battleship Potemkin ( 19
25
), noted that Eisen tein ‘felt that a new
society meant a new kind of vision; that the way people saw things
must be altered; that it was insufficient to put new material before
old eyes.’
In a certain sense, given his background in the technology
of engineering, Eisenstein is the perfect paradigm for the techno
logical artist. He thought of his cinema as totally utilitarian, ratio
nal, and materialistic, claiming that he merely applied what he
18
11. Sergei Eisenstein, sti l l from
The Battleship Potemkin, 1925.
Artist and engineer Sergei
Eisenstein joined the precision
of science with the vision of art
in films that he felt advanced the
cause of the Bolshevik Revolution.
learned in mathematics and engineering to the making of his films.
If the Russian avant-garde can be characterized by the tension
between Vladimir Tatlin’s view of art as an industrial process
and Kazimir Malevich and Vasily Kandinsky’s aesthetically
based ‘pure feeling’ of art, Eisenstein would side with Tatlin.
Nonetheless, long after its utility had passed (as a tool for exciting
support among the masses for the Revolution) his film The
Battleship Poternkln, for example, is heralded for the sheer energy of
its emotional peaks and unflinching vision and artistry.
Eisenstein’s dynamic images, accomplished by varied camera
angles and sophisticated montage editing, owe much to the frag
mented shapes of Cubism, in which multiple views of reality (seen
simultaneously as if from above and from the side in repetitive
layerings) allowed for multiple understandings of reality. This key
aspect of modernism, enhancing perception by altering it, found a
home in Russian photography and cinematography of the 1920s
and 1930s. Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov ( 1896- 1954 ), though
overshadowed in history by Eisenstein, was equally influential in
his development of montage techniques for his politically charged
films such as The Man with the Movie Carnera( 1929). 12
During the same period, the century-long tradition of avant
garde film in France was taking hold, strongly influenced by the
writings of Louis Delluc ( 189(}- 1924) who called for a ‘pure’ cine
ma, equal to a ‘symphonic poem based on images,’ as distinct from
the melodramas that were then dominating American, French,
and German films. Abstract art, cubism, and collage all made an
appearance in films by visual artists Man Ray (Return to Reason, 1923)
19
12. Dziga Vertov ,
sti l l from The Man with
the Movie Camera, 1929.
Along with Eisenstein ,
Dziga Vertov created ‘dialectical
montage,’ or a use of mu ltiple
images aimed at ‘liberating
the sight of the masses’ in the
new Russia.
and Fernand Leger (Le Balletmecanique, 1924 ), as well as filmmak
ers Rene Clair (Entr’acte, 1924) and Luis Buliuel (L’Age d’or, made
with Salvador Dali, 1930). Abel Gance perhaps best represented
Dulac’s ‘cinematic poem’ in films such as Dr Tube’s Mania (1915),
J’accuse(1919), La Roue(1922), and especially his magnum opus,
Napoleon ( 1927). Other examples of early avant-garde cinema
include the German Expressionist classic The Cabinet of Dr
Caligari ( 1919), directed by Robert Wiene, and A Page if Madness
( 1926) by Japanese director Teinosuke Kinugasa.
Thus, by the beginning of the twentieth century, the photo
graphy of images of movement, first achieved by Muybridge in
1878, had evolved into the ‘illusion’ of mechanically produced
movement which is cinema. Within a few short years an aesthetic
of the poetic image developed and the captured (or filmed) image,
aided by the still photography of Laszl6 Moholy-Nagy and his
peer Alfred Stieglitz, assumed an undeniable legitimacy as an art
form. Art and technology, as represented by still photography
and cinema, were becoming forever entwined as the thematic
dichotomy between art and life gradually dissolved in the face of
ubiquitous machines.
As cinema became more and more dominated by Hollywood
from the late 1920s and into the 1940s the international avant
garde languished somewhat until its renewal in the US in the
1950s. Meanwhile, the visual arts were undergoing radical trans
formations under the influence of European Dada, especially as
practised by Marcel Duchamp ( 1887-1968), whose importance to
the issue of art and new media is central.
’20
13. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy,
Lightprop, 1922,
from the fi lm fin Lichtspiel:
Schwarz/Weiss/Grau
(Light Play: Black/White/Grey),
1922-30.
Duchamp to Cage to Fluxus
How one feels about Marcel Duchamp is, essentially, how one feels
about a great deal of contemporary art, so profound was his influ
ence. He stepped outside any confining notion of art, and with his
readymades (the wheels, shovels, coat racks he chose to exhibit as
art), forced the question ‘What is art?’ to its deepest level. Duchamp
produced a prodigious body of work extending from painting, to
mixed media (The Large Glass, also known as TheBrideStrippedBare 15
by Her Bachelors, Even, 1915-
23
), to installation ( Etant donnes,
1946-66), to film (Anemic Cinema, 1926). Duchamp’s radical shift of 14
emphasis from object to concept allowed for multiple methods to be
introduced to a redefined artistic enterprise. His importance to the
present study rests not only in what he did but in what he allowed or
initiated in art. The type of thinking he encouraged made explo-
21
14. (above) Marcel Duchamp,
Optical disc No. 1 0 from
Anemic Cinema, 1925-26.
15. (right) Marcel Duchamp,
The Large Glass (The Bride
Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors
Even), 19 15-23.
For Duchamp, everyday objects
like the chocolate grinder (visible
in the lower portion of this
work on glass) , replete with its
manufactured geometrical design,
l i berated him from ‘the cubist
straitjacket,’ as he called it.
rations into different media and artistic forms seem very natural,
almost expected. Especially for those who found the ‘business’ of art
so distasteful, Duchamp’s liberal approach to materials and forms
detached the object from commercial appeal, at least initially,
because it was the idea that was important; and it was not yet clear
how to sell an idea. (Later Conceptual artists, properly so called, like
Sol LeWitt, Donald .Judd and .Joseph Kosuth, figured out a way.)
For artists of the late 1950s and 1960s who were in one way or
another influenced by Duchamp in their thinking about what con
stituted art, no material seemed out of place as a means of personal
expression . .Joseph Beuys ( 192 1-86) – who criticized Duchamp tor
his lack of political engagement – exhibited felt suits; Robert
Rauschenberg affixed pillows and quilts to canvases.
By the late 1950s the time was right tor an artistic iconoclast
like Duchamp to exert wide influence, especially in America,
22
16. (below) Joseph Beuys,
Felt Suit, 1970.
17. (below right) Robert
Rauschenberg, Bed, 1955.
where he had settled permanently after the Second World War.
Younger American artists had wearied of the hegemony of
Abstract Expressionism whose rugged, gestural style had become
synonymous with American art. There was a restlessness in the
art world that was manifested in the emergence of Pop art and
the multimedia experiments of John Cage ( 19 12�92) and his
Black Mountain College collaborators: Robert Rauschenberg,
dancer/choreographer Merce Cunningham, and musician David
Tudor. Furthermore, by 1950 the important writings of Euro
pean and American Dadaists, including Duchamp, had been col
lected and published by Robert Motherwell and were becoming
well known.
Cage, with his own synthesis of Eastern philosophy and
experimental music (inherited from Arnold Schonberg, among
others), began having a great influence on younger artists through
23
his teaching at Black Mountain, then at the N ew School for Social
Research in New York, where his classes on new music attract
ed future performance artists like Allan Kaprow (b. 1927) and
Richard Higgins (b. 1938). Based on his studies of the I Ching
(Book rif Changes) and Zen Buddhism, Cage emphasized the
element of ‘chance’ in art as a valid way of making a work. His
music compositions incorporated ambient noises from the street,
sounds produced by pounding on the wood and strings of a piano,
and, uniquely, silence (4′ 33″, 1952). His notions became epito
mized in the choroegraphy of his companion Merce Cunningham
whose intricate dance steps reflect the essence of non-sequential
movement exercizes.
Armed with notions of art as an idea and the role of chance in
life and art, artists were ready for a new explosion of creativity as
epitomized by Fluxus, an ‘intermedia’ movement that flourished
in the 1960s and inaugurated several innovations in perfor
mance, film, and, eventually, video. Fluxus was an international
movement of artists, writers, filmmakers, and musicians under
the leadership of George Maciunas ( 193 1-7 8), the Lithuanian
born provocateur who organized the early Fluxus events, first at
AG Gallery in New York ( 196 1) and then at festivals in Europe
starting in 1962. Similar in spirit to Dada (Maciunas’s manifesto
described it as ‘Neo-Dada in music, theater, poetry, art’), Fluxus,
as an avant-garde, was anti-art, particularly art as the exclusive
property of museums and collectors. It made jabs at the serious
ness of high modernism and attempted, following Duchamp, to
aflirm what the Fluxists felt to be an essential link between
everyday objects and events and art. They made this notion man
ifest in minimal, yet acessible performances. A Fluxus event, as
defined by German- American artist George Brecht, was the
smallest unit of a situation. One, devised by artist Mieko Shiomi,
was described as ‘an open event.’ The event was simply ‘an invi
tation to open something which is closed.’ Participants were
asked to write down exactly what happened during their ‘event.’
This simple charge became a statement against the loftiness of
museum art as well as a participatory action as people gathered
to perform it.
Similarly minimal music compositions, referred to as ‘scores’
by John Cage, stripped all artifice
.
from the orchestral or perfor
mance setting and required only attention to a minute detail.
LaMonte Young’s (b. 1935) Piano Piece for David Tudor #’2( 1960)
consisted of this direction: ‘Open the keyboard cover without mak
ing, from the operation, any sound that is audible to you. Try as
’24
many times as you like.’ These minimal instructions, present in all
Fluxus performances, whether of a so-called musical nature or
not, opened the event to multiple interpretations as well as
accidents. Anything could happen during one of these events,
resulting in chance occurrences and the desired multiple interpre
tations. Audience membet·s became participants (or co-conspira
tors), no longer passive observers. Fluxus events thus became the
perfect embodiments of Duchamp’s dictum that the viewer com
pletes the work of art. Indeed, with Fluxus, the viewer not only
completes, but actually becomes the work of art in his or her direct
participation in the event.
A minimal aesthetic began to develop, inherited from concrete
poetry, Dada manifestos and experimental music, and extended to
film as well, becoming an important element in the development of
media art. Fluxfilms, as they are referred to, comprise approxi
mately forty short films created by several of the at·tists (lew of
them filmmakers) associated with Fluxus. Nam June Paik’s Zen 19
for Film (1962-64), a prototypical Fluxus film, was presented
at the Fluxhall (Maciunas’s loft on New York’s Canal Street).
Actually an early installation (a tableau consisting of a home
movie screen, an upright piano, and double bass), Paik’s film
turned its back to the entire mechanism of lat·ge scale movie
making (from expensive film stock to lights, sets, optical etl’ects
editing, marketing, etc.). The film was nothing more than approxi
mately one thousand feet of clear 16-millimetre leader projected,
unprocessed, onto the screen with a running time of thirty min-
utes. Stripping film to its barest essential (the film stock itself),
Paik’s image less projection became the minimalist example for all
Fluxfilms to follow.
American film writer and curator Bruce Jenkins makes the
cogent observation that Paik, in subverting the usual expectations
of film viewing, ‘instilled a performative aspect into the screening
context and, in the process, liberated the viewer from the manipu
lations of both the commercial and the alternative cinema.’
Without images or sound, Paik’s film became a tabula rasa tor the
viewer’s free associations. With each additional screening of the
film, scratches, dust, and other chance events of film projection
inevitably occurred, thus rendering the film new, in a certain way,
each time.
Flux us artist and photographer Peter Moore (b. 1932), using a
high-speed, slow motion camera, made Disappearing Music for Face
( 1966). Based on another performance score by Mieko Shiomi
(which, in toto, reads: ‘Performers begin the piece with a smile and
25
18. (above) Yoko Ono, Filmstrip
from Film No. 1 (Fiuxfilm No.14!
-Lighting Piece, 1955/l966
19. (below) Nam June Paik,
Zen for Film, 1964.
The spare aesthetic of Minimalism
was adopted even by the
iconoclastic artists of Fluxus. Here
Nam June Pa ik projected clear
film leader inside a television set.
during the duration of the piece, change the smile very gradually
to no-smile’) the film featured Yoko Ono (b. 19.’3.’3), another Fluxus
artist. Ono’s mouth, chin, and cheeks are seen in close-up, reveal
ing the minute changes in expression that occur during the film.
Shot in only eight seconds of film time, when projected in slow
motion, it ran for eleven minutes.
Another fragment of Ono’s face, this time her right eye, is fea
tured in Eyeblink (c. 19G 1 ), which, as its title suggests, is the most
minimal of all acts. Ono’s own film, No. 1 (c. 1964), recalling the
still photographs of Harold Edgerton, features a slow-burning
match, suggesting perhaps the dangerous underside of even the
most minimal act.
By 196(;, Flux us had produced a body of films that, in their ele
mental nature (also referred to as essentialist), called into question
all of the common associations viewers bring to the watching of a
film, including being the one observed (as Ono stares into the cam
era at the end of Disappearing Music for Face). George Maciunas
made his own film, 10 Feet( 1966), consisting entirely of ten feet of
clear lead. Other Fluxfilms included George Brecht’s Entry-Exit
( 19()5), which consisted of a shot of the word ‘Entrance’ on a plain
white wall which gradually fades to dark then lightens to reveal
the word ‘Exit,’ and James Riddle’s Nine Minutes ( 1966), in which
stencilled numbers appear on the black screen every minute.
26
While Flux films are generally considered critiques of main
stream and even avant-garde film, they also generated a new ener
gy in filmmaking with their simplicity and playfulness. From our
remove, it is clear that Fluxfilms like Paik’s Zen for Film or Michael
Snow’s Wavelength ( 1969), though ostensibly concerned with the
31
essentials of film and film technique, are, in themselves, highly
poetic and meditative works. Though nothing in art or life seemed
sacred to them, Fluxists found meaning in the everyday material
of their art (whether it be their bodies, or the strings of their
pianos, or the leader of their film).
Some of the targets of the Fluxists, in terms of film, were the
tremendously influential new wave French filmmakers, especially
Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930), and the American Stan Brakhage (b.
1933). With Godard representing the political/poetic art film and 27
Brakhage the personal/poetic, their films comprise what to the
Fluxists were the elitist st1·ategies of both poles of the avant
garde. Not everyone was Fluxist, however, and avant-garde cine-
ma thrived in the middle oft he twentieth century as it had earlier.
Film and Avant-Garde Cinema II
The fervor for cinematic experimentation reached a peak in the
1950s and 1960s, first in the United States, then in France. The
Eastman Kodak Company had released 16-millimetre film for
amateur use in 1923, but even it was too expensive for most inde
pendent artists. As its use became more commonplace hy mid-cen
tury, artists, though still relatively few in number, began to make
films. Among the most influential are the Americans Stan
Brakhage, Kenneth Anger, Hollis Frampton, Maya Deren (born in
Russia), Jack Smith, Bruce Conner, Marie Menken, Andy Warhol,
Pat O’Neill, Jordan Belson, and John Whitney, the Canadian
Michael Snow and the Greek-American Gregm·y Markopoulos.
In his Allegories qf Cinema ( 1989), American film historian
David James noted that most of these filmmakers, several of whom
had migrated into filmmaking from other media, brought issues
that preoccupied painters to film. Among these he included the
representation of motion and duration; and the expression of
‘extraordinary psychological states.’ While the latter could be
said of any art form (poetry, fiction, drama), the former resulted
from the originating tactics of the technology of photography.
The technology improved when artists adopted it but the
20. Mieko (Chieko) Shiomi,
Disappearing Music for Face, 1966.
27
technology came first. As we shall see in later chapters, James indi
cates that artists who came to technological media from other
forms often transferred their painterly or sculptural concerns to
the new medium, whether film, video, or digital art. Naturally,
other artists have engaged new media from the start, not as a
secondary practice.
Markopoulos and Warhol will serve as good examples of each
approach. Gregory Markopoulos (1928-92), who as a teenager
studied with Hollywood director Josef von Sternberg, represents
the filmmaker as poet, a phrase one might also use to describe Stan
Brakhage. By eighteen Markopoulos had begun shooting what is
still considered a classic of avant-garde cinema, the trilogy, Du
Sang, De La Volupte, et De La Mort (Of Blood, Pleasure, and Death,
1947-48). In subsequent films such as Swain (1950), Twice a Man
( 1963 ), and The Mysteries ( 1968 ), he made original use of color,
composition, rhythm, and fractured temporal structures. Often
inspired by classic works of Greek mythology, Markopoulos’s
films explored abstract narratives with an economy of means that
incorporated his own inventions, including in-camera editing,
a radical approach based on the single frame rather than the
single shot. The Illiac Passion (1964-67), based on Aeschylus’s 23
Prometheus Bound, featured several well known underground per
sonalities of the 1960s cast as mythical figures: Andy Warhol as
Poseidon, Jack Smith as Orpheus, Taylor Meade as Sprite,
Kenneth King as Adonis, and the Beauvais brothers, Richard and
David, as Prometheus and his conscience. After he moved to
Europe in 1967, Markopoulos made over one hundred films, many
of which remain unprinted.
The use of 16-millimetre film continues among avant-garde
filmmakers but to a much lesser extent, having been replaced by
digital video which can be transferred to film. American-born
Robert Beavers (b. 1949) explores abstract associations between
the human form, visual art and architecture in films such as The
Painting (1977-97) and EJPsychi (1997). American Lawrence 24.25
Brose (b. 1951) investigates Oscar Wilde’s notions of aesthetics
and desire in his abstract 16-millimetre film De Prqfundis ( 1997).
American Ernie Gehr (b. 1941) has made two dozen experimental
films in 16-millimetre since 1967. In Serene Velocity (1970) he
focuses his camera on a corridor in an office building. Nothing ever
moves in this twenty-three minute film except for Gehr’s camera
lens which he alternates between the zoom setting and normal
every quarter of a second, thus giving the impression that the
corridor is shaking.
28
21. (below) Andy Warhol,
Kiss, 1963.
22. (below right) Andy Warhol,
Eat, 1964, with Robert Indiana.
Warhol’s early films represent
the artist’s manipu lation of
time. Repetition, freeze frames,
extended stationary camera shots,
and retarded projection speeds a l l
cons pi red to a Iter the viewer’s
experience of time.
Representative of artists coming to film from another medi
um, Andy Warhol ( 1928-87), intrigued by the ‘underground’
films of his acquaintances Jonas Meekas and Jack Smith, began
making films in 1963. Obviously enamored of the reproducibility
of art objects through his experience as a designer and print maker
(e.g. 100 Campbell’s Soup Cans, 1962, or 35 Jackies, 1963), as well as
photographer, Warhol was naturally drawn to the moving camera.
He was not immune to fame, to say the least, knowing full well
‘movies’ were the most alluring path to it. He made over sixty films
between 1963 and 1968, many of them classics of the underground
genre. In films such Sleep (1963), featuring actor John Giorno
sleeping for six hours in front of a stationary camera; Kiss ( 1963),
with its extended close-ups of couples kissing; and Eat ( 1964), in
which artist Robert Indiana slowly eats one mushroom, Warhol
confounded viewers with a mix of real and filmic time. With
Warhol the underground surfaced for a while as his films found
their way into legitimate theaters. He also translated to the canvas
filmic techniques of editing, repetition of frames, and structural
tension. In his famous portraits of actresses Marilyn Monroe and
Elizabeth Taylor, he also joined the legends of Hollywood to
avant-garde art, while aligning himself with both at the same time.
Occupying an uneasy place between commercial and avant
garde cinema is the Swiss-born Jean-Luc Godard. In his more than
seventy films and full-length videos since the late 1950s, he has
repeatedly questioned the nature of cinema itself. In his ongoing
project Histoire(s) du cinema (History(ies) of Cinema, begun in
1989), a combination of film and video, he traces the entire history
of worldwide film via many layers of images, interwoven with
superimposed texts and loud music. For Godard, montage reveals
rather than obfuscates deeper truths.
23. (left) Gregory J. Markopolous,
The /Iliac Passion, 1964-67.
Gerard Malanga as Ganymede
and Paul Swan as Zeus.
Less ‘cool’ (or distant) than
Warhol, Gregory Markopoulos
filmed what he called ’emotional
landscapes,’ rich in color and
composition, enhanced by his
own in-camera editing device.
24, 25. (right and above)
Robert Beavers, The Painting,
1977!1997.
Detail shows a side panel of
The Martyrdom of St Hippolytus
in the Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston. Continuing in the spirit
of 1960s formal experimentation,
Beavers juxtaposes images
to create emotional tension.
The figure on horseback is one
of the executioners tearing the
saint apart, while the young man
below (Beavers himself) looks
nervously through a window.
31
26, 27. Jean-Luc Godard,
two stills from Le Mepris
(Contempt), 1963.
Strongly influenced by Russian
revolutionary fi lmmakers,
especially Dziga Vertov, Jean-Luc
Godard has created a personal
and political cinema constructed
on what he calls ‘sound, image,
and text.’
Often neglected by critics until recently, 8-millimetre films,
introduced in 19
32
and the cheapest alternative available, became
quite popular among hobbyists as well as artists after the war.
Following in the footsteps of 16-millimetre, the 8-millimetre film
became even more of a protest against the excesses of Hollywood.
Compact, cheap, and easy to hold, this camera became the means
of personal expression for artists shut out of the commercial sys
tem. It also attracted artists who made careers out of the filmed
media rather than practising it occasionally while engaged in their
primary medium.
Artists such as Ken Jacobs, Saul Levine, George and Mike
Kuchar, Joe Gibbons, Lewis Klahr, Robert C. Morgan, and Stan
32
28. Ken Jacobs, Window, 1 964.
For Jacobs, ‘There was a short
period when Underground Fi lm
was a buzzword. There was the
kind of glow of celebrity about
some of the people making work.
The celebrity made those people
crazy and the lack of celebrity
made the rest of us crazy.’
Following pages:
29. Scott Stark,
Acceleration, 1993.
For artists l ike Scott Stark,
8-mi l l i metre film was a portable
and affordable means to
approximate the texture and rich
color of more expensive fi lm.
Brakhage, among scores of others, made singular, intimate films
with 8-millimetre stock. Ken Jacobs made quirky, diaristic films
that use actors (Winter Sky, 1964) and family members (he and his
wife on their honeymoon in We Stole Away, 1964 ). In Window
( 1964) the small camera becomes an extension of the artist’s
body. In a similar vein, Saul Levine’s Saul’s Scaif( 1966-67) and
Note to Pati ( 1969) are poetic, often fast-paced, personal narratives.
Especially memorable for capturing innocence and youth are
scenes shot in the snow in Note to Pati.
Use of 8-millimetre continued into the 1990s. Peggy Ahwesh’ s
(b. 1954) The Fragments Project ( 1984-94) contains an intimate
look at the characters who populate her personal life. More abstract
is Scott Stark’s Acceleration ( 1993) which captures the traces of a
moving train from the perspective of a stationary camera.
The 16-millimetre and 8-millimetre cameras were portable
and available for artists to own, rent or borrow. Many did, not
only to make experimental films, but also to record the work
they were doing in their studios or to use in performances. And
soon, yet more portable, and eventually more affordable, the Sony
Portapak video camera became available and a new chapter in
media art began.
33
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