"The State of Video"

Video art is everywhere. No longer marginalized as "new media," it has become an almost mandatory part of every exhibition; painters, sculptors and photographers all make videos too. While New York is still widely regarded as the medium's epicenter, California—now an art world capitol in its own right—has seen its profile rise along with video's popularity. Now, "California Video," opening March 15 at the J. Paul Getty Museum, makes a claim for the Golden State as a significant hub of activity both in video's unruly history and its burgeoning future. The first comprehensive survey of work produced in California, the exhibition also identifies a humorous, irreverent aesthetic that differentiates West Coast video from counterparts elsewhere.

Covering the late '60s to the present, the exhibition includes over 70 works by 58 artists, from classic pieces by pioneers like Bruce Nauman, John Baldessari, and Martha Rosler, to some surprising, unsung gems: the caustic, post-feminist vignettes of Cynthia Maughan, theatrical mixed-media installations by Skip Sweeney, and striking experiments with light and the body by Wolfgang Stoerchle. The show also includes a sampling of more recent work by established artists—Mike Kelley, Diana Thater, Bill Viola—and up-and-coming talents like Brian Bress, Euan Macdonald, and Harry Dodge & Stanya Kahn.

"I really wanted it to go up to the present," says exhibition curator and Getty Research Institute senior projects specialist Glenn Phillips, "but I also knew that there's no possible way with the amount of space that I have, that I could really do a perfect representation of what's going on in California with video right now."

Still, the exhibition and accompanying catalog attempt to provide a comprehensive picture, particularly of historic pieces from the '70s. Roughly half of the works date from that period, while the rest range from the '80s all the way up to this year. The earliest example is Bruce Nauman's black and white, single-take "Walk with Contrapposto" from 1968, in which the artist paces the length of a narrow corridor while trying to maintain the classic tilted pose of Greco-Roman statuary. Oddly enough, the most recent work also has a classical theme. "Oculus Sinister (left eye)," by Los Angeles artist Jennifer Steinkamp (see sidebar), is a colorful animation inspired by the lava flows that buried Pompeii. It was created specifically for an architectural oculus—a recessed, cylindrical skylight—in the museum's ceiling.

The majority of the older works are drawn from the video archive of the Long Beach Museum of Art, which the Getty acquired in 2005. Comprised of nearly 5,000 works collected between 1974 and 2000, the archive is a largely unknown repository of video art from California and around the world. Now that the works are housed at the Getty, a full-time conservationist is restoring and transferring the tapes to make them available to the public.

With such a large collection to choose from, mounting a cohesive exhibition was a daunting task. For example, Phillips found that the definition of a "California artist" is largely a matter of perception rather than residence. "Artists move all over the place," he says, "I really just decided that as long as I believe it, it's OK." Some major figures, like Nam June Paik, are conspicuously absent. Although Paik spent a few years teaching at CalArts in the early 70s, Phillips thinks he is too strongly identified with the video scene in New York to be considered a California artist. On the other hand, the show includes a 1977 work by Martha Rosler that she made while living in San Diego, even though she has long since been based in Brooklyn, New York.

The opportunity to give exposure to under-appreciated works was another important consideration. "It just seemed a lot more important to me to show some of these works that aren't as familiar to people than to just do a greatest hits of all the video pieces that have already been mentioned in textbooks," says Phillips. But he also wanted to make sure that the show was accessible to the general public that accounts for most of the Getty's visitors. "We'll have a lot of people that this is the first time they've probably ever seen video art," he says, "And I want that to be a good experience for them. So I did try to think about pieces that stand out on their own without needing a lot of historical explanation."

Although many of the works are influenced by performance or conceptual art that often challenges the storytelling conventions of commercial film and video, others reflect the medium's turn towards narrative since the '80s. Phillips was particularly drawn to works that took some aspect of California as their subject.

For example, a 2003 work by Sam Green, a San Francisco filmmaker not usually associated with video art, documents his search for the grave of Meredith Hunter, the young black man who was murdered at the infamous Rolling Stones' concert at Altamont Speedway in 1969. "Lot 63, grave c" reveals that although the murder has become a symbol of the death of '60s idealism, the specifics of Hunter's identity and life have been largely neglected.

Another young San Francisco artist, Cathy Begien, uses narrative in a more self-conscious way in her 2004 work "Black Out." In the piece, shot with a single, static camera, the artist sits blindfolded, recounting a wild night out on the town. As her tale unfolds, figures enter and exit the frame to hand her drinks, cigarettes and other props. The resulting re-enactment is alternately hilarious and pathetic, intimately revealing, yet thoroughly artificial.

Phillips admits that it was difficult to select representative works from the younger generation of video artists working in California. "I think a small handful of very young artists got lucky to an extent," he says, although he maintains that "most of the pieces by younger artists are in some way picking up on or engaged in the types of questions or approaches that you see in the earlier pieces."

For example, Begien's use of a static camera and self-deprecating humor echoes works from the early '70s by Baldessari and William Wegman. Baldessari's "I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art," from 1971, is a tongue-in-cheek declaration in which the artist's hand repeatedly inscribes the words of the piece's title, schoolboy style, on a sheet of paper. In a series of shorts, Wegman often shares the spotlight with his dogs, performing simple, comedic actions that are revelatory in their banality.

Los Angeles-based Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn's "Whacker," 2005, in which a woman wearing a sundress and heels casually operates a motorized weed cutter, harks back to feminist works such as Suzanne Lacy's "Know Where the Meat Comes From," 1976, with its mix of feminine tropes and sublimated violence. While Dodge and Kahn play with the notion of the femme fatale and castration anxiety, Lacy's video takes the form of a demented cooking show, revealing latent aggression embedded in the stereotypically female realm of food preparation and consumption.
While West Coast artists are concerned with many of the same issues as their East Coast and international peers, they tend to approach them with a different attitude. "There's always a lot of humor that you find in California video," Phillips says, "There's a sort of charisma from the artist that you definitely find a lot."

It's tempting to assume that this focus on personality results from a proximity to Hollywood's celebrity-making machine, but Phillips notes that commercial entertainment and video art have followed parallel, but largely separate trajectories. "Video art was seen as something that had to be almost the opposite of Hollywood," he says, "There's this real uneasy relationship…television is always somehow in the background." In Southern California, video art was influenced by the economics, if not the aesthetics, of Hollywood. When Walt and Roy Disney funded CalArts in 1970, they were mainly interested in creating a top-notch school for animators, but they also seeded a prolific, experimental video program that was home to Baldessari, Allan Kaprow and other key figures.

Video art's contentious relationship to mass media is represented most prominently in "California Video" by a reconstruction of a room-size installation from the mid-70s. A collaboration between two Bay Area artist collectives, T.R. Uthco and Ant Farm, "The Eternal Frame" is a re-enactment of the famous Zapruder film of President John F. Kennedy's assassination. Shot cheaply without city approval on the same Dallas street where the president was killed, the re-enactment appears on a TV set in a middle class living room overflowing with JFK memorabilia.

Displayed only once in its original form at the Long Beach Museum of Art, the installation was destroyed shortly thereafter in a studio fire. Working from period photos, the Getty has meticulously reconstructed the piece, a process that included making replicas of the wallpaper and furniture from scratch, and combing eBay for JFK memorabilia. "It will probably be better than the original," says artist Doug Hall, a founding member of T.R. Uthco. He also points out that as a "replica of a replica," the new installation echoes the collectives' own studious recreation of the Zapruder footage. T.R. Uthco and Ant Farm were interested "in how media functions, in how knowledge is constructed through the images that we receive through television and newspapers," says Hall, "Somehow we came to the conclusion that we needed to recreate that event, to study that event, and the only way we knew how to do that was to participate in it, to re-involve ourselves in it physically."

In a way, "California Video" is a similar endeavor, reconstructing history from a particular point of view that until now has largely been buried or simply overlooked. It's an important heritage to reclaim, especially now that video plays such a central role in the art world. "Video is no longer on the fringes," says Phillips, "It's a lot more possible for a video to be considered a very, very limited edition that sells for a very, very high price.…which is a little bit of a shame, because of course the original utopian vision of video is that it would subvert all of that." With "California Video," the Getty has seized an opportune moment to remind us of the medium's egalitarian roots and to assert the importance of California—itself a utopian enterprise—in the maverick legacy of video art.

This feature originally appeared in the May/June 2008 issue of Art Ltd. Reprinted with permission.

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