http://youtu.be/llacDdn5yIE Chris Burden, Metropolis II, LACMA, 2012
http://youtu.be/JE5u3ThYyl4 Chris Burden, Shoot, performance 1971
From Performance to Video Art
Joseph Beuys, Siberian Symphony, FESTUM FLUXORUM FLUXUS, 1963, Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal, Germany.
George Maciunas (Lithuanian-American (1931–1978) Fluxus Manifesto, 1963
Yoko Ono (Japan, b. 1933) Cut Piece, performance, 1964 (Japan) and (right)1965 (NYC,Carnegie Hall)
Shigeko Kubota (American b Shigeko Kubota (American b. Japan, 1937, married to Nam June Paik) Vagina Painting, performance, July 4th, 1965, New York City, Perpetual Fluxus Festival, (red paint on white paper, paint brush attached to crotch of underpants)
Nam June Paik, 1961 Fluxus Festival of New Music, Weisbaden, German
Nam June Paik (American, b Nam June Paik (American, b. Seoul, Korea, 1932 - 2006) Zen for Head, Fluxus performance, 1962
Nam June Paik and John Cage in Marcel Duchamp and John Cage still from performance video by Shigeko Kubota, 1972
Paik, (left) Zen for TV, 1963 (right) TV Buddha, 1974
Marshall McLuhan Understanding Media, first published in 1964 The period after World War-II in the US is considered the final birth of television. The explosion of sets into the American marketplace occurred in 1948-1949.
Paik (left) began interfering with television images in the early 1960s; (right) TV Magnet, 1965 “Some day artists will work with capacitors, resistors and semi-conductors as they work today with brushes, violins and junk.” Paik
Nam June Paik, (left) TV Bra for Living Sculpture, 1969 (right) Opera Sextronique with Charlotte Moorman (US 1931-1991), 1969
(left) Mooreman, Paik, Joseph Beuys, Fluxus Action, 1966; (left) with Yoko Ono and John Lennon (1971); (right, below) Moorman performing Paik's Concerto for TV Cello and Videotapes (1971) at Galeria Bonino, New York, November 23, 1971
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/global-grove/video/1/ Nam June Paik, Global Groove, 1974; Paik in studio of WGBH, which broadcast Global Groove 'This is a glimpse of a video landscape of tomorrow when you will be able to switch on any TV station on the earth and TV guides will be as fat as the Manhattan telephone book.' - Paik
Paik, Video Fish, 1975, Three channel video installation with aquariums, water, 45 live Japanese fish, Pompidou Center (Paris) collection, 7 of 15 monitors
Paik, Video Flag, (1985-1996) 70 video monitors, 4 laser disc players, computer, timers, electrical devices, wood and metal housing on rubber wheels, 94 3/8 x 139 3/4 x 47 3/4 in.
Nam June Paik in collaboration with Norman Ballard, Paul Garrin, David Hartnett, and Stephen Vitiello, Modulation in Sync, 2000. Three-channel video and stereo sound installation with 100 monitors, seven projectors, two lasers, water, mirrors, projection screens, and metal structure, variable dimensions. Paik retrospective, Guggenheim NYC
Fashion Avenue from Nam June Paik's Suite 212 series, on Seoul Square Media Canvas, 2011. For current exhibition, Mediascape, à pas de Nam June Paik, video series is projected every night onto the huge screen 256 feet high and 325 feet wide: 42,000 LEDs
Laurie Anderson (US b. 1947) Duets on Ice, performance in New York City and Genoa, Italy, 1973-4, playing Bach while wearing ice skates embedded in ice. When ice melted the performance ended. Compare Edouard Manet The Old Musician, 1862, artist as wanderer, rag picker
Laurie Anderson, Performance United States Part II, 1980 The Orpheum, New York; (right) album covers United States I-IV, 1984
Laurie Anderson, United States Part I, 1980, Orpheum Theater Multiple disjunctive narratives. Voice through the harmonizer shifts from “voice of authority (deep, masculine) to female (her own). The woman repeatedly asks “Hello, excuse me, can you tell me where I am?” The response is “You can read the signs.”
Anderson’s United States Part I opens with her modified voice-of-authority reading: A certain American religious sect has been looking at conditions of the world during the Flood. According to their calculations, during the Flood the winds, tides and currents were in an overall southeasterly direction. This would mean that in order for Noah's Ark to have ended up on Mount Ararat, it would have to have started out several thousand miles to the west. This would then locate pre-Flood civilization somewhere in the area of Upstate New York, and the Garden of Eden roughly in New York City. Now, in order to get from one place to another, something must move. No one in New York remembers moving, and there are no traces of Biblical history in the Upstate New York area. So we are led to the only available conclusion in this time warp, and that is that the Ark has simply not left yet.
(below right) Poster from Anderson’s The End of the Moon, 2005, BAM performance (top) at NASA as the agency’s first artist-in-residence, 2004
Doug Aitken, Sleepwalkers, Jan-Feb, 2006, 8 projections on MoMA NYC exterior walls http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJaTjc3TMyo
Video performance: Bruce Nauman, Stamping in the Studio, 1968, 60 minutes (excerpt, 5 minutes) From: Rewind: Video Art and Alternative Media in the United States 1968-1980 Media N 6494.V53 S97 1995 Program 2: “Investigations of the Phenomenal World: Space, Sound, and Light” From Ubuweb: http://www.ubu.com/film/nauman_t.html
Video performance: 1977 Martha Rosler, Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained 38 minutes http://www.ubu.com/film/rosler_vital.html “I did my best to interrupt voyeurism by having a long shot – a stationary shot that fatigues the viewer and diminishes aspects of the character’s presence on the screen. It becomes boring to look at something without camera mobility and without reaction shots. (Rosler, 1981) From: Rewind: Video Art and Alternative Media in the United States 1968-1980 Media N 6494.V53 S97 1995 Program 4: Gendered Confrontations
Video performance: 1978 Nam June Paik, Merce by Merce by Paik 28 minutes A tribute to choreographer Merce Cunningham and artist Marcel Duchamp Video was choreographed for 2-D monitor screen by Cunningham. Audio includes voices of John Cage and Jasper Johns. Part 2 is by Paik and Shigeko Kubota and includes montage-interview with Marcel Duchamp and meeting between Cunningham and Leo Castelli. “I think I understand time better than the video artists who came from painting-sculpture. Music is the manipulation of time. All music forms have different structures and buildup. As painters understand abstract space, I understand abstract time. Nam June Paik, 1974 From: Rewind: Video Art and Alternative Media in the United States 1968-1980 Media N 6494.V53 S97 1995 Program 5: Performance of Video-Imaging Tools
Mona Hatoum (b. 1952) Palestinian-Lebanese based in London. (right) video still from So Much I Want to Say, 1983 Hatoum, Light at the End, 1989, London, iron frame and six electric heating elements
Mona Hatoum, still from Measures of Distance, 15-minute video, 1988
Shirin Neshat, Iranian based in New York – 2 photographs from 1994 Women of Allah series; right: Allegiance with Wakefulness, ink on photograph of artist’s feet with feminist Farsi poetry.
Shirin Neshat, still from The Shadow under the Web, film transferred to DVD and projected as installation, 1997. Neshat synthesizes new image technology; Iranian, American, and European film aesthetics; the poetry, music and songs of her homeland, and the global fusion sounds of Phillip Glass. Two years after producing this work she was declared an enemy of the Iranian state.
“Leaving has offered me incredible personal development, a sense of independence that I don't think I would have had. But there's also a great sense of isolation. And I've permanently lost a complete sense of center. I can never call any place home. I will forever be in a state of in-between.” - Neshat, 2000