From Performance to Video/Electronic/Film-based Art "The artist is a visionary about life. Only he can create disorder and still get away with it. Only he can use technology to its fullest capacity. The artists have to use technology because technology is becoming inseparable from lives." – Billy Klüver

In 1966, Swedish engineer Billy Klüver founded E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology) with Robert Rauschenberg, Fred Waldhauer, and Robert Whitman. (below) Robert Rauschenberg and Billy Klüver, Soundings, 1968, audience claps and makes lights go on and off behind plexiglass panels. Ludwig Museum, Cologne

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. 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 (American, b. Seoul, Korea, ) Zen for Head, Fluxus performance, 1962

Nam June Paik, 1961 Fluxus Festival of New Music, Weisbaden, German

Nam June Paik and John Cage in Marcel Duchamp and John Cage still from performance video by Shigeko Kubota, 1972

Nam June 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

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 ), 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

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

Nam June Paik, Video Flag, ( ) 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, 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

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 Media N 6494.V53 S Program 2: “Investigations of the Phenomenal World: Space, Sound, and Light”

Video performance: 1977 Martha Rosler, Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained 38 minutes “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 Media N 6494.V53 S 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 Media N 6494.V53 S Program 5: Performance of Video-Imaging Tools

Doug Aitken (California b.1968) Sleepwalkers, Jan-Feb, 2007, 8 projections on MoMA NYC exterior walls

Doug Aitken, Song I, video projection on the outside of the Hirshhorn museum, Washington, DC, March 22, 2012 to May 13, Using eleven high-definition video projectors, Aitken redefines cinematic space. Visitors to the National Mall will see the first-ever work of 360-degree convex-screen cinema.

Laurie Anderson (US b. 1947) Duets on Ice, street performance in New York City and Genoa, Italy, , playing Bach while wearing ice skates embedded in ice. When ice melted the performance ended.

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.”

(below right) Poster from Anderson’s The End of the Moon, 2005, performance (top) at NASA as the agency’s first artist-in-residence, 2004

Hatoum, Light at the End, 1989, London, iron frame and six electric heating elements Mona Hatoum (b. 1952) Palestinian- Lebanese based in London (right) video still from So Much I Want to Say, 1983

Mona Hatoum, still from Measures of Distance, 15-minute video, 1988

hatoum_creation

Mona Hatoum, Current Disturbance, 1996, visitor hears the electric current feeding flashing lightbulbs in a minimalist structure of metal cages. The bulbs light up and fade out at irregular intervals, illuminating the room and the mass of wiring on the floor, creating a sense of physical threat, a commentary on the dangers of contemporary separation and connection. Postminimalist detail

Mona Hatoum, Bunker, steel tubing, maximum height, 15 ft. White Cube, London 2011, Postminimalist Detail showing “bullet-holes”

Mona Hatoum, Suspended, chain swings with maps of capital cities incised on the seats White Cube, London 2011, postminimalist installation

Pipilotti Rist, I’m not the girl who misses much, Pipilotti Rist (Swiss b. 1963) "Ever is all over" video installation (two overlapping projections), 1997 Museum of Modern Art, New York, # #

Pipilotti Rist, Selfless In The Bath Of Lava, 1994, audio video installation (video still) PS1 Long Island City, New York. Tiny screen under the floorboards near the entrance

Pipilotti Rist: Pour Your Body Out, video/audio installation at MoMA NYC 2008

Tania Bruguera (b Havana, Cuba) Poetic Justice, , video Installation, used tea bags, 8 one- second selection from several international historic newsreels, 8 LCD screens, 8 DVD discs, 8 DVD players | 62.33' x 6.2' x 11.8'

Tania Bruguera, Poetic Justice (details), , video Installation

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, 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