From Gadget Video to Agit Video: Some Notes on Four Recent Video Works

Abstract

The usage of video technology in artistic practice since the mid sixties has undergone rapid and drastic changes. This makes it a particularly significant topic for the study of the shifts to which art in general has been subjected since the conclusion of post-Minimal and Conceptual art, the context within which video production established itself firmly as a valid practice of representation-production. These changes concern not only the affiliations of art practice with other discourses (film, television, advertising) but also the conditions of its institutional containment (video's implicit and explicit claim to lead the way out of the vicious circle of gallery and museum institution straight into the mythical public sphere of broadcast television) as well as its audience relationship (opening and broadening audiences, addressing very specific audiences at the site and the moment of their conditions and needs).

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Notes on contributors

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, an art historian and critic, is Assistant Professor of Art History at the State University of New York, Old Westbury, instructor at the School of Visual Arts, and editor of the Nova Scotia Series. He received the 1985 Frank Jewett Mather Award for distinction in art criticism.