The introduction of low-cost videotape equipment in the mid-1960s allowed the noncommercial use of video to proliferate. Artists began exploring new alternatives to the by-then-rote format of television, using video as an interactive medium that focuses on creating its own reality,... [more]

The introduction of low-cost videotape equipment in the mid-1960s allowed the noncommercial use of video to proliferate. Artists began exploring new alternatives to the by-then-rote format of television, using video as an interactive medium that focuses on creating its own reality, rather than being entertaining. Video artists present viewers with art as an object more than ephemeral image, with art that exists spatially, not just temporally. Through projection and the positioning of monitors, Video artists invade and manipulate space, aggressively encroaching on the viewer. Vito Acconci's "Ten-Point Plan for Video" demonstrates his idea that the monitor is a pole on the axis of a face-to-face relationship between artist and audience: onscreen he faces the viewer outside the screen. What Acconci articulates is the way in which Video art forces us to reevaluate our position. Are we as viewers implicated in the situation with the subject, or do we stand in front of a situation that is solely about that subject? Video works by Nam June Paik, Ant Farm, Dara Birnbaum, and Martha Rosler regularly intervene in the gap between our bodies and the images that condition our responses to the world around us. Playing with that distance in his large works, Paik deploys numerous monitors showing varying subjects. The "fun houses" he creates use images to alter our sense of environment. In contrast, Bill Viola erects environments around his taped images to enhance the total art experience. Here the video monitor is a body double, an object through which we watch our own dreams, fears, lives, and deaths. As a medium, video can support art forms from Installation to Performance art; the common thesis it proposes is that, while images surround and pervade us, we can watch actively and selectively, ultimately directing our own sequences. [show less]