Reading Assignment: “Introduction,” New Media in the Late 20th-Century Art, Michael Rush

 Prompt: For each readings (3 total in the course) you will be responsible for responding to questions posed by the instructor. Pick two questions out of the three listed. Each question response should be approximately one paragraph. Reading responses are due by the in-class discussion. These responses will help guide our in-class conversations on the readings. 

 

1) How does time-based art in the 20th-Century question the long tradition of painting as the privileged medium of representation?

2) Why was Marcel Duchamp’s approach to art so groundbreaking?

3) How were/are artists experimentally approaching art? Give an example from the reading.

Choose two questions to answer

New Media in Art
Second edition

26

7

i l lustrations, 124 in color

� Thames&. Hudson world of art

To Nikos Stangos, in memoriam

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank numerous colleagues who have shared their
breadth of knowledge with me over several years, including
Chrissie lies, Christine van Assche, Lori Zippay, Galen Joseph­
Hunter, Berta Sichel, John Hanhardt, Magda Sa won, Dominique
Nahas, Barbara London and so many artists, to name a few, Vito
Acconci, Carolee Schneemann, Martha Rosier, Michal Rovner,
Douglas Gordon, Gary Hill, Thomas Hirschhorn, Grahame
Weinbren. Special thanks to my editors at the New York Times,
Annette Grant, and Art in America, Betsy Baker; to Electronic Arts
Intermix, to Julia MacKenzie and the staff at Thames & Hudson,
especially editor Andrew Brown. Thanks as well to AI Sabatini,
Bill Castellino, and Lily.

1-3. (title page) Pipilotti Rist,

three stills from I’m not the Girl Who Misses Much, 1 986.

© 199

9

and 2005 Thames & Hudson Ltd , London

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced

or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and

retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

First published in 1999 in paperback in the United States of America by

Thames & Hudson Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 101

10

thamesandhudsonusa.com

Second edition 2005

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 20031089

27

I S B N -13: 978-0 -500-20378-1

I S B N-10: 0 -500-20378-4

The first edition of this book was published under the title

New Media in Late 20th-Century Art.

Designed by John Morgan

Typeset by Omnific

Printed and bound in Singapore by C.S. Graphics

4. Richard Prince,

My Best, 1996.

Words and paint have appeared

on canvases since the early part

of the twentieth century, but what

is not immediately apparent in

this painting by Richard Prince is

that the bundles of intertwining

lines took shape in his computer

and were then silk-screened onto

the canvas.

Introduction

One of the characteristic perceptions of twentieth-century art was

its persistent tendency to question the long tradition of painting

as the privileged medium of representation. Early in the century

Braque’s and Picasso’s determination to incorporate everyday

material in their paintings, such as newsprint, tablecloth fringe,

or rope, was expressive of their struggle to extend the content

of the canvas beyond paint. This ‘struggle with the canvas’

pointed the way for scores of twentieth-century artists, from the

Russians Malevich and Tatlin, to Pollock at mid-century, to a

painter such as Richard Prince (b. 1949) whose abstractions take

shape in a computer before they are painted onto the canvas.

Abstraction, Surrealism, and Conceptualism, to name but a few

twentieth-century forms, all participated in a profound questioning

of traditional painting.

This perception, while apt in some ways, is too generalized

and does not tell us enough about the breadth of practices intro­

duced in the last century. Another characterization of the period

focuses on the ‘experimental’ nature of its art: artists bursting

from the shells of painting and sculpture in a huge variety of ways

and incorporating new materials into their work; paintings affixed

with readymade objects or fragments of objects representing

everyday life; shifts in focus away from ‘objective’ representation

to personal expression; uses of new technological media to render

meaning and new ideas of time and space. ‘All art is experimental,’

US film and video critic Gene Youngblood wrote, ‘or it isn’t art.’

The speed with which the twentieth century created an elec­

tronically linked planet is reflected in the swift expansion of art

practices beyond traditional painting and sculpture to an almost

frantic inclusion of everyday things into the arena of art. Anything

that can be parsed as a subject or a noun has probably been includ­

ed in a work of art somewhere by someone. This inclusiveness

bespeaks a central preoccupation of the contemporary artist, which

is to find the best possible means of making a personal statement in

art. Following a complex psychological path laid down by Nietzsche

and Freud that places the subject at the center of history, art, too

has become entwined with ‘the personal’. This view, championed

by, among others, Marcel Duchamp, put the artist at the very

core of the artistic enterprise in a new way. No longer under the

7

gravitational pull of the canvas, the artist was free to express any

concept through whatever means possible. This concept can relate

to the history of art, to the politics of the day, or to the politics of

the self The manner in which expression is conveyed and the

means used to achieve it have led to such a proliferation of materi­

als that one critic, Arthur Dan to, has declared ‘the end of art’ as we

have known it. ‘It came to an end,’ he writes, ‘when art, as it were,

recognized that there was no special way a work of art had to be.’

The final avant-garde of the twentieth century was that art

that engaged the most enduring revolution of a century of revolu­

tions: the technological revolution. Initiated by inventions outside

the world of art, technology-based art (encompassing a range of

practices from photography to film to video to virtual reality, and

much else in between) has directed art into areas once dominated

by engineers and technicians.

Curiously, while new technology itself involves a plenitude

of machines, wires, and dense mathematical and physical com­

ponents, the art that has been born from the art-and-technology

marriage is perhaps the most ephemeral art of all: the art of time.

A photograph is said to capture and preserve a moment of time; an

image created inside a computer resides in no place or time at all.

Images, scanned into a computer, then edited, montaged, erased,

or scrambled, can seem to collapse the normal barriers of past,

present, and future.

Of all the new materials introduced into art since the mid­

twentieth century, this book will explore the dominant trends in

media and performance, video art, video installation and digital

art, including photographic manipulations, virtual reality and

other interactive forms. Not daunted by technological change,

artists who employ these new media see themselves as part of the

change and want to participate in it. They are excited by the possi-

8

5. Etienne-Jules Marey,

Gymnast Jumping over
a Chair, 1883.

bilities of technology, not alienated by them. Film and television

have informed their everyday experience, but unlike those who

pursue commercialized uses of technologies, these artists seek to

make personal statements without regard for the commodity

value of what they do. Like other artists who work in paint or wood

or steel, these artists explore, and often subvert, both the critical

and technological potentials of the new media. That technological

advances have come from some of the artists who have probed the

uses of media in their work is itself an interesting by-product.

While the use of new media in art does have a history, it is not easi­

ly delineated. This history has yet to be written, largely because it

is always developing. This does not mean that we cannot attempt

a history, or at least a synthesis of different approaches to this his­

tory; for it is art history’s duty to suggest links and point the way

toward historical understanding, even within the confines of what

must be a limited overview.

The simplest way to trace a history of new media in art would

be through the development of the technology itself (from, say,

Marey and Muybridge in photography, to Edison and the Lumiere

brothers in film, and so on) but then all we would have is a timeline

similar to the one devoted to the development of aviation. While

certain key artists and movements in twentieth-century art pre­

sent themselves as precursors to artists who work in technologi­

cal media (what branch of contemporary art, for example, would

not claim Marcel Duchamp as a predecessor?) with this art no

straightforward linear narrative is possible. Not only are we still

in the midst of the story, the story itself began and continues with

simultaneous activities among different kinds of artists in sepa­

rate parts of the world. For these reasons a thematic approach

seems more appropriate than a strictly chronological one.

9

6. Eadweard Muybridge,

Descending Stairs and Turning
Around from the series Animal
Locomotion, 1884-85.

11

7. Eadweard Muybridge,
La Nature: Studies in Animal

. Locomotion, 1878.

Time Art

After the mid- 1960s, as critic and curator Anne-Marie Duguet has

said, ‘Time emerged not only as a recurrent theme but also as a

constituent parameter of the very nature of an art work.’ With the

emergence of performances, events, Happenings, installations,

then videos, the temporality of the art form was central. Currently,

computer-based interactive art supplies and requires a suspension

of time as the viewer enters into a contract with the machine that

inaugurates and sustains the art action.

The story of media art is inextricably linked to developments

in photography throughout the century. Time and memory, both

personal and historical, are the substance of photography; and

with the still and moving image, artists and amateurs were intro­

duced to a new way of visualizing time. Representation clearly

involves space (the space occupied by the object represented and

the space of the painting or sculpture itself; the placement of

the image, etc.); but less clear is time, and this is where the

revolution wrought by photography and its now bigger cousin,

moving photography, film, assumes its place of importance. With

photography, humans began to participate in the manipulation of

time itself: capturing it, reconfiguring it, and creating variations

on it with time lapses, fast forward, slow motion, and all those

other time-related phrases which are proper to the art and science

of photography.

The French philosopher Henri Bergson’s ( 1859- 1941) study

of ‘time’ strongly influenced artists of all stripes: photographers,

painters, writers, choreographers, videographers. Bergson placed

time at the center of metaphysics; for him, reality consisted of flux,

essentially the movement of time. ‘The essence of time is that it

goes by,’ he wrote in his immensely influential book, Matter and

Memory ( 1896). ‘What I call “my present” has one foot in my past,
and another in the future.’ These notions were seized upon by

artists and critics, and throughout the Western world even popu­

lar magazines would discuss Be•·gson’s notions of time because

they addressed a universal hunger tor understanding. For artists,

who had always been fascinated with the body in space and time, he

became a muse who championed the interaction between intuition

and perception. Ironically, potent as his ideas were for artists,

Bergson disdained the introduction of technology into the arts,

believing that the pure perception allowed by intuition, unaided by

machines, was what mattered.

From the beginnings of photography, however, art and

technology co-existed in an essential bond that has benefitted

/2

8. Giacomo Balla, Dynamism
of a Dog on a Leash,

19

12.
Balla creates the i l lusion of

motion th rough a series of

min ute, radiating diagonals.

both for more than one hundred years. Etienne-Jules Marey

( 183(}- 1904 ), a scientist and physician whose tenure at the College

de France overlapped with Bergson’s in the early 1900s, and

Eadweard Muybridge ( 183(}-1904), an artist, were the pioneers

of instantaneous photography, or ‘chronophotography,’ which

had a profound effect on artists, from Futurists, especially

Giacomo Balla, to Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters, and

mid-century avant-garde filmmakers like Hollis Frampton and

Stan Brakhage. Seurat, Degas and many other artists were also

taken with the camera’s ability to capture successive movement

in still frames, but their interest was not directly obvious in

their canvases. Artists like the Futurists who propounded a

mechanistic aesthetic embraced photographic technology and

applied it to their painting. Towards mid-century, as we shall

see, it was the technological advances in film and video that

were adopted by artists to create what we know now as multi­

media art.

14

Muybridge’s 1878 photographs of horses in motion were the

first to capture what looked like the actual, discrete sequence of

motion. Muybridge devised the means of portraying the speed of a

horse’s running by the action of several cameras (in this case,

twelve) set up in a row and arranged to go off in sequence as the

horse ran by. He attached a piece of string to the shutter and

extended it across the horse’s path. As the horse ran in front of

Muybridge’s cameras the shutters were released by the horse’s

movements over the string, each making an image at 1/200th of a

second. The resulting images, when placed next to each other,

showed the horse in what appeared to be continuous rapid move­

ment. Muybridge went on to use as many as twenty-four cameras

in his attempts to perfect the capturing of motion. The results of

his efforts comprise the eleven-volume Studies in Animal Locomotion

( 1888). Initially, his photographs were intended as adjuncts to sci­

entific studies, but quickly they were adopted by artists in their

studies of human and animal motion.

In 19 1 1, the Futurist Carlo Carra depicted motion in Funeral

if the Anarchist Galli and in 1912 Giacomo Balla pain ted the extra­

ordinary Dynamism if a Dog on a Leash. Umberto Boccioni, like

them, turned to photographic studies to learn how the portrayal of

movement is realized through repetition. His Dynamism if a Cyclist

( 19 13) offers proof of the drama in dynamic sequencing of images.

Marcel Duchamp’ s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 ( 19 12),

one of the most controversial paintings of its time, took direct

inspiration from several of Muybridge’s studies, perhaps especial­

ly Ascending and Descending Stairs ( 1884-85), in which a woman

can be seen carrying a water bucket up, then down, the stairs.

Film and Avant-Garde Cinema I

As revolutionary as these ‘studies in time’ may have appeared,

another means of capturing movement was evolving across the

Atlantic that would mark the emergence of one of the major artis­

tic influences of the twentieth century: cinema. Both popular and

avant-garde cinema of the early century were to have a profound

impact on media art of the mid-century.

Cinema was developed in the laboratories of American inven­

tor Thomas Edison ( 1847- 1931) who assigned his assistant

William Kennedy Laurie Dickson ( 186()-1935) to use the phono­

graph as a model for making moving images that could be watched

through a viewer. In 1890, Dickson made a moving image camera

called the Kinetograph, followed a year later by the Kinetoscope

viewer. By 1895, several innovators, starting with the Lumiere

15

10

9. (above) Eadweard Muybridge,

Ascending and Descending Stairs
from the series Animal
Locomotion, 1884-85.

‘”‘

10. (right) Marcel Duchamp,

Nude Descending a Staircase,
No.2, 1912.
Duchamp abstracted Muybridge’s

studies in motion in his own explorations

of time and the fourth dimension.

brothers, had projected filmed images onto screens for a

paying public. In quick succession, Frenchman George Melies

(1861-1938), often referred to as ‘the first screen artist,’ intro­

duced dissolves, time-lapse photography, and artful lighting (the

essence of cinematography) in films such as Cinderella ( 1899) and

The Dreyfus Affair (1899). Looking very much like an out-take

from a 1950s science fiction film, Melies’s A Trzp to the Moon, 1902,

shows a ‘rocket’ landing in the eye of the ‘man in the moon.’ In

1903, Edwin S. Porter from Edison’s lab made The Great Train

Robbery in which editing techniques were used for the first time to

establish continuity and to create narrative tension.

The art of film attracted several practitioners right away who

made lasting contributions to the form. As early as 1915, the

American D. W Griffith ( 187 5-1948) made his epic The Birth if the

Nation followed only a year later by Intolerance, an interweaving of

four narratives exposing the dangers of hypocrisy throughout

history. Other early directors whose work is still referenced by

artists in international cinema would include Frenchmen Louis

Feuillade and Abel Gance (1889-1981), the Germans F. W

Murnau (1888-1931) and Fritz Lang (189(}-197G), the Swede

Victor Sjostrom, the British-born Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977)

and the Russian Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948).

Eisenstein’s work is a clear product of the dynamic interplay

between art, technology and life during the Soviet avant-garde

period (roughly from 1915 to 1932). He represented a new type of

media artist who had training in mathematics, engineering and

art, and was for several years in his youth a theater designer with

Russian avant-garde director Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940).

Eisenstein, expressing his links to Constructivism and Cubism,

perfected the techniques of cinematic montage (initiated by D. W

Griffith), which enabled him to manipulate emotional responses

through the vibrant processes of film editing. Eisenstein sought

new ways of seeing which would parallel the new world image

under Marxism. His art has clearly outlived the political struggle

that nurtured it. Film critic Stanley Kaufman, writing about The

Battleship Potemkin ( 19

25

), noted that Eisen tein ‘felt that a new
society meant a new kind of vision; that the way people saw things

must be altered; that it was insufficient to put new material before

old eyes.’

In a certain sense, given his background in the technology

of engineering, Eisenstein is the perfect paradigm for the techno­

logical artist. He thought of his cinema as totally utilitarian, ratio­

nal, and materialistic, claiming that he merely applied what he

18

11. Sergei Eisenstein, sti l l from

The Battleship Potemkin, 1925.
Artist and engineer Sergei

Eisenstein joined the precision

of science with the vision of art

in films that he felt advanced the

cause of the Bolshevik Revolution.

learned in mathematics and engineering to the making of his films.

If the Russian avant-garde can be characterized by the tension

between Vladimir Tatlin’s view of art as an industrial process

and Kazimir Malevich and Vasily Kandinsky’s aesthetically

based ‘pure feeling’ of art, Eisenstein would side with Tatlin.

Nonetheless, long after its utility had passed (as a tool for exciting

support among the masses for the Revolution) his film The

Battleship Poternkln, for example, is heralded for the sheer energy of

its emotional peaks and unflinching vision and artistry.

Eisenstein’s dynamic images, accomplished by varied camera

angles and sophisticated montage editing, owe much to the frag­

mented shapes of Cubism, in which multiple views of reality (seen

simultaneously as if from above and from the side in repetitive

layerings) allowed for multiple understandings of reality. This key

aspect of modernism, enhancing perception by altering it, found a

home in Russian photography and cinematography of the 1920s

and 1930s. Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov ( 1896- 1954 ), though

overshadowed in history by Eisenstein, was equally influential in

his development of montage techniques for his politically charged

films such as The Man with the Movie Carnera( 1929). 12

During the same period, the century-long tradition of avant­

garde film in France was taking hold, strongly influenced by the

writings of Louis Delluc ( 189(}- 1924) who called for a ‘pure’ cine­

ma, equal to a ‘symphonic poem based on images,’ as distinct from

the melodramas that were then dominating American, French,

and German films. Abstract art, cubism, and collage all made an

appearance in films by visual artists Man Ray (Return to Reason, 1923)

19

12. Dziga Vertov ,

sti l l from The Man with
the Movie Camera, 1929.
Along with Eisenstein ,

Dziga Vertov created ‘dialectical

montage,’ or a use of mu ltiple

images aimed at ‘liberating

the sight of the masses’ in the

new Russia.

and Fernand Leger (Le Balletmecanique, 1924 ), as well as filmmak­

ers Rene Clair (Entr’acte, 1924) and Luis Buliuel (L’Age d’or, made

with Salvador Dali, 1930). Abel Gance perhaps best represented

Dulac’s ‘cinematic poem’ in films such as Dr Tube’s Mania (1915),

J’accuse(1919), La Roue(1922), and especially his magnum opus,

Napoleon ( 1927). Other examples of early avant-garde cinema

include the German Expressionist classic The Cabinet of Dr

Caligari ( 1919), directed by Robert Wiene, and A Page if Madness

( 1926) by Japanese director Teinosuke Kinugasa.

Thus, by the beginning of the twentieth century, the photo­

graphy of images of movement, first achieved by Muybridge in

1878, had evolved into the ‘illusion’ of mechanically produced

movement which is cinema. Within a few short years an aesthetic

of the poetic image developed and the captured (or filmed) image,

aided by the still photography of Laszl6 Moholy-Nagy and his

peer Alfred Stieglitz, assumed an undeniable legitimacy as an art

form. Art and technology, as represented by still photography

and cinema, were becoming forever entwined as the thematic

dichotomy between art and life gradually dissolved in the face of

ubiquitous machines.

As cinema became more and more dominated by Hollywood

from the late 1920s and into the 1940s the international avant­

garde languished somewhat until its renewal in the US in the

1950s. Meanwhile, the visual arts were undergoing radical trans­

formations under the influence of European Dada, especially as

practised by Marcel Duchamp ( 1887-1968), whose importance to

the issue of art and new media is central.

’20

13. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy,

Lightprop, 1922,
from the fi lm fin Lichtspiel:
Schwarz/Weiss/Grau
(Light Play: Black/White/Grey),

1922-30.

Duchamp to Cage to Fluxus

How one feels about Marcel Duchamp is, essentially, how one feels

about a great deal of contemporary art, so profound was his influ­

ence. He stepped outside any confining notion of art, and with his

readymades (the wheels, shovels, coat racks he chose to exhibit as

art), forced the question ‘What is art?’ to its deepest level. Duchamp

produced a prodigious body of work extending from painting, to

mixed media (The Large Glass, also known as TheBrideStrippedBare 15

by Her Bachelors, Even, 1915-

23

), to installation ( Etant donnes,

1946-66), to film (Anemic Cinema, 1926). Duchamp’s radical shift of 14

emphasis from object to concept allowed for multiple methods to be

introduced to a redefined artistic enterprise. His importance to the

present study rests not only in what he did but in what he allowed or

initiated in art. The type of thinking he encouraged made explo-

21

14. (above) Marcel Duchamp,

Optical disc No. 1 0 from
Anemic Cinema, 1925-26.

15. (right) Marcel Duchamp,

The Large Glass (The Bride
Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors
Even), 19 15-23.
For Duchamp, everyday objects

like the chocolate grinder (visible

in the lower portion of this

work on glass) , replete with its

manufactured geometrical design,

l i berated him from ‘the cubist

straitjacket,’ as he called it.

rations into different media and artistic forms seem very natural,

almost expected. Especially for those who found the ‘business’ of art

so distasteful, Duchamp’s liberal approach to materials and forms

detached the object from commercial appeal, at least initially,

because it was the idea that was important; and it was not yet clear

how to sell an idea. (Later Conceptual artists, properly so called, like

Sol LeWitt, Donald .Judd and .Joseph Kosuth, figured out a way.)

For artists of the late 1950s and 1960s who were in one way or

another influenced by Duchamp in their thinking about what con­

stituted art, no material seemed out of place as a means of personal

expression . .Joseph Beuys ( 192 1-86) – who criticized Duchamp tor

his lack of political engagement – exhibited felt suits; Robert

Rauschenberg affixed pillows and quilts to canvases.

By the late 1950s the time was right tor an artistic iconoclast

like Duchamp to exert wide influence, especially in America,

22

16. (below) Joseph Beuys,

Felt Suit, 1970.

17. (below right) Robert

Rauschenberg, Bed, 1955.

where he had settled permanently after the Second World War.

Younger American artists had wearied of the hegemony of

Abstract Expressionism whose rugged, gestural style had become

synonymous with American art. There was a restlessness in the

art world that was manifested in the emergence of Pop art and

the multimedia experiments of John Cage ( 19 12�92) and his

Black Mountain College collaborators: Robert Rauschenberg,

dancer/choreographer Merce Cunningham, and musician David

Tudor. Furthermore, by 1950 the important writings of Euro­

pean and American Dadaists, including Duchamp, had been col­

lected and published by Robert Motherwell and were becoming

well known.

Cage, with his own synthesis of Eastern philosophy and

experimental music (inherited from Arnold Schonberg, among

others), began having a great influence on younger artists through

23

his teaching at Black Mountain, then at the N ew School for Social

Research in New York, where his classes on new music attract­

ed future performance artists like Allan Kaprow (b. 1927) and

Richard Higgins (b. 1938). Based on his studies of the I Ching

(Book rif Changes) and Zen Buddhism, Cage emphasized the

element of ‘chance’ in art as a valid way of making a work. His

music compositions incorporated ambient noises from the street,

sounds produced by pounding on the wood and strings of a piano,

and, uniquely, silence (4′ 33″, 1952). His notions became epito­
mized in the choroegraphy of his companion Merce Cunningham

whose intricate dance steps reflect the essence of non-sequential

movement exercizes.

Armed with notions of art as an idea and the role of chance in

life and art, artists were ready for a new explosion of creativity as

epitomized by Fluxus, an ‘intermedia’ movement that flourished

in the 1960s and inaugurated several innovations in perfor­

mance, film, and, eventually, video. Fluxus was an international

movement of artists, writers, filmmakers, and musicians under

the leadership of George Maciunas ( 193 1-7 8), the Lithuanian­

born provocateur who organized the early Fluxus events, first at

AG Gallery in New York ( 196 1) and then at festivals in Europe

starting in 1962. Similar in spirit to Dada (Maciunas’s manifesto

described it as ‘Neo-Dada in music, theater, poetry, art’), Fluxus,

as an avant-garde, was anti-art, particularly art as the exclusive

property of museums and collectors. It made jabs at the serious­

ness of high modernism and attempted, following Duchamp, to

aflirm what the Fluxists felt to be an essential link between

everyday objects and events and art. They made this notion man­

ifest in minimal, yet acessible performances. A Fluxus event, as

defined by German- American artist George Brecht, was the

smallest unit of a situation. One, devised by artist Mieko Shiomi,

was described as ‘an open event.’ The event was simply ‘an invi­

tation to open something which is closed.’ Participants were

asked to write down exactly what happened during their ‘event.’

This simple charge became a statement against the loftiness of

museum art as well as a participatory action as people gathered

to perform it.

Similarly minimal music compositions, referred to as ‘scores’

by John Cage, stripped all artifice
.
from the orchestral or perfor­

mance setting and required only attention to a minute detail.

LaMonte Young’s (b. 1935) Piano Piece for David Tudor #’2( 1960)
consisted of this direction: ‘Open the keyboard cover without mak­

ing, from the operation, any sound that is audible to you. Try as

’24

many times as you like.’ These minimal instructions, present in all

Fluxus performances, whether of a so-called musical nature or

not, opened the event to multiple interpretations as well as

accidents. Anything could happen during one of these events,

resulting in chance occurrences and the desired multiple interpre­

tations. Audience membet·s became participants (or co-conspira­

tors), no longer passive observers. Fluxus events thus became the

perfect embodiments of Duchamp’s dictum that the viewer com­

pletes the work of art. Indeed, with Fluxus, the viewer not only

completes, but actually becomes the work of art in his or her direct

participation in the event.

A minimal aesthetic began to develop, inherited from concrete

poetry, Dada manifestos and experimental music, and extended to

film as well, becoming an important element in the development of

media art. Fluxfilms, as they are referred to, comprise approxi­

mately forty short films created by several of the at·tists (lew of

them filmmakers) associated with Fluxus. Nam June Paik’s Zen 19

for Film (1962-64), a prototypical Fluxus film, was presented

at the Fluxhall (Maciunas’s loft on New York’s Canal Street).

Actually an early installation (a tableau consisting of a home

movie screen, an upright piano, and double bass), Paik’s film

turned its back to the entire mechanism of lat·ge scale movie­

making (from expensive film stock to lights, sets, optical etl’ects

editing, marketing, etc.). The film was nothing more than approxi­

mately one thousand feet of clear 16-millimetre leader projected,

unprocessed, onto the screen with a running time of thirty min-

utes. Stripping film to its barest essential (the film stock itself),

Paik’s image less projection became the minimalist example for all

Fluxfilms to follow.

American film writer and curator Bruce Jenkins makes the

cogent observation that Paik, in subverting the usual expectations

of film viewing, ‘instilled a performative aspect into the screening

context and, in the process, liberated the viewer from the manipu­

lations of both the commercial and the alternative cinema.’

Without images or sound, Paik’s film became a tabula rasa tor the

viewer’s free associations. With each additional screening of the

film, scratches, dust, and other chance events of film projection

inevitably occurred, thus rendering the film new, in a certain way,

each time.

Flux us artist and photographer Peter Moore (b. 1932), using a

high-speed, slow motion camera, made Disappearing Music for Face

( 1966). Based on another performance score by Mieko Shiomi

(which, in toto, reads: ‘Performers begin the piece with a smile and

25

18. (above) Yoko Ono, Filmstrip
from Film No. 1 (Fiuxfilm No.14!
-Lighting Piece, 1955/l966

19. (below) Nam June Paik,

Zen for Film, 1964.
The spare aesthetic of Minimalism

was adopted even by the

iconoclastic artists of Fluxus. Here

Nam June Pa ik projected clear

film leader inside a television set.

during the duration of the piece, change the smile very gradually

to no-smile’) the film featured Yoko Ono (b. 19.’3.’3), another Fluxus

artist. Ono’s mouth, chin, and cheeks are seen in close-up, reveal­

ing the minute changes in expression that occur during the film.

Shot in only eight seconds of film time, when projected in slow

motion, it ran for eleven minutes.

Another fragment of Ono’s face, this time her right eye, is fea­

tured in Eyeblink (c. 19G 1 ), which, as its title suggests, is the most

minimal of all acts. Ono’s own film, No. 1 (c. 1964), recalling the
still photographs of Harold Edgerton, features a slow-burning

match, suggesting perhaps the dangerous underside of even the

most minimal act.

By 196(;, Flux us had produced a body of films that, in their ele­

mental nature (also referred to as essentialist), called into question

all of the common associations viewers bring to the watching of a

film, including being the one observed (as Ono stares into the cam­

era at the end of Disappearing Music for Face). George Maciunas

made his own film, 10 Feet( 1966), consisting entirely of ten feet of
clear lead. Other Fluxfilms included George Brecht’s Entry-Exit

( 19()5), which consisted of a shot of the word ‘Entrance’ on a plain

white wall which gradually fades to dark then lightens to reveal

the word ‘Exit,’ and James Riddle’s Nine Minutes ( 1966), in which

stencilled numbers appear on the black screen every minute.

26

While Flux films are generally considered critiques of main­

stream and even avant-garde film, they also generated a new ener­

gy in filmmaking with their simplicity and playfulness. From our

remove, it is clear that Fluxfilms like Paik’s Zen for Film or Michael

Snow’s Wavelength ( 1969), though ostensibly concerned with the

31

essentials of film and film technique, are, in themselves, highly

poetic and meditative works. Though nothing in art or life seemed

sacred to them, Fluxists found meaning in the everyday material

of their art (whether it be their bodies, or the strings of their

pianos, or the leader of their film).

Some of the targets of the Fluxists, in terms of film, were the

tremendously influential new wave French filmmakers, especially

Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930), and the American Stan Brakhage (b.

1933). With Godard representing the political/poetic art film and 27

Brakhage the personal/poetic, their films comprise what to the

Fluxists were the elitist st1·ategies of both poles of the avant­

garde. Not everyone was Fluxist, however, and avant-garde cine-

ma thrived in the middle oft he twentieth century as it had earlier.

Film and Avant-Garde Cinema II

The fervor for cinematic experimentation reached a peak in the

1950s and 1960s, first in the United States, then in France. The

Eastman Kodak Company had released 16-millimetre film for

amateur use in 1923, but even it was too expensive for most inde­

pendent artists. As its use became more commonplace hy mid-cen­

tury, artists, though still relatively few in number, began to make

films. Among the most influential are the Americans Stan

Brakhage, Kenneth Anger, Hollis Frampton, Maya Deren (born in

Russia), Jack Smith, Bruce Conner, Marie Menken, Andy Warhol,

Pat O’Neill, Jordan Belson, and John Whitney, the Canadian

Michael Snow and the Greek-American Gregm·y Markopoulos.

In his Allegories qf Cinema ( 1989), American film historian

David James noted that most of these filmmakers, several of whom

had migrated into filmmaking from other media, brought issues

that preoccupied painters to film. Among these he included the

representation of motion and duration; and the expression of

‘extraordinary psychological states.’ While the latter could be

said of any art form (poetry, fiction, drama), the former resulted

from the originating tactics of the technology of photography.

The technology improved when artists adopted it but the

20. Mieko (Chieko) Shiomi,

Disappearing Music for Face, 1966.

27

technology came first. As we shall see in later chapters, James indi­

cates that artists who came to technological media from other

forms often transferred their painterly or sculptural concerns to

the new medium, whether film, video, or digital art. Naturally,

other artists have engaged new media from the start, not as a

secondary practice.

Markopoulos and Warhol will serve as good examples of each

approach. Gregory Markopoulos (1928-92), who as a teenager

studied with Hollywood director Josef von Sternberg, represents

the filmmaker as poet, a phrase one might also use to describe Stan

Brakhage. By eighteen Markopoulos had begun shooting what is

still considered a classic of avant-garde cinema, the trilogy, Du

Sang, De La Volupte, et De La Mort (Of Blood, Pleasure, and Death,

1947-48). In subsequent films such as Swain (1950), Twice a Man

( 1963 ), and The Mysteries ( 1968 ), he made original use of color,

composition, rhythm, and fractured temporal structures. Often

inspired by classic works of Greek mythology, Markopoulos’s

films explored abstract narratives with an economy of means that

incorporated his own inventions, including in-camera editing,

a radical approach based on the single frame rather than the

single shot. The Illiac Passion (1964-67), based on Aeschylus’s 23

Prometheus Bound, featured several well known underground per­

sonalities of the 1960s cast as mythical figures: Andy Warhol as

Poseidon, Jack Smith as Orpheus, Taylor Meade as Sprite,

Kenneth King as Adonis, and the Beauvais brothers, Richard and

David, as Prometheus and his conscience. After he moved to

Europe in 1967, Markopoulos made over one hundred films, many

of which remain unprinted.

The use of 16-millimetre film continues among avant-garde

filmmakers but to a much lesser extent, having been replaced by

digital video which can be transferred to film. American-born

Robert Beavers (b. 1949) explores abstract associations between

the human form, visual art and architecture in films such as The

Painting (1977-97) and EJPsychi (1997). American Lawrence 24.25

Brose (b. 1951) investigates Oscar Wilde’s notions of aesthetics

and desire in his abstract 16-millimetre film De Prqfundis ( 1997).

American Ernie Gehr (b. 1941) has made two dozen experimental

films in 16-millimetre since 1967. In Serene Velocity (1970) he

focuses his camera on a corridor in an office building. Nothing ever

moves in this twenty-three minute film except for Gehr’s camera

lens which he alternates between the zoom setting and normal

every quarter of a second, thus giving the impression that the

corridor is shaking.

28

21. (below) Andy Warhol,

Kiss, 1963.

22. (below right) Andy Warhol,

Eat, 1964, with Robert Indiana.
Warhol’s early films represent

the artist’s manipu lation of

time. Repetition, freeze frames,

extended stationary camera shots,

and retarded projection speeds a l l

cons pi red to a Iter the viewer’s

experience of time.

Representative of artists coming to film from another medi­

um, Andy Warhol ( 1928-87), intrigued by the ‘underground’

films of his acquaintances Jonas Meekas and Jack Smith, began

making films in 1963. Obviously enamored of the reproducibility

of art objects through his experience as a designer and print maker

(e.g. 100 Campbell’s Soup Cans, 1962, or 35 Jackies, 1963), as well as
photographer, Warhol was naturally drawn to the moving camera.

He was not immune to fame, to say the least, knowing full well

‘movies’ were the most alluring path to it. He made over sixty films

between 1963 and 1968, many of them classics of the underground

genre. In films such Sleep (1963), featuring actor John Giorno

sleeping for six hours in front of a stationary camera; Kiss ( 1963),

with its extended close-ups of couples kissing; and Eat ( 1964), in

which artist Robert Indiana slowly eats one mushroom, Warhol

confounded viewers with a mix of real and filmic time. With

Warhol the underground surfaced for a while as his films found

their way into legitimate theaters. He also translated to the canvas

filmic techniques of editing, repetition of frames, and structural

tension. In his famous portraits of actresses Marilyn Monroe and

Elizabeth Taylor, he also joined the legends of Hollywood to

avant-garde art, while aligning himself with both at the same time.

Occupying an uneasy place between commercial and avant­

garde cinema is the Swiss-born Jean-Luc Godard. In his more than

seventy films and full-length videos since the late 1950s, he has

repeatedly questioned the nature of cinema itself. In his ongoing

project Histoire(s) du cinema (History(ies) of Cinema, begun in

1989), a combination of film and video, he traces the entire history

of worldwide film via many layers of images, interwoven with

superimposed texts and loud music. For Godard, montage reveals

rather than obfuscates deeper truths.

23. (left) Gregory J. Markopolous,

The /Iliac Passion, 1964-67.
Gerard Malanga as Ganymede

and Paul Swan as Zeus.

Less ‘cool’ (or distant) than

Warhol, Gregory Markopoulos

filmed what he called ’emotional

landscapes,’ rich in color and

composition, enhanced by his

own in-camera editing device.

24, 25. (right and above)

Robert Beavers, The Painting,
1977!1997.

Detail shows a side panel of

The Martyrdom of St Hippolytus
in the Museum of Fine Arts,

Boston. Continuing in the spirit

of 1960s formal experimentation,

Beavers juxtaposes images

to create emotional tension.

The figure on horseback is one

of the executioners tearing the

saint apart, while the young man

below (Beavers himself) looks

nervously through a window.

31

26, 27. Jean-Luc Godard,

two stills from Le Mepris
(Contempt), 1963.

Strongly influenced by Russian

revolutionary fi lmmakers,

especially Dziga Vertov, Jean-Luc

Godard has created a personal

and political cinema constructed

on what he calls ‘sound, image,

and text.’

Often neglected by critics until recently, 8-millimetre films,

introduced in 19

32

and the cheapest alternative available, became

quite popular among hobbyists as well as artists after the war.

Following in the footsteps of 16-millimetre, the 8-millimetre film

became even more of a protest against the excesses of Hollywood.

Compact, cheap, and easy to hold, this camera became the means

of personal expression for artists shut out of the commercial sys­

tem. It also attracted artists who made careers out of the filmed

media rather than practising it occasionally while engaged in their

primary medium.

Artists such as Ken Jacobs, Saul Levine, George and Mike

Kuchar, Joe Gibbons, Lewis Klahr, Robert C. Morgan, and Stan

32

28. Ken Jacobs, Window, 1 964.
For Jacobs, ‘There was a short

period when Underground Fi lm

was a buzzword. There was the

kind of glow of celebrity about

some of the people making work.

The celebrity made those people

crazy and the lack of celebrity

made the rest of us crazy.’

Following pages:

29. Scott Stark,

Acceleration, 1993.
For artists l ike Scott Stark,

8-mi l l i metre film was a portable

and affordable means to

approximate the texture and rich

color of more expensive fi lm.

Brakhage, among scores of others, made singular, intimate films

with 8-millimetre stock. Ken Jacobs made quirky, diaristic films

that use actors (Winter Sky, 1964) and family members (he and his

wife on their honeymoon in We Stole Away, 1964 ). In Window

( 1964) the small camera becomes an extension of the artist’s

body. In a similar vein, Saul Levine’s Saul’s Scaif( 1966-67) and

Note to Pati ( 1969) are poetic, often fast-paced, personal narratives.

Especially memorable for capturing innocence and youth are

scenes shot in the snow in Note to Pati.

Use of 8-millimetre continued into the 1990s. Peggy Ahwesh’ s

(b. 1954) The Fragments Project ( 1984-94) contains an intimate

look at the characters who populate her personal life. More abstract

is Scott Stark’s Acceleration ( 1993) which captures the traces of a

moving train from the perspective of a stationary camera.

The 16-millimetre and 8-millimetre cameras were portable

and available for artists to own, rent or borrow. Many did, not

only to make experimental films, but also to record the work

they were doing in their studios or to use in performances. And

soon, yet more portable, and eventually more affordable, the Sony

Portapak video camera became available and a new chapter in

media art began.

33

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