Disturbances and Distortions
Program by Glenn Phillips
Distortion, feedback, noise: some of the most powerful works of early video art are the result of astonishingly muscular manipulations of thevideo signal. Yet there is more to these lush and trippy abstractions than first meets the eye. This program samples artists鈥� approaches to analog processing and other forms of video manipulation in the 1960s and 70s, looking at the surprising array of techniques by which artists encoded conceptual, political, emotional, or narrative content into their works.
Wolf Vostell,听Sun in Your Head, 1963, black-and-white, silent, 7:10
鈥淪ingle Frame sequences of TV or film images, with periodic distortions of the image. The images are airplanes, women men interspersed with pictures of texts like: 鈥榮ilence, genius at work鈥� and 鈥榠ch liebe dich.鈥� The end credit is 鈥楾elevision d茅collage, Cologne, 1963.鈥�
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听Kohei Ando,听Oh! My Mother!, 1969, color, sound, 14:00
Oh! My Mother听was made using the feedback effect, which is produced by infinitely expanding the image by looping the video.鈥�
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Nam June Paik,听Early Color TV Manipulations, 1965-68, color, silent, 5:18
Marked by a playful, irreverent sense of improvisation and experimentation, these experiments with image manipulation and synthesis form a link between Paik鈥檚 performance and sculptural works of the 1950s and early 1960s and the celebrated video works and installations of his later years.
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Steina and Woody Vasulka, Excerpts from听Vasulka Video, 1978, video, black-and-white and color, sound听Stan VanDerBeek, Vanishing Point Left, 1977, color, sound, 9:30
In听Vanishing Point Left, the 鈥渧anishing point鈥� is an analogy for the metaphysics of watching the video screen, which assumes such forms as a mandala, flower or gyre.
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Joanne Kyger,听Descartes, 1968, single-channel video, black-and-white, sound, 11:25听Wolfgang Stoerchle,听Sue Turning, 1973, video, black-and-white, sound, 12:00
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Glenn Phillips听is Principal Project Specialist and Consulting Curator in the Department of Architecture and Contemporary Art at the GettyResearch Institute in Los Angeles.听His exhibition听California Video听won the International Association of Art Critics award for best exhibition of digital media, video, or film in 2008. His other exhibitions include听Time/Space, Gravity and Light;听Marking Time;听Evidence of Movement;听Reckless Behavior; Pioneers of Brazilian Video Art 1973-1983;听Surveying the Border: Three Decades of Video Art about the United States and Mexico; and听Radical Communication: Japanese Video Art 1968-88.
Prior to working at the Getty he was Assistant Curator for Special Projects at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where he worked on a number of exhibitions, including听No Wave Cinema;听The American Century: Art & Culture 1900-2000; the听1997,听2000听and听2002 Whitney Biennial听exhibitions;听Bitstreams: Art in the Digital Age;听and听Tony Oursler: The Darkest Color Infinitely Amplified.听 For the Pacific Standard Time initiative he is co-curator of the three-part exhibition听It Happened at Pomona: Art at the Edge of Los Angeles 1969-73, and a member of the curatorial team for the exhibition听Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture 1950-1970听at the J. Paul Getty Museum.听 He is co-director, with Lauri Firstenberg, of the Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival.