Heiner Holtappels (NL)| Reconstructing identity of the 21century video art in the global age |
The social responsibility and possibility of video art
- From Portapak to WebCam
Heiner Holtappels (NL) POV - Point of View Since the late 1970s, the Zeitgeist (common sense) has shown an existential uncertainty, a crisis of management and of consciousness. The centrifugal forces - once unleashed by Copernican ideas - now confront us inexorably with a world view which the art historian Sedlmayr described as ‘the loss of the centre’ and which according the philosopher Lukács leads to the ‘metaphysical alienation of man’. Cast into an infinite emptiness, drifting apart at ever greater velocity and surrounded by the ever-shrinking fragments of a once coherent world, we perfect our long-distance communications to compensate for the loss of proximity. In political jargon this is called the individualistic society, while the thinkers and doers see a gap in the market into which they can sell yesterday’s neo-Ptolemaic ideas as a New Age tranquillizer. It is from this point of view, if from different angles, with different objectives and a changing narrative, that I wish to plot the contours of art in general and of video art in particular. In other words, what you are now reading is the scenario for a history in the form of a film plot. The highest ideal in this is to turn the fiction into reality.  Illustration taken from YIVF#02 The establishing shot of the twentieth century in bird’s eye view The twentieth century surpassed the cultural riches of all preceding centuries from the Renaissance until today, not only in the abundance art and the profusion and diversity of its works, but also in the broad awareness of aesthetics as a touchstone of civilization. Never before have people held the past in higher esteem, cherished the present more warmly or invested more in the future, than now. The past century was, however, also the most atrocious, ravaged by two world wars and countless regional ones, by holocaust and the merciless exploitation of people and of nature. ‘The need for art is indicative of increasing barbarism in society.’ (‘Kunstbedürfnis verweisst auf zunehmende Barberei in der Gesellschaft.’) Whether or not this statement by Peter Sloterdijk is true, is not the point. It at least expresses the need for coherence between aesthetic and ethical progress at a time when thinking in linear, hierarchical structures is in continual decline. If we are to understand the history and development of media art, we must take into account the diversity of conceptions, which differ in their scientific, religious or philosophical background, which are backed up by psychological, sociological and political arguments and are presented with much rhetorical elan. He who looks back is in search of continuity. A review of the progressive tendencies in the twentieth century shows that the twenties, the sixties and the eighties were the creative milestones of the century. They were an answer to the conservative, reactionary movements that flourished in the intervening periods.  Illustration taken from YIVF#02 The twenties were marked by the vigour and the rapidly ensuing crisis of the social revolution. Constructivism and Futurism interpreted the pervasive technological euphoria as communist and capitalist utopias, as reactions to the industrial revolution and the political liberalism of the nineteenth century. But every euphoria was followed by a petit mort: the betrayal of totalitarian hopes by Stalinism and Fascism. The sixties saw the peaceful revolution and the struggle for the autonomy of the individual, which was still embedded in a collective longing. The establishment was swept away by peaceful uprisings in Berlin, Paris and Washington. Instead of continuity, experiment now became the standard. The visual arts disclosed their full range in Fluxus and Conceptual Art: from a maximum of ethical and social aspiration to a minimum of aesthetic weight. The eighties took the form of a transformation of political, economic, scientific and cultural systems, all of which tended in one direction - the fuzzing of boundaries. Major technological advances in the communicative media, in biotechnology and applied computing made it into an optimistic decade. In the euphoria, many walls fell. Speculation, notably in the art market, was rife, and the infrastructure was laid down for the new complexity of the network society. What was once thought of as an integral whole now appeared as a miscellany of individual findings interlinked through chat rooms. The media-saturation and aesthetization of the individualized world was a reflection of contemporary philosophy. ‘When interpretation flourishes and works of art are practically unable to escape the shadow of their own hermeneutic advertising, this is primarily the fault of a modern philosophy - a philosophy that has lost touch with the truth because there is no longer a single entity one can describe as the successful union of the true, the beautiful and the good. Contemporary philosophy needs aesthetics and uses the roundabout route of aesthetic theory to say what a “real philosophy” would have to say, if it still existed. Aesthetics is a crutch on which an untenable philosophy drags itself through the twentieth century.’1 Medium shot, or how twentieth-century technology conquered the arts The most important art form of the twentieth century was film - not because of its primary economic status, but because of its capacity for being understood as a universal language, anywhere in the world, without an arduous translation. The visual grammar of film was evidently simple enough to take root in every culture, while being complex enough to portray the main human narratives. Technically speaking, film is reproducible without loss of information (like books, graphic art, photography, radio and television). Upgrading presents no difficulty: the transition from analogue to digital is easily made. The technology of film might have remained no more than a fairground attraction had it not proved its capacity as a mediator of traditional, current and future content. It transposed theatre (tragedy, drama and comedy), music (from opera to videoclip), literature (epic, novel, novella, reportage and poetry), visual art (all genres, from self-portrait to still-life and landscape). It has used every accepted style, from realism to minimalism. In other words, film satisfies practically all the criteria of classic art forms: being able to render reality through representation, expression and reflection. But film’s most decisive success has been to render the changing time and space experience of modern man, through acceleration and deceleration, and the discontinuous experience of space (montage and camera angle). Film prepares the way technologically for what we later observe as social change: the fragmentation of reality, based on a discontinuous experience of time and space. Video technology adds real-time rendering to this, a feature widely used by artists in the early years of video art in closed-circuit installations and performances. The rise of the personal computer brought an opportunity to tempt the consumer into becoming a producer, by means of interactivity. The consumer is no longer a passive spectator but a designer of reality. The real world changes from a datum into a potential, an actuality to be created.  Illustration taken from YIVF#02 Close up, or the introduction of the subject The establishing shot dissolves into an 800-year long zoom from feudalism to civil society, from the collective to the individual granted fifteen minutes of stardom (the contemporary counterpart of nobility) by Andy Warhol. The camera zooms in farther, from palaces to towns, to glass towers where, in an over-designed living or working environment, a person comes into view. The gaze concentrates first on his face, then on his eye (as the place of recognition of the human, of expression and reflection) finally to disintegrate into the here and now, the realm of pixels. The self-portrait in a convex mirror by Parmigianino (1503-1540) perhaps just expresses the vanity of a young artist eager to show off his painterly skills. But the unending stream of self-portraits produced by artists introduces the emergent belief in individualism as a pacesetter of history. In painting, however, the self-portrait remains a representation of a mirror-image, a visible proof of the impossibility of really seeing oneself. The camera puts an end to this. The representation of yourself is no longer a mirror image but an authentic, ‘objective’ image. The camera allows you to see yourself as through the eyes of a spectator. Every artist since the start of modernism has been a poseur, an actor playing himself in the hope of making a convincing impression. The claim of autonomy, the cult of genius and of the modern artist’s star status, can be read as nothing other than an attempt to compensate for the lost paradise of the monopoly of visual representation.  Illustration taken from YIVF#02 Epilogue, or video art as deceleration Video art has, during the last thirty years, recapitulated the history of art from its origins to the present. This may be expected of any new art form: testing the new aesthetic capability by reproducing the past. Only once this test has been accomplished can the phase of developing the new begin. Media art is in the same stage of development as film was in 1895. Socially, media art has not progressed since 1975, when individualism became common property. Technically, we have reached 1995, the point where the Internet became available as an infrastructure. Digital coding brings the promise of a new cultural revolution, comparable to that inaugurated by typography, which mechanized information and liberated it from interpersonal communication. The modernism of the last 200 years shows changing styles with a shorter and shorter duration, accompanied by a simultaneous increasing annexation of new areas. Visual art colonizes the media (photography, film, video, computers), design (graphics, product design and fashion) and the performing arts (theatre, music, dance). It also seeks new territories in non-Western cultures. Media art since the 1960s has shown a similar course of development. It reacted to the aesthetics of television, and tries to lay claim to television’s production and distribution possibilities – first by disruption, and later by the failed attempt to run its own broadcasting organization. The artists of Aktionskunst and happenings which emerged from the Fluxus movement annexed the aesthetics of theatre and disseminated their work increasingly by documentation on video as well as film. The next stage, in the 1980s, was for artists to occupy the narrative domain of experimental film. By the end of that decade, this movement had expanded to take in the aesthetics of bad taste – pornographic film and kitsch. The anthropological/political documentary appeared and completed the erosion or liberation of the last remnants of the canon of modern art. From the late eighties onwards, postmodernism was the new utopia which aimed to realize the aesthetic ideals of the French Revolution: égalité, liberté, fraternité. The digital camera and digital montage has put everyone in a position to produce his own images and stories, and the arrival of the Internet in the nineties has opened up the possibility worldwide distribution, and to find kindred spirits for even the most private wisps of fantasy. It is inherent to every utopia that it can have only one fate: that of failure, the incapacity to conclude the story with a happy end. Perhaps this is the real difference between visual art and film, in which case we can concur with Peter Sloterdijk: ‘The need for happy endings is indicative of increasing barbarism in society.’ 1. Peter Sloterdijk, Kopernikanische Mobilmachung und ptolemäische Abrüstung, 1987. |
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