Video art

genre c. 1963-present United States Germany

Video art is art made with video technology as its medium - from single-channel tapes shown on monitors to room-sized installations of stacked screens and live camera feeds. It took shape in the early 1960s, when portable recording equipment such as the Sony Portapak let artists work outside broadcast television's studios and schedules. Early practitioners - Nam June Paik and Wolf Vostell in the avant-garde circuit, Joan Jonas and Martha Rosler in performance and feminist art - used the medium's grain, scan lines and instant playback as material, dissecting how television shaped perception. By the 1980s Bill Viola's slow, monumental projections had moved video into the museum's core, and today it is a staple of contemporary art, shown everywhere from biennials to gallery walls.

Cosmic Dust Bin - Interstellar (Trancel Music Video)
Cosmic Dust Bin - Interstellar (Trancel Music Video)CC BY 3.0 (credit: Cosmic Dust Bin (both music and video)) · source

Defining characteristics

  • The screen as part of the work: monitors, projections and CRT stacks used sculpturally
  • Grain, scan lines, tracking errors and interlace treated as aesthetic material
  • Real-time feedback loops between camera and monitor - a subject watching itself
  • Looping, repetitive or durational time structures instead of one fixed image
  • Multi-channel installations that occupy a room rather than a frame
  • Media critique: work that turns television's own language against it

Key figures

  • Nam June Paik (1932-2006) — Founder figure of video art; TV sculptures and broadcast collages such as Global Groove
  • Wolf Vostell (1932-1998) — Fluxus artist among the earliest to use television and video as art material
  • Joan Jonas (b. 1936) — Pioneer of video and performance who made the medium's own grammar her subject
  • Martha Rosler (b. 1943) — Feminist and media-critical video, notably Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975)
  • Bill Viola (1951-2024) — Made slow, large-scale video installations central to the contemporary museum

Example works

Sources

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