4 (*) elements of video installation

/// SITE

My contention is that ANY installation is site-specific. There is no such thing as an installation of any art that doesn't have a context. There is, however, a tradition of painting and sculpture and screened film and theater that pretends to have an INVISIBLE context by which I mean that the support framework for the art work is imagined away, ignored, or unconsidered.

for screened film/video
This is usually a traditional screening or a commercial distribution network.

for performance
This is traditionally the procenium stage and the "suspension of disbelief".

for sculpture, painting, and sculptural video and film (not screened)
This is generally the gallery space that we refer to as "the white cube".

These contexts pretend that they are invisible and so there is an idea that somehow they are NEUTRAL which is impossible, because, just like in the real world, EVERYTHING is political and EVERYTHING is historical.

So the idea is that when we're looking at art, or making it, we need to be looking beyond the immediate,
  concrete,
    cohesive,
      well-defined,
        easy-to-pin-point
object in front of us and start to see how all objects are connected to, or even embedded in, the world. When we make something, it IS a thing and it has all of its qualities, but then it also has these threads coming off of it that attach it in any number of ways to its spot in the world.

What to me is the cool part about this is that not only does the world at large affect every little thing you make, but every little thing you make affects the world at large.

Your final assignment is going to be to do a site-specific piece. Now, by the definition that I just gave, that means that just about everything qualifies. We'll talk about that more in a minute, but what I want to point out is that we are going to be talking about site straight through this class in relationh to everything, not just that one assignment.

/// MATERIALITY

Big Issue Number Two that an installation class needs to address is the topic of FORM AND CONTENT or, another term for a similar concept, THE MEANING OF MATERIALS. Since this is a video installation class, it seems to me that the primary material is going to be video. So the question is "What does it MEAN to use video to say whatever it is that you are trying to say with your art?" And one way of trying to figure that out is by looking at the MATERIAL aspects of video, that is, doing a FORMAL ANALYSIS — looking analytically at its FORM.

We could look at video as material by deconstructing it and looking at the mechanics of what makes it work but there are so many different kinds of video and ways that video is installed in the world around us that my intuition is that this approach is too limited, may often miss the point, and may prevent us from being able to address all of these differing types.

As I was thinking about all these different kinds of video — and starting to feel a little overwhelmed — I started to think that maybe video, in different guises, could actually B E   e v e r y t h i n g.

Then I thought, well, in terms of material, what is EVERYTHING? And the answer is either solid, liquid, or gas. That's what we learned in elemenbtary school, at least, — that all matter is either solid, liquid, or gas and I think that video as a material can be all three of those things.

For the materiality portion of this class — which is the second big assignment — we are going to be looking at and making video installations that use video materially for solid, liquid, or gaseous qualities and the different meanings and emotive qualities these uses have.

/// TIME ELEMENT & AUDIENCE

I want to discuss these 2 together; they feed into the first assignment which is about scale.

Obviously video has a time element because it has duration (length of the tape), and speed (pace of the edits). Installation also has a time element which is wed firstly to its architectural presence and secondly to the TIME that a viewer spends IN the piece — that is the TIME of perception.

That's one way that the audience is involved in the piece — in terms of time.

Audience is also a big variable in an installation because unlike the audience of a video or a painting, the audience of an installation can OBJECTIVELY CHANGE the piece because the audience of an installatin in IN the artwork: the audience has a sculptural presence that changes the piece.

What if you made a little tent out in a field with an installation about being lonely. What happens if twelve people crowd into that tent in order to see the piece? The audience as OBJECT has just changed your work.

The audience as SUBJECT can change the work too. (By subject I mean the perceiving subject or the person with subjectivity that's doing all the interpretting.)

And in this sense the audience is a big variable for one simple reason — the Narcissist Rule which says that everyone is the center of their own universe and that people are going to interpret your work in relation to the scale of their own bodies.

The first assignment is about temporal and spatial aspects of video installations and I want to make the point here that the spatial aspect can in many ways get boiled down to a question of audience which is something that is not always given as much consideration as I beleve it should.

/// * (a word about CONTEXT, COMMUNITY, and YOUR ROLE IN THIS CLASS)

The last thing before we get started is that we need to talk about the expectations that I have for all of you as a class which I want to lay out very plainly up front.

All of what I've just been talking about has to do with more than just making video installations. When we talk about site and how EVERY art object has a context, that is a way of looking at the world. It means that nothing and no one is in a bubble. And it's something I want to extend to the way this class works too. You are all here as yourselves but you're also part of a larger context and in this case the context is the community of this class. You are responsible for contributing your role. Everyone is responsible for making this class work and, ultimately, for each other's education.

I expect that everyone will teach us something. For the fourth assignment, each of you is responsible for giving a presentation to the class on a video installation artist whose work you think is important. I'm imagining these as slide and/or screening lectures but if you would like to use another format I am open to suggestions.