Abstract Video: The Moving Image in Contemporary Art - Softcover

Jennings, Gabrielle; Mondloch, Kate

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520282485 ISBN 13: 9780520282483

Verlag: University of California Press, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

Offering historical and theoretical positions from a variety of art historians, artists, curators, and writers, this groundbreaking collection is the first substantive sourcebook on abstraction in moving-image media. With a particular focus on art since 2000, Abstract Video addresses a longer history of experimentation in video, net art, installation, new media, expanded cinema, visual music, and experimental film. Editor Gabrielle Jennings - a video artist herself - reveals as never before how works of abstract video are not merely, as the renowned curator Kirk Varnedoe once put it, "pictures of nothing," but rather amorphous, ungovernable spaces that encourage contemplation and innovation. In explorations of the work of celebrated artists such as Jeremy Blake, Mona Hatoum, Pierre Huyghe, Ryoji Ikeda, Takeshi Murata, Diana Thater, and Jennifer West, alongside emerging artists, this volume presents fresh and vigorous perspectives on a burgeoning and ever-changing arena of contemporary art.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Gabrielle Jennings is Associate Professor, Graduate Art, at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California.

Kate Mondloch is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art and Director of the New Media and Culture certificate program at the University of Oregon.

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“Abstract Video charts a diverse range of perspectives and topics in the fields of art history and media studies. This collection of thoughtful articles by established figures and emerging voices demonstrates that the idea of abstraction is relevant not only to painting, where it is has been thoroughly explored, but also to video, where it has been largely ignored. Abstraction provides a new lens through which to regard the work of contemporary artists who work with moving images. This excellent book will be of interest to artists, curators, and scholars alike.” —Mark Tribe, author of New Media Art

“This anthology is very exciting and timely, the list of authors and topics impressive and broad. It is a great sign of the continuing vitality of abstract cinema in our own time.” —A. L. Rees, author of A History of Experimental Film and Video

“A deft and comprehensive critical anthology devoted to abstraction in the analog and digital realms. From origin stories to contemporary works, this volume collects some of the most diverse and theoretically rigorous writings on a woefully underexamined art form. Abstraction in the moving image (beyond film) finally has a collection of writings that grapples head-on with the engaging, innovative, and compelling use of abstraction in the video landscape and its intriguing intersection with contemporary visual culture.” —Erika Suderburg, author of Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art

Aus dem Klappentext

Abstract Video charts a diverse range of perspectives and topics in the fields of art history and media studies. This collection of thoughtful articles by established figures and emerging voices demonstrates that the idea of abstraction is relevant not only to painting, where it is has been thoroughly explored, but also to video, where it has been largely ignored. Abstraction provides a new lens through which to regard the work of contemporary artists who work with moving images. This excellent book will be of interest to artists, curators, and scholars alike. Mark Tribe, author of New Media Art

This anthology is very exciting and timely, the list of authors and topics impressive and broad. It is a great sign of the continuing vitality of abstract cinema in our own time. A. L. Rees, author of A History of Experimental Film and Video

A deft and comprehensive critical anthology devoted to abstraction in the analog and digital realms. From origin stories to contemporary works, this volume collects some of the most diverse and theoretically rigorous writings on a woefully underexamined art form. Abstraction in the moving image (beyond film) finally has a collection of writings that grapples head-on with the engaging, innovative, and compelling use of abstraction in the video landscape and its intriguing intersection with contemporary visual culture. Erika Suderburg, author of Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art

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Abstract Video

The Moving Image in Contemporary Art

By Gabrielle Jennings

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2015 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-520-28248-3

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Foreword Kate Mondloch, 
Preface: Abstract Video Art Gabrielle Jennings, 
1. Introduction: On the Horizon Gabrielle Jennings, 
PART ONE. TRANSMISSION, 
2. Film Image / Electronic Image: The Construction of Abstraction, 1960–1990 John G. Hanhardt, 
3. Joseph Kosuth's The Second Investigation in Vancouver (1969): Art on TV John C. Welchman, 
4. Abstract Transmissions: Other Trajectories for Feminist Video Siona Wilson, 
5. Abstract Video Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, 
PART TWO. INTERFERENCE, 
6. Visual Music's Influence on Contemporary Abstraction Cindy Keefer, 
7. Getting Messy: Chance and Glitch in Contemporary Video Art Gregory Zinman, 
8. Delirious Architectures: Notes on Jeremy Blake, Liquid Crystal Palace, and Digital Materialism Michael Connor and Johanna Gosse, 
9. Abstract Video: net.video.abstraction Tilman Baumgärtel, Sarah Cook, Charlotte Frost, and Caitlin Jones, 
10. Interactive Abstractions: Between Embodied Exploration and Instrumental Control "Underneath Your Fingertips" Katja Kwastek, 
PART THREE. RECEPTION, 
11. Real Time, Screen Time Lumi Tan, 
12. The Spreadability of Video Christine Ross, 
13. Spectral Projections: Color, Race, and Abstraction in the Moving Image Maria-Christina Villaseñor, 
14. Go with the (Unregulated) Flow: Fluidity, Abjection, and Abstraction Trinie Dalton and Stanya Kahn, 
15. Sine Qua Son: Considering the Sine Wave Tone in Electronic Art Philip Brophy, 
Mediography, 
Bibliography, 
List of Illustrations, 
Contributors, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

On the Horizon

GABRIELLE JENNINGS

Abstract art is propelled by ... hope and hunger. It reflects the urge to push toward the limit, to colonize the borderland around the openings onto nothingness, where the land has not been settled, where the new can emerge.

KIRK VARNEDOE, PICTURES OF NOTHING: ABSTRACT ART SINCE POLLOCK

Video art has rarely been analyzed through the lens of abstraction; it is often amorphous, ungovernable, and disembodied with spaces that confound Renaissance perspective and encourage contemplation. As the late art historian Kirk Varnedoe put it, "pictures of nothing." And of everything. In light of scholarship on abstraction in other mediums, it is useful to consider this history because video has transformed from an essentially narrative analog form (TV) to a pervasive digital art medium. This collection examines abstraction in video art after 2000 — moving image artworks that were made just after analog video nearly went extinct and bytes and pixels became dominant.

Video Art has had film and television, the twin hounds of narrative, nipping at its heels for decades now, referencing these forms while distinguishing itself through various means — reflexivity, nonlinear narrative, and medium specificity, to name just a few. The title for this volume, Abstract Video: The Moving Image in Contemporary Art, illustrates its own problematic: it carries a history of video art proper that points towards both its predecessor (film) and its offspring (new media art). Like the horizon, abstract video is visible but unattainable, an idea as much as an image, looking left and right, an interrupted and a continuous line, movement and stillness embodied.

This volume examines the term abstract in traditional ways that modernism embraced but also in the ways that film historians discuss Structuralist and experimental film, according to perception and duration, and in ways media historians use the term in referring to the digital. It looks at how we think through abstraction and tracks changes as the medium itself continues to evolve. Though video emerged with the advent of videotape, the term video now encompasses all moving image media.

The closest Varnedoe comes to discussing moving image works in Pictures of Nothing is his consideration of James Turrell's light installations, Afrum-Proto (1966), and Wedgework (1974). These works exemplify important formal qualities of abstract art: they don't exist in the natural world, and like architecture and film, they reference things outside themselves. These phenomenological events are a useful place to begin a consideration of abstraction in video art because, like video, they are made of light and are best experienced through prolonged viewing. Crucially, movement over time is not a quality of either piece, but it is an essential aspect of this book.

The only mention of the moving image in Pictures of Nothing is in the discussion of two feature films: Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982). It seems no coincidence that these masterpieces of modern cinema contain the peculiar sense of the abstract often found in science fiction: the unknowable colliding with the familiar. Varnedoe reminds readers of the "great, grey, forbidding slab that first appears to a group of apes at the beginning of [2001] and later reappears on the moon, sending out a piercing signal in the direction of Mars" and connects modernist sculptor John McCracken's "planks" to the monolith. The sculptures are very much about presence and in this context pose an important question in regard to the moving image: can an image — which is not a thing, which may be fleeting, and is always moving — have the same kind of gravity and presence as an actual object? Varnedoe refers to Blade Runner in the context of an android's expiration, thereby illustrating his inability to be comprehensive in the span of six lectures and hinting at the heartache of his terminal illness. It is tempting to think that, had Varnedoe had more time, more lectures ahead of him, that he would have wanted to consider new forms of abstraction — experimental film, video, and new media practices among them.

Aesthetic dialogues used to occur in parallel worlds — painting, sculpture, and film each on fairly separate tracks. This has changed. Previously concurrent discussions now intersect regularly, requiring greater elasticity and new definitions. For this book, I asked a diverse set of writers and practitioners to attend to the abstract in the contemporary moving image, to contextualize, and to guide the reader through the countless streams of light.

* * *

Ecstatic Resistance is an inquiry into the temporality of change. Time, the time of transformation, the duration and physicality of the experience of change. And drama — the arc of history. The temporality of the ecstatic opens a non-linear experience in which connections are made at breakneck pace and a moment later time appears to stop us in the dynamism of one challenging thought.

— EMILY ROYSDON, ECSTATIC RESISTANCE

With a fair bit of excitement, I opened Abstraction (2013), the latest anthology in the Whitechapel: Documents in Contemporary Art series. The collection runs the gamut from social and political utopias to a more Greenbergian "focus on medium-specificity and self-reflexiveness" and opens up the field in expansive ways though not specifically in terms of moving image practices. Similarly, most of the essays in...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520282485
• ISBN 13: 9780520282483
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar