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Essay by Karen Kelly
A significant element of Dia's Rooftop Urban Park Project, as
outlined by Dan Graham, is the ongoing development of a video
library for public use. Of primary consideration was the site
for viewing videos on the roof at Dia: the inclusion of a video
monitor in the café area is intended to stress the function
of television's situation within a social space-an idea that has
been a central focus of Graham's work since the 1960s. The video
library was also formed to provide a much-needed resource: a video
repository that includes both scheduled programming and free public
access to the collected titles.
Graham's performances have often incorporated the use of video
to contrast video realities in relation to actual physical time
and space, deliberately engaging the TV audience as active participants
in the televisual process. When characterizing the act of watching
video, Graham insists on the narrative constructions inherent
in the medium: "video feeds back indigenous data in the immediate,
present-time environment." By comparison, "Film is contemplative
and 'distanced'; it detaches the viewer from present reality and
makes him a spectator."1 Through his or her involvement in
the architectural placement of the video monitor or the video
camera, the TV viewer, then, is not a passive consumer. These
architectural codes of narrative determined the construction of
the video salon at Dia as an active social space, where the intimate
experience of TV viewing takes place in a public setting.
In various essays and video works, including Picture Window Piece
(1974), Graham has correlated the picture window of the suburban
home with the glass of the television screen, in their mediation
of public and private, inside and outside space. Lynn Spigel has
examined the position of television in postwar America as "caught
in the contradictory movement between private and public worlds."
As such, television became an alternative space coalescing with
the suburban picture window-"the central design element used
to create an illusion of the outside world."2 The windows
and open doors of the video salon, and Graham's sculptural pavilion
Two-Way Mirror Cylinder Inside Cube, operate similarly within
the urban setting, but remind the visitor of his or her own subjectivity
by means of shifting and reflected images of the individual and
of the surrounding city.
The framework from which to begin building a collection of videos
for the library consisted of four broad categories: performance,
narrative, animation, and architecture. The initial program was
formed by drawing on the advice and suggestions of five consultants:
Bruce Ferguson, John Hanhardt, Michael Nash, Michael Shamberg,
and Sheena Wagstaff. This will be an ongoing project, with new
videos added to the collection each year.
The category of "performance" illustrates how the medium
has been used by artists in performance, investigating what the
video camera and monitor signify and represent in relationship
to the positioning of "audience" and "stage,"
as in Vito Acconci's voyeuristic video confrontations. It also
includes deconstructive studies of performance, as in Charles
Atlas's music and dance docu-extravaganzas and Michelle Parkerson's
historical portrait of the activist music and performance collaborative
Sweet Honey & the Rock. The "architectural" category
is expanded through the incorporation of videos that investigate
the construction of physical and psychological space. In documentary
tapes, such as those by Michael Blackwood Productions or Kamal
Kozah, contemporary architects critically discuss their practice.
The "narrative" category stretches the boundaries of
the art of story-telling. Feminist narratives, such as those by
Cecilia Condit and Judith Barry, use familiar tropes-the fairy
tale and the love story-to render allegories of irony, desire,
and horror in suburbia. Of course, what charges these categorizations
is how they fuse and blur. For example, some of the most iconoclastic
contemporary "animation" works are those not bound to
classic narrative convention, thus providing an open call to the
elusive possibilities of computer-generated editing and imagery.
Critiques of dominant media ideologies might also be considered
through their narrative dimensions. Examinations of cultural mythologies
through media images expose mechanisms formulating collective
history. Subverting video's initial history as an instrument of
corporate control, videomakers have found creative methods of
reinvesting in subjectivity.
The collection is being assembled within the framework of these
four areas with an intent to represent broad conceptual patterns
in videomaking. Among the works are low-budget independently made
artists' videos, music videos, activist video, and film distributed
on video. The program is intended to provide an environment for
diverse genres to be viewed in critical exchange. However, the
library has not necessarily been compiled to provide historical
structures for viewing video. In fact, as Doug Hall and Sally
Jo Fifer have observed, the medium actually "defies the art
historical practice of ordering the field into a depoliticized
hierarchy of stylistic categories." They attribute this institutional
challenge to "video's multiple origins and explicitly anti-Establishment
beginnings."3 The power of media imaging is steadily reinforced
by fluid and rapid changes in the technology of information flow
systems. With interactive video looming as shopping mall, workplace,
and playground of bourgeois culture, alternative venues for video
continue to support a persistent referendum on dominant televisual
vocabularies.
1. Dan Graham, "Essay on Video, Architecture and Television,"
in Video-Architecture-Television: Writings on Video and Video
Works 1970-1978. (Halifax, NS: The Press of the Nova Scotia College
of Art & Design,1979),62.
2. Lynn Spigel, "The Suburban Home Companion: Television
and the Neighborhood Ideal in Postwar America," in Beatrice
Colomina, editor, Sexuality and Space. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
Architectural Press, 1992), 189.
3. Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer, "Introduction." Illuminating
Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art. (New York: Aperture, 1991),
14.
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