/ guerrilla art
14-02-03
Video politics: guerilla tv, ant farm, eternal frame
Video entered the US mid 1960s as a technology and discourse.
Video art was, as te video art story begins, founded by Nam June Paik and alligned itself with other art forms. Personal, inovative and radical. Experimenting with lifestyles was a response to pravatiztion and consumerism of daily life. Influence on, The medium is the medium, marshall mcluhan, 1969. Art the mechanical production “the machine as seen at the end of the mechanical age”:the passage from manual to visual replicates the passage from photography to cinema and televiscion. Benjamin emphasizes the cult value versus exhibition and between distraction and contemplation. History of video parallels the development of commercial television.
Guerilla tv
Video theory was fashionable as well as usefull. Shamberg media America, was a positive concept linked to youth and the future. Information structure had to be redesigned for video freaks. Power to the people meant eacces to information and video. The government is, school, print culture and corporations embodied product, centarlity and homogeneity rather than process, diversity and heterogenity. Tied to conventions with spokesmen speaking for us. Destruction of the medium by itself, movements and personality burn themselves out quickly by when being devoured by the public. The communication systems themselves are what shape social structure, not philosophy. It works with people not fromup above them. Video ould bring global salvation via acces to communication.
Ant farm opposition of commercial telvision. Anyine can and should be an artist. Denial of hierarchy (only worker ants). 1970 purchase of portapak. Love for cars “environmental nomads”. Free to move in any direction to enhance cybernetic activity. The van made collaborations with other groups possible, turning of the producing alternatove readings of events from convention floors. Ant farms policy: record real or imaginary events, disregarding distinction between them. They were aware of the confusion between real and imaginary. Usage of technology meanwhile condmening it. Undermining of print and book culture. Eternal frame, not only the assasination itself but particualarly the circulation and repeated viewing of the Zapruder movie footage, endlessly rerun by amateur detectives and scrutinized signalled the end of mastering. Video makes it possible to do live recordings of events. Cultural catastrophe both mediating ans exacerbating the event, the real is tranformed into representation. Intrusion of the real is also the taking over of commercial television. (together with the anchorman we wait for the next event).
Eternal Frame, the real is intertwined when passers by actually are emotionally aangeraakt by the event that is being reeenacted. How could the veiwers enjoy the re-enacting so much? Critical question of catastrophe coverage.
Gilles Deleuzes model of simulation. Simulacrum subverts the world of representation and is not a degraded copy. Spectators pov in the definition of the simulacrum posits the mass outside as a sceptical force of negativity. Epilogue 1988
Video culture brazenly hawked communiction as salvation, bleieving that politcal inequities would fall into line. The theoretical object has shifted. Coutnter culture opposition to corporate. The entire conceptual infrastructure is ideologically connected with dominant practice, still that of politcal economy. Video and television portray a virual catalogue of the traits of postmodernism which suggests that tv serves as a theoretical object for modeling post modernism, allthough this has nit been explicitly stated. The blurring of and status of art and pop cuulture, op and genres. Epitomizing every blemish or glow, television is the quintessential embodiment of postmodernism cenral traits. Consumer television is the enemy so networks come back with parodies rewriting a counter culture. Domestic lifes are portrayed in the show family ties. Consumer rape, powerfull realisation of the dream of accessebility and pluralism and politics and art gone sour as they were displaced into the home market. The private home as the modern theater of pornography might not have conrtolled counter culture. Home video is a protrayal of the family life and not video art,