Artforum n° 61-09 – the screen age – art and video

AUTHORS: Collective work
PUBLISHER: Artforum (May 2023)

SOFTCOVER: 160 pages
LANGUAGE: English
ISBN13: 200-0-000-03679-3

In stock

In stock

16,00

SUMMARY

What was video art? On the occasion of “Signals: How Video Transformed the World,” a major survey at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (on view through July 8), Artforum considers a medium whose novelty—its “promise of the new,” as Alex Kitnick writes—once electrified artists and theorists. Today, video has colonized every facet of life and demands new approaches. In the following pages, a group of distinguished contributors chronicle the ways artists have mobilized the screen, whether by wielding it as a weapon in an asymmetrical war with mass media, jamming its conventions to antagonize the banalities of content, or cultivating its capacities for liveness, immediacy, and feedback.
For the issue’s keynote essay, Kitnick charts a genealogy of video art’s elusive past and tenuous future, tracing artists’ engagements with the ever-shifting target of the now. Three contributors examine video through the lens of recent exhibitions: Tina Rivers Ryan offers her take on “Signals”; Erika Balsom weighs in on “People Make Television” at London’s Raven Row; and Anna Lovatt considers “I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen” at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Finally, four artists—Seth Price, Martine Syms, Tiffany Sia, and Cory Arcangel—share video works that have shaped their practices.
table of contents

columns
books
James Meyer on Yve-Alain Bois’s An Oblique Autobiography
film
James Quandt on Cyril Schäublin’s Unrest
slant
John Ganz on Gerhard Richter

on site
Michael Ned Holte on Barbara T. Smith’s “The Way to Be”
on site
Susan L. Aberth on “Leonora Carrington: Revelación
on site
Annie Dell’Aria on “Meditation Ocean”

features
THE SCREEN AGE: VIDEO’S PAST AND FUTURE
NO RESOLUTION: VIDEO ART IN AND AROUND THE CONTEMPORARY
Alex Kitnick on video art’s elusive past and tenuous future
THE SCREEN AGE: VIDEO’S PAST AND FUTURE
Seth Price recalls his days working at EAI and coming around to Bruce Nauman’s performance tapes
THE SCREEN AGE: VIDEO’S PAST AND FUTURE
Tina Rivers Ryan on “Signals: How Video Transformed the World”
THE SCREEN AGE: VIDEO’S PAST AND FUTURE
Martine Syms discusses Dara Birnbaum’s 1990 installation Tiananmen Square: Break-In Transmission
THE SCREEN AGE: VIDEO’S PAST AND FUTURE
Erika Balsom on “People Make Television”
THE SCREEN AGE: VIDEO’S PAST AND FUTURE
Tiffany Sia writes on the 1990 video Taiwan: The Generation After Martial Law
THE SCREEN AGE: VIDEO’S PAST AND FUTURE
Anna Lovatt on “I’ll Be Your Mirror: Art and the Digital Screen”
THE SCREEN AGE: VIDEO’S PAST AND FUTURE
Cory Arcangel on John Knecht’s The Possible Fog of Heaven, 1993
PREVAILING LATITUDE
Siddhartha Mitter on the Sharjah Biennial
OPENINGS: FRIDA ORUPABO
Portia Malatjie on Frida Orupabo