Video Art

In the Beginning

I graduated with a BFA (Bachelors of Fine Arts, Cum Laude) in Digital Film Making and Video Production at the Art Institute of Washington DC. Yes, I know, that's quite a mouthful of words, but I present them to you to make myself sound like I know what I'm talking about. I recently had this discussion with a good friend of mine about video art and the differences between that and actual production work.

Picture a color spectrum (you know good ol' ROYGBIV). On one end, you have high end, epic blockbuster movies like Transformers and Avatar. Moving further along, you get into romantic comedies and dramas. Foreign, Indie, and horror movies are somewhere in the middle of this spectrum, and then it dips into music videos and finally video art. Keeping in mind that it is a color spectrum, a lot of times, things mix and you get interesting bold new colors or ugly colors of slop that no one would paint their porn barn with. Oh, by the way, porn is ultraviolet. Invisible to most, but all around us.

Assmaster Cycle

After laying down those ground rules, I'd like to say that I really don't like a large portion of video artists. A lot of them, in my opinion, are really photographers who think that they're larger than life (even more so). Video artists are the pinnacle of that goofy artist that no one understands and wears all black to prove it. They hang out in over-stylized coffee bars that sell $25 drinks of pure decadence. Sure I'm over generalizing a group of people, but they deserve it. Matthew Barney is a perfect example of this.

He has a particular visual style and design that is absolutely stunning. It would just work better if it was photography. There's very little narrative that's going on here that video would be the required medium for it. The pacing is so slow, it might be better for it to be a set of photographs. People would be able to muse over it and gain a better understanding for themselves or zoom through the whole process faster.

Video artists tend to want to take photography concepts and make them into videos that no one really wants to sit down and watch for 8+ hours. People pay a huge amount time and patience for nothing that's nearly as entertaining or causes as much debate as a Michael Bay movie, which is really sad actually.

RESPECT

Now the video artists I do respect are Jeremy Blake and Nam June Paik. Jeremy Blake was like a video version of Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock, though later he turned into a goofy, almost Tim and Eric kinda guy. I've talked about him before though. Nam June Paik, I like because of his actual intervention in the viewing of video within itself.

He mixes ideologies and symbolism in almost real time with when you are viewing it. A lot of it is a head trip, not because you're sitting down watching it, but because sometimes it interacts with you and requires you to be there to view it. It's a form of performance art with TV being the annoying guys dressed up, dry humping you in a rape tunnel. Only it's much nicer and doesn't leave physical stains (the mental ones are always the hardest to remove).

Slowly moving up from video art is the music video or video artists who need money. Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze both started out doing music videos and both have Charlie Kauffman to thank for launching their indie film careers. This is really where things should get started. Even though MTV (all its entities) rarely play videos at times when people are actually watching, people now have access to youtube and such to actually watch these things and have them take off to mild success.

Video art is one of those mediums where I feel it's a cop out to society. It isn't really doing anything that innovative. There's a loss where the artist focuses too heavily on the content that the technical ability of the video itself is just lost. Sometimes they'll focus so much on the technical ability, that there's nothing to see.

When you get into higher budget films, cinematographers are the artists that really drive the look and visual style. The best will compose each shot so that there is nothing that has to be cut away while helping to move the story line further. Conrad Hall was a perfect example of this.

Both images above taken from Road to Perdition

Taken from American Beauty

He focused so much on how lighting was portrayed and how it would add to the scene. You can see how it helps build the drama without having to get in the way of the story telling. It's the perfect meshing of a brilliant artist and an apt screenwriter with a director at the helm to even everything out. Great movies have great teams. It's never really one person that makes the movie great. Video artists need to learn this and work together instead of just being at the helm of every project and proclaiming it their own.

The Future of Video Art

New forms of augmented, virtual, and mixed reality can really make or break video artists. It can really pull off ideas and concepts that were not achievable before. Or, it can really cause headache inducing acid trips that each new video artist will be known for creating and ripping off each other. Either way, something must be done to compel video artists to reach out and try something different by challenging themselves to be normal and see if they are as good as they really are. After all, getting a concept across a large audience is already a hard enough job to do.

If you think I was too hard on video artists, please join me tomorrow where I'll be attack big budget American movies.