Film and Video

Choreographing for the Camera is a film, video and conference series on the concept of video dance that includes audiovisual pieces somewhere between dance, film and video created by directors, choreographers and dancers working together. To reconstruct the process since Merce Cunningham and Nam June Paik made their first video dance piece, it is important to remember that modern dance and film have been conjoined since the outset and have had cyclical moments of intense collaboration. The appearance of video - the tool closest to avant-garde movements - at the time of the ascendency of the creation of contemporary dance in the United States and Europe rekindled a desire to experiment among choreographers. The possibility of participating in the great communicative power of audiovisual media tempted many young choreographers who found new staging spaces and new ways of reaching in the public in images. The 1980s were a golden age for video dance productions, especially in France and Belgium, where public institutions decisively supported their creators. Festivals and shows like the Centre Pompidou’s Video Danse and competitions like Grand Prix and Dance Screen organised by the International Music + Media Center (IMZ), became meeting points for the profession and a thermometer of the quality and quantity of productions in the genre, and also revealed the growing interest of television programmers. It was during these years as well that video dance began to appear in Spain: La Mostra de Video-Dansa in Barcelona was a driving force, not only from the point of view of dissemination, but also in terms of production in the country. In Madrid, festivals like Madrid en Danza provided annual grants, while the Metrópolis (TVE) and Piezas (Canal+) programmes regularly broadcast national and international video dance programmes.

Computer-generated images and interactive virtual reality systems, both products of a graphic evolution in images and the historical development of the interaction between artist, artwork and viewer, have heralded a complete transformation in traditional art practices. Everything Flows: Spanish Computer Graphics is a collection of videos that illustrate this important transformation in Spain through a selection of some of the most outstanding works of the last ten years, from the first computer-generated piece by Juan Carlos Eguillor (San Sebastian, 1947 - Madrid, 2001) to works made in the sphere of virtual reality by Águeda Simó and telematic projects by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (Mexico City, 1967).

On This Side of the Channel: British Video Art is a retrospective made up of four programmes of video art, computer animation and other creative works produced for commercial television in the British Isles that stand out from other electronic works because of their originality and the quality. Spanning a quarter century (from the first formal experiments to recent projects using more sophisticated technology), this programme presents a revealing record of British artists who have used electronic media to make important, vibrant creations as an alternative to commercial television. The first set of works, grouped under the title A Brief History of British Video Art: 1975 - 1990, offers a historical overview of video art projects that includes works by David Hall (Leicester, 1937), Jeremy Welsh (Gateshead, 1954), Mona Hatoum (Beirut, 1952) and Keith Piper (Malta, 1960); the second, New British Video: 1990 - 1994, focuses on a short period of four years to highlight the richness of the most recent work, including pieces by Michael Curran (Scotland, 1963), Steve Hawley, Andrew Stones (Sheffield, 1960) and Terry Flaxton (London, 1953); while A Brief Introduction to British Computer Animation: 1968 - 1994 returns to a more extended timeframe to spotlight the most important examples from the world of computer graphics, almost from its very beginnings. The programme starts off with some of the first experimental projects done in the domain of computer-animated images, featuring artists like Tony Pritchett (England, 1938), Stan Hayward (England, 1930) and Darrell Viner (Coventry, 1946 - London, 2001), and ends with some truly surprising and sophisticated technological pieces, exemplified by Alan Schechner, William Latham (England, 1961) and Andrew Budd. Finally, the works grouped under the title Virtual Television focus on a highly innovative group of electronic pieces that were either especially produced for or premiered on British television, such as First Direct, directed by Marc Ortmans, A Short History of the Wheel (1993) by Tony Hill (London, 1946) and Stooky Bill (1990) by David Hall.

Video art, an art trend that uses video as its medium, has served as a form of expression for a large number of Spanish artists. It is relatively young: it was born at the end of the 1960s and, since the first works appeared, its evolution has been paired with technological advances in the medium. Video Art: The First 25 Years commemorates the first quarter century of this means of artistic expression with an anthological exhibition curated by Barbara London that includes 48 works in chronological order from the early years of video until the 1990s. The programme features North American artists such as Nam June Paik (Seoul 1932 - Miami, 2006), Bill Viola (New York, 1951), Gary Hill (Santa Monica, 1951), Laurie Anderson (Glen Ellyn, 1957), Peter Callas (Sidney, 1952) and Woody Vasulka (Brno, 1937). Taken as a whole, these works provide an exemplary review of the historical evolution of video and a great opportunity to become acquainted with its main trends.

The Action

Cyberculture is upon us. It is the last movement of the 20^th century. Its supporters are the first cyberspace nomads: a heterogeneous group of visionary scientists, hackers, computer-fan musicians and digital image artists. Their interests range from high technology to virtual games, from hypertext to smart drinks, from cyberpunk literature to the Internet and brain implants. Their motto: Information must be free! Art Futura ’94: Cyberculture is a video and conference programme designed to draw attention to this new and fascinating universe.

The Cave is a multi-channel video installation by Beryl Korot (New York, 1945) with music by Steve Reich (New York, 1936) inspired by the multimedia opera The Cave (1994), the first collaboration between the two artists, made up of music, video and theatre for 13 musicians and four singers. 

New Trends from the World Wide Video Festival 1993-1994 is a single-channel video programme that brings together a selection of works representative of the dominant trends at the 12^th World Wide Video Festival, a very broad - though always random - review of the immense diversity found today in multimedia art. Within the variety inherent in the programme, it is possible to identify some larger trends. Many of the works reveal a desire for political commitment, a motif that has become stronger in recent years as many of the artists have become obsessed with the changes in the world, especially in the Eastern Bloc and China. There is also a tendency to mix an artist’s images with earlier ones, as well as an important increase in elements from performance pieces and videos based on performance art. An upsurge in documentary-type productions made by and about artists from a very personal point of view is also notable. Finally, many of the works in this selection share an autobiographical intent.

A Sampling of Film and Video from the 1993 Whitney Biennial is a film and video programme that brings together some of the pieces featured at the Biennial held by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1993. The museum, a key institution in the art world, has traditionally been the place where art has been evaluated. However, until recently, the exhibitions there tended to give priority to their analysis of the historiographical aspects of production without sufficiently considering the complexity that characterises the use of the media in contemporary culture. The media arts today respond to the public setting in which we live and they draw on it, creating a fluid discourse that makes a more varied relationship possible between the artist and the artwork, as well as between artists and society, efficiently subverting the dominion of a uniform national identity.

The concept of extended art as designed and practiced by Joseph Beuys (Krefeld, 1921 - Düsseldorf, 1986) requires communication routes that go beyond traditional exhibition forms, in addition to photography and text. Actions are a central medium in his work, as are his appearances in public during conferences and debates and the long-term processes that he initiated with projects like 7,000 Oaks. The structural elements in these works can be captured by film and video. By recording the images and sounds of these events and actions, which date back many years in Beuys’ oeuvre, they can be more intensely reproduced, while the visual documents offer reliable material for analysis at the same time. This series of screenings presents an approach to the themes in Joseph Beuys’ work with the assistance of extracts and examples from the artist’s audiovisual legacy that include hundreds of scenes in order to illustrate his human side and illuminate the incredibly complex structure of his artistic work from another angle. The videos and films that recorded his actions, like Eurasia Siberian Symphony, Celtic and Filz TV, contain numerous references to earlier situations and contexts for using the materials and objects that form part of installations today as reminiscences of his actions or are found in collections as isolated pieces. In this way, it is possible to experience the genesis of specific works and the nature of the process of the overall work. The visual documents complete the installations and the exhibited objects.

Paris (Europe) Here: New Video Trends in France is a video programme that responds to current questions about the place occupied by videos produced in France today in the field of the visual arts, undeniably confirming its role as a specific place where the different creative currents found in this field for decades cross and interweave. It is a place, a function, a space and a time where artists do not have to defend themselves against film or the visual arts to implant their own compositions in every corner. Subjecting themselves to otherness, carrying the other with them like an agent of the ego, these works calmly pass by earlier fights, the battles won and lost in the fields of creation and dissemination.

1993 marks 30 years since the spring-summer of 1963 when Nam June Paik (Seoul, 1932 - Miami, 2006) inaugurated his Exposition of Music-Electronic Television at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal. Having acquired a mythical aura over the years, the event is considered to represent the birth of the electronic arts today. This video programme reflects recent investigations in the field, which have made it possible to recover and publically present some of Paik’s ealiest work - particularly his experimental films, early videos and the first intermedia audiovisual explorations - now rescued from the oblivion in which they lay for 30 years.

Art is like blood: it has to flow continually to stay alive. When the media through which it is expressed do not expand, its only alternative is to find new channels that almost magically lift it to a higher level. Art Futura ’93/Retrospective ’90-92 is a video and conference programme that presents some of the most important pieces and contributions to the field from works seen over the four years of Art Futura, an annual art and technology programme that came to life in Barcelona in the 1990s. It four sessions, dedicated respectively to Virtual Reality (1990), the Cybermedia (1991), the Global Mind (1992) and to Artificial Life (1993) have been guided by the idea of “scratching the future”, of building a space for artists’ ideas and expressions that, by their very nature, do not fit into the categories established by art institutions, as especially occurs in the case of those that make use of the new technologies.

Time Code IV is a video programme that features the pieces included in the fourth Time Code, an international project founded in 1986 by a group of broadcast directors and programming heads from the most important television stations, along with independent producers from several countries. It uses television as a medium for visual communication and cultural exchange, respecting the identity of each participant and also guaranteeing that countries with fewer possibilities can take part with their own productions. The project is structured such that each of the participants produces a short piece by a video artist from their country and in exchange receives an international programme with all of the pieces produced by the other countries for the event. In each case, the main challenge is to create an international network of broadcast directors, programming heads and cultural programme producers to establish communication and cooperation in the field of images. Time Code I presented seven productions by internationally renowned video artists like Robert Cahen (Valence, 1945), Gusztav Hamos (Budapest, 1955), Brenda Miller (New York, 1941) and Xavier Villaverde (La Coruña, 1958). Time Code II featured twelve video clips under the generic title of Transfer Musical and included the Spanish piece Ruedo 360, 5600º K by Gustavo Martínez, which was acquired by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía for its presentation at the Moving Image Biennial. Time Code III, entitled Rituals of Love, presented seven videos related to the theme of love and included the participation of the Museo Reina Sofía.

At the point where films on art are at their most inventive and creative, Pablo Picasso (Malaga, 1881 - Mougins, 1973) has long been a target, the object of inquiry and seduction. Trapped by a silent and almost forgotten attraction, the cinema has focused on his oeuvre, a motionless immensity in time. After the Second World War, when films on art appeared in France, Belgium and Italy, three essential pioneers in the genre made - within years of each other - three key films in the history of films on art, all about Picasso’s work: Guernica (1949) by Robert Hessens and Alain Resnais (Vannes, 1922), Visite à Picasso (1950) by Paul Haesaerts (Boom, 1901 - Brussels, 1974) and Picasso (1953) by Luciano Emmer (Milan, 1918 - Rome, 2009). It is almost impossible to imagine all the films that have been made about the artist since then and difficult to realise that, going back a bit further in time, other films could emerge from where they lie hidden to take their place on the long list of works dedicated to the painter from Malaga. The result would be 140 hours of screen time, i.e., an uninterrupted programme of five and a half days. In these otherworldly sessions, the painter and his work would appear on the screen, in forms ranging from drawings to ink, engravings to sculpture, from collage to oils, ceramics and pottery. Nothing would interrupt the artist’s work except for the changing of the reels in the projector, brief intervals in this permanent cinema session. The fascinated viewer would then take a kind of condensed, stunning tour through the work of a lifetime.