Past Exhibitions

Video Trajectories, an exhibition presented in the MIT List Center's Bakalar Gallery, was organized by MIT Professor Caroline A. Jones (October 12-December 30, 2007).  Selections from these works—considered masterworks from video art history—are being presented to a broader public on The Media Test Wall. Dara Birnbaum’s Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, 1978-79, is the second presentation in a five-part exhibition series. Video Trajectories (Redux) will continue with Bill Viola, The Space Between the Teeth, 1976, (November 17-January 2); Nam June Paik, Video Synthesizer and “TV Cello” Collectibles, 1965-71 (January
5-January 30); and Gary Hill, Soundings, 1979, (February 2-March 6).

Video is used as a medium by different kinds of artists. All the video artworks in this series were made by artists coming out of theater or dance communities, Conceptual art, Minimalism, performance art, sculpture, sound engineering, and avant-garde music. Some focused on the strange new medium of video itself. Like audiotape, videotape could be recorded, played back, and re-recorded almost instantly. Like photography and film, it faithfully (if electronically) represented anything put in front of it. But unlike film, there was nothing to "see" on the tape itself—it was dependent on the electronic apparatus to be scanned and seen. Moreover, video art was born in the context of a fully commercialized mass medium—television.

Particularly in the U.S., early video artists crafted their tapes with a strongly dialectical eye on "the boob tube." Above all, artists of the 1970s wanted television viewers to wake up to the media world in which they were already living, and to develop an active rather than passive relationship to the medium. Artists working with early video technology attempted to intervene in the intimate psychological relationship that could develop between the average person and his or her television set. Later in the 1980s, home video systems gave every family of means the ability to "be on T.V." but by the 1990s the intimate phase of video art's history was over. Video became increasingly spectacular and it has evolved into present day technologies that allow the projection of high-resolution signals onto a screen, a wall, or the vaulted ceiling of a Renaissance church. Video Trajectories stays with pre-spectacular video, allowing earlier phases of the medium's surprising infancy to come into view.

Trained in architecture and painting, Birnbaum early on understood the estranging power of repetition. Here she drew on kinescope technology (film shot from a television monitor) to enable her to make a video compilation of “found” footage snatched from the broadcast series Wonder Woman (televised from 1976-1979). A pioneering example of “sampling” from a still-analog age, Birnbaum’s Technology/Transformation focuses in on the transformative “bursts” when actress Lynda Carter becomes a super-she-ro. Addressing the ecstatic moment of amplified female power (before the ambivalent discharge of female aggression), the artist announced her interest in “arresting moments of TV time for the viewer, which would then allow for examination and questioning.”

Excerpted from “Video Trajectories” by Caroline A. Jones, as published in Sounding the Subject/Video Trajectories, Cambridge:  MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2007.