Whitney Biennial Video

This Biennial once again gave video greater prominence than it has in the rest of the art world, offering a full day’s programming of work by 16 videomakers, shown in a gallery just opposite the museum entrance, as well as two installation pieces elsewhere. Video doesn’t fit into art’s usual marketing structures, and so has remained problematic within the gallery scene, even as new technology continues to increase its significance as the dominant communications and entertainment medium of the culture. In this context of growing social importance and general art-world neglect, the handful of museums and other art spaces that program video regularly appear particularly farsighted.

John Hanhardt, the Whitney’s curator of film and video, has long conducted one of the most active and consistently interesting video programs in the city, with last year’s extraordinary Nam June Paik retrospective his crowning achievement to date. His selections for the Biennial reflected his distinct tastes, in particular his consistent championing of video installations. That chimerical genre, combining video and sculpture, was represented here by Ohio at Giverny, Mary Lucier’s lyrical two-tape, seven-monitor tour de force—one of the hits of the Biennial—and by Shigeko Kubota’s River, 1979–81.

Two of the tapes in the Biennial’s harvest—Juan Downey’s The Looking Glass, 1981, and Bill Viola’s Hatsu-Yume (First Dream), 1981—are to my mind among the most important works of the past several years, demonstrating a high degree of both technical mastery and thematic interest. The Looking Glass appears at first to be a disquisition on voyeurism and the Other as expressed through the use of mirrors in architecture, a kind of richly textured, far-reaching intellectual/archeological dig. But as the tape unfolds an autobiographical strain emerges. Downey describes his youthful fascination with Velázquez’s Las Meninas, and then presents Leo Steinberg analyzing the compositional implications of the painting—arguing that viewer and painting mirror each other in a shared act of looking, of seeing and being seen. By punctuating documentary interviews and scenic shots with occasional video effects, Downey emphasizes the mediated nature of his investigation itself, turning the mirrors of his topic onto himself, his tape, and those watching it.

Hatsu-Yume (First Dream), shot with advanced equipment borrowed from Sony’s labs, continues Viola’s longstanding interest in extending screen time to reveal the inner workings of events. But where that device—a technically difficult one to achieve in video—seemed an end in itself in earlier work, here it is subsumed into a meditative, lyrically beautiful presentation of aspects of Japanese life based on a trip Viola made to that country. Water serves as the unifying metaphor for Viola’s Japanese vision, whether in shots of fishing boats at night or of a rainy neon-lit Tokyo street; Viola has recently applied the metaphor to his technical process as well, declaring that video treats light like water.

Edin Vélez’s Meta Mayan II, 1981, and Matthew Geller’s Windfalls, 1982, were other standouts in the Biennial’s selection. Vélez’s impressionistic record of Indian village life in Central America intersperses closeups of the faces of peasants and of the swirling activity in the local marketplace with news reports from American media of political unrest in the region, while Geller weaves together two stories—one, of a musician’s lapses of etiquette in attempting to jam with jazz musician Jaki Byard, and the other, of a man’s doomed attempt to buy a hot TV without getting burned. Geller’s allusive narrative seems to suggest the need for a kind of cosmic cool, a politesse based on confronting desire.

Overall the video in this show can perhaps best be characterized as being resolutely video art, as opposed to video or TV. Even the tapes that might be classified as documentaries—Martha Rosler’s A Simple Case for Torture, 1982, for example, or Downey’s, Vélez’s, or Viola’s works—are as much conceptual or poetic as straightforward records and analyses. The process manipulation found in some of these tapes becomes a central concern in the large proportion of work here (between a third and a half, depending on who’s doing the counting) that relies on image synthesizers and other equipment to colorize and transmute camera imagery or to generate noncamera patterns.

Both image-processed work and conceptual or poetic documentaries are particularly significant genres in video today, but the preponderance of this kind of work made the selection seem narrow, a feeling heightened by the familiarity of many of the names represented: six of the video artists included in this Biennial were also shown in the last one. Granted, they were represented by new works, but there’s a wealth of other work around that deserves to be shown in as prestigious a showcase as the Biennial. I would have liked to see a couple of out-and-out documentaries, tough, political, dealing with important issues usually ignored by broadcast TV, of the sort produced by Downtown Community Television. I’d also like to have seen more work not aimed at a visual-arts audience (or, even narrower, a video-arts audience). Why not feature some of the performing artists who have worked with video to telling effect in recent years—Robert Wilson, David Gordon, Joan Jonas, Brian Eno? Or selections from Julia Heyward’s bizarre and beautiful rock ’n’ roll videodisc? Or rock tapes themselves, since they seem to be influencing the work of many younger video artists, and in at least a few cases—some from David Bowie or the Rolling Stones, for example—can hold their own in an art context? Or work by James Byrne, Woody Vasulka, Ed Bowes, Deans Keppel—and on and on? The Whitney has shown work by some of these people in its regular programs; why not in as important a venue as the Biennial?

It’s always easy to come up with lists of this sort in writing about big survey exhibitions. Probably more than any other group in the art world, curators are expected to be representative in their selections of work to show, since public museums, within the overall limits of their programs, are at least implicitly reflective of a broad range of art. But of course curators are also individuals, with tastes and perceptions shaped by study and experience. The conflict between these two factors becomes especially strong in shows like the Biennial, in which a major museum gives its imprimatur to a limited number of artists—declaring in effect that this is what’s happening, and, by implication, that if it isn’t here it isn’t happening. In the end it’s probably preferable that in choosing work for such shows curators give their support to what they like, what they fully believe in, and not attempt a false, easy overview that they don’t really endorse. The problem isn’t curators who don’t have a sufficiently broad point of view, but the shortage of institutions willing to attempt such inherently problematic, but tremendously valuable, surveys as this.

—Charles Hagen