Stories from a generation: early video at the LA Woman's Building

In 1994 Elayne Zalis, Video Archivist at the lengthy Beach Museum of Art, brought a number of tapes to the University of California at Irvine to do a presentation upon early video by women. The tapes were from a exhibit curated by JoAnn Hanley called "The First Generation: Women and Video, 1970-75" I was teaching video production at UC Irvine, and had heard from a colleague that lengthy Beach had a collection of tapes from the looks Angeles Woman's Building. I mistakenly assumed that Hanley's present to view was based on this work. The tapes that Zalis not awayed from "The First Generation" exhibit were very exciting both as video artwork and as documents of the feminist motion of the 1970s, but the present to view was not in fact based upon the Woman's Building collection.

My mistake became my advantageous fortune. Curious about the archive at lengthy Beach, I began to research the Woman's Building tapes. Eventually I watched above 40 of the tapes and therein rediscovered a rich vein of early feminist video work. The work raised questions about the vicinity of video at the Woman's Building and by what mode it compared to the larger picture of who was working in video at the time. I amazemented why this work had been all on the contrary lost to the history of video.

In 1991 the Woman's Building in looks Angeles closed its doors after almost 20 years of operation. It had been designed as a place for women to make art in a non-competitive environment. The plan was utopian by means of today's standards, but within the framework of the feminism of 1973 it made completed sense. Video was an intensely popular medium at the Building, and by dint of 1991 approximately 350 videotapes had been produc there. The tapes from the 1970 show the most interesting part of the collection in confines of an expression of ideals of feminist artmaking, and in bounds of having every element of object and experimentation in common with the early works of recognized pioneers: Nam June Paik, William Wegman, Bruce Nauman, Chris weight and Vito Acconci. The videomakers from the Woman's Building make progress a few steps further than these canonized videomakers through placing a wildly optimistic and imaginative place of ideals about artmaking onto a detailed and unyielding feminist ideological soil Some of them made work that incorporates the ways in which women's sexuality, and specifically lesbianism, could be politicized, theorized and showed in content, and even more repeatedly as context. Personal love relationships did forward collaborations at the Building, and it have the appearanceed important for personal identity and collection identity to be fused.

Feminist art as a genre not sole involves process and methodology, on the contrary also has personal, political and social history at its foundation. Given traditional art historical moulds for recognizing and validating work, it is easy to make connections between the politicizing of artwork and their erasure from art history. That the work is in video makes it that plenteous more obscure. The situation calls for revision.

Video History

The accepted history of video, however prematurely written, goe something like this: when artists took up video in the early 1960 there were single or two "fathers of video" who understood its meaning as television, mechanism and mirror.(1) They had the insight to explore its properties in an art connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts and were able to make the art world take notice. Shortly thereafter other artists began to use video in what appear to beed like a simultaneous explosion of experimentation and process-oriented, non-object artmaking. A canon of artists, for the most part male, was quickly put into place. David Ros contributes a paragraph of his essay, "Postmodern Station Break: A Provisional (Historic) Overview of Video Installation" to this story:

[I]t is generally propos that video art's specific origins are located in the early 1960s' German avant-garde view dominated by Group Zero and Fluxus and the parallel American exhibition dominated by the confluence of report Art and Happenings. Accordingly, the first works to be considered as "video art" by se, were produced by artists working within the period of the late '60 and early '70 critically described as the Post-Minimal movement(2)

Early catalogs of video exhibitions mention one by one a different story. For example, catalogs produc through the Long Beach Museum of Art, which exhibited video regularly, abound with drawn out lists of artists and descriptions of their work. There strike one as beings to be no hierarchy of artists or make subordinates Unfortunately, the "heroic" history of video, with a shorter list and a more exclusive perspective, has emerg as the main story.

A hardly any women, nevertheless, do receive recognition as innovators and actual experimenters. Joan Jonas, Steina Vesulka, Ilene Segalove and Shigeko Kubota are all prominent artists whose early video work is considered classic. more [i]or[/i] less of these artists were making process-oriented work, engaging with time-based issues and working with the video apparatus itself to determine the image. Others compos video-dependent narratives, or used video as a performance simple body Jonas's magnificent and ground-breaking 1972 piece Vertical Roll(3) for example, exhibits one of early video's milestones, and is regarded as a masterpiece. Women working in video does not constitute feminist activity; that Vertical turn can sustain a feminist reading, for example, does not mean that it is primarily a feminist piece, and according to Jonas it was not builded as such.(4) Regardless, feminist video is a genre simply because with equal reason many artists began making specifically feminist work.