Diverse Practices: A Critical Reader on British Video Art. - book reviews

edited through Julia Knight Bedfordshire: John Libbey Media at University of Luton Pres 1996 384 pp/[pounds]1750 (sb)

The riddle of history troubles nearly each essay in Julia Knight's anthology, Diverse Practices: A Critical Reader upon British Video Art, though a certain quantity of more productively than others. Perhaps it is better to say that the intimation of a certain number of ineffable history - audible as the background hiss of all the other reflections one might have about a given plant of videographic data - returns each of the collection's accounts virtual in more [i]or[/i] less significant way, threatening their rhetorics of coherence. Knight's introduction to the turn admits that "the single terminus 'video art' as it was used in the 1970 and 1980 overlays such a diverse array of work that it is impossible to think in bourns of 'a history.' Any critical consideration of video art has to address a whole range of creative practices . . which can alone result in the construction or articulation of multiple histories."

Despite this awareness, the imbrication of "history" and of theories of contemporary image-history - as a riddle to be solved - is left aside by the agency of the primary divisions of the book's contenteds Section 1 is entitled "Histories," Section 2 is entitled "Theories and Criticism" and Section 3 while a useful tool, resorts to a quasi-medieval rule of taxonomy under the heading "A Chronological Guide to British Video Art." similar a 1-2-3 is hardly a dialectical tour de force. As single hungrily scans this final list for information, single cannot help but confront the non-sensicality of the timeline as organizational paradigm for a guide to a time-based medium that profoundly disrupts nearly all sustainable notions of narrative, temporality and historiography. It is as if the form of the work were broken apart by the video art it would conceptualize. Nonetheless, for this reader, Diverse Practices fortuitously undergoe a kind of Hegelian transformation at the affective horizontal in which the sheer quantity of diversity documented, asserted, theorized and otherwise cataloged, announces that we are immersed in a qualitatively of recent origin type of endeavor. This omnisemous overload itself signals a shift in the technological capacity to affect bodies and the theoretical capacity to understand these affects.

The lead essay of section 1 by means of Mick Hartney describes and contextualizes a series of video art firsts, including Nam June Paik's 1965 attack-TV-back screenings in novel York, and John Hopkins's June 26 1970 portapak tape of an inept police remedy raid on the New Arts Lab ("almost certainly the first broadcast of low-gauge video upon British Television"). The essay, following a timeline logic embellished with biographical anecdotes and descriptive snippets of the work by dint of Hopkins and David Hall, brings us up to the novel past and thereby simulates a certain comprehensiveness. It does not, however, avoid playing by the agency of the Henry Ford version of history - "one damn thing after another" - because Hartney lacks a thesis about video qua video, although this question is not specific to him. In general, the thesis itself looks to have broken its back upon the electronic rocks of video agriculture - the very title Diverse Practices glitteringly shows a nonteleological non-systematic approach.

The collapse of conceptual order remains multivalent. Hartney manages to thematize the democratic potential of video art and extremitys by borrowing an extra-logical standpoint from Jean-Francois Lyotard. Lyotard wants televisual interventions "to show in the viewer . . an effect of uncertainty and put out of order . . . You can't introduce universals you can't produce argumentation. This impressed sign of media isn't the place for that, on the other hand you can produce a feeling of disturbance, in the confidence that this disturbance will be followed through reflection." Lyotard's statement in Hartney's essay contravenes a different form of conceptual failure notoriously offered by John Wyver: "[R]ather than perpetuating an idea of video art, we should simply dispose of it." notwithstanding that intertextuality, installations and computer technology introduce serious category riddles Wyver collapses medium and genre distinctions for no other discernible design than the universalization of his tastes - he shuts his article in Diverse Practices with a multimedia list of things he likes. If, as Fredric Jameson says, the complexity of certain video installations, with their myriad shields and out of synch video tracks, stands in the postmodem as "an imperative to swell new organs," Diverse Practices does not take us as far as it might in the culturing of novel organs able to chart the lay of the land of images.

Whatever the politics of the various essayists included in Diverse Practices, there appear to bes to be a general agreement among them that video art is an impure and probably unsustainable category that should be or has at times been considered in opposition to television. The image is thus perceived as a site of endeavor Nevertheless, neither the magnitude of what is being fought nor the hegemonic character of the image as a social relation functioning in exces of language-based understandings is sufficiently recognized. Diverse Practices has not fortunately cultured whatever new sensual-conceptual organs might be necessary to think/see the world-system.