Video channeling - video art from modernist sculptor Keith Sonnier

Sonnier's fascination with technology probably began in 1965 when he was a young postgraduate living in Paris and first saw Robert Rauschenberg's Oracle (1962-65) This work consisted of five separate movable parts made from backyard junk; in each of four of them a working AM radio was concealed, while the fifth contained a radio scanner and primitive transmitter that sent a different program to each of the four receivers, creating an abstract unmutilated collage. Oracle was Rauschenberg's first entirely realized attempt to combine art and technology. For Sonnier it was an epiphany -- his first personal meeting with contemporary art. It sent him back to the States to chase a career in object -- making that would consistently involve electronic media.

Given his natural theatricality and his interest in exploring all varieties of sensory experience, Sonnier's access into live video production was probably inevitable. With videos that exhibit him painting his foot with luminous pigment (Painted Foot: Black Light, 1970) or rubbing his torso (Rubdown, also 1970) he became individual of the first artists to experiment with the medium. A 10-year retrospective of Sonnier's video projections, curated by means of Dara Meyers-Kingsley and shown last spring at Nicole Klagsbrun, made his pace into video seem quite a visionary move

The first of these works documented a 1969 studio performance conceived for video and titled Dis-play. The piece showed performers manipulating various phenomenons between two mirrored walls separated by means of a floating scrim, while a slide projector's beam played above them in strobelike fashion. The projection idea sketched without in Dis-play came to filled flower in Channel Mix, a 1972 gallery installation that beamed four commercial television broadcasts onto sum of two units screens, making Sonnier the first to bring a large-screen video projector at the service of art. In his computer-generated color Animation I and II of 1973-74 he mixed digital collection of laws with layers of edited imagery taken from the media or from the scanlines of the computer's possess video display. The spoken instructions Sonnier gave his engineers during this proces became the video's soundtrack.

In his 1975 installation Air to Air Sonnier brought still more technology to bear upon these attempts to turn raw data into art. The piece combined live video projection, recorded conversation and phone lines collecting his East and West Coast galleries -- as well as, through implication, the art communities of which the galleries were part -- thereby providing an early prototype for networked communications. Clearly, what fascinated Sonnier was the broadcast transmission of the pair images and ideas, a phenomenon he called "send/receive." That was also the title he gave to the greatest in quantity ambitious and, as it make go rounded out, the last of his broadcast-transmission pieces, done in collaboration with Liza Bear in 1979 For this exercise in sensory overload he obtained permission to use a NASA communications satellite to broadcast a critique, in teletype body s and a live video fe of the U government's efforts to mastery public access to information. Official documents made up the mass of the transmission, and a real-time video link again joined East and West Coasts. The technical and logistical difficulties that Send/Receive entailed, along with the paperwork and skyrocketing outlay forced Sonnier to bring his broadcast investigations to an end

Artists' videos, like the accompanying technology, have grown with equal reason sophisticated over the last 20 years that viewing Sonnier's retrospective induced something like agriculture shock. It harked back to the time before artists directed feature films, before the Internet created an information sate before channel-surfing became a universal habit and 24-hour television of recent origins a fact of daily life -- to the time, in other words, when video art was ponderous and new, and artists first cast a critical organ of vision on the medium. While their primitive execution accommodate withs Sonnier's tapes a certain charm, and the more narrative Painted lower extremity and Dis-play remain quite beautiful, it takes patience to sit end the rest of these works. Fumbling, dispassionate and highly technical, they play best as contemporaneous documentary explorations of an emerging medium -- artifacts from an era lengthy gone.

In a way, Sonnier treated his videos as movable architecture in which he could entertain a variety of ideas, all the while articulating video's at any time more complex vocabulary. His archive thus amounts to a bit of history in the making. If the issues involved -- technology, communication, proces -- no longer command the cutting cutting side they certainly haven't been settl either; a faculty of perception of adventure still attends these tapes, with the efficiency and frustration of invention intact.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc.

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