Vasulkaland
Posted by ben on 18 Jan 2007 at 03:24 pm | Tagged as: art paparazzi, video/film
Sometimes you come across an artist web site that is so exhaustive you can spend hours dwelling in this visionary world, tracing out a career or leaping across decades of creative activity in an instant. The first site I found like this was Gerhard Richter’s elegant online document of his paintings, his Atlas, his editions, and even tours of select exhibitions.
Today I finally visited the Vasulkas’ site, which may not be as impressively interconnected as Richter’s, but presents and astounding document of their body of work, dating back to the early ’70s. Apart from a large number of videos and stills, their site provides PDFs of books and catalogs they have produced, photo documentation of installations, and an archive of the early years of The Kitchen.
For those unfamiliar with their work, here’s a little synopsis, courtesy Gene Youngblood:
Using the video synthesizers and image processors that were the user-built folk instruments of electronic culture, Woody exhaustively explored, demonstrated and categorized the “primitives” of electronic imaging. The visual manifestations of this research he called “artifacts” rather than art. But the material was so hypnotically beautiful that almost everyone else called it art—and it lived as art in the art world. Thus, a man who claimed to be uninterested in an art career became one of the seminal figures in the history of video art.
Steina, meanwhile, pursued two related paths. In a series called Violin Power, which began in the mid-70s, she “performed” video by using her violin to control real-time image processing. Later, she controlled laser discs with her violin in live performances. She continues to refine both techniques today. Her other body of work, called Machine Vision, involved robotic camera controls that removed human intentionality from the camera’s point of view. Together, then, the Vasulkas participated in developing (when they didn’t single-handedly pioneer) almost all the audiovisual possibilities intrinsic to video as an electronic moving-image and performance medium.