Sixty years of evolution and revolution in video

Like a lot of people who’ve spent time writing about cinema, I have mixed feelings about the related form of gallery-based video art. At its best, it can unshackle the full expressive potential of the moving image from the sometimes limiting constraints of narrative film-making. At its worst it just looks like shoddily made, badly performed indulgence.

Both of these poles and plenty in between are on show at Signals: How Video Transformed the World, running at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). The exhibition features work from the last six decades which (the introduction claims) “reveals the ways in which artists have posed video as an agent of global change – from televised revolution to electronic democracy”.

With more than 70 pieces from around the world, drawn largely from MoMA’s own collection, Signals does feel like a reasonable attempt at representing work which tries, with varying degrees of success, to catch the quicksilver yet profound impact of the electronic moving image, be it rudimentary magnetic tape in the 1960s or cloud-based 4K streams in the 2020s.

As a sensory experience, it’s overwhelming. Screens of all makes, eras and sizes squat on the floor, are mounted on walls and hang from ceilings. Dangling cables and snaking power leads foreground the pre-Bluetooth tech on which most of the installations are based. It feels like you’re wandering through a never-made David Cronenberg film – a sensation enhanced when you come across Movie-Drome, Stan Van DerBeek’s 1965 “experience machine” in which films and slides were intended to create a “mental mutation” in an audience lying prone on the floor.

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By the mid-1980s themes had emerged which remain familiar today: video as a tool of social control and surveillance; video as state propaganda and corporate brainwashing

For Van DerBeek and many of his 1960s and 1970s successors, video was a technology of liberation, its relative cheapness (compared to film) and accessibility opening up potential for new sorts of political mobilisation and communication. Activists set up “guerrilla television” collectives such as Videofreex, which ran pirate broadcasts out of New York, foreshadowing the community TV movements which sprang up across the world in the 1980s and 1990s.

Other works anticipate technologies which would become commonplace decades later. Liza Béar and Keith Sonnier’s Send/Receive (1977) used a satellite link to set up a live feed between artists in New York and San Francisco; in Hole in Space (1980), Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz staged a real-time video chat between public spaces in New York and Los Angeles. By 1984, 25 million people were tuning in to June Paik’s Good Morning, Mr Orwell, which featured live and taped contributions from Laurie Anderson, Peter Gabriel, Joseph Beuys and Allen Ginsberg. In hindsight, you can see this as a kind of electronic gentrification, with the avant-garde staking out new ground so that big business and mass audiences would follow.

Inevitably, the utopianism soon soured; by the mid-1980s themes had emerged which remain familiar today: video as a tool of social control and surveillance; video as state propaganda and corporate brainwashing; video as mind-numbing, meaning-destroying information overload.

Video art is often at its best when offering these dispatches from the front lines, and these are clearly the main concern of Signals’ curators. Not for them the painterly compositions, abstract patterns or cinematic allusions of some artists working in the medium. From political protests against the American war in Vietnam to footage of the Chinese crackdown in Hong Kong, the exhibition brings us bang up to our present political moment with explorations of the increasingly common use of video in law enforcement. Contemporary questions about the use to which police video is put are on the news agenda in Ireland right now but are even more pressing in the US, where footage from bodycams and dashcams has become central to the unfolding narrative of systemic police violence against black people.

All of this should make for a fascinating tour through the last six decades of media culture, and at its best Signals does that but there are caveats

All of this should make for a fascinating tour through the last six decades of media culture, and at its best Signals does that. There are caveats: some of the political critiques are painfully banal or over-didactic; American imperialism and neoliberal capitalism are routinely and predictably deplored, but the complicity of the viewer in the visual spectacle is less often explored.

More seriously, the sheer amount of video on display – more than 35 hours of it – militates against deep engagement with individual works and makes the viewer’s experience more akin to channel surfing. One of the attractions of a constantly looped video piece is that you can enter and leave it wherever you please. The downside of an exhibition like this is that few people will sit through the longer works. To be fair, MoMA has made some of the pieces available to stream on their website, which does beg the interesting question of whether you need a physical gallery for video any more.

See some of the work at moma.org/calendar/channels/1