Freeze II is exactly the kind of exhibition that Arthouse should be organising and promoting. It is, as curator Anya von Gosseln remarks, an ad hoc, personal survey of video art, extending from technically rudimentary, pioneering efforts to current productions with sophisticated, digitally produced imagery, plus a couple of forays into other digital areas. Though it is in no sense comprehensive, it is substantial and as such forms a useful primer, not least for younger artists and art students who, as von Gosseln points out, often seem driven to endlessly recreate the kind of work that belongs in the past.
A case in point is her compendium of pieces by Dennis Oppenheim, whose land art works will form the subject of an exhibition at IMMA later this year. From 1968's Landslide on, these pieces recall the rather pedantic, cerebral approach of conceptual artists of the time, a combination of high seriousness and quirky idiosyncrasy A more contemporary version of this is evident in Grace Weir's Clock. Jurgen Klauke's actions and performances, documented on tape, take a more political, didactic line, including a 1985 performance in which two politicians approach each other, shake hands, smile, kiss each other passionately and then slap each other across the face in a ritualised enactment of political game-playing.
A range of Irish work is included, some selected from open submission. There is a lot of common ground between Michael Fortune's Obsession and Sin Sin's Take Off. The former is a very funny, Father Ted-style satirical comedy about a Wexford man obsessed with the innate superiority of his county. He polices the county boundaries, reminds his neighbours of their inferiority and is a surprisingly plausible creation. The latter satirises anorak obsessiveness, with a plane-spotter working himself into a state of hysterical excitement watching jets taking off.
Both pieces are variants of confessional, video diary formats, as is IAT's (International Art Terrorists) ongoing series, in which they visit various museums, break the rules and get themselves thrown out. A degree of technical roughness is licensed by the informal format, but overall, with a few exceptions, the Irish representation is a little too rough for comfort. Von Gosseln's choice ranges far and wide. Lawrence Weiner's video drama, from 1982, recalls European art cinema in its meandering style. Dave Gearey imaginatively evokes the last minutes of a dying man. One of the most effective pieces, visually and aurally, is Phill Niblock's sound and vision work, in which a succession of ambiguous, projected still images coalesce, to his own intense, compelling soundtrack.
It is clear by now that artists have fallen head-over-heels for video. And despite the countless hours of poorly recorded banality that are still produced under the protective banner of fine art, many have learned to use it proficiently, ingeniously and innovatively. Yet curiously, as with cinema, there is a lurking awareness that the medium doesn't need them. In the conventional sense of the terms, a sculptor sculpts, a painter paints, a printmaker makes prints: they occupy a central position in relation to their media, but video artists play around on the fringes of an immensely powerful technological medium that is largely, and rather woundingly, indifferent to their efforts.
Furthermore, like any novel medium, it tends to develop in its own, unforeseen tangential ways, to throw up its own forms and possibilities. Such varied areas as advertising, music video and interactive video games inspire and absorb a huge amount of creative energy, and manage to engage a mass audience that has consistently eluded mainstream fine artists - though part of the appeal of video for them has to be its potential as a mass medium. Some of the works in this show would translate very effectively to television, for example, and there seems no good reason why video art hasn't managed to make the leap from the art ghetto to the wider cultural arena in this way.
Well, that's not quite true. There are several good reasons, including the sheer poor quality and the wilful obscurity of much of what is produced. But the same goes for any art form, and the best of video easily stands on its own merits. Channel 4 is exceptional in having made some effort in this direction, even if broadcasts have tended to be transmitted in the early hours of the morning. There is a border area where avant-garde musical and visual artists interact, while television comedy is another, less likely, arena of mutual influence, but by and large, and from the first, fine artists have played an outsider role in relation to video.
Again as with film and, to a much lesser extent, photography, they have tended to offer an unofficial, alternative and often critical take on the medium, something that to some extent actually validates their efforts. Of course, they may not see it that way themselves. They may well view themselves as being firmly in the centre of the stage.
And it is not impossible that posterity will eventually judge the past 25 years as an era that produced a remarkable canon of video art, including work from the likes of Bill Viola and Bruce Nauman, while the vast amount of dross will be consigned to well-deserved obscurity. Not impossible but, given the current, extraordinarily fragmented state of visual art, even the notion of such a coherent assessment of activity within one medium seems hard to envisage.
