11
WOODY VASULKA
C u r a t o r i a l S t a t e m e n t
I T W A S N O A C C I D E N T
when Peter Weibel called
Steina and me last November with the question:
Could you curate this show? Peter had met with
Gene Youngblood and us here in Santa Fe at least
twice - 1986 and 1987 - for the sole purpose of
illuminating ourselves through ongoing discussions
about the remarkable experience of early video
which still seems to occupy our life so much. Peter,
Gene, Steina and I have all gone through the “Media
Activism” of the sixties which left us with a “front
row view.”
For me, video has not been an intellectual move-
ment. Early protagonists Nam June Paik and Frank
Gillette have given it an illusion of certain legiti-
macy, but no one has dealt with the formal concerns
of media. My own interest was in confronting the
syntax of film with the new video image, a concern
that has not been addressed at all by the video
movement. The criticism of media art has never
risen from the shallow and sketchy.
Yet, I think, Peter’s offer to us to curate an
exhibition made some sense after all: Steina has a
good personal video archive, and we have accumu-
lated both general and custom/personal video in-
struments which map a certain line of aesthetic
vocabularies (as they rather rapidly appeared in the
early 1970’s). We have also had a long standing
interaction with their makers.
When we arrived in New York in the mid-1960’s
Steina and I were struck by two experiences: the
American decadent movement and the aesthetic
use of technology. We set out to explore both via
video. Jackie Curtis took us through the
demimonde
;
with George Brown and Eric Siegel we poked through
instruments - organizing Time and Energy. There
were vast resources for our education, from LaMonte
Young’s drift oscillators to Automation House, from
loft to loft, there was a state of creative frenzy - a lot
of materials, new systemic thinking, another prom-
ise of techno-aesthetic utopia . . .
After Peter’s call, our time got very short. It was
mid-January when Ars Electronica confirmed and
we assembled our team: MaLin Wilson (independ-
ent curator & writer), David Dunn (composer &
writer), and David Muller (technician). I knew we
needed to present not dead but live instruments -
the earlier the instrument the better. We had to
locate them, transport them and restore many. As I
am writing this in mid-April, only God knows how
this adventure will turn out.
On the other hand, many of those involved
seemed to be just waiting for our call. Ralph Hock-
ing, founder of the Experimental Television Center
in Binghamton, New York, is now by default, the
only large scale producer and facilitator of person-
alized, custom-built video instruments. By even
greater default, Ralph and Sherry Miller Hocking
are the only collectors and archivists of many of
these instruments. Ralph picked up the phone as if
we were having an uninterrupted conversation over
the years.
We still haven’t located Al Phillips to whom Eric
Siegel entrusted his only video synthesizer. In a
comparison to electronic audio instruments, there
is no comparable historical or intellectual protocol
to even consider the video instruments as cultural
artifacts. While Paik’s first synthesizer is still in the
basement of MIT, the first Buchla box has just been
Photo: Woody at Columbia in the mid-sixties, fresh off the boat.
12
EIGENWELT DER APPARATEWELT
purchased from Mills College by a French institu-
tion.
It is a real pleasure to lift up a piece of scrap, to
dust it off, return its name, restore it, insure it for
thousands of dollars and publish it in an Austrian
art catalogue!
T H E M Y O P S I S :
Video infringed on our private
lives, crowding our loft on Fourteenth Street. We
established the Kitchen in 1971 to resolve that.
Overnight we became part of a large network rang-
ing from Europe to Japan to Canada.
Of course, the global character of the network did
not help our own craft of making pictures electroni-
cally; that was helped by a very small tribe building
circuits. This tribe is the subject of our exhibition.
There was a legitimate underground technological
community, with a life free enough to practice low
budget experimentation and manufacturing. A new
range of high frequency components appeared on
the market at the same time that there was a
dominant archetypical image commonly shared by
the usage of hallucinogens. Finally, there was a
generation of artists eager to practice the new
witchcraft. And, indeed there was an audience . . .
It is important to note that besides these experi-
ments with video, there was widespread practice of
mixed media including television as closed circuit
installations. And, of course, electronic sound
making was in its golden era. It is even more
important to understand that all of these forms of
media work were being conducted against a full
blown cultural background: painting, sculpture,
poetry, music and film, to mention only a few. As
insiders, the perspective we offer may be grossly
exaggerated; nevertheless, that’s what you, the
viewer, will be getting.
Within the video movement our choices for this
exhibition will look a bit odd. We are not going to
show or describe works outside of the consideration
of audio/video as electronic signal - that blessed
state when it becomes accessible for alteration by
electronic instruments. We are avoiding the essen-
tial and important pictorial and conceptual influ-
ences arising from “art as style” during the time
period, from social influences and, from gallery and
art market influences. We also believe that the most
important works of art in video have been system-
atically presented by other curators. On the other
hand, what we found more essential, more mysteri-
ous and unexplainable as newcomers from the “Old
World” was the undefined spirit of American inno-
vation and invention. To us it was all there was to do.
In the 1960’s we used to distinguish between
white collar and blue collar artists. Both of us came
from socialist societies and would at “the tip of the
hat” side with the working class. We thought the
world was still material, even though we were han-
dling metaphysical material - Time and Energy.
T H E T E C H N O L O G Y :
Besides the instruments,
the essence of the exhibition is the images, both still
and moving. In our private work we have advanced
to the technological state of presenting our work on
laserdisc. From the moment that we discovered a
link between the laserdisc and the printed page
through the barcode we knew it would suit the
purpose of the exhibition magnificently. Despite the
clumsy laserpen for reading the barcode and de-
spite the time delay, we are convinced that this is a
perfect marriage of method and subject.
T H E T A P E S :
Steina has always been an avid
collector of videotapes. Very early she was engaged
in personal tape exchanges, a habit she still keeps.
During the early days the urge to share unique
discoveries drove people into almost compulsory
communication videoletters, “how to’s” and “look
what I’m doing” were common, almost a genre.
Many times we were the first on the receiving end,
and today we are looking at an amazing assortment
of tapes which forms the core of this exhibition.
There is an unprecedented affinity between elec-
tronic sound and image-making. Each generation of
artists seems to come up with a tempting proposi-
tion of uniting the acoustic and the visual and vice
versa - hoping once and for all to solve the mystery
of audio-visual aesthetics. The generation that is
the subject of our exhibition has gotten somewhat
closer: even if the mystery of composing images with
sounds was never revealed, this time the material,
i.e. the frequencies, voltages and instruments which
organized the material were identical. The advent
and use of the oscillator became the natural link. As
in our case, many of our colleagues and friends used
audio oscillators of audio synthesizers to generate
their first video images. The first video instruments
13
WOODY VASULKA
were inspired by the architecture of audio instru-
ments, and the first organization of images was
negotiated in similar ways. With feedback, which all
these instruments possess generically, the prelimi-
nary nomenclature of generated images was estab-
lished. The continuity between instruments of sound
and instruments of image-making was basic to our
conception of the exhibition in discussions with
Peter Weibel. We also knew that there was a chance
that the great weight of the cultural history of sound
and music might tip the balance of the exhibition off
center. So be it.
Woody Vasulka
Santa Fe, New Mexico
April, 1992
R E G R E T S :
Now, the time is up . . . I still regret that we did not
get Tambellini’s Black spiral working and that Beck’s
DVS would require such logistics to restore and
present. I also guess that Siegel’s EVA may still be
intact and possibly alive. . . .
I also miss a “proper” historical background:
Bauhaus, Czech kineticists, full summary of Ben
Laposky, Mary Ellen Bute, the Whitneys in film and
all the European video instrument builders:
DePuouy, Richard Monkhouse and others involved
in constructing and using electronic tools. What we
have is only a preview to the ultimate show, to the
mythical and forbidding “Project 2000,” where the
twentieth century will be thoroughly combed with a
fine toothbrush.
—W.V. May, 1992
E P I T A P H :
Do I believe that video meant anything significant?
Was it a legitimate art movement? Will it be remem-
bered? I suppose if art in the future continues to be
made electronically or becomes even more depend-
ent on technology, then the history of this move-
ment shall be secure. If, on the other hand, technol-
ogy should be rejected in the art making of the near
or distant future, the efforts of this tribe, “the tribe
that worshipped electricity”, (as Jonas Mekas put
it), will certainly lapse into obscurity.
—W.V.
