VMAC Article

Irresolutions: Or Questions about Video, Ackbar Abbas

Let me begin by confessing that what I am going to say about video and video art has no authority. I am not a practitioner, and I don’t want to give the impression of telling practitioners what they can or should do. My field is cultural criticism. I see video as an increasingly important social and cultural phenomenon that the critic has to address, because it is part of the mediascape that surrounds us like a second nature or an alternative reality; a mediascape that includes photography, film, television and computer technologies. Like many of us here, I too would like to find out more clearly “What is video art?” But perhaps we can try to do that not by looking for a definition, which at this point may be both chimerical and undesirable, but by addressing some specific questions that video raises about art, culture and technology. As will be apparent from my remarks, I agree with Gilles Deleuze’s assumption that ‘The tools always presuppose a machine, and the machine is always social before it is technical’; i.e. it is social and cultural conditions that make technical innovations possible.

The first question concerns the cultural status of video art, which some say is now in a position to displace or even replace older art forms. In the 1930’s, the photographer/theorist Moholy Nagy liked to say, in an optimistic moment, that the illiterate of the future is not the person who cannot read or write, but the person who cannot take a photograph. In a similar vein, in 1965 Nam June Paik, ‘the father of video art’, made the following famous statement: ‘As collage technique replaced oil paint, the cathode ray tube will replace the canvas.’ These apocalyptic statements, we now know, have not come true, nor are they likely to. Video will not replace painting or photography or cinema. To think that it would is to confuse progress in technology with progress in the arts. The argument that ‘as new technologies make old ones obsolete, so new art makes old art obsolete’ is a false syllogism.

This leads me to a related question which concerns the relation between art and technology. Going back to Paik’s statement, there is something positive to it, if we take him to mean that art today cannot ignore technology, that ours is the age of electronic and digital reproduction. Read in this way, it is no longer a theory of progress. Rather, it is a reminder that technologies have the capacity to introduce new ways of seeing or new regimes of the visible which interact, conflict and co-exist with the old. What video (and now digital) images introduce then are some additional items on our visual menu. Besides the seen, the unseen and the half-seen (which the history of visuality from painting to cinema has creatively explored), we now also have: the quickly seen, i.e. the televisual image in ‘real time’; and the ‘obscene’, the high-resolution, hyperreal image. Both the televisual and the hyperreal challenge our understanding of time and space. High-tech resolution can result in its own cultural irresolutions: this is the lesson of video. The important critical point to make here then is that video is defined as much by its technological properties as by its social and cultural use. Furthermore, advanced technology does not automatically mean an advanced culture. What it does mean though is that there are now more regimes of the visible available than we can handle, resulting in much confusion. Video art is important and exciting it seems to me in this way in which it intervenes in these regimes of the visible.

My next question, which brings together technical and cultural issues, concerns video’s relation to time. On the question of time, video can be clearly distinguished from films. Time in narrative films is always a represented time, whether it is 50 years or one day or in rare cases like Hitchcock’s The Rope, even when the time of action and the time of viewing is the same. By contrast, video practices seem to alternate between only two times. It works on the one hand, with real time, the time of the instant, a time captured in live; or on the other hand with an indefinite time, by collaging images from prepared tapes that may resemble films. So while in the films time is always the time of representation, in video, time (in both the cases pointed to) tends to be the time of performance. In this respect, video is much closer to dance than to film. The close association of dance and video is not accidental. Dance is concerned with speed and movement, and video can play with changing speeds and stop action much more readily than film can. This is surely why films that deal with the contemporary city as it is transformed by technologies of speed tend to borrow the video techniques of changing speeds and stop action. One obvious local example is Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express. For similar reasons, video has an affinity to fashion. Only video is able to bring out what is valid about fashion, the fact that time in fashion too is the time of performance. It is not surprising therefore that in a film that tries to bring together both the elusiveness of cities and fashion – Wim Wenders’s Notebook on Cities and Clothes – video is necessarily brought in to supplement film. Finally, it is this performative aspect of video that predisposes video towards becoming an art of installation. In video installation, the video screen becomes an object among objects, the ultimate performative, even if it is an object of a peculiar kind.

One of the most illuminating questions about video is the question of its relation to sound. This is the question posed brilliantly by the French scholar Michel Chion in discussing, among other subjects, the work of video artist Gary Hill, Chion begins by saying that video artists often don’t know what to do with sound, besides providing a neutral music background or a voice. However, the reason for this tells us something interesting about video. It is much easier, Chion notes, for video than for film to go fast, to go fast enough to keep pace with the text. While other video artists are involved in dance, Gary Hill’s involves ‘the confrontation of a spoken text with an image at the same pace.’ Therefore it seems that everything involving sound is already located in the video image, and duplicated there – hence sound’s redundancy. What Hill’s videos make us do is listen with our eyes. Chion makes a similar point in a discussion of MTV (which allows us to note in passing that video art is not just the art video; it could also include TV and MTV). The rapid succession of images in MTV gives images themselves some of the characteristics of a soundtrack. As a soundtrack mixes words, noise and music all of which we can hear at once, the rapid succession of single images in MTV allows the spectator’s memory to function like an ideal visual mixer, producing from the single images a sense of visual polyphony. It is in this way that MTV, ‘a television-of-optional-images’ that we watch distractedly, can liberate the eye – which is also what video art aims to do.

This discussion of video time and video sound now leads me to a final question, the relation of video to meaning. More and more it seems, video is replacing photography as the medium of evidential truth. Instead of wedding photographs, we now have the wedding video. Photographs of the scene of a crime yield their authority to videotapes recorded by hidden cameras. Video as evidence however is subject to the same ambiguity as the photograph. The photograph, Roland Barthes said, ‘is a certain but fugitive testimony.’ So too is video and perhaps the best example of video’s testimonial ambiguity is the famous tape made by a passerby of Rodney King being beaten by the Los Angeles police. The first jury who saw the tape astonishingly enough acquitted the LA police – because the tape was shown and framed in a certain way by the defense lawyers. At the retrial, the second jury overturned the first verdict, because the tape was shown to them differently, and framed by a different argument. What this example seems to illustrate is the irresolution of video, whose meaning, like the meaning of other cultural artifacts, is subject to ideological manipulations.

There is however another way of thinking about the relation of video to meaning, suggested in a short essay of Wim Wenders, where he describes how he watches film on TV, by switching on at arbitrary moments or changing channels; in effect, giving film some of the feel and texture of video. I will let Wenders describe the result:

There are some moments in films that are suddenly so unexpectedly direct and overwhelmingly concrete that you hold your breath or sit up or put your hand on your mouth . . .

The phenomenon often happens by chance, especially when you’re watching television. You switch to another channel; a picture of an empty street at dusk, the streetlights are just coming on, a car flashing its indicator drives into the frame, in the background a woman with a dog on a lead comes out of a house, there’s an imperceptible fade and the screen goes back. You’ve seen the end of a film, an unbelievably clear and simple image that didn’t mean anything because you were spared the shot leading up to it. (Emotion Pictures, 52, 53)

What Wenders seems to be evoking here, it seems to me, is in fact the nature of the video image when it is at its most powerful and effective. Such a video image typically spares us ‘the shot leading up to it.’ The image is not inscribed in a set of meanings; rather it describes, or better still, de-scribes, and in de-scribing rather than inscribing, disconnects itself from the thread of meaning, without thereby becoming meaningless. How we might ask is this amazing feat achieved? Here we will have to turn to the work of the video makers themselves as they explore the limits of visibility and meaning. The irrepressible Nam June Paik has already said “Video doesn’t mean I see; It means I fly”. Perhaps a definition of video art, as good as any, is art that shows no fears of flying.

[End]

(The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author/s. They do not necessarily represent the views of VMAC.)

Editor’s Note:
We recently unearthed an ink-jet printed typescript of Prof Ackbar Abbas’s ‘Irresolutions: Or Questions about Video’ in our VMAC storage. After asking around, we discovered that the article was probably commissioned by us in the early 2000s. In this neat and concise essay, Prof Abbas offers his cultural takes on videography. In dissecting how video art contributes to the regimes of the visible, Prof Abbas looks into the video time, video as fugitive evidence, how MTV trains us to ‘listen with our eyes’, and how video can possibly ‘de-scribe’ meanings.

This article has been reprinted with the permission of the author.

 

Staff Pick

The “The Best of Videotage” series, compiled by Videotage, consists of six volumes of selected video works in VHS format. VHS was the primary video art distribution format back in the 1990s. In the first volume, titled “Lost and Found”, 11 artists explored postcolonial cultural identity and their “lost and found” in the 1980s and 90s. 26 years later, it is another journey of “lost and found” while we are digging through the Videotage’s archive.

 

About VMAC Newsletter

VMAC, Videotage’s collection of video and media arts is a witness to the development of video and media culture in Hong Kong in the past 35 years. Featuring artists from varied backgrounds, VMAC covers diverse genres including shorts, video essays, experimental films and animations. VMAC Newsletter provides an up-to-date conversation on media arts and their preservation while highlighting its collection and contextual materials.

From August 2022 onwards, VMAC Newsletter will be published on a bi-monthly basis.