VMAC Article

Thinking with the Camera – Video is Presence in the Present
Or: How I became the initiator and co-founder of today’s Video-Forum (Excerpt)
Wolf Kahlen (Commissioned by n.b.k. Video-Forum)

Don’t forget that ‘video’ means ‘I see.’ In the present tense. So not seeing in the past, not to preserve something, like I saw, or I have seen. In the present, the videotape – that’s how it all began – can run and run and run. Like the car in the Volkswagen advertisement from the late ‘60s: It runs and runs and runs. This primal experience with the first video technology, which I still have ‘in my gut,’ was exhilarating. It hasn’t faded for me, but it is absent from normal video consumption today. It was literally ‘compressed.’ Presence in the present is the original capital of video art. The camera is running, and the image on it or the monitor shows something happening simultaneously, or appearing before us, possibly we see ourselves, now or with a time lag. Today, video is merely a term for a medium. The images preserved with it are the norm. Still, every TV viewer can ‘feel’ how different a ‘live’ experience is. Even today, it is indicated when images are live. Recorded images are the tools of the know-it-all, they are training material. Of course they can also have good qualities. Video art is something totally different. Optimal use of the medium can be found in closed-circuit installations, which maintain a direct link between the camera and the viewing of the images. CCTV, as Slavko Kacunko called it, is when television is involved.

In India, it was said about a certain yogi: He can turn the inside of a tennis ball outward, and the outside inward. As I mentioned, In 1968 VW had an advertising slogan: “It runs and runs and runs and runs…” Around that time, the cassette tape became the most popular medium, one that runs and runs and runs. The ingenious Möbius strip is more than an invention or mathematical phenomenon. It’s a veritable work of art, reflecting our desire for reversibility and infinity. As an image, it’s as powerful as the inverted tennis ball. Video art is also an object, one that ‘faces’ us and is therefore a matter of fact. Facts are actual results of an act. Videos are results of acts: Of thought processes triggered by the video, while the video is running. Which, of course, are first triggered by processes of perception. And first, by fields of impressions. Videos can be facts of thought. They can. And should, according to my view of the pioneer years, the late 1960s. Because artworks are tools of thought. For simultaneously possible and impossible thoughts, like those inspired by the Möbius strip and the tennis ball. Interspersed with the counterpart of thinking: feelings. The idea that something simultaneously is and is not deeply corresponds to our experience of the world, but is rejected by rational thought. Yet both/and is a constant reality. Because the Earth is round, landscapes are boundless and endless. Obstacles aside, they have no ending or beginning. They are an experience of infinitude, both spatial and temporal. They are what makes nature feel so gratifying. It grows and grows, but at the same time: It dies and revives, dies and revives. Its times flow and flow and flow. Just like our existence. Always questioning whether we will return, or where we will live on, after the caesura of death. It’s ultimately the dream of reversibility. In 1969 when I made my first video plans, 15 concepts, I called them ‘Reversible Processes.’ Bazon Brock immediately contradicted me: Nothing is reversible. (He probably meant in physics – rightly, but too narrowly). He later changed his mind. In his theory of ruin, which I had him recite at my Berlin Ruins of Art in 1987, the opposite was revealed. The both/and is always there, but it stokes our fear, ultimately, our fear of death. That’s why we hoard goods and cling to people. But both/and is the true freedom. True awareness of reality is needed to perceive it, accept it, even cultivate it. A reality that exists and does not exist, at the same time. It’s not dual, and certainly not digital. Buddhists speak of the ‘ten thousand things’ when they say: All is One. The one is both the ten thousand things and (only) the One. The ten thousand things are both the One and themselves. That is the art of thinking. Artists of all genres are image-makers, image-givers, image-creators. Lasting art remains in our memory as images through our eyes, ears, thoughts, deeds, taste, balance, energy, heat, and cold, to name a few of our 27 senses. This applies to all creations, in the sciences, philosophy, medicine, architecture, design, fashion, or cooking. The ‘inventors’ of the safety pin and fried potatoes both had images in mind. A key phrase like ‘I think, therefore I am’ or ‘E=mc2’ are, first and foremost, images. In physics and math one speaks of ‘elegant solutions’ or ‚models.’ They are nothing but images.

Lasting video means lasting images. At its best it is an image, the image, not the shape of a point but a field. It can run, have a course, but is not linear. Video creators are not data providers, and certainly not image exploiters. A running video happens, becomes an act in time, simply by running. It doesn’t have to show action, doesn’t have to tell stories. Film has always done that more professionally. A video – in my sense – is the unique opportunity, over time, to attune, initiate, or even lull a viewer into an atmosphere that animates thought, to create FIELDS, not points or linear sequences of impressions. Thinking moves, irritates, disturbs, or confirms. A tape artwork, or rather screen artwork, can bring the mind to a meditative zero point. Or it can be so unsettling that viewers become nervous and reluctant. Preferring or even shutting down their own willful thoughts. Allowing the uncontrollable to drift off. A ‘good’ video allows drifting off. There’s nothing to miss as long as the viewer keeps sitting. The center creates a linear concentration. The open field creates a strong impression. It’s like being caught in a spider’s web. Example: ‘TAU’ from 1973. This video is about tension and relaxation that builds up and releases when you turn a rope with both hands. It’s a law of nature. Of course, films can do that too. Generally, that’s their aim, together with their content, be it descriptive or associative, even abstract. (Throughout film history, of course, there have been wonderful so-called ‘abstract films’. But at heart they are narrative abstractions. Art history rightly praises its authors). From the beginning, this distinguished the early ‘videos from California’ from the ‘videos from the East Coast.’ In American video publications you can see this difference immediately. European videos are still unfairly not seen at all by the Americanized video scene. Not even when they were later noticed in the late 1970s. They are omitted despite their qualities. Although the Museum of Modern Art in New York showed my videos in ‘Art from Berlin’ in 1977, this corrective step by Barbara London remained inconsequential. ‘America First’ is deeply embedded in American education. Video art history needs to be rewritten. But that’s not the issue here.

On my path to video, I met the Gestalt psychologist Rudolf Arnheim in New York in 1965– 66. A lifelong bond developed between us. He came to my tiny studio in Weehawken, New Jersey, overlooking Manhattan, where my first UMBILD took up the entire room: A lampshade-like barrel, three meters in diameter, which you could enter only by stooping low. On the outside it looked like a cylinder. Inside, it was a painted canvas, creating the seductive illusion of a square room or amorphous space. I wanted to confront the ‘different perceptions of outside and inside.’ This requires time, the material of time, as used in film, literature, and music. Hence Rudolf Arnheim’s and my interest. He immediately understood the role of simultaneity in this case. And how hard it was, not to create a ‘sequence’ in the image inside, but an all-round ‘being in space and time.’ He wrote about it in a catalogue for my show in New York in 1966. Even at 103, shortly before his death, he remembered it vividly. Rudolf Arnheim, the ingenious Gestalt psychologist who focused on perception in the arts – today they would call him a media scientist or media philosopher. In his 1932 book ‘Film as Art’ he identified the fundamental processes of perception and cognition, similar to McLuhan later. He understood what I wanted: to unite the outer form with the inner form, the tennis ball of the Indian yogi, despite it being impossible. Over time, standing before it and entering it, then being inside it, and later again outside it, having both/and experiences. To experience not one reality, but SIMULTANEOUS REALITIES. (There is no reality, there are only realities. W.K. 1982) He rightly drew my attention to the danger of falling into a linear reading of the image through the spatial illusion of painting, instead of experiencing the image around me as a FIELD. As a kind of gravitational field of thought. At the time I didn’t have any video experience, but I did use an old American TV with a tiny round screen in the studio to mirror what was on TV into my room. Not as a work of art, but as a pleasurable experiment. I was on my way to closed-circuit TV. A few months later I was lucky to hear Marshall McLuhan, which further confirmed our new, absolutely insightful world view. There was no Internet or digital simplifications of the world yet. But he clearly foresaw all those fundamental changes in our consciousness, not as objects, but as psychic and perceptual upheavals, like an earthquake or landslide of the senses. And the placelessness and timelessness we will ‘fall’ into, because we are not prepared for it. Because we have not taken the realities of the world seriously as a given, nor its boundlessness and the flow of all processes. He saw the role of the global world as that of a global village, spoke of virtual money as a medium, the rise of clichés and rumors, etc. Even an artist like Andy Warhol understood more about media back then than many video artists do today. His 8-hour film of the Empire State Building, which premiered in March 1965, is virtually a meditative ‘running’ video. When he made his 50-minute ‘infinite’ film ‘Kiss’ in 1963, I’m sure he would have loved to have had a medium like video. Video could also be used as a cognitive tool in the arts. Only a few artists have done this; most of today’s video makers have not taken this new path, but just ‘fill their old wine in new bottles’ or ‘new wine in old bottles’ (after all, video is already over 50 years old). They use the medium narratively to describe facts, in ways that are linear or virtual and surreal. But television and film can already do all that.

The history of all media, the ‘extensions of our senses’ (McLuhan speaks of extensions of our body), which we humans are desperately seeking and will also seek to invent in the future, shows, starting with the mirror image, how we are slowly but surely distancing ourselves from factual reality, not approaching THE REALITY, as is repeatedly claimed. Neither smelling screens nor selfies can help. Today’s (2021) television images are so sharp, high contrast, and color tuned that an unspoiled, sensitive viewer has the false impression of getting ever closer to reality, while at the same time being ‘pushed’ into a completely different world, one that ‘stands out from the background,’ that is ever more unreal, even surreal. It’s only logical that people then want to immerse themselves into even more ‘impossible’ (virtual) worlds. In other words, surrealism, the bourgeois dream of imaginary (today we say ‘virtual’) worlds, has (unfortunately) finally prevailed. This is a dangerous development, as we are increasingly ‘falling off the face of the earth.’

Editor‘s Note
This is an excerpt from Wolf Kahlen’s article ‘Thinking with Camera: Video is Presence in the Present’, first published in 2021 on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the n.b.k. Video-Forum. Special thanks to the author and n.b.k. Video-Forum for permission to reproduce.

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

 

 

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VMAC Catalogue，2011

Since 2008, Videotage has been working with the video art archive. In 2011, the newly digitized and restored archive was officially released, and a selection catalogue was produced. In the same year, Phoebe Man, Ellen Pau, and Alvis Choi curated a series of touring programs with VMAC’s video resources, named “Hong Kong Experimental Shorts”, “Homemade Videos”, and “Anniversary”.