Video Installation

Abstract

While at first, “video installation” would seem to refer to a particular medium and mode of display, in practice, the term is applied to a range of intersecting media, histories and genres, including but not limited to experimental and expanded cinema, video art, installation art, digital and new media art, and the emergent category of artists’ moving image. In short, “video installation” encompasses an expansive field of moving image practices, formats, and configurations, from multichannel film projection to video sculpture to immersive and interactive media environments. The term can apply to moving images that emanate from or are projected onto screens, monitors, or mobile devices, and are displayed in spaces outside of a conventional cinematic context. In terms of historical periodization, the rise of video installation coincided with the emergence of analog video technology in the mid- to late 1960s and the concomitant emergence of installation art during this same period. Up until the 1980s, video installation took shape predominantly as gallery-based displays of CRT monitors. Often configured into sculptural arrangements that self-reflexively acknowledge their physical support, “video sculptures” invoke and comment upon video’s genetic ties to broadcast television. Yet, other, more feedback-driven modes of installation, such as Nam June Paik’s TV-Buddha (1974) or Bruce Nauman’s Live-Taped Video Corridor (1970), emphasize the instantaneity of real-time closed circuit video over the sculptural presence of the monitor, and thus privilege surveillant over the televisual optics. By the 1990s, as video projectors improved in quality and decreased in cost, the bulky CRT gave way to the projected moving image, which in turn has emerged as a dominant mode within contemporary artistic production. Since it can adapt to a variety of spaces and surfaces—wall, ceiling, floor, screen, objects, even viewers’ bodies—projection opens up a multitude of experiential possibilities. Projection can also be sculptural, as in the work of Tony Oursler and Krystof Wodizcko, who generate uncannily embodied video portraits by projecting moving images onto free-standing objects, buildings, and monuments. Video projection can also be immersive or environmental, such as in Anthony McCall’s Solid Light Works (2005–2010), a suite of monumental, linear beams of white light projected into darkened gallery spaces, which act as updated, digital variations of his influential expanded cinema work, Line Describing a Cone (1973). In response to its dominant position within contemporary artistic practice, scholarship and criticism devoted to moving image installation, curation, and distribution have spiked since the 1990s. This bibliography offers a selection of relevant literature on this topic. Beginning with an overview of key scholarship on the history of video art and contemporary artists’ moving image, the bibliography transitions to more focused, thematic investigations of and significant prehistories, including topics like expanded cinema, video aesthetics and ecologies, and installation art. Finally, it includes a selection of key exhibition catalogues, including specialized sections on video projection and video sculpture. In tracing the entwined emergence of video and installation art since the 1960s, this bibliography also limns another historical intersection, that of video art and experimental film. While typically, these practices have been framed as historically distinctive, aesthetically autonomous and driven by medium-specific concerns, this bibliography takes inspiration from and highlights more recent scholarly, critical, and curatorial perspectives that align and cross-reference these traditions, and in doing so, situate themselves at the disciplinary intersection of art history and film and media studies.