Kyle Kopta DTC

   Video art is interesting to me in that it has the capacity to be very impersonal and commercial, as is the case in many blockbuster films, but it also has the potential to be a profoundly personal and expressive medium if put into the right hands. For artists like Bill Viola, video art is a vehicle for self-discovery and expression through a process similar to a painter experimenting with different paints on a canvas. On the other hand, other artists like Andy Warhol used video as a form of diary and documentation to act as a supplement or companion piece to the actual work being produced int he studio. Using video as a means to document the process of creating really lends itself to the idea of process art and audience participation as well.    What I found most interesting about this section was the idea of shocking and alluring viewers into a unique relationship between the artist and the viewer. The book explores this idea in regards to American artist Chr...

Option 1 Option 2 Option 3

   This section in the book focuses on the emergence of video art as it relates to Conceptualism and the increasing popularity of television in the American home. As television was becoming an integral part of everyday life, artists understood the effectiveness of communicating with their audience in a televisual way. To add on to this, through advertising, a new consumer society was forming that only worked to perpetuate this television culture. Although television was helpful to early video artists in many ways, the critique of this new television culture was the subject of many early video works.    What I found interesting about this section was the inception of alternative coverage of different events. Today, we are accustomed to seeing coverage of significant events from a multitude of sources (especially the thousands of smaller sources that can be found online). However, a time existed when a few large groups had the ability to create an uncontested narrati...

   This section touches upon media performance as it related to different schools of thought in the latter half of the 20th Century. One such example is that of the disruption of the 1968 Miss America beauty pageant. Through this street theater, feminist ideology of the time was able to manifest in performance. This was only one of the many liberation movements that would go on to utilize media performance and street theater as a way to draw from a theory and promote it in some way.    What really interested me in this section was the theory of the Situationist International, who where an organization of avant-garde artists and intellectuals. They subscribed to the idea that theory should be the main idea with which artists draw from for their aesthetic actions. Furthermore, they were critics of work that saw itself as detached from politics and the social climate. This theory concerning self-governing art makes me think about the value of art in relation to its su...

   This section is an examination of the symbiotic relationship between media as an art form and performance. As art as a performance evolved, the action of making the art became just as, if not more, important as the final painted subject. This idea of art evolving from a marketable object to a process in and of itself and distancing itself from other commercial and traditional art is very interesting to me. How much of art is actually just one's ability to convince others of a work's artistic worth?    When one typically thinks of art, they think of the final product. However, the idea of the process being the source of the actual art is interesting in that it requires an artist to examine their rhetoric carefully. Rather than having to sell the final product itself, one must be able to sell others on the process as well as convince the audience that it is performative art, rather than just an unorthodox way to make a painting or video. This makes me think of w...

   Chapter 3, 'Video Installation Art', is an examination of video installation as an art medium and the emergence of the context of a work becoming an integral part of its content. This idea of completely controlling the context of a piece of art was very interesting to me. Before reading this chapter, I believed that I had exercised a large amount of control over how others have seen my art. Whether it be through the size of an image, the color of an art mat, or the frame for a photograph, I believed I was making a great effort in how others viewed my art. However, this does not even hold a candle to the extent to which these installation artists control the environment in which their art lives. Through a manipulation and consideration of the time and space surrounding their work, video installation artists were able to push the idea of sculpture and poetry into a new art form.    What also interested me in this chapter is the collapse of boundaries that can be a...