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After a whole semester trying to figure out what, if anything, the difference between these two are, I think I’ve finally come to some kind of closure. While there may not be a thick line separating the two, with strict definitive rules about what’s considered what, I have decided that for the most part, they tend to follow some general patterns. Granted there will always be exceptions to the “rules.”

Generally, the duration of video art is typically less than 30 minutes long per piece, whereas artful video is typically much longer, closer to the length of a cinema piece of more than an hour. Video art is often short enough, and vague enough to be played on an endless loop, where artful video will usually have a definite starting and stopping point. Video art often times also has no definitive plot line or narrative, while artful video usually will. H20 for example, has a main theme running through it of water and would more than likely be considered as video art. On the other hand Metropolis, which has an easily identifiable plot of workers rising up and rebelling against their oversee-ers and being tricked by a scientist’s creation would more likely be considered artful video.

Plot duration usually correlates to the video’s actual duration, to an extent anyways. The plot duration, or tempo, of video art is typically fairly short, and will usually at most take up the course of a few hours, or maybe a day or so of in-video time. Artful video though, can have a tempo of literally anything. The plot could take place over a few minutes, a few hours, several days, years, even millenia if the director so chose.

There’s also an idea of commercialism and audience. Most video art would be found in museums, where artful video is more commonly found in theaters. Something like “Street of Crocodiles” by the Brothers Quay is much more likely to be seen in a museum or as part of a more private library of work than say, the latest Bruce Willis movie. Museums are sparsely advertised outside some fliers and pamphlets, and yet good ol’ Bruce will be seen plastered across the TV airwaves and internet months before the movie is ever even released. Such advertisement brings countless more people in to see his performance in an artful video piece than those going to a museum to see video art.

Video art can be set up in ways to try and engage the audience and have them almost interact with the video. Sharin Neshat sets up a few of her videos to be projected onto the walls of a room where people have no choice but to walk in between them and cast shadows. Yet if you were to walk into a movie theater and stand up in front of the screen you’d probably find yourself getting yelled at by the other audience members and told to sit back down by the theater ushers.

Video art seems to be more about the artist trying to either get a message or point across in attempt to intrigue the audience and make them stop and think, and look at something from a different point of view. In contrast, artful video seems, for the most part, to just be a way of trying to entertain people and soak up their money on movie tickets, DVDs, merchandise, and the like. Artistic struggle versus economic profit?

There is no cut and dry line that differentiates the two. Often they tend to cross over into each other’s realms, if they can be called such. Cremaster’s a pretty good example. Long, with a seemingly discernible plot, but doesn’t make much sense, and is shown in museums alongside replicas (are they replicas or the originals?) of props used in the movies. Supposedly this is video art, but it seems to show a lot of characteristics of what might be considered artful video. But even still, just based on observations, there do seem to be general rules and ideas that tend to differentiate a good majority of video art from artful video.

Decided for the sake of compression, that I’d just dedicate a single post to all the artists not covered, rather than to have a separate one for each. Just makes things a bit neater, and I like things to be nice and tidy.

Eleanor Antin: For some reason the videos on Art:21 wouldn’t play for me, I guess my computer just doesn’t like Realplayer. There was nothing listed for her on Art:21′s youtube section either. I did search her on wiki though, and got a little information about some of her non-video artwork. One of the most interesting ones was her piece “Carving: A Traditional Sculpture.” She took pictures of herself naked for during different stages of herself on a crash diet. The things some people do to themselves for the sake of art.

Douglas Gordon: Seems to have a bit of an obsession with Alfred Hitchcock. He took the original movie Psycho, and slowed it down to last a full 24 hours, entitling it 24 Hour Psycho. Such an original title, I wonder if anyone sat through the entire thing.

William Kentridge: Actually a recent artist, he been in exhibitions for the past 10 years and won a lot of awards. I found one of his methods to be very interesting. He does animation style videos using successive charcoal drawings. The interesting thing though is that the drawings are all done on the same piece of paper, on top of one another.

Linda Montano: Actually did two 7 year performances. She wore the same color of clothes, every day for 1 year, to correspond to the Hindu energy system of Chakra, each year being a different color. The first time around she saw people once every month. The second time around she did the same thing, but only saw people four times a year. That’s some serious dedication.

Pipilotti Rist: She made a collection of videos which she called the “Super 8″ series. One of these, You Called Me Jacky, is, I believe, Pipilotti standing and playing air guitar while lip synching to a song by Kevin Coyne. Aside from some clips of trees and such that look like they were filmed from a moving vehicle, that seems to be pretty much the whole video. Entslastlungen Pipilottti Fehler is another interesting video. It shows Pipilotti on screen as a woman sings in German. Between versus, the singing stops, and a drum sounds off followed by a cymbal crash. During the drums, Pipilotti is seen standing, but she falls down in time with every cymbal crash. Between the fallings are what appear to be interference like what you’d find on the TV when a channel is off air or the cable goes out.

So, I’m watching some of those Vito videos…And I have to say they’re not what I was expecting. But then again I wasn’t really sure what to expect when the still shot of the one is a closeup of someone’s mouth…The black and white one is very disorienting. I had a hard time trying to see what was going on, since the room is rather dark and the camera is shakily following the man, is that Vito himself? around as he stumbles around. The other I just couldn’t understand a word that the speaker was trying to say, other than “no,” I did make that word out. Reading the little article on him only kind of helped me to make some sense of the works. I guess he’s mainly experimenting with taking videos of his own body? Or parts of his own body? Very odd stuff indeed.

Finally finished, here’s a project requested of me by Carol. Ever since she saw my original hawk footage, she had wanted me to use it to make a video. So, I give you my experiment, “Confounding Circumstances.”

It’s primarily an experiment, I wanted to play around with a new video editing program I’d gotten and see what it could do. It’s basically just some footage set to music, with some aspects of photo-montage added into the mix as well. I’ve done stuff like this before, several friends and I practice making what’s known as “Anime Music Videos,” AMVs, where you take clips from animated shows and organize and set them to various music. For example, one might take clips of Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner, and set them to Shania Twain’s “Gonna Getcha Good.” I’ve never done one using live footage that I’d taken myself though, so this was rather interesting. With the AMVs, you don’t have to worry about shaky cameras, where if taking actual footage, and without a tripod as the hawk footage was taken, then it can become a nuisance very quickly.

But all in all I think it turned out rather well for what it is. Final times are no less than: 45 minutes hawk watching, 30 minutes people watching, and 6 hours of editing. The music I’ve used is a song called “Abyss” by DJ Taka. It’s from the Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) Max game, which for those of you unfamiliar with the series (seriously, what’s wrong with you? Get with the program!), is a dancing video game where you step on buttons on a dance pad that correlate to arrows on the screen. I chose this song for several reasons. It has a really nice beat and rhythm to it that I thought lent itself perfectly to the confusing kind of atmosphere I was trying to create. Anytime we observe nature we’re always doing it from our own viewpoint. But what about the view of the creature? What was running through that hawk’s mind while he stood there eating, constantly staring at everyone staring back at him?

Anyway, enough of my rambling, enjoy! (Bonus points to whoever can spot the singing birdy first!)

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The only thing I kept repeating over and over to myself while watching this was “what the hell is going on.” But I guess that’s the point, there isn’t a point. I often times hear the term “eye candy” when people refer to movies with new or amazing special effects, where pretty much the main point of the movie is that it looks good. I guess in a sense one could call this “mind candy.” It screws with your mind because even though there may be an underlying message or some inkling of a plot, you just can’t quite grasp it, at least not the first time you watch it I’m sure. Not being able to see the rest of it probably also contributes to the confusion factor. Does something happen at the end to help…explain what’s going on? When the yellow race car looking thing crashed, were the drivers hurt or killed? Were the drivers ever even going somewhere to begin with, or were they just driving for the hell of it? A very bizarre film indeed.

Figured it was time to dust off my blog. I realized something the other day while we were working on our current group projects. Performance art is highly amusing. The looks on the faces of those around are so funny. I won’t go into details for sake of surprise for later, but while we were “performing” I found it extremely difficult to keep a straight face. I’m reminded of those two video artists, and for the life of me I can’t remember their names at the moment, who did the performances where one stood on a table while the other kicked a leg out etc. Lucky for them, when they were performing they didn’t have anyone else around, other than maybe someone behind the camera. But when performing in the middle of a crowd, where many people are walking past every few seconds it’s difficult. I guess it’s just something you have to get used to after having done it a lot.

Yesterday I noticed something interesting, while trying to get some footage for my video project. I was trying to get shots of people walking by the camera, just carrying on minding their own business. Reasons being will spoil the fun, so I’ll just say that much at this point. Anyway, I set up my tripod by a tree near the bookstore, right between the 2 brick pathways. My thought was that since it’s close to the bookstore and campus walk, there should be a fair amount of traffic going past.

Traffic there was…passersby there were not. Alot of times people would see me sitting there and purposefully walk around so as to avoid being on camera. Now, I can understand that it’s only polite, if someone seems to be taking landscape or nature shots, that one wouldn’t want to be in the way. But when you want people to walk in front of the campus on purpose, this can become fairly irritating.

Finally I decided to experiment. Make it look like I was taking a break. If people didn’t think I was filming, they’d be more inclined to walk in front, wouldn’t they? I turned the video option on, and just pointed it in the right direction, then leaned against the tree. I sat there for a little while and sure enough, the people walking around would tend to glance over, and keep on going. Just what I wanted. Every now and then I’d adjust the angle of the camera to get a different view, or If I saw someone coming from a ways away, I’d guess at which path they were going to take and spin the camera around quickly to face the right direction, then go back to my tree. I haven’t reviewed the footage yet, but I’m hoping it came out nicely, and I won’t have to play candid camera a second time.

The squirrels on the other hand…leave much to be desired as far as their cooperation goes…

Personally I found Chelsea Girls to be a bit difficult to watch. And by difficult, I don’t mean disturbing, I personally wasn’t offended or disturbed at all. My difficulty was in trying to make sense of what was going on, given the double reel. I kept finding myself trying to listen to the audio of one side, while watching the silent video of the other. Or sometimes I’d constantly find myself trying to go back and forth between them. It was definitely a chaotic experiance, trying to decipher just what was going on, at any given time.

First thing I did was to go to the actual Interview Magazine website, which I must say, is far too flashy and irritating for me to use for long. That and I didn’t see anything there other than current articles in the magazine. Maybe I missed a History link, I can’t say for certain. So I turned away from that and went looking elsewhere.

I learned that apparently the magazine used to focus mostly on the arts, similar to genres and styles that Warhol himself produced, and interviews with celebrities. But as he strayed from the magazine that he himself had founded, it started to veer off in other directions. It seems to be mostly based around more of a fashion world nowadays. I have to wonder whether Warhol would have approved of this change in focus, or whether he’d have just let it be to do its own thing.

I also found it quite interesting, if not somewhat amusing, that Warhol used to give out free magazines to try and draw in sponsors. What better way to grab the interest of potential sponsors or customers than to give them free reading material? Sure beats a business card any day.

Nam Jun Paik’s work is so far beyond what we’ve been looking at so far, it’s almost in another category entirely. It’s video, but it’s sculpture at the same time. Robots made of television sets, 70 monitors set up and synchronized to mimic the stars and stripes of the flag, even Tv bras.

I do have to say, I’d love to be able to see his Video Fish piece in person, it must be quite something to stand there staring into an aquarium full of fish, with monitors playing looping video of even more fish behind it, and trying to determine which fish were real, and which were video. And to think that Charlotte Moorman was arrested while performing in his Opera Sextronique is just for some unexplainable reason very amusing.

His style of art is definitely not what would come to my mind immediately when thinking about video art. I probably wouldn’t have ever thought of including the actual monitor that the art is being viewed on as a part of the work itself. This brings a whole new dilemma to the debate of Video Art vs. Artful Video.

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