Smashed cars and Chinese chewing: the five masterpieces of video art

This article focuses on 5 different artists who are essential to video art and explore it each differently. The first artist talked about was Pipilotti Rist, and her video “Ever is All Over” is what is discussed. I have already seen this video, actually quite recently for the first time in class. It was interesting to see her create this video in a time where video was just beginning and portable devices were just starting to become slightly available. 

“TV Buddha” by Nam June Paik, is a piece that I have seen before but did not know much about. It was nice to read this blurb about it because it actually has a great thought provoking meaning. The buddha is staring at a tv with a camera pointed at him. It appears as tho it is a live recording, but the image stays still as a mirror image with nothing moving in the background. This presses the question: is the buddha staring into the present as a live image or the past by it being a recording. 

I’ve never heard of Joan Jonas not have I ever seen this work “vertical roll” It seems like an interesting concept to recreate the effect that an old tv would naturally create. I also think it was successful to never show the figure fully, and instead show piece by piece and let the imagination put those pieces together into a full figure.

The next artist showcased is Bill Viola with his work “He Weeps for You.” I actually saw this piece very recently while I was researching interesting video art. I think this is very cool because he uses a water droplet as a way to capture images instead of showing a room or image from a still shot. We talked recently about how you can project your art on many surfaces and I think this relates to that even though this isn’t the presentation.

Lastly Zhang Peili’s video “Eating” is interesting to me because it is shown as a triple stack of videos.  It shows three different views of one act occurring: eating. One is of the cheek/jaw, one of the mouth and one of the plate of food. I like the way this was presented and how the use of sculpture was incorporated to make it more visually appealing and interesting.