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Do Experiemental Video Art convey their message to the audience clearly? Or is it not important?

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Video as a medium of communication has been in existence for more than hundred years now.  In this time the role, technology and application of the medium has evolved considerably. Experimentation is done for numerous purposes.  The obvious motivation is to stretch, test or expand the techniques of creating video art.  But the manner in which content is formatted, presented and perceived can also be experimented with.  Today, directors are empowered by the new digital technology that is available, which makes experimentation easier to carry out.  But this comes with the proviso that the audience is still able to understand and appreciate the novelty being offered them.  This essay will explore this subject in detail.

Video art is applicable to a diverse set of broadcast mediums. Chief among them are television, cinema and the Internet.  In the case of television, “the televisual public sphere disseminates and normalizes a model of split identification in which the self confronts its non-identical representations.” (Joselit, 2000) This understanding of the nature and effect of the medium enables the filmmaker to modify his style and content accordingly.  Even within television, it is commercial television which supports a disproportionately high number of productions compared to public service broadcasting.  Such being the case, the splitting in viewer identification “remains veiled in order to facilitate the viewer’s assimilation of the consumerist, ‘family-oriented’ values which are axiomatic under late capitalism.” (Joselit, 2000) This is not to say that most television productions under the commercial genre succumb to this compulsion.  The works of Peter Campus are one among many exceptions. In Campus’ work,

“the contradiction between a spectator and his or her mechanical and cultural mediation is provocatively heightened. On one register, such a juxtaposition of television and video art is a relatively conventional avant-gardist critical move in which Campus’s work is shown to identify and represent social contradictions which would otherwise remain invisible. But on another register, it is less conventional in its methodology.” (Joselit, 2000)

There is debate surrounding the importance of audience understanding the message of the video art.  The genre, style and intent of the filmmaker is the major factor here.  Some films are deliberately made in an abstract fashion, whose beauty lies in its ambiguity.  This is the modernist direction in film and cinema where narrative forms have undergone experimentation. A discussion of French cinema is relevant here, as it offers a rich repository of filmmaking for over a hundred years.  French directors, screenwriters and cinematographers have influenced or initiated various ‘waves’ of cinematic style over this period.   French New Wave cinema is especially influential in this regard, which gave rise to truly modernist interpretations of cinematic art.  Auteurs like Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Alain Resnais, etc have pushed the boundaries of narrative form and content.  In the case of Godard, the break from conventional cinema or cinema du qualite is so complete that his works have eschewed narrative story-telling altogether.  Instead, in the highly experimental ‘attempts at cinema’ (as Godard refers to his works) the emphasis is on constructing essays.  This is a sharp deviation from the traditional preoccupation with storytelling.  Godard can be credited with pioneering the ‘video essay’ format, an experimental genre that is marked by its artistic, theoretical, and political perspectives. It is a format that is not easily accessible to the lay audience.  The video essay marks

“a distinct aesthetic strategy, one that is premised on a mode of relationality. According to Ursula Biemann, the video essay as a genre, situates itself between documentary film and video art. Considered too experimental, self-reflexive and subjective for documentary, the video essay stands out within the spectrum of video art as socially involved and political.” (Springgay, 2008)

Even the most experimental director will at one point be constrained by the dictates of commerce.  This is especially so because video rental, sale and distribution industries are small when compared to other entertainment media. It is almost impossible to name any video artists who have actually earned their living from their work for any sustained period of time. In fact, even if one accumulates royalties from rental and sale of video art for many years it would still not even cover production costs.  Only a few filmmakers are fortunate enough to find supplementary income through teaching at universities and art schools.  Some others get by with administrative or curatorial jobs at media art centres. But the overall picture is pretty bleak. It is very important for the audience to understand the economic and financial structure of the video art industry.  For otherwise, viewing works of art in exclusion of these factors, would give an incomplete understanding of the content itself.  It is the survival instincts of the director that override all other artistic considerations.  All experimentation in technique and content are limited by the economic imperative.  What this means is that the director has to aim to reach a broad audience base.  To this extent, his content and style cannot be too esoteric or sophisticated.  In this manner, the economic necessities erect limitations on the director’s intent, and by extension the scope for audience’ imaginative interpretation. The acute economic problems of the video art industry are highlighted by this passage:

“Production grants, always scarce and usually scant, have been hard hit by recent cuts in state and federal funding. Innovations in analog technologies such as nonlinear editing, and the foreseeable obsolescence of familiar analog technologies (such as the venerable 3/4″ system), are occurring at rates far too rapid and costly for most non-corporate consumers, be they individual artists, media-access centers or educational institutions, to stay on or near the cutting edge.” (Chris, 2006)

In the era of broadband Internet, camera-enabled mobile phones and Youtube, the complexion of video making and distribution has undergone a revolution.  Many pundits worry that video as an art form might be coming to an end. In conjunction, the original impulses for video-making that television enabled has also neared an end.  Caught helplessly in an industry in decline, the video maker has lost the relevance he once possessed.  These days, “the burdens placed on video to be topical, critical, political, even revolutionary, have superseded aesthetic development, sometimes at the expense of even moderate standards of technical quality – and this, despite the fact of poorly constructed tapes or those of substandard technique, limits access to many potential screening venues.” (Chris, 2006)

Directors are constantly adjusting their methods and styles to suit the changing demands of the audience. In recent years, this is reflected in the increasing usage of documentary elements even in narrative forms.  Filmmakers such as Alexander Kluge, Harun Farocki, Peter Watkins, etc have helped create a movement in this respect. The invoking of documentary features is in part recognition of lack of serious intellectual discourse in video art.  It is a response to the perception that video art is ineffective for social change.  The medium is thus seen capable of instigating “an exchange with an audience about the status of ideas such as truth or authenticity….the increasing interest in the unstable and reflexive aspects of documentary is seen as ‘aesthetic journalism’”. (Chris, 2006) Elements of documentary are intertwined with the subject of realism, though the latter is genre finding application across art forms.  Contemporarily, video art has embraced political subjects in an unprecedented fashion. The subjects they touch on range from “the trauma of language and identity in Kosovo, to the relationship between Malaysian skinhead subculture and British colonial history, to the promises and betrayals of talk shows and reality TV.” (Collins, 2011, p. 44)

Finally, modern video art is as much a product of technology as it is of the artist. The experimental approaches witnessed in the genre “through specific exploration of devices like repetition, partial repetition, review and reworking, permutation and system, prefigures many of the structural principles inherent in the technology of Random Access Memory”. (De Bruyn, 2003)  Thus technologically empowered, the filmmaker’s challenge is in exposing his audience to these new capabilities.  ‘Non-linearity’ in narrative structure is a particularly modern phenomenon in video art.  The filmmaker will have to remember that from the point of view of the spectator, the experience (the journey itself in the end) can only be linear because our lives move only forward through time. Maya Deren has contributed to theories related to such structures – which he classifies into horizontal or vertical planes of development. The aesthetics of this format are built around a few fundamental principles: “the drama moves forward on the horizontal plane–the narrative. Layers of meaning are added by repeating the same sequence of events with changes–the vertical plane. We end up with a matrix.” (De Bruyn, 2003) In this way, the experimental is indebted to the digital. A new area of concern for directors handling digital filmmaking technology is that of ‘interactivity’. Hereby significant new issues are created “for the understanding of the relationship between the work and the spectator and for the concepts of authorship which may be seen as intrinsic to digital media” (De Bruyn, 2003)

 Works Cited

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