The Buggles probably defined my life, although I didn’t know it at the time. They are, of course, famous for “Video Killed the Radio Star”, which was a minor electronic Brit Pop hit in 1979 but became known much more for being the first music video played on MTV back when it went on-air in 1981. My parents were definitely worried about the corrosive influence of MTV in the early 80s, and despite being early adopters of cable in southern Maine, instructed my sister and me in no uncertain terms that we were not to watch such nonsense. This meant, of course, that we watched more MTV than we actually probably wanted to, and I saw the Buggles video – they were a one-hit wonder – many times, along with other masterpieces such as “Life in a Northern Town” by Dream Academy and much more of the solo career videos of the members of Fleetwood Mac than I now care to admit.
I thought about this today as I was trying to think about what I’m going to do next weekend, which really is just go somewhere and look at art and maybe paint and definitely think about it all. My parents have graciously offered to take both the dog and the boy off my hands for a few days; I haven’t had a break, admittedly, since last March when Covid-19 lockdowns started, and while I’m not proud of it, I’m sure they’re starting to see the obvious signs of strain. On the one hand, I think it’s just weakness on my part: for most of the life of the human race, we’ve had to raise children (and animals) without a break, without vacations, and needing a few days’ rest is a bit of a farce in that light. But in the past, you would have been raised and trained to the task, to the exclusion of the other elements of human existence: you would have not been an artist or a poet or a banker (sorry to conflate by association those three things). You would have been a farmer, and since farming happens every day, and you do farming every day, the idea of a vacation would be the foreign concept. But when you are an artist, or a poet, or a banker – someone whose being is totally and solely focused on the creation and maintenance of intangible connections between human beings, and has nothing to do with the physical perpetuation of the world itself – then a vacation is almost necessary.
Let me expand on this for a second. People – and things – that exist to perpetuate the physical world also live in that physical world in their entirety. The weather, the water in the pond, the clouds in the sky, the temperature of the air – all of it is immediate and necessary, and informs not just their mood (as it does for all of us) but it informs what they can and will do as active agents. That’s the world for animals outside of the home, and the world for human beings in general until, oh, the last few millenia, and even then, only for a small (but increasing) portion of us human souls. We respond to the physical world as an agent unto itself which forces us to react.
For most of us – at least, most of us who have access to this website – that is no longer the case. The weather, the air, the water in the pond, the clouds in the sky is only incidental; it might have well been painted behind us as we act with one another in a world of pure human imagining. Most of what we do – especially those of us in the purely intangible professions, software and banking and art and music – is completely removed from the physical space in which we still, actually, live. It doesn’t matter that today it was -8C when I woke up, in terms of how I will work through my spreadsheets and essays and Powerpoints and long range planning board agendas, and it doesn’t matter that it warmed up to +4C under cloudy skies and a strong north-northeast wind which made it felt like -4C and meant the forest pathways were still frozen and slick and essentially unpassable. But to someone even a little closer to the world than me – say, the lobsterman down the street whose daughter plays with my son, or even to my son who has to wait for the bus when the sun has still not warmed the air enough to matter – all of that weather stuff is essential. The lobsterman may or may not go out today, given the wind from the north and what is probably some rough and troubling waters; the cold may mean the ice on his traps and the icing which will follow on deck doesn’t make sense, if tomorrow looks better. My son has to bulk up to meet the bus, and to be able to play outside, and with the clouds, playing outside doesn’t seem nearly as attractive as staying inside.
I count my son lucky that he gets to live at least one full year here in rural Maine, although he actually is learning to despise the relationship with nature that I have. He wants to stay indoors – like his fictional heroes, who prefer video games and comfort – and he’s migrating slowly but surely to the online world, which is at once manipulable via programming (which he’s learning quickly), bright and shiny (humans haven’t lost their greed for lustre), and active. By “active”, I mean it’s dynamic, moving – it’s not like drawing or writing, which is static once placed on the page. That which moves – and which can be repeated – is seductive in a way against which the static cannot compete. Indeed, the static arts – painting, sculpture, and I’d place in that realm writing as well – are forced into a different realm against the dynamic arts. They have to rely upon an appreciation of the craft of creation by those of us who choose to apprehend it: we, the viewers or readers, have to accept that the work is a moment in time, and have to choose either to embrace it – including the sins of the creator at the time – or reject it.
Dynamic arts – and I think I’d include music here, apropos Mark’s recent essay – don’t have that burden. Works that change in performance, which could be music, theatre, ballet, opera, are subject to re-interpretation by those who perform them. Mark and I have a long-running comic opposition on Nietzsche – I find him reprehensible – but I can’t really argue with Mark’s appreciation of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. After all, I don’t need to witness the bombastic and blatantly anti-Semitic productions which so inspired the Nazis in the early 20th century; I can appreciate the tortured but still faithfully-orchestrated productions of the Metropolitan Opera in the last thirty years. All that remains constant is a score, which itself has to be re-performed by a set of musicians who can never perfectly recreate what they did the last time. Compare that to the Caravaggio on the wall – it is, essentially, permanent.
And I was thinking about this when seeing a recent video art performance. Video art lives in a kind of no-man’s land in a lot of ways. It wasn’t possible until about 130 years ago or so, and the idea of video art – as opposed to “movies”, just theatre on screen – only came about in the 1960s or 1970s. Bill Viola is usually named as the founder of the school, the first person who used what is sometimes thought of as “kinetic” art – images that change and move – to create purely abstract works of beauty. I find Viola’s work to be turgid and weak at the same time, but to his credit, he’s trying something new, and one shouldn’t expect the first experiments to yield success. Viola deserves credit for launching the field of video fine art, though, because it asks a fundamental question about what art is. Does art create an object of beauty (we can debate what “beauty” is, but that’s another essay), or does it capture beauty? If it creates, then the idea of whether it is moving or static really comes down to what we, the viewer or consumer, want from beauty: I might want a picture on the wall or a sculpture in stone, but you might want a video – it’s just down to preference. If art captures beauty, though, we have a more difficult question.
Capturing beauty is far more open ended, but it also comes with a moral cost. We cannot possess that which is beautiful, any more than we can possess that which is intelligent or loving. We can apprehend it, with our eyes or our nose or our hands or our mind or soul, but we can’t possess it. But it’s possible that art, in its essence, is an effort on the part of our sentient and self-reflective and recursive minds to possess, to take from the living – the dynamic, that which we are actually equal members of – some element which we find to be pleasing, or productive. I think there is, in that way, something in art which is actually somewhat destructive: we do not create, but rather we enslave an image, we take it from the past and we force it onto our walls, or into our galleries, as a way of exercising control over it. This isn’t to say that all art is of that kind, but I think a decent portion of art is – particularly those artworks that even in their creation deny agency to their subjects. I’m thinking here of Sargent’s watercolours of Venetian gondoliere, or Gaugin’s subjects in Tahiti, but I’m also thinking about the walkaway photographs of a Weegee, who by his own admittance cared not a whit for his subjects, whether rich, poor, dead, or alive.
Video art is more prone to this dichotomy, between creation and capture, because technology – both of actual filming and the creativity allowed in the editing process – is broadening the range of what is art today. The painter is stuck in a moment in time, by the nature of a static canvas and the paint upon it; the sculptor even more so. While the idea of capturing a scene, or a landscape, or a portrait may be the theoretical ideal – and in the writings of many painters it clearly is – the act of creation is explicit in the surviving artifact of the artwork itself. Music and theatre, on the other hand, do capture something of a moment – but then it vanishes, never to be repeated. It is thus predominantly a creation – of the composer’s score, of the director’s stage instructions – and its capture is only that of the moment of its performance. And video and film have come to in some way bridge this boundary: it captures the performance moment, but allows for replay, and thus freezes only one performance in time. Editing introduces a further wrinkle: the artist – the director of the film – has captured a specific moment in time, but her editing choices now can create a very different work.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say there is a black and white resolution to this quandary. I do think artists tend towards either one end of the spectrum or another – that is, they are either explicit in their materialism, in their objectification of the world, in which case they are trying to capture; or else they are explicit in their role as creator, in which they acknowledge not just their agency but release their depicted from any claim. Artists – and authors, for that matter – have to discover their own relationship to creation over a lifetime, and they also have to explore – or, to demonstrate my bias, tempt – their own inclination to capture and own their images and their subjects through a career.
I don’t think either creation or capture are inherently moral or immoral, but I would posit that that the act of creation is less prone to the dangers of objectification than is the act of capture. Objectification – the reduction of people, things, events, souls, to a material basis which denies their unique essence in time and in relation to all – is really the foundational immoral act, because it allows us to then destroy without consideration. Something may not be worth much consideration – it may only be inanimate and fungible with another substance – but all things must surely be worth some consideration. Objectification rejects that, and allows the sentient being to class some things as being utterly deserving of contempt. Artworks that capture, that seek to take some of the essence of beauty of something else and to preserve it in some way, are thus on a slipperly slope towards making the non-beautiful other-essence of those objects somehow susceptible to being worthless or meaningless.
In this, actually, I find Dada to be a supreme expression of joy: what better thing than to find – to create – the beauty of a urinal? of a lead pipe? Not to capture it – surely the object-ness of the urinal was captured by the good folks in Kohler, Wisconsin – but what Dada really is, is Marcel Duchamp finding beauty in the urinal by declaring it so, thus really creating it and forcing us to acknowledge it, by celebrating it in a gallery. We can deny it, but even that act essentially acknowledges Duchamp’s initial act: that of creation, the creation of beauty purely out of, first, an otherwise mundane object, and then the primary artistic act, a declaration of beauty. We can do this with practically anything – and Thoreau demands that we do so with anything we find in the non-human world by way of challenge – but for Duchamp to do it in a pisser just emphasizes the fact that all things are, fundamentally, beautiful. That doesn’t require capture – indeed, capturing it desecrates it – it just requires acknowledgement, that act of creation.
This is an extreme, but it serves the purpose: creating beauty has very little chance of stepping into the moral quicksand of capture. I’m thinking now of Artemnesia Gentileschi, whose latest exhibit I’ll have to miss because of Covid but at least I can enjoy it online. Her works seem to be looking to create a beauty out of her subjects – much as those of Anders Zorn, who is now my favourite portraitist. There are artists who take subjects who are sort of plain – you know, who look like me – but they find that spark in their subject’s eye, find the way to craft the beauty of their soul into the cut of their cape or the tilt of their hat. That act of creation is essentially opposed to the material, especially in art: it is an assertion of the wonder of the transcendent despite the limitations of the paint, of the canvas, of the film. It even transcends the beauty – or lack thereof – of the subject: the whole point is that the artist as creator can find that beauty. Sargent missed this; Zorn did not. And so much of our modern art simply relies on the aesthetic beauty of the subject, when the masters of art only relied on creating beauty, for surely, all of us are beautiful in our way.
Compared to Zorn, or Caravaggio, video art is still in its early days, and my guess is the materialist technology toy fun factor element of facing an editing table, or an iMovie console, is still too tempting for most artists to not wonder what they can capture and twist and splice and turn to their acquisitive object. Movies – probably because they are connected more closely to the theatre, to opera, to music – have a better pedigree – after all, movie directors started on the stage, in reality, rooted to the sweat and emotion of the theatre – and good directors and actors still come together to create magic, every now and long again. As we know too well, painting and sculpture are stuck in the same rut as history and literature – trying to find ways to make themselves relevant as technology changes what it means to create – but painters and sculptors still have to feel their medium to achieve their work; indeed, the most worthless of modern artists, Jeff Koons and the like, are the ones who industrialize their production. I have high hopes for video – eventually – because like movies, the person behind the camera is still a real person, and unless they devolve into pure editing, they remain connected to the subject through the stratum of the air, if nothing else. But for now, video loves the mixing and editing board: it’s just another category killer.
Maybe that’s true of any art medium when it first emerges. Viola’s work is trite in the extreme, as is all of the video “artists” I’ve encountered in galleries and the video “art” one encounters online. But the form itself is new; ancient frescoes and paintings are hamfisted compared to what we’d expect from a decent painter today. Sculpture, arguably, is not, but then again, carving and three-dimensional object creation is linked powerfully to tool making, which has several hundred thousand years of crafting history behind it – maybe that just means we have better instincts for that medium. Writing is no different either: despite what we all say about Homer, let’s face it, he’s sort of tiresome as either a plot author or as a dialoguist. And all media rely on the physical beauty of the subject as the starting point. It’s the true artist that can transform the ugly into art. In a week where the ugliest remnants of the Civil War have upset the American republic, it’s worth remembering that President Grant, who is represented in the Capitol with a sculpture that shows his homely features and sad face realising the burden of destroying half of a country in the name of justice, does not possess a beautiful form. But the work possesses beauty in a way that no other amoral work can.
I think it’s possible that video art will remain out of reach for us as a medium because of this fundamental confusion. It can capture vistas of time, but it misses the compelling historical nature of the movie – movies create a narrative, time-driven, and without embarrassment or pretense – and video art also misses what defines photography and painting and sculpture, in their ability to capture the singular moment, the instantaneous epiphany which we find all too fleeting. And it fails the test of music, which is always being destroyed, always and directly and openly admitting its transience. What does video have to offer, other than neat tricks? And what else are we, as consumers – as viewers – as critics – what else are we looking for? The only thing it offers right now is a kind of visual tricksterism. Viola’s work, and most of what I’ve seen to date in major galleries and online, is trying to capture some moment: a visual effect, an eerie pairing of sound or silence with a visual that doesn’t mesh, or a time-series set of visuals which just remind you that you are not, in fact, in the forest with aspens whispering, or in the water with the cool current against your skin, or watching the ashes fall from a fire in the trees. All lovely images, but the video artist – at least so far – only serves to remind you of how they cannot express the sensation of that moment nearly as well as the photographer, or the painter, or the orchestrator, or the director.
Or, for that matter, the radio star. I’ve been watching a lot of Have Gun Will Travel lately, which is the only major television show which then spawned a radio drama. The radio drama is different, but no less compelling, than the TV show – which itself is a masterpiece of late 50s noir simply placed in an Old West setting. Radio – and what is our current version thereof, the podcast – has a kind of power that video art still can only dream of possessing. Foley effects and the power of the human voice – at least, to those of us who are human – evolved quickly in the hundred or so short years of the medium’s existence. Which makes one wonder why video art still remains so stillborn: radio drama was a simple extension of storytelling, and surely video art was just a mild tweak of moviemaking – which also quickly evolved and thrived – or alternatively, a dynamic movement of visual art. But it remains to be seen whether it has any future. I’ve tried to explore what it’s missing, compared to other forms, but at its heart, there is something dead about it that defies my ability to describe – especially when put against anything else which could be a close cousin.
So that’s an interesting problem. What makes an art medium fail? What other art mediums have failed? Murals, maybe? No one has really explored holograms, although technology means they may fall into the “uncanny valley” at least for the time being. The one-act play?
I was looking forward to this weekend so as to be able to have some uninterrupted time to go to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, have a delicious meal somewhere, and then maybe on Monday go the Portland Museum of Art. The museums are closed again, alas, because of this new strain of Covid flying around; the restaurants I wanted to visit have closed permanently. I’ll spend the weekend at home, reading, listening to music, definitely painting and probably doing some photography, and probably writing a bit too – apologies to all for whatever emerges on that last front. But I’m looking forward to the museums and galleries opening their doors again, and exploring once again the beauty they contain.
Just not so much for anything by Bill Viola.