Art Criticism

1970 marked the publication of Gene Youngblood’s now-formative Expanded Cinema – a text that was instrumental in legitimizing video and new media as viable and serious artistic forms. Youngblood went on to a career in both practice and theory, making a life’s work of championing the uses of video towards both social and political ends. This interview, conducted at SAIC, comes seven years after the release of Expanded Cinema and details its author’s primarily philosophic concerns with the medium of video.

Magenheimer’s video explores the bounds of narrative and the illusion of received wisdom in the seven minutes and twenty-two seconds it takes to rob a house. Here, images of medieval art, popular cinema, and “live” news reportage speak candidly to the constructedness of all storytelling traditions.

The Luminous Image was an international exhibition of video installations held in the fall of 1984 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

Nathan Lyons (b.1930) has contributed to the field of photography as a critic, author, curator, educator, and photographer. He has published several books and catalogs, including Photographers on Photography (1966), Photography in the 20th Century (1967), Towards a Social Landscape (1967), Persistence of Vision (1968), and Notations in Passing (1974).  His body of work consists primarily of photographs which focus on American culture.

Appropriating material from the introduction to the nightly television show, PM Magazine and a commercial for Wang Computers, Birnbaum uses enlarged still-frames from each of the sources to compound a new image of the indelible American Dream. To the soundtrack of an acid rock version of The Doors' L.A. Woman, repetitive images of an ice skater, baton twirler, cheerleader, and young girls licking ice cream, exemplify dominant cultural images of women — images that emphasize their performative nature: the idea that woman is a spectacle arranged for the (male) viewer's pleasure.

British theorist and art historian Eddie Chambers (b.1960) is a curator and a regular contributor to Art Monthly and European journals on contemporary art. His writings were collected in Run Through the Jungle (1999). Since the early 1980s he has been involved in organizing and curating a considerable number of artists' exhibitions. In addition to his exhibition work, he has written extensively about the work of artists in the United Kingdom and other countries, including Australia, Jamaica and the U.S. His articles and other texts have been widely published in magazines and journals such as Third Text, Visual Culture in Britain, International Review of African American Art, and Wasafiri.

"One of Baldessari’s most ambitious and risky efforts. Seated and holding a sheaf of papers, he proceeds to sing each of Sol LeWitt’s 35 conceptual statements to a different pop tune, after the model of Ella Fitzgerald Sings Cole Porter. What initially presents itself as humorous gradually becomes a struggle to convey Lewitt’s statements through this arbitrary means."

—Helene Winer, “Scenarios/Documents/Images,” Art in America 61 (March 1973)

John Tagg is a writer, educator, and a leading contributor to the development of art-historical and photographic theory, focusing on political analysis of institutionalized culture and interventions within it. He is a professor of art history at State University of New York-Binghamton and author of Grounds of Dispute: Art History, Cultural Politics and the Discursive Field (1992) and The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (1988). Interview by James Hugunin.

A historical interview originally recorded in 1988.

Cyclops / "monitor" / minotaur.

Note: A 20-second video loop self-portrait.