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The Unification of the Senses: Intermediality in Video Art-Music

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2011

Holly Rogers
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Abstract

The electromagnetic basis of video technology allowed sound and image to be recorded simultaneously: as a result, composers could visualize their music and artists could sound their images. Many believed that such intermedial audio-visuality signalled a brand-new art form that was free from lineage. Using Nam June Paik as an example, this article suggests that this is inaccurate. During the twentieth century, composers were experimenting with spatializing their sounds, while artists were attempting to include time as a creative element in their visual work. The intermedial capabilities of video technology allowed these two disciplines to come together, acting as a conduit that facilitated the fusion and manipulation of pre-existing elements. Understood in this way, music and art in the twentieth century cannot coherently be discussed as individual disciplines, but rather encourage a more lateral history – or spatial sensibility – that moves fluidly through the space between them.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 136 , Issue 2 , 2011 , pp. 399 - 428
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Musical Association

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References

1 See, for example, Nicholas De Oliveira, Nicola Oxley and Michael Petry, Installation Art (London, 1994), 13. This journey is charted in Douglas Davis, Art and the Future: A History/Prophecy of the Collaboration between Science, Technology and Art (London, 1973), 149.

2 Curated by Christine Van Assche, Media Arts Curator at the Centre Pompidou, this exhibition, which ran from 20 September until 10 December 2006, claimed to recount ‘the history of this very contemporary field, punctuating the main phases of contemporary art from 1965 to 2005’: the exhibition notes can be found at <http://www.miamiartcentral.org> (accessed 24 January 2008).

3 ‘Whitney Film and Video: A History 1970–2009’, <http://whitney.org/FilmAndVideo/About> (accessed 21 April 2011); Bill Viola: Installations and Videotapes (exhibition catalogue, London and New York, 1987).

4 The first video installation collected by the Whitney was Paik's V-Yramid (1982): see Chrissie Iles and Henriette Huldische, ‘Keeping Time: On Collecting Film and Video Art in the Museum’, Collecting the New: Museums and Contemporary Art, ed. Bruce Altshuler (Princeton, NJ, 2005), 65–84 (p. 69).

5 Anna Bakalis, ‘It's Unreel: DVD Rentals Overtake Videocassettes’, Washington Times, 21 June 2003 (<http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives?p_action=list&p_topdoc=11>, accessed 24 May2010).

6 See <http://sabrinapenayoung.blogspot.com/> and <http://www.kathyhinde.co.uk/> (accessed 29 July 2010).

7 The Hugo Boss moving-image artist winners were Matthew Barney (1996), Douglas Gordon (1998), Pierre Huyghe (2002), Rirkrit Tiravanija (2004) and Tacita Dean (2006). Marjetica Potrč, an architect and artist, won in 2000.

8 The manifesto states further that it aims ‘to provide new spaces for art forms new to Tate – including photography, film, video and performance’: <http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/transformingtm/whychange.shtm> (accessed 24 May 2010).

9 Progress on the museum can be followed at <http://www.paiknamjune.org/ENG/DD/?M= D4&keyword=&searchitem=0&adminok=&page=2> (accessed 24 May 2010).

10 Concert halls and opera houses are embracing video technology in a number of other ways: the San Francisco Opera has installed several high-definition video screens (known as ‘OperaVision’), for instance, to provide full and close-up shots of the stage for those occupying restricted-view seats; London's Royal Opera House has recently bought a video producer and distribution company – Opus Arte – to release and market film versions of its productions; and New York's Metropolitan Opera has begun to simulcast its performances in cinemas to those unable to acquire, or afford, its theatre tickets. See Jess Hamlin, ‘Grand Opera Gets Grander with State-of-the-Art-Screens’, San Francisco Chronicle, 2 June 2007, p. E-1. Of the Royal Opera House's purchase of Opus Arte, Marc A. Scorca, President of Opera America, said: ‘It again demonstrates the close link between opera and today's multimedia world. Opera is the traditional art form that translates most effectively to multimedia representation’ (Daniel J. Wakin, ‘Royal Opera Steps into New Act’, New York Times, 31 May 2007 (<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/31/arts/music/31roya.html?_r=1&oref=slogin>, accessed 24 May 2010)).

11 <http://www.eno.org/see-whats-on/productions/production-page.php?itemid=26>; <http://www.roh.org.uk/whatson/production.aspx?pid=13699> (accessed 21 April 2011).

12 Charles Esche, for instance, explains that while the presence of Bill Viola's Nantes Triptych in London's Tate Modern underlines the achievement of video in being accepted into the art world, it also signals the loss of its early extremist sensibilities (‘Video Installation: Conceptual Practice and New Media in the 1990s’, Diverse Practices: A Critical Reader on British Video Art, ed. Julia Knight (Luton, 1996), 195–206 (p. 196)).

13 David A. Ross, quoted in Martia Sturken, ‘Paradox in the Evolution of an Art Form’, Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art, ed. Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer (New York, 1990), 101–21 (p. 107).

14 Nam June Paik, ‘Versatile Color TV Synthesizer’ (1969), Videa 'n’ Videology: 1959–1973, ed. Judson Rosebush (New York, 1974), [54–7] (p. [55]).

15 Filippo Marinetti, The Variety Theatre (1913); quoted in RoseLee Goldberg, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present (London, 1988; repr. 2001), 17.

16 Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York, 1970), 134.

17 William Furlong discusses this free space in Audio Arts: Discourse and Practice in Contemporary Art (London, 1994), 128.

18 Scott Bartlett, quoted in Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 264.

19 The passage continues: ‘An art for the eye that distinguishes itself from painting in that it takes place temporally (like music) and the artistic emphasis does not (as in the image) consist in the reduction of a (real or formal) process to a single moment, but precisely in the temporal development of formal aspects. That this art develops temporally is one of its most important elements of the temporal rhythm of optic events. It will therefore produce an entirely new type of artist, up until now only latently present, positioned somewhere halfway between painting and music’ (Walter Ruttmann, ‘Malerei mit Zeit’ (1919), quoted in Heike Helfert, ‘Technological Constructions of Space-Time: Aspects of Perception’, trans. Brian Currid, Media Art Net, <http://www.mediaartnet.org/themes/overview_of_media_art/perception/1/> (accessed 24 May 2010)).

20 John Belton, ‘Looking Through Video: The Psychology of Video and Film’, Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices, ed. Michael Renov and Erika Suderburg (Minneapolis, MN, and London, 1996), 61–72 (p. 65). This is no new idea, however: as early as 1975, Raymond Williams pointed out that, ‘unlike all previous communications technologies, radio and television were systems primarily devised for transmission and reception as abstract processes, with little or no definition of preceding content’ (Television: Technology and Cultural Form (New York, 1975), 25).

21 This information comes from a behind-the-scenes documentary called A Passage to Middle-Earth: The Making of Lord of the Rings (The Sci-Fi Channel, USA, 9 December, 2001).

22 Michael O'Pray discusses Warhol's methods of filming in Andy Warhol: Film Factory (London, 1989).

23 Fred Camper, ‘Brakhage Wants to Make you See’, By Brakhage: An Anthology, The Criterion Collection DVD liner notes (New York, 2003), 15–17 (p. 16).

24 Ruttmann, ‘Malerei mit Zeit’.

25 Belton has pointed out that ‘no technology develops autonomously. It is always a direct or indirect product (or by-product) of other technologies, which leave their imprint upon it. Video is no exception’ (‘Looking Through Video’, 61).

26 Bill Viola, Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House: Writings 1973–1994, ed. Robert Violette and Bill Viola (London, 1995), 159.

27 Belton, ‘Looking Through Video’, 63.

28 Viola, Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House, 63.

29 Viola explains: ‘The divisions into lines and frames are solely divisions in time, the opening and closing of temporal windows that demarcate periods of activity within the flowing stream of electrons. Thus, the video image is a living dynamic energy field, a vibration appearing solid only because it exceeds our ability to discern such fine slices of time’ (Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House, 158).

30 Robert Arns, ‘The Form and Sense of Video’, Artscanada (October 1973), 15–24; quoted in Viola, Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House, 63. This notion was already prevalent in 1916: Hugo Münsterberg, for instance, explained that in cinema ‘apparent movement is in no way the mere result of an afterimage […] but is superadded, by the action of the mind, to motionless pictures’ (The Film: A Psychological Study; the Silent Photoplay in 1916 (1916; repr. New York, 1970), 29).

31 Nicholas Cook, Analysing Musical Multimedia (Oxford, 2000).

32 Paik uses these terms when he explains that ‘video art imitates nature, not in its appearance or mass, but in its intimate “time-structure” […] which is the process of AGING (a certain kind of irreversibility)’ (‘Input-Time and Output-Time’, Video Art: An Anthology, ed. Beryl Korot and Ira Schneider (New York, 1976), 98–103 (p. 98)).

33 Igor Stravinsky, ‘The Phenomenon of Music’, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons (London, 1942; repr. 2003), 21–44 (p. 30).

34 Kevin Donnelly, ‘Performance and the Composite Film Score’, Film Music: Critical Approaches, ed. Donnelly (Edinburgh, 2001), 152–66.

35 See Rick Altman, ‘The Material Heterogeneity of Recorded Sound’, Sound Theory: Sound Practice, ed. Altman (New York and London, 1992), 15–34.

36 Walter Ruttmann, quoted in Dieter Daniels, ‘Sound and Vision in Avantgarde and Mainstream [1]’, <http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/image-sound_relations/sound_vision/> (accessed 29 July 2010).

37 Ruttmann's recollection, quoted from Standish D. Lawder, ‘Der Abstrakte Film: Richter und Eggeling’, Hans Richter 1888–1976: Dadaist, Filmpionier, Maler, Theoretiker (Berlin, 1982), 27–35 (p. 30); quoted in Barbara John, ‘The Sounding Image: About the Relationship between Art and Music: An Art-Historical Retrospective View’, <http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/image-sound_relations/sounding_image> (accessed 29 July 2010).

38 Oskar Fischinger, ‘Sounding Ornaments’ (1932), first published in the Deutsche allgemeine Zeitung (8 July 1932); quoted in William Moritz, Optical Poetry: The Life and Work of Oskar Fischinger (Bloomington, IN, 2004), 179.

39 John G. Hanhardt, The Worlds of Nam June Paik (New York, 2000), 20.

40 John G. Hanhardt, The Worlds of Nam June Paik (New York, 2000), 30.

41 John G. Hanhardt, The Worlds of Nam June Paik (New York, 2000), 24.

42 Steina Vasulka, at <http://www.vasulka.org/Steina/Steina_Orka/Orka.html> (accessed 29 July 2010).

43 Vasulka discussing ‘Violin Power : The Performance’, <http://www.vasulka.org/Steina/Steina_ViolinPower/ViolinPower.html> (accessed 29 July 2010).

44 Vasulka, ‘Description and Technical Specifications of the Performance of Violin Power’ (1992), quoted in Yvonne Spielmann, Video: The Reflexive Medium (Cambridge, MA, and London, 2008), 334 (n. 110).

45 ‘Robert Cahen: Passage at Preston Harris Museum and Art Gallery’, <http://www.culture24.org.uk/art/art64388> (accessed 29 July 2010).

46 Cahen (details of original source not given), quoted in Chris Meigh-Andrews, ‘Robert Cahen: Passage’, Art Monthly, 326 (May 2009), 39.

47 Tony Conrad, ‘LYssophobia: On Four Violins’, Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, ed. Christopher Cox and Daniel Warner (London, 2004), 313–18 (p. 316).

48 Conrad later wrote several essays on musical topics, including an exploration of non-Western scales and Schenker. See his ‘Preparing for the Propaganda War in the Time of Global Culture: Trance, Form, and Persuasion in the Renovation of Western Music’, <http://tonyconrad.net/bard.htm> (accessed 29 July 2010).

49 Viola, Knocking at an Empty House, 151–2.

50 Yalkut, in an email message to Spielmann (18 April 2004), quoted in Spielmann, Video, 79.

51 Spielmann, Video, 8.

52 Spielmann, Video, 60–1.

53 Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis, MN, 1985), 4.

54 Paul Hegarty, Noise/Music: A History (New York, 2009), 3.

55 Critic (1826) quoted in Margaret Notley, ‘“With a Beethoven-like Sublimity”: Beethoven in the Works of Other Composers’, The Cambridge Companion to Beethoven, ed. Glenn Stanley (Cambridge, 2000), 219–39 (p. 235); Igor Stravinsky, quoted in Lucy Miller, Adams to Zemlinsky (New York, 2006), 44.

56 Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (Chicago, IL, 2003).

57 Luigi Russolo, ‘The Art of Noises’ (1913), repr. in Mary Ann Caws, Manifesto: A Century of Isms (Lincoln, NE, 2001), 205–11 (p. 208).

58 Edgard Varèse, quoted in Gunter Schuller, ‘Conversation with Varèse’, Perspectives of New Music, 3/2 (spring–summer 1965), 32–7 (p. 34).

59 Christopher Stephen Kerse, The Law Relating to Noise (London, 1975), 8.

60 Pierre Schaeffer, A la recherche d'une musique concrète (Paris, 1952), 22, quoted and trans. in Hegarty, Noise/Music, 32.

61 John Cage, ‘The Future of Music Credo’ (1937), Silence (Middletown, CT, 1961), 3–6 (p. 3).

62 John Cage, ‘The Future of Music Credo’ (1937), Silence (Middletown, CT, 1961), 5.

63 Hegarty, Noise/Music, 4.

64 Fontana, ‘Sound as Virtual Image’, <http://www.resoundings.org/Pages/sound%20As%20Virtual%20Image.html> (accessed 29 July 2010).

65 Alan Licht, Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories (New York, 2007), 13.

66 Alan Licht, Sound Art: Beyond Music, Between Categories (New York, 2007) 14. Interestingly, the term ‘Sound/Art’ was first documented in America by the Sculpture Center in New York City in 1983. The exhibition, curated by William Hellerman, included the work of Acconci, Les Levine and Carolee Schneeman, artists also involved in video work. Such inclusion highlights the multidisciplinarity of many of those working with video.

67 One recent exception is the winning piece for the 2010 Turner Prize: for her sound installation Lowlands Away, Susan Philipsz sang a sixteenth-century Scottish song; in its original setting, recorded versions of the song could be heard from speakers situated underneath three bridges over the River Clyde in Glasgow. See <http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/turnerprize/> (accessed 21 April 2011).

68 Licht, Sound Art, 35.

69 Licht, Sound Art, 13.

70 André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion, ‘The Cinema as a Model for the Genealogy of Media’, Convergence, 8/4 (2002), 12–18 (p. 12).

71 André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion, ‘The Cinema as a Model for the Genealogy of Media’, Convergence, 8/4 (2002), 12–18 (p. 12).

72 André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion, ‘The Cinema as a Model for the Genealogy of Media’, Convergence, 8/4 (2002), 12–18, 14.

73 Spielmann, Video, 87, 117.

74 Allan Kaprow, ‘Video Art: Old Wine, New Bottle (1974)’, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley, CA, and London, 1996; expanded edn 2003), 148–53 (p. 148).

75 Jean Baudrillard, ‘In the Shadow of the Millennium’ (1998), trans. François Debrix, quoted in Marilyn A. Zeitlin, Bill Viola: Buried Secrets (Tempe, AZ, 1995), 57.

76 Sean Cubitt, Timeshift: On Video Culture (London and New York, 1991), 1.

77 Dick Higgins, Horizons (New York, 1998), 9, 27–8.

78 Spielmann, ‘Intermedia in Electronic Images’, Leonardo, 34/1 (2001), 55–61 (p. 60).

79 Spielmann, ‘Intermedia in Electronic Images’, Leonardo, 34/1 (2001), 59.

80 Julie Reiss, From Margin to Center: The Spaces of Installation Art (Cambridge, MA, 2001), p. xv.

81 Siegfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge, MA, 1941).

82 Youngblood describes intermedia as ‘the nervous system of mankind’ (Expanded Cinema, 41).