Customer Reviews

Video Art

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I would like to think of myself as someone who is fairly well informed of the (short) history and theory of video art. As such, I will say this book is a very basic, sort of bland overview of the langauge of video. It's very well put together in terms of it being flashy and "hip"; all the stills are well printed and all the big, "in-vogue" art star names are included (but where are people like Haron Faroqi? Or did he just shoot on film and thus not make the hipster cut?) With that said, there is little to no actual critical content in the writing. It introduces concepts in a very simple way, and doesn't actually end up saying much other than varying degrees of further artist canonization. I don't know maybe I am just too picky and also semi-brainwashed by more rigorous academic books on the topic, but I actually stopped reading the book because it was so boring. If you're looking for a slick coffee table book with which to impress your friends, one that will let them know that you too have joined that cool club called "connoisseurship of video art" and a book that they will tend to thumb through just to look at "all the pretty pictures" (which I find hilariously absurd- a book of still images taken from video), then this book is for you. If you're looking for anything deeper than that, I would look elsewhere to titles like "Illuminating Video : An Essential Guide to Video Art" by David Ross, Doug Hall, Sally Jo Fifer, and David Bolt.

N. Harrison pretty much nails it - this is just a coffee table book. Blowups of individual video stills are nice looking, but don't convey much of anything about the works. The blurbs are largely superficial. Rush's earlier book "New Media in Contemporary Art" is a much better survey of the terrain. Harrison's point about Harun Farocki also illustrates a wider point - the conceptual rubric of "video art" is incoherent and unnecessary. It was a stop-gap introduced in the 60s when this stuff was brand new, but unnecessary and no longer useful today. These are simply Artists. Full stop. They often work in installation, sometimes in film, video, photography, computational playback mechanisms (Stan Douglas)... the term "Video Art" is now simply marketing jargon.