Eric Cameron “The Grammar of the Video Image” (#videoarchive)
Arts Magazine, Dec. 1974, v. 49, no. 4, pp. 48–51
The body of videotapes produced around 1971 by students and faculty of Nova Scotia College of Art and Design constitutes an exploration of the structure of video-recording that is wide-ranging in its perception of salient features, and acute in its grasp of their mode of qualifying meaning. They spell out, in effect, a grammar of the language of videotape.
The television screen (like a film, a photograph or a painted picture) presents a configuration of tonal variations over a two-dimensional surface that may communicate the sense of a world fully in the round, but it retains an independent and sometimes contradictory geometry. In a class of Patrick Kelly’s, as their contribution to 13 Spatial Definitions, John Handforth had a group of fellow students place themselves so as to present a circular outline to the camera, while Brian Tanner, in his piece, had hands coming from the side to isolate a void in the centre. In Strip Up, Patrick Kelly applied strips of masking tape to the monitor to help performers take up the rectangular shapes of the uncovered surface. Interpretation depends on cues that may be misleading. In another ‘spatial definition,’ Marion Petite appears to be viewed from above walking; it is only when she sits up that we see she was lying on the ground, moving her feet against a wall.
Like film, but unlike painting and photography, videotape has the ability to communicate action. Movement, as well as size and shape, is subject to the perspective of the camera. Wallace Brannen walked a mile along a road towards the camera, at a steady pace throughout, but his apparent progress changes dramatically over the last two hundred yards.
Movement in this instance results from the behavior of the subject, but the camera itself may be moved. In Patrick Kelly’s Catch, masking tape is fixed vertically and horizontally over the monitor forming a cross. The artist stands in front of the camera holding a sheet of plexiglass with similar markings on it. As the operator turns the camera from side to side, he follows quickly to regain registration.
The changes in image-scale produced by a zoom-lens may appear to move the camera closer to the subject or away from it. In another of Patrick Kelly’s pieces, the cameraman manipulates the zoom-lens, while the artist comes forward or retreats into the distance, holding in his arms a mirror that he now tries to keep in a constant relationship to the frame of the monitor image.
Pieces like these last two are possible because telerecording (unlike cine- or still-photography) allows the performer to see his image on a monitor as it is being recorded. In Video Tracing, Brian McNevin sat in front of the monitor and traced the image of himself sitting in front of the monitor; he then held the tracing up to the camera, restoring the identical image in outline.
A videotape may take its image from another videotape or a film or photograph, but a televised photograph-or “photographic” drawing-confounds our expectation of movement. Harold Pearse’s 133 Days in Halifax, based on a series of still photographs of the same view on 133 different days, generates a revived sense of halted time as they fade into each other. Conversely, Albert McNamara’s Smile, in arresting the movement of a transitory expression as he sits in front of the camera for half-an-hour, may momentarily call into question the reality of his own presence.
The only actual movement in videotape is that of the tape through the machine and of the resulting light impulses across the screen, and the only actual time is the time it takes these things to happen. The time of the subject, like its form, is an illusion, and likewise admits of both misinterpretation and manipulation. Student Douglas Waterman in one of the finest works to have emerged from the College had the camera
trained on its own recording mechanism placed beside him on a carpet. Shuffling his feet builds up static electricity in his. body. After a while he stoops and touches the tape as it comes off the recording head; the discharge erases a band that appears in replay before we see him bend down and touch the tape.
Television (unlike film or photography) conveys a “low resolution” image that may, for simple lack of detail, admit of ambiguities. Front and Back by Richards Jarden shows a figure in a dark short-sleeved shirt with arms hanging loosely by his side. The picture is cut off just below the shoulder and above’ the elbows.
Videotape (like film) may employ sound; it operates on twin levels of reality and illusion just like the visual aspect; and this exposes it to the same hazards. Moreover, sound and vision may be recorded independently. In Length 4, Gerald Ferguson sat beside a tape-recorder playing back the fourletter words from his own Standard Corpus, and tried to keep pace from memory. We see him hesitate, falter, and then moo to catch up, but the words we hear come out with impeccable regularity sound comes directly from the audio-recorder.
Even when sound and vision record the same situation, one may falsify the sense of the other. Douglas Waterman’s Inhale Exhale has three performers standing round a microphone. One exhales into it, the next inhales, and so on. The sound presents a continuous pattern of breathing that is interrupted only at the visual level.
Sound relates to the perspective of the microphone as the visual image relates to that of the camera. In an extraordinarily beautiful and austere piece, another student, Percy Simmons, appears supine on the floor at some distance from the camera, but the microphone is taped to his chest; we hear his heartbeat. As he raises his legs in the air, the beat quickens; then returns to normal after a short rest. In other tapes, David Askevold directs the camera at a standing microphone, then wraps aluminum foil around it till the screen is filled; Graham Dube watched a microphone being dragged over rough ground.
The monitor may not only convey information back to the performer but may recycle it through the camera; feedback of sound results only in “boom.” Brian McNevin set up a camera looking at its own monitor while the microphone swings in front of the loudspeaker. On screen, we see a succession
of monitors, each framed by the next and in front of each a succession of parallel swinging microphones. The sound is generated out of the hum of the mechanism itself; it increases in volume with proximity of microphone and speaker.
The camera records only the surfaces of objects immediately in front of it but locates them clearly; the microphone is more flexible but less precise. Jon Young, in an untitled piece, moves a pile of four bricks from the background to a position closer to the camera, and then the same distance again to bring them right in front of it, and then again to a position behind the camera. At this final stage, the sound indicates the continuation of an action no longer visible, but we have to be told precisely how it relates to the rest.
The possibilities of interaction and mutual reinforcement of video image and verbal language are extensive and complex. Wallace Brannen touches on this topic in a very short tape called Step. He walks from the back of the room to the camera saying “step” at each step he takes. Word and act are complementary; they indicate at once which “step” he means and also how to conceptualize a performance that might otherwise be construed as “coming forward.” What ambiguity remains is that, of language and image equally: whether “step” should be interpreted verbally as process, or nominally as accomplished fact.
There is no escaping the didactic elements. These tapes are academic not only in the truistic sense of being the products of an academic institution, but also in the sense that often causes the term to be used pejoratively-that they emerge as the evident outcome of theoretical speculation. Where they differ from the sort of work that gained academic art a bad name is that speculation is not aimed at codifying the merits of past achievements, but, in 1971, was breaking new ground; also that the theoretical insight is itself the essential content of the work. Given the general succinctness and sensitivity of its embodiment, theoretical insight rises to the level of real quality as art.
