Video Art

Video art in the nation's oldest art museum? Yes, workers are busily installing "Electronic Super Highway: Nam June Paik in the '90s," which opens Saturday at the Museum of American Art, in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, at Broad and Cherry Streets. Paik, sometimes called the "George Washington of video art," has established a beachhead of sorts in Philadelphia. Through the summer, the Philadelphia Museum of Art showed a group of eight Paik videos made over the last 30 years, part of the museum's new video gallery.

Trying to discuss "video art" is a little like talking about "the homeless" - no such creature exists. In real life, homeless people are a diverse group, an absence of domicile being the thing they have in common. Video art, two programs of which are being exhibited at the Philadelphia Art Alliance, is also heterogeneous and impossible to pigeonhole. Curated by Mark Pierson and produced by the Interrelated Arts Foundation, the show includes 14 works running a total of 2 hours and 15 minutes.

For anyone interested in video art, the Fabric Workshop and Museum's current offering is a must-see. Guest curator John Ravenal has selected two large-scale video installations by Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist and Iranian-born Shirin Neshat, both making their mark in international shows (they each won a prize at recent Venice Biennales). Where's the fabric, you ask? It's in the new video lounge/cafe, with retro-moderne curtains and furniture fabric designed by Jorge Pardo, housing a companion show of eight video artists on three monitors.

Video art, which has been around for three decades, is gradually emerging as a significant medium, particularly now that computer manipulation of video imaging has become common. The new video gallery at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is one manifestation of video's growing visibility locally. Another is the fact that video-art pioneer Nam June Paik will have a major exhibition in the fall at the Museum of American Art of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The fourth exhibition in the Art Museum's video series, sponsored by a grant from the museum's Women's Committee, features 13 artists who were winners or finalists in the media arts division of the 1993-94 Pew Fellowships in the Arts.

What is art? Marcel Duchamp posed the question early in the last century, and no one has yet concocted a satisfactory answer. The best we can do is appropriate Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's observation about pornography: "I know it when I see it. " "Homage to Duchamp (Part II)," the new video program at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, addresses a subset of the question: What is dance? The program consists of two segments totaling nearly 29 minutes by video-art pioneer Nam June Paik.

Video art in various forms has been around for more than 30 years. During that time it has become increasingly complex technically and more sophisticated in terms of aesthetic goals. Yet the term "video art" remains amorphous, because the medium can be manipulated in so many ways. Video art began by mimicking film and commercial television. Artists made "videos" that viewers watched passively, in linear time - beginning, middle, end. This was the obvious path into video art, but for viewers it isn't always the most satisfying because they must surrender themselves to the format.

Today's popular culture being what it is, we tend to think of video as entertainment or, secondarily, as a pedagogical tool. It's more difficult to perceive video as an art medium, especially when "video artists" themselves diverge on how best to use it. In its early days, video art often looked like electronic painting. But most video artists eventually turned to a modality that more resembled experimental film, and video became narrative. It seemed only a matter of time before technological advancements would bring video to a state when it could develop a distinctive personality and capability as an expressive medium.

Video art makes demands that most of the fine arts do not, namely, that one must watch a video from beginning to end. This is why, I've realized, the video art I've been moved by invariably borrows from, or at least alludes to, feature films. It's not that I need a narrative, just to experience something familiar. Humor, pathos, fear, or even ennui will do. So I've appreciated Doug Aitken's portentous, moody videos, for example, which suggest that an event of some magnitude is imminent - which, as we all know, can be just as thrilling as anything that ever does happen in art or in life.

Two hundred thirty-eight years ago, Benjamin Franklin flew a kite in a thunderstorm and made a discovery that led ultimately to the VCR. How fitting, then, that Philadelphia should mark the bicentennial of his death with two video installations and one that honors his experiments with electricity and music. All three installations are in Independence National Historical Park. Besides honoring Franklin, they inaugurate a festival of the electronic arts called "The Electrical Matter," after the title of one of Franklin's papers on electricity.

Jackie Ferrara is a sculptor who works with the forms of architecture. She fashions monumental structures from strips of wood by stacking and nailing, sometimes tinting them with thin stains. The pieces are monumental in suggesting grandeur, but in scale they are disarmingly modest. With two exceptions, the pieces Ferrara is showing at the Goldie Paley Gallery of Moore College of Art are table-top models of works that could be constructed to practically any scale, even up to the size of a city block, without attenuating their compositional integrity.

It is time to celebrate the work of producer/DJ Alex Epton. Better known as XXXChange, Epton has done racy bracing remixes for alterna-heroes Bjork and Thom Yorke to great acclaim, as well as produce Kid Sister and his buds in Australia's disco-punk sensation The Death Set. More famously, the young Baltimore expatriate did time in Philadelphia as the music-making half of Spank Rock, the rude electronic rap outfit he shared with his buddy MC Naeem Juwan....

'Queer Voice" isn't an exhibition about gay art or gay artists, it's about voices that sound funny, usually by design. It investigates the way the human voice can be used as an art medium in itself - how it can be shaped, bent, twisted, and stretched to convey a broad variety of effects and conditions, from gender mixing (men sounding like women) to people sounding like machines. Ingrid Schaffner, senior curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, has stocked "Queer Voice" with audio and video works in which voices - or, in one case, a near lack of them - create structure and character.

Video art makes demands that most of the fine arts do not, namely, that one must watch a video from beginning to end. This is why, I've realized, the video art I've been moved by invariably borrows from, or at least alludes to, feature films. It's not that I need a narrative, just to experience something familiar. Humor, pathos, fear, or even ennui will do. So I've appreciated Doug Aitken's portentous, moody videos, for example, which suggest that an event of some magnitude is imminent - which, as we all know, can be just as thrilling as anything that ever does happen in art or in life.

What is art? Marcel Duchamp posed the question early in the last century, and no one has yet concocted a satisfactory answer. The best we can do is appropriate Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's observation about pornography: "I know it when I see it. " "Homage to Duchamp (Part II)," the new video program at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, addresses a subset of the question: What is dance? The program consists of two segments totaling nearly 29 minutes by video-art pioneer Nam June Paik.

Though one of the touchstones of 20th-century musical modernism, Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire is a stranger in the concert hall thanks to its reputation for requiring huge amounts of rehearsal and making audiences as crazy as its title character (a commedia dell'arte figure who goes mad from looking at the moon). Don't ask how it became a sold-out hit in two performances Friday and Saturday at Temple University's Tomlinson Theater. Maybe Schoenberg isn't box-office poison anymore.

For anyone interested in video art, the Fabric Workshop and Museum's current offering is a must-see. Guest curator John Ravenal has selected two large-scale video installations by Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist and Iranian-born Shirin Neshat, both making their mark in international shows (they each won a prize at recent Venice Biennales). Where's the fabric, you ask? It's in the new video lounge/cafe, with retro-moderne curtains and furniture fabric designed by Jorge Pardo, housing a companion show of eight video artists on three monitors.

Video art in the nation's oldest art museum? Yes, workers are busily installing "Electronic Super Highway: Nam June Paik in the '90s," which opens Saturday at the Museum of American Art, in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, at Broad and Cherry Streets. Paik, sometimes called the "George Washington of video art," has established a beachhead of sorts in Philadelphia. Through the summer, the Philadelphia Museum of Art showed a group of eight Paik videos made over the last 30 years, part of the museum's new video gallery.

Video art, which has been around for three decades, is gradually emerging as a significant medium, particularly now that computer manipulation of video imaging has become common. The new video gallery at the Philadelphia Museum of Art is one manifestation of video's growing visibility locally. Another is the fact that video-art pioneer Nam June Paik will have a major exhibition in the fall at the Museum of American Art of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. The fourth exhibition in the Art Museum's video series, sponsored by a grant from the museum's Women's Committee, features 13 artists who were winners or finalists in the media arts division of the 1993-94 Pew Fellowships in the Arts.

Video art in various forms has been around for more than 30 years. During that time it has become increasingly complex technically and more sophisticated in terms of aesthetic goals. Yet the term "video art" remains amorphous, because the medium can be manipulated in so many ways. Video art began by mimicking film and commercial television. Artists made "videos" that viewers watched passively, in linear time - beginning, middle, end. This was the obvious path into video art, but for viewers it isn't always the most satisfying because they must surrender themselves to the format.

Wanna meet the man recently described by the New Yorker magazine as "the coolest person in New York at the moment"? Sure you do. Come along and let's meet Fab 5 Freddy. Freddy, 32, known as Fred Braithwaite when he was growing up in Brooklyn's turbulent Bedford-Stuyvesant section, has been getting ever more prominent since September 1988, when he premiered on cable television as the host of Yo! MTV Raps. Nothing else approaches his hour, at 10 p.m. each Saturday, as a showcase for rap music.