One of the highlights of Ars Electronica, which was staged in Linz, Austria, last. June, were the presentations by Woody and Steina Vasulka which highlighted their invaluable contribution to video art. For two successive (and very warm) nights the Vasulkas, with the aid of a large video wall, spoke engagingly about video-especially the genre of image process video-in the context of their own innovative work since 1971 when they founded The Kitchen, a significant centre for experimental video, music and performance in New York. Their more recent laserdisk work will be screened at the forthcoming TISEAThird International Symposium on Electronic Art-in Sydney this November.
Though the room at the Landesmuseum was a little too small for the large enthusiastic crowd, the site itself was serviceable. The Vasulkas demonstrated in their amusing and stimulating talks how, contrary to the public dismissal, in the 1970s and 1980s, of image-process video as "electronic wallpaper", their art (and the similar generic works of their contemporaries) is highly relevant to our mass-mediated society. The Vasulkas, who belong to the first generation of American video artists, have created a corpus of video installations and tapes which attest to the postmodern textuality of video as an electronic medium and, most persuasively, to its compositional flexibility, underlining Woody's important observation (that cuts across the entire rich seam of international video) that "there is a certain behaviour of the electronic image that is unique ••• It's liquid, it's shapeable, it's clay, it's an art material, it exists independently".
The Vasulkas were also responsible (in association with writer Malin Wilson, composer David Dunn and technician David Muller) for an extraordinary exhibition at the museum (to my knowledge the first exhibition... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline