half dozen festival 2006
through the first decade of the twenty-first century, it seems almost glib to observe the popularity of video art. And yet not ten years ago, video was struggling to promote itself within the broader field of Australian contemporary art. As we now know, the development of affordable, durable technologies saw its stocks rise as a marketable and collectable form, while its portability made it eminently attractive to a proliferation of international biennales eager to reign in their substantial freight costs. With this sort of commercial and institutional legitimation, debates that were so prevalent in the mid-nineties, around defining video as a discrete set of moving-image-–based practices, have generally abated in favour of an unquestioning acceptance of its near-ubiquity in contemporary exhibition culture. At the same time critical engagement has tended toward attempting to deal with the medium on its own terms.
The problem is that these terms are not particularly clear. What should be made, for instance, of the sheer diversity of practices incorporated under the umbrella term ‘video art’, from performance documentation, to highly scripted narratives, to medium-specific technical experiment? Of the tension between co-existing modes of presentation, including modular approaches that regard video as simply a self-contained sequence of images reproducible through any given display mechanism, or highly determined installation-based practices according to which viewing context is a crucial consideration? Or of the ongoing prevalence of an intertextual approach to more popular manifestations of screen-based media, such as music video, computer games, documentary film and especially cinema, both experimental and mainstream?
These questions were not so much raised as provoked by The Late Sessions, a recent program of contemporary Australian video art presented in a pair of