NEW YORK • In 1974, Ms Barbara London, a young curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, started what was probably the first ongoing video art exhibition programme in any museum, anywhere.
Operating out of a former broom closet, she slowly acquired videos by artists such as Bruce Nauman, the late Paik Nam-june and Joan Jonas.
"There was no market at the beginning," Ms London says in a telephone interview. "These early installations cost next to nothing and yet for a museum, with every acquisition, the money was always tight."
Today, video art is in every selfrespecting contemporary museum collection in the world, and the artists whom Ms London first exhibited are firmly entrenched in the art-historical canon.
"Video art has slowly, radically transformed to encompass a wide range of technical explorations in art," writes Ms London in her new book, Video Art: The First Fifty Years. The medium has moved "from fringe to mainstream".
Despite all that, by virtually every measure, video art has yet to match other media.
In museums, video-heavy exhibitions, while often well-received by critics, fail to generate attendance at the same pace as exhibitions of paintings or drawings or sculpture.
One component that might stand in the way of video art taking its place as an equal of painting is the fact that video, unlike any other medium, requires a machine to be fully realised.
You can hang a painting on a wall, but to play a video, you need a video player. And video players go obsolete quickly.
"The art evolved as the tech evolved," Ms London says. "In the 1960s, nobody could touch the equipment except an engineer. The actual film of these videos had to be kept in vaults with stable temperature and humidity levels."
Today, even digital video is not without its complications, she says. "Even if you're using off-the-shelf software, you still need technical mavens, who are the new conservators for media art."
Video art has always had collectors, even if they could be counted on one hand.
In the mid-1970s, Ms London writes, Los Angeles-based Stanley and Elyse Grinstein were "about the only contemporary art collectors who acquired unlimited-edition videotapes".
And yet, for all the medium's adherents, there are many more people who stay away.
"Among collectors, there's a technophobia," Ms London says. "It's a big responsibility to acquire these works."
The other obvious barrier is the fact that one cannot simply glance at a video and know what it is about, let alone whether or not it is any good.
If a sculpture is self-evidently bad, one can simply walk past it.
In contrast, video requires a longer time investment - and many people are unwilling to make that kind of commitment.
To Ms London, it did not matter if people stayed "a nanosecond or longer" because even if the interaction occurred for just a split second, "they'd seen something edgy and weird, and the next time they'd come back and say 'Oh, yeah.' "
The goal, she says, "was to provide a grounding".
Nevertheless, Ms London acknowledges that not everyone is that patient. The future, she says, could be shorter and shorter pieces.
"The younger generation is glued to its smartphones and is bopping around online," she says.
"So the younger generation of artists is making shorter work. Maybe they'll make a (break) from the type of art you watch from start to finish."
BLOOMBERG
