Early Video Art as Private Performance

Abstract

The adoption of video by artists responded to the affordance of immediacy and portability for the making of a motion picture recording. In the early 1970s in England, the potential of this facility was as novel as it was without precedent in the photo-time-based arts and collaborative work between artists generated a range of approaches to working with the new media of the day. This paper draws on two sets of detailed notes the author made in 1973, now held in the British Artistsí Film & Video Study Collection in London and the Rewind archives in Dundee, that record his reflections on the creative potential of the Portapak video recorder and Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) systems. The making of The Heart Cycle during 1973 commenced as a series of experiments with a roll of 16mm film and a CCTV system, recording a series of procedures and adjustments made to the system during experiments and ërehearsalsí. With references to the work of Donald Schön (1983), contemporary VJ and digital video culture, the paper reappraises the creative process for framing and making the artwork. The conclusions reached at the time about synthesising the videotapeís final form as private performance are explored in the context of contemporary motion pictures and the expanded public contexts for reception. The Heart Cycle has been selected for the Rewind/LUX DVD boxed set, An Anthology of Early British Video Art, 1972-82.