Film, Video and Music

In 1971 Nam June Paik and the avant-garde cellist Charlotte Moorman produced TV Cello, one of a series of performance-based works they made together in New York. The title alone joins a concert instrument to a household television, and it sums up the territory of this section, where the gallery meets the cinema, the concert hall and the living room television.

Artists have long borrowed moving images and recorded sound. Our coverage takes in artists’ film, video art and installation, the crossovers between visual art and music, and the festivals and institutions that gave this work a public.

The composer who became a video artist

Paik started in music. He wrote his University of Tokyo thesis on Arnold Schoenberg, and from 1958 to 1963 he worked at the WDR electronic music studio in Cologne alongside Karlheinz Stockhausen. Meeting John Cage there changed his direction. When he showed alone for the first time, at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal in 1963, the title put sound first: Exposition of Electronic Music, Electronic Television. A year later he settled in New York.

From there the work multiplied. In 1969 he showed in the Howard Wise Gallery exhibition TV as a Creative Medium, and with the engineer Shuya Abe built the Paik/Abe Synthesizer at WGBH in Boston. Global Groove, a tape of 1973, borrowed the visual and aural grammar of television and turned it into a dense, disjunctive collage of images, music and electronic effects. TV Buddha and TV Garden followed in the mid 1970s. Paik coined the phrase “electronic superhighway” to predict the age of networked communication, and in 1982 the Whitney Museum of American Art gave him a comprehensive retrospective. A Tate Modern exhibition of more than 200 works, organised with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, traced five decades of his career, including the room-sized Sistine Chapel of 1993.

Warhol behind the camera

Andy Warhol began making films in 1963. Sleep (1963), Empire (1964), Kiss and The Chelsea Girls (1966) are now counted among the classics of avant-garde cinema, and between 1964 and 1966 he made the Screen Tests, a body of four-minute filmed portraits. He also took sound and image on the road in The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, a travelling multimedia show featuring the band The Velvet Underground. Later he produced television: Andy Warhol’s TV and Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes aired in the mid 1980s on Madison Square Garden cable television and on MTV.

Festivals and frames

The festival as a format belongs to this story too. La Biennale di Venezia, founded in 1895 as an art exhibition, added music, cinema and theatre in the 1930s, and its film festival of 1932 was the first in history. Video found its own venues later. The Kitchen in New York ran open video screenings on Wednesday evenings in 1971 and 1972, and Paik’s work went on to appear at documenta 6 and 8 in Kassel and in the Whitney Biennial, a sign that the large survey exhibitions had made room for the screen.

Watching and listening

Time-based work asks for time. A video loop, a score or a film shown in a gallery has a duration, and seeing part of it is not the same as seeing it. The articles below give these works their full length on the page: who made them, with what equipment, for which audience, and how they have been preserved and shown since.