Watergate/video art/Pynchon mention

[pynchonoid]

Why Watergate was the first piece of video art 
Richard Nixon´s televised Watergate ordeal transfixed
the public. It was the first piece of video art,
argues Jonathan Jones. 

Video, in America, has always had an epic national
resonance, and a poetic melancholy, that touches
pungently on the life of the republic. TV is America,
or it became America. But when? Was it during the 1960
presidential election, when John F Kennedy and Richard
Milhouse Nixon debated with each other on television?

Or was it in 1974, when Nixon, the defeated 1960
candidate who went on to become Republican president
in the late 1960s, was forced to resign after
revelations about the illegal lengths his people were
prepared to go to during his 1972 re-election
campaign? Defending himself on TV with a sweating,
monstrous, isolated face, Nixon, who had always been
TV´s candidate, revealed not just that this was a
video age but that video was not the innocent thing it
had seemed in the early days of network TV. It was not
Bonanza and Bewitched. It was distant colour images of
a helicopter taking off from the roof of the embassy
in Saigon. It was, like the audio tapes Nixon made, an
index of distance from the democratic: it was the
death of the agora.

The essentials of video are the essentials of a
decayed public life: the artefacts of conspiracy. The
aesthetic of early video - black and white, violent
and confessional, yet not confessional at all - is an
aesthetic of paranoia.

It is, then, no coincidence that the most compelling
and distinctive examples of early American video date
from the Watergate era. And the videotapes,
transferred to disk and preserved as a cult rarity, do
seem outrageously disconnected from what we now know
as video art. Video installation is now such a
universally accepted form, so integral to the culture
of museums, that it can seem banal - is banal. There
are so many cinema-scale projections and so few ideas.
It is salutary to return to the monochrome intensity
of 1974, to realise that video can be about something:
can speak resonantly of history, politics and the
self.

Video art is a child of the 1970s, the first decade in
which home videotaping technology was realistically
available and, not coincidentally, the age of
Watergate. The shamed president was TV´s candidate: a
homely TV rhetorician. Perhaps that is why the
TV-addicted Warhol saw him so well. In 1972, while
Nixon was up to no good behind the scenes, Warhol made
a poster for the opposition. "Vote McGovern," says
Warhol´s contribution to the Democrat campaign. All he
shows is Nixon´s face: derived from a photograph and
coloured a diabolical green against lurid orange.
Warhol conveys the experience of watching Nixon on TV:
the president was unreal, a fiction, a monstrous
imposition on public credence.

This was how the novelist Philip Roth saw Nixon as
early as 1960, in an essay lamenting the plight of the
novelist in a country that (and this is 43 years ago)
seemed to be exceeding all bounds of plausibility,
making fiction redundant. The most spectacular example
of this was the sight of Nixon on television: "Perhaps
as a satiric literary creation, he might have seemed
´believable´," wrote Roth, "but I myself found that on
the TV screen, as a real public figure, a political
fact, my mind balked at taking him in."

As it turned out, American novelists rose to the
challenge. Paranoia and conspiracy theory structure
the fiction of Pynchon and DeLillo. Nixon inspired
more cultural achievement than any other American
president: the paranoid style in 1970s cinema, from
The Conversation to Taxi Driver, constitutes a Nixon
cycle. He even inspired an opera. But his contribution
to the birth of video art is less well known.

Nixon´s undermining of belief in the transparency of
American public life coincided with TV´s loss of
innocence: a medium that had survived the quiz show
scandals of the 1950s was, as Americans argued over
the meaning of images from Vietnam and the riotous
inner cities, increasingly seen as alienated from
truth, a means of manipulation, the corporate
fictionalisation of real life. Certainly, that was how
artists saw it.

It would be erroneous to call the American videotapes
made by artists in the 1970s "video art"; none worked
exclusively with the camera and one of them, Richard
Serra, is better known as the greatest living
sculptor. They were grainy, black-and-white,
aggressive little numbers, with no aspirations to the
cinematic. Most of all, they were not simply made with
TV, but about it - or, rather, against it. The early
classics of American video are critiques of network
TV´s mendacity and madness, which they associate with
Nixon and the degradation of American public life.

The host of Serra´s 1974 parody game show, Prisoners´
Dilemma, explains that the loser will spend six hours
alone in a basement - "that´s about the length of the
average boring artist´s videotape". Cue knowing
chuckles from the studio audience.

[...]
Prisoners´ Dilemma is, said Serra in 1974, about
Watergate. In an interview given in January that year,
when it was not yet clear the president would resign
(he did so in August), Serra explained that his game
show was designed to reveal TV´s mendacity, as
epitomised by Nixon: "It´s all a lot of shit. Listen,
I know television consciousness was developed in the
60s. And yet, in 1974, people still accept what they
see on their TV sets as valid information."

Serra dramatises a false consensus by which everyone
takes seriously, something they know is "a lot of
shit". Other artists caught on video in the Watergate
era communicated the breakdown of any language of
trust in a world where nothing seemed true.

Vito Acconci´s taped performances project a persona
that is pure Travis Bickle; Acconci´s aggressive,
isolated protagonist resembles the angry loner in Taxi
Driver. In Walkover, Acconci paces a long corridor, a
seedy interstitial space. The camera is static at one
end of the corridor, and Acconci paces first towards
it, then away, then back again, smoking, talking to
it. Is he talking to a lover or an ex-lover? "You
understand me, you were always the one who understood
me, the rest of them don´t but you´ll understand me,"
he says. The camera, whose position you occupy, might
represent somebody he´s tied up.

In another piece, Acconci sits in a basement at the
bottom of the stairs, holding an iron bar, psyching
himself up to defend his territory: "I´ll hit anyone
who comes down those stairs."

His defence of his space recalls another video by
Serra, which wonders: if you hear a burglar
downstairs, should you pick up a gun? And both of them
remind you of Gene Hackman in The Conversation (1974),
the surveillance expert discovering he is the watched
not the watcher, tearing apart his apartment trying to
find a bugging device.

Although the video of the 1970s is about TV, it makes
you think of the cinema of the period. It shares the
menace of great 1970s cinema: it is sometimes as
gripping and as large - because it has a sense of
history - as those great films by Coppola and
Polanski. By contrast, video installations today are
cinematic in scale but rarely occupy the mind in the
same way. Perhaps the critic Clement Greenberg was
right when he argued that modern art must make
explicit the limits of its medium: a painting is
greatest, or most modern, when it confesses it is a
flat plane. Video is most powerful when it confesses
to being TV.

Or perhaps Watergate was not so much the end of
innocence as its elegy: the last moment when what was
happening to our culture seemed worthy of outrage,
anger, exposure. The last time anyone cared.

- Video Acts: single channel works from the
collections of Pamela and Richard Kramlich and New Art
Trust, at the ICA, London SW1, from tomorrow. Details:
020-7930 3647
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003
 

<http://www.artdaily.com/links.asp?idl=28&id=93>


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<http://www.pynchonoid.org/>

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