Diverse Practices: A Critical Reader on British Video Art.

edited by Julia Knight Bedfordshire: John Libbey Media at University of Luton Press, 1996 384 pp./[pounds]17.50 (sb)

The problem of history troubles nearly every essay in Julia Knight's anthology, Diverse Practices: A Critical Reader on British Video Art, though some more productively than others. Perhaps it is better to say that the intimation of some ineffable history - audible as the background hiss of all the other thoughts one might have about a given set of videographic data - renders each of the collection's accounts virtual in some significant way, threatening their rhetorics of coherence. Knight's introduction to the volume admits that "the single term 'video art' as it was used in the 1970s and 1980s covers such a diverse array of work that it is impossible to think in terms of 'a history.' Any critical consideration of video art has to address a whole range of creative practices . . . which can only result in the construction or articulation of multiple histories."

Despite this awareness, the imbrication of "history" and of theories of contemporary image-history - as a problem to be solved - is left aside by the primary divisions of the book's contents. Section 1 is entitled "Histories," Section 2 is entitled "Theories and Criticism" and Section 3, while a useful tool, resorts to a quasi-medieval method of taxonomy under the heading "A Chronological Guide to British Video Art." Such a 1-2-3 is hardly a dialectical tour de force. As one hungrily scans this final list for information, one cannot help but confront the non-sensicality of the timeline as organizational paradigm for a guide to a time-based medium that profoundly disrupts nearly all sustainable notions of narrative, temporality and historiography. It is as if the form of the book were broken apart by the video art it would conceptualize. Nonetheless, for this reader, Diverse Practices fortuitously undergoes a kind of Hegelian transformation at the affective level, in which the sheer quantity of diversity documented, asserted, theorized and otherwise cataloged, announces that we are immersed in a qualitatively new type of endeavor. This omnisemous overload itself signals a shift in the technological capacity to affect bodies and the theoretical capacity to understand these affects.

The lead essay of section 1 by Mick Hartney describes and contextualizes a series of video art firsts, including Nam June Paik's 1965 attack-TV-back screenings in New York, and John Hopkins's June 26, 1970 portapak tape of an inept police drug raid on the New Arts Lab ("almost certainly the first broadcast of low-gauge video on British Television"). The essay, following a timeline logic embellished with biographical anecdotes and descriptive snippets of the work by Hopkins and David Hall, brings us up to the recent past and thereby simulates a certain comprehensiveness. It does not, however, avoid playing by the Henry Ford version of history - "one damn thing after another" - because Hartney lacks a thesis about video qua video, although this problem is not specific to him. In general, the thesis itself seems to have broken its back on the electronic rocks of video culture - the very title Diverse Practices glitteringly represents a nonteleological non-systematic approach.

The collapse of conceptual order remains multivalent. Hartney manages to thematize the democratic potential of video art and ends by borrowing an extra-logical standpoint from Jean-Francois Lyotard. Lyotard wants televisual interventions "to produce in the viewer . . . an effect of uncertainty and trouble . . . You can't introduce concepts, you can't produce argumentation. This type of media isn't the place for that, but you can produce a feeling of disturbance, in the hope that this disturbance will be followed by reflection." Lyotard's statement in Hartney's essay contravenes a different form of conceptual failure notoriously proffered by John Wyver: "[R]ather than perpetuating an idea of video art, we should simply dispose of it." Though intertextuality, installations and computer technology introduce serious category problems, Wyver collapses medium and genre distinctions for no other discernible purpose than the universalization of his tastes - he closes his article in Diverse Practices with a multimedia list of things he likes. If, as Fredric Jameson says, the complexity of certain video installations, with their myriad screens and out of synch video tracks, stands in the postmodem as "an imperative to grow new organs," Diverse Practices does not take us as far as it might in the culturing of new organs able to chart the lay of the land of images.

Whatever the politics of the various essayists included in Diverse Practices, there seems to be a general agreement among them that video art is an impure and probably unsustainable category that should be or has at times been considered in opposition to television. The image is thus perceived as a site of struggle. Nevertheless, neither the magnitude of what is being fought nor the hegemonic character of the image as a social relation functioning in excess of language-based understandings is sufficiently recognized. Diverse Practices has not successfully cultured whatever new sensual-conceptual organs might be necessary to think/see the world-system.

Stuart Marshall, in his influential 1985 essay "Video: From Art to Independence: A Short History of a New Technology," does sustain a provocative thesis. His essay narrates a history of a video art that had to seek support in the academy and therefore submitted to a modernist aesthetic that foregrounds the "'inherent' properties of the medium." Although "[t]he early practice of video artists can be described as modernist in that the technology of video was their major preoccupation rather than the world in front to the lens," Marshall argues that video art's interrogation of an electronic medium where (unlike film or painting) the maker was always held at a distance from its materiality "produced a[n] unexpected consequence, the establishment of a critical relation to dominant technology and its representational practices," for which later, in the mid-1970s the Women's Movement "provided a major political context." Though the argument is nifty, it is far too neat, and other writers in the volume (notably John Byrne) insist upon modifications and exceptions. Thus when a writer manages to realize a thesis on even a "short history" of video, others break it apart.

Sean Cubitt's stand-out essay, "Populism and Difficulty: Television and Video Art," also complicates Marshall's picture, albeit with the benefit of 10 more years of video art production. Cubitt's essay waxes comprehensive in an intertextual rather than a chronological sense - it draws upon practically every other writer in the collection as well as video artworks by many of them as well as many others. In the manner of Scratch Video's sampling, Cubitt specifies, within the space of a single entry, some of the parameters and contradictions of the British Video Art World through his linguistic incorporation of video's forms of expression. Cubitt's readings of video pieces are almost translations, quasi-cybernetic attempts to mine the formal and conceptual practices of video art in a linguistic medium. Like Catherine Elwes, whose "The Pursuit of the Personal in Video Art" cogently underscores and amplifies the power of feminist video art to represent personal situations of oppression and possibility, Cubitt's close readings provide concepts for video-forms in a way that address, and to a certain extent redresses, visual media's induction of a crisis in language. What is excluded from the symbolic order, the unthought and the not-yet-sayable, is paramount. The images interrupt language and demand that it reconstitute itself on new grounds. Elwes provides an excellent example of how this videographic refiguration of the world functions:

In Horses (1994) Lucy Benning records women who can imitate horses. The result is both comical and profoundly disturbing as we struggle to bring together the spectacle of a gendered female with the bodily eruptions and grunts that return us to her physical presence. In this context sound is not, as Jean Fisher puts it, "the carrier of a message." Instead it allows "the power of the voice and body to act beyond its subjugation to articulated speech." Benning's final subject is so overwhelmed by the power of her own ululations that she ends each display with an apologetic giggle.

Such efforts to chart the dynamics of videography in dimensions operating in excess of the Lacanian symbolic are for me the most promising. Among the hundreds of other things going on in Cubitt's essay, he places Elwes's work next to Marshall's in order to write that "it is tempting to see in early British Video Art precisely that missing critique of TV as a medium which the academy and the critical establishment had failed to provide." His readings of video works by Marshall, David Hall, Elwes, Steve Hawley, Terry Flaxton, Sera Furneaux, Jeremy Welsh, Keith Piper, Simon Robertshaw, David Larcher and many others, endeavor to delineate dimensions of this critique of the dominant. Cubitt's project posits the articulation of the unthought of the image as a way of challenging a global hegemony structured by capitalism and patriarchy and secured by visual technologies.

Other noteworthy efforts to "win the imaginary for the symbolic" - as Christian Metz described the task of film theory - in Diverse Practices include those of Philip Hayward, Michael Maziere, Jeremy Welsh and Richard Wright. Hayward's crucial claim is that "any cultural practice which uses new technologies must be considered against the broader significance of those technologies[:] . . . the transnational data order; the global war machine; the planet's ecologies; [and] the nature of the body and its subjectivity constructed within these." Welsh, whose extensive nomenclature for electronic media is itself almost a theory, argues that video can "no longer be separated from its function as a strategic weapon." Maziere, who asserts that "in the UK 'video art' has become an historical term," disagrees with Wyver's smug relativism and insists that "the creation of new forms of image-making . . . demand[s] a new vocabulary." Wright's "More Power" brilliantly elaborates the sublime proliferation of potential visual forms by computers where "[f]unctions multiply so rapidly that enough names for them cannot be thought of fast enough."

Despite these efforts to language a medium that has shattered history and rendered its atrocities almost ungraspable, and despite discussions on the dematerialization of the art object, the warping of narrative by images, the problematization of gallery space, the significance of the subject and the body as problems of telematics, etc., one cannot help but feel that video (art) criticism is in its infancy even though media society is already a monstrous adolescent. What is lacking in this important volume, aside from an index (that would render its intertextuality hypertextual), is a sense of the life-and-death urgency of its purported project. Knight's statement that "in looking back it has been impossible not to look forward as well," will not obscure in these works a troublesome break with what is most radical about British cultural critique. The sign of this misrecognition of the future (which is also a sign of the times) is a mandatory optimism sifted into the buzzing prose of Diverse Practices, a blank irony somehow continuous with the spectacle, which Guy Debord appropriately described as the diplomatic presentation of hierarchical society to itself.

JONATHAN L. BELLER teaches Film and Video and American Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.