De-collage/Collage Reading

Right at the beginning of the reading it defined its thesis which was that video has been formed as an opposition to the dominant commercial television and as an international new form of art in the late 1950s and early 1960s. As it mentions in the thesis statement, TV had set the standard for video work both in the US and in Europe. When the portable videotape recorder and player became accessible in 1965 artists such as Nam June Paik and Wolf Vostell jumped on the new media and went on to set models of what video art was to be. Often times video pieces were ironically critical of things such as pop art, everyday gestures, and high society despite it's status as new technology. It became very much in tune with the anti-art movement Fluxus. "Happening events" that were large scale and involved an interaction with the space as a social environment became popular. Paik and Vostell above all else wanted their work to make the viewer question TV's hold on society and to create new tools out of video and television.


I agreed the reading very much. I personally feel that video art came about as a way to oppose mainstream media and television programming. To this day video art is usually focused on producing something that cannot be seen in everyday life even though you're usually viewing the same medium. This also ties in with the claim that it made about having critical agendas. Often in video pieces, a direct reference is made to conventional television, film, or everyday life and usually that is mocked or made light of in some form or another to point out the pitfalls of the traditional lifestyle.