Time-based painting… or why I don’t use cameras
People often ask me “what is video art?” This question is often accompanied by a very puzzled expression. It’s a good question, especially when they go on to ask how it could be different from film.
This question threw me when I first encountered it. I don’t think there can be a straightforward answer; some video art is very akin to short film, even indistinguishable from it (other than by its context in a gallery setting, perhaps).
The best response I could think of was that the difference is not between distinct (if related) categories, but rather is more analogous to the difference between poetry and novels. Films, like novels, tend to use a narrative structure, and tend to be longer. Poems tend to be short and are less likely to use an overt narrative. The distinction between poetry and novels is sometime very blurry, or even non-existant (verse novels are a case in point) but we understand the difference all the same. The analogy has clear limitations, but it’s reasonably clear.
Time and the so-called still image
In moving, or extending, from painting to video, the relationship between video art and film has been largely irrelevant. The point has been to explore a kind of time-based painting, albeit in a way that doesn’t bear an overly close similarity to what I do with paint. That is, the video work is not simply an animation of my paintings, which would be pointless and possibly corny. Still, it’s worth exploring why that is.
One concern that I’ve had for a very long time is an interest in the nature of image making. Here on my website you can see reproductions of my paintings, but they really are poor substitutes for the real thing.1 When looking at a painting you generally can’t, in fact, take it all in at once, even from a distance: the area of focus in the visual field is simply too small.The still image is therefore in fact a virtual still image, assembled out of a sequence of fragmentary perceptions. It follows that you examine a work over a period of time, even if that period of time is quite short. Painting is not so far removed from cinema as one might imagine, and a work such as Veronese’s Wedding at Cana is the perfect example of painting as cinema.2
For this reason, amongst others, it’s always seemed pointless to try to reproduce what I do in painting in video.
Video is its own medium, complicated by the use of cameras
Painting and video are distinct media, and attempts to make one resemble the other are often (though not necessarily) kitsch. Paint as such isn’t an essential requirement for painting – just think of Matisse’s remark that drawing is painting with limited means – and use of cameras is not an essential characteristic of video. Animation is perhaps a purer and simpler way to make video. More importantly, the use of a camera complicates the way in which the image is perceived by virtue of its nature as a documentary tool.
Finally, cameras don’t allow the same level of decision making that one has in painting. When animating, the image can be built both frame by frame and pixel by pixel. When using a camera, even if the footage is heavily manipulated, there’s always a degree to which the image is determined by contingency. The more the camera image is controlled at a fine level, the closer it moves to painting.
- There are good reasons why certain works are more than 2 x 2 metres while others are quite small. (Of equal importance are questions such as the precise colour, which is never perfectly reproduced, and tangible elements such as paint texture and layering.)
- There’s a second dimension to this, which is that one enters into an image imaginatively — that is, the image is experienced as a virtual space.