At the beginning of this year, the Vienna Media Workshop presented the »Video Edition Austria Release 01,« a selection of Austrian video productions made since 1994.

In 1980 a large exhibition devoted to Austrian video works took place in the Museum of the 20th Century under the title »Video Made in Austria.« As part of this project, a telecommunications conference was held with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (»Artist's Use of Telecommunications«). So, in 1980, video art did indeed provide a framework for experiments enlarging the scope of art to embrace the field of media and technology, and was - and not just in Austria - a form of media art with a wide and important history. More than twenty years later, the idea of video art as a conceptual framework for extended media practices seems questionable in view of the fact that, however vaguely the term is used, video art has had a very varied past: the conceptual and analytical works and installations in the sixties and seventies, an important medium for the development of counter-opinion up into the eighties, the struggles to get into galleries and museums in the eighties, a significant field for visual explorations as late as the start of the nineties - before being pushed into the background by various digital and Net-based visual forms. But it would be wrong to sound video art's death knell. In a way, some of these uses of (digital) video became relevant again, particularly in the second half of the nineties: as a quick documentary medium for specific communities and counter-movements (the comeback of video magazines), and as a field for experimentation and a condensate for developing visual concepts in the art area.

So, in the past few years, video has turned out to be still an important area in the context of media art and documentary strategies, beyond the discussions of technological, media utopias that have completely taken over the discourse on Net art and interactive art. Video »after video« - as one could say in analogy to digital »photography after photography« - appears as a virulent intersection of numerous visual strategies and aesthetic fields that have either been derived from different areas or themselves become an intersection of various audio-visual discourses through video practice.

In 1994, the Vienna Media Workshop brought out the first part of »Video Edition Austria« (curated by Eva Brunner-Szabo, Gerda Lampalzer and Anna Steininger), which provided - and still provides - an overview of 25 years of video art and artistic video documentary works in Austria. In January 2002, »Release 01,« which continues and extends this by adding productions made since 1994, was presented in the Vienna Kunsthalle. The curators Eva Brunner-Szabo, Gerda Lampalzer and Judith Wieser-Huber have divided the material into the areas of art and documentation, and rearranged it according to theme: Confrontation, Movement, Narration and Space are the categories for art, Reflections and Stories of Travel those for documentary works. This thematic arrangement is justified less by the potentially exact descriptions it allows than by the way it enables the contrast of completely different approaches, such as that of Oliver Hangl's »Lovers' Walk« (2001) with maia's »NOTDEF./VERSION ONE« (1999) in the category »Movement.«

This means that »Video Edition Austria Release 01« reflects Austrian video art as a diversified intersection of artistic and documentary methods of production. The spectrum of works included ranges from Carola Dertnig's »Dancing with Remote« (1997) and Erwin Wurm's »One Minute Sculptures« (1997) to Norbert Pfaffenbichler and Lotte Schreiber's »36« (2001), Markus and Sabine Marte's »ME/JU« (1998/99), skot's »AUS« (1998) and Gertrude Moser-Wagner's »Indicatore-Project« (1996), and contains a variety of video-production techniques and aesthetics used and implemented in differing ways. The collection makes the question of video's status as an art form seem completely obsolete: the medium has long been a functional part of conceptual strategies dealing with questions of the politics of visibility and presentation, strategies that are constantly redefining video as a visual discourse.

 

Translated by Tim Jones

 

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