INTRODUCTION

On the Horizon

GABRIELLE JENNINGS

Abstract art is propelled by ... hope and hunger. It reflects the urge to push toward the limit, to colonize the borderland around the openings onto nothingness, where the land has not been settled, where the new can emerge.

KIRK VARNEDOE, PICTURES OF NOTHING: ABSTRACT ART SINCE POLLOCK

Video art has rarely been analyzed through the lens of abstraction; it is often amorphous, ungovernable, and disembodied with spaces that confound Renaissance perspective and encourage contemplation. As the late art historian Kirk Varnedoe put it, "pictures of nothing." And of everything. In light of scholarship on abstraction in other mediums, it is useful to consider this history because video has transformed from an essentially narrative analog form (TV) to a pervasive digital art medium. This collection examines abstraction in video art after 2000 — moving image artworks that were made just after analog video nearly went extinct and bytes and pixels became dominant.

Video Art has had film and television, the twin hounds of narrative, nipping at its heels for decades now, referencing these forms while distinguishing itself through various means — reflexivity, nonlinear narrative, and medium specificity, to name just a few. The title for this volume, Abstract Video: The Moving Image in Contemporary Art, illustrates its own problematic: it carries a history of video art proper that points towards both its predecessor (film) and its offspring (new media art). Like the horizon, abstract video is visible but unattainable, an idea as much as an image, looking left and right, an interrupted and a continuous line, movement and stillness embodied.

This volume examines the term abstract in traditional ways that modernism embraced but also in the ways that film historians discuss Structuralist and experimental film, according to perception and duration, and in ways media historians use the term in referring to the digital. It looks at how we think through abstraction and tracks changes as the medium itself continues to evolve. Though video emerged with the advent of videotape, the term video now encompasses all moving image media.

The closest Varnedoe comes to discussing moving image works in Pictures of Nothing is his consideration of James Turrell's light installations, Afrum-Proto (1966), and Wedgework (1974). These works exemplify important formal qualities of abstract art: they don't exist in the natural world, and like architecture and film, they reference things outside themselves. These phenomenological events are a useful place to begin a consideration of abstraction in video art because, like video, they are made of light and are best experienced through prolonged viewing. Crucially, movement over time is not a quality of either piece, but it is an essential aspect of this book.

The only mention of the moving image in Pictures of Nothing is in the discussion of two feature films: Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982). It seems no coincidence that these masterpieces of modern cinema contain the peculiar sense of the abstract often found in science fiction: the unknowable colliding with the familiar. Varnedoe reminds readers of the "great, grey, forbidding slab that first appears to a group of apes at the beginning of [2001] and later reappears on the moon, sending out a piercing signal in the direction of Mars" and connects modernist sculptor John McCracken's "planks" to the monolith. The sculptures are very much about presence and in this context pose an important question in regard to the moving image: can an image — which is not a thing, which may be fleeting, and is always moving — have the same kind of gravity and presence as an actual object? Varnedoe refers to Blade Runner in the context of an android's expiration, thereby illustrating his inability to be comprehensive in the span of six lectures and hinting at the heartache of his terminal illness. It is tempting to think that, had Varnedoe had more time, more lectures ahead of him, that he would have wanted to consider new forms of abstraction — experimental film, video, and new media practices among them.

Aesthetic dialogues used to occur in parallel worlds — painting, sculpture, and film each on fairly separate tracks. This has changed. Previously concurrent discussions now intersect regularly, requiring greater elasticity and new definitions. For this book, I asked a diverse set of writers and practitioners to attend to the abstract in the contemporary moving image, to contextualize, and to guide the reader through the countless streams of light.

* * *

Ecstatic Resistance is an inquiry into the temporality of change. Time, the time of transformation, the duration and physicality of the experience of change. And drama — the arc of history. The temporality of the ecstatic opens a non-linear experience in which connections are made at breakneck pace and a moment later time appears to stop us in the dynamism of one challenging thought.

— EMILY ROYSDON, ECSTATIC RESISTANCE

With a fair bit of excitement, I opened Abstraction (2013), the latest anthology in the Whitechapel: Documents in Contemporary Art series. The collection runs the gamut from social and political utopias to a more Greenbergian "focus on medium-specificity and self-reflexiveness" and opens up the field in expansive ways though not specifically in terms of moving image practices. Similarly, most of the essays in...