Repères historiques 1960

Video as an art form emerges at the beginning of the decade from the encounter of visual artists, engineers, and television station managers who work together to explore new possibilities for the use of the video medium.

Pierre Schaeffer becomes the head of the Research Department at the RTF (future ORTF). He creates the Groupe de Recherche Musicale and in 1968 the Groupe de Recherche Image (GRI), the first group for the creation of video images in France.

In Venice, L'Enterrement d'une chose (Burial of a Thing), conceived and carried out by Jean-Jacques Lebel, Alain Jouffroy, and Jean Tinguely becomes the first happening in Europe.

First presentation of Karl-Heinz Stockhausen's Originale at the Theater am Dom in Cologne. Nam June Paik begins his experiments in the electronic studio at the WDR.

First Fluxus Festival at the American Students and Artists Center in Paris: "Poetry, music, and antimusic, factual and concrete". The program includes musical works by George Maciunas (In Memoriam to Adriano and Solo for Mouth and Microphone), Nam June Paik (One for Violin Solo, Serenade for Alison), Wolf Vostell (Décollage Musique "Kleenex"), and Robert Filliou (Poi Poi Symphony no. 2 and Père Lachaise no. 10), along with a selection of films by Paik. At the same time, Jean-Jacques Lebel creates the first Free Expression Workshop at the American Students and Artists Center. This initiative will help future exchanges between French and American artists (3-8 December).

The nascent Fluxus group gives fourteen concerts/happenings in Wiesbaden. The professional musicians who refuse to play the music they are given are replaced by artists, who proceed to compose three hours of "antiviolin" music (the famous scene in which Dick Higgins, George Maciunas, Ben Patterson, Wolf Vostell, and Emmett Williams destroy a grand piano) (September).

Nam June Paik, invited by the experimental music studio of the WDR in Cologne, undertakes experiments with cathode tubes and the possibilities of modulating the electronic image (summer).

The World Fluxus Festival of Total Art, organized by Ben Vautier with the participation of George Maciunas, takes place at the Hôtel Scribe in Nice. The event is marked by various happenings (Ben, Robert Bozzi, and George Maciunas). Films by Ben record the festival (25 July-3 August).

Jean-Christophe Averty and Max Debrenne experiment with the first graphic effects on television images for the monthly variety shows "Histoire de sourire" (Story of Smiling) and "Les Raisins verts" (Green Grapes) on France's first channel.

Nam June Paik and Wolf Vostell present their first experiments with images at the Parnass Gallery in Wuppertal (Exposition of Music-Electronic Television, 11-20 March). On the model of John Cage's prepared pianos, and in the spirit of Fluxus events, Paik places thirteen televisions prepared for the distortion of images on the floor among many other objects. This "event" is retrospectively identified as the beginning of video art.

Wolf Vostell makes Sun in Your Hand, his first film work conceived like a video. It will be shown for the first time in 1964 in Amsterdam. Vostel films television images in order to modify and scramble them later on.

Jean-Jacques Lebel and Marc'O organize the first Free Expression Festival at the American Students and Artists Center in Paris. It includes happenings, film screenings, and a Fluxus concert by Ben with the participation of Serge Oldenbourg (Serge III). The festival is combined zith an exhibition of Pop and Nouveau Réaliste artists. Also present are George Brecht, Nam June Paik, Wolf Vostell, and La Monte Young (25-30 May).

Jean-Christophe Averty does two theater pieces in black and white, with special effects : Ubu Roi by Alfred Jarry and He Joe by Samuel Beckett. Produced by the ORTF, they are broadcast on the first channel.

Jean-Jacques Lebel organizes the Second Free Expression Festival at the American Students and Artists Center in Paris, with the participation of Arrabal, Ben, Robert Filliou, Serge III, Nam June Paik, and Charlotte Moorman (video installation : Robot Opera) (17-25 May).

Wolf Vostell's exhibition "'Phänomene', Verwischungen, Parituren" and happening dé-coll/age are organized by the Autofriedhof and the René Block Gallery in Berlin (9 February-27 April).

With a Rockerfeller Foundation grant, Nam June Paik buys one of the first Sony Portapaks on the American market. On 4 October he shows a tape accompanied by a text entitled "Electronic Video Recorder" at the Café Au Go-Go in New York, a gathering place where performances often take place.

Les Levine, one of the early Portapak users, makes his first videotape, Bum. In 1966 he makes one of the first closed-circuit installations using a time lag, so that viewers see themselves with a five-second delay. The installation is presented at the Toronto Art Gallery.

Jean-Christophe Averty sets up the Vidéo Production Company with Igor Barrère, François Chatel, Pierre Tchernia, and Alexandre Tarta (March).

Third Free Expression Festival at the American Students and Artists Center in Paris, with actions by Robert Filliou, Jean-Jacques Lebel, and Kudo. The festival is suspended by the police (April).

Verwischungen. Happening-Notationen, presentation of works, performance, and happening by Wolf Vostell at the Kunstverein in Cologne (July).

Martial Raysse creates Portrait Electro Machin Chose at the Research Department of the ORTF. Initially filmed in video in order to make use of special effects techniques, the videotape is subsequently transferred to 16 mm film. The same year, Raysse creates a closed-circuit video installation, Identité, maintenant vous êtes un Martial Raysse (a camera that films visitors in order to reflect them in a "monitor-painting").

Aldo Tambellini opens the Black Gate in New York, the first "Electromedia Theater," where he organizes screenings and creates environment-actions using video.

KQED-TV in San Francisco sets up an experimental workshop on the double initiative of Brice Howard and Paul Kaufman and with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. In 1969 it will be named "National Center for Experiments in Television at KQED-TV" and funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Endowment for the Arts. WGBH-TV in Boston initiates its artists- in-residence program through a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.

"American Sculpture of the Sixties," exhibition presented at the Los Angeles County Museum, includes a video installation by Bruce Nauman.

In Québec, Jean-Luc Godard develops the project for a broadcast entitled "Communications" for Radio-Nord. Several programs, recorded in video, are to be transferred to film for the broadcast; the quality of the result is deemed inadequate and the project is abandoned (December).

Danish artist William Louis Sørensen conceives his first video installation, Any Magnetic or Magneto-Optical Recording System That..., a magnetic tape loop with live recording and nearly simultaneous playback of the image.

Creation of the GRI (Groupe de Recherche Image) at the ORTF under the direction of Pierre Schaeffer. François Coupigny develops the "truqueur universel" (universal special effects device), which is used by Martial Raysse, Peter Foldès, and Jean-Paul Cassagnac for attempts at coloring the video image from black-and-white images.

New production and distribution structures emerge: Jean-Luc Godard creates the Sonimage Company in Paris, then moves it to Grenoble. Chris Marker creates the SLON (Service for Launching New Works) group with André Delvaux: "a cooperative available for all those who wish to make documentaries and who share certain common preoccupations." Filmmakers, workers, and political activists join (autumn).

French television commissions Le Gai Savoir from Jean-Luc Godard. Filmed in the studio in December 1967, it will be edited after May 1968. By deconstructing the traditional narrative structure of film, Godard explores its critical and educational capacities. His argument is deemed too subversive, and the film is never broadcast.

Video becomes an additional tool (shooting and editing facilities) for political filmmakers. Godard and Marker use the first Sony 2100 ½-inch black-and-white cameras to create rough documents that will be distributed in the form of a counter-culture magazine called Vidéo 5 in François Maspéro's bookstore. Also shown in this bookstore are works by students at a school run by Noël Burch and Jean-André Fieschi.

Wibke von Bonin, rédactrice du WDR (Westdeutscher Rundfunk), passe commande de Black Gate Cologne aux artistes Otto Piene et Aldo Tambellini en vue d'une émission de 23 minutes sur une de leurs performances.

Creation of the San Francisco artists group Ant Farm (Chip Lord, Doug Michels, and Curtis Schreier). They begin using video in 1971 and participate in Radical Software magazine. They also create Guerilla Television (which gives its name to the 1972 book by Michael Shamberg), where they will be joined by Global Village, Video Freex, and Paper Tiger TV.

First exhibition including video art organized by Pontus Hulten at the Museum of Modern Art in New York: "The Machine to Make the Mechanical Age," with work by Nam June Paik.

Multi Medial in Vienna. Peter Weibel presents two videotapes: Prozess als Produkt, recording the preparations for the exhibit during which it was to be shown, and Publikum als Exponent.

Alain Jacquier, of the ORTF's Research Department, installs the first ¼-inch and ½-inch equipment allowing taping and editing in one-inch Ampex and later I.V.C. at the University of Paris 8-Vincennes and the Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He places video equipment borrowed from Jean-Luc Godard at the disposal of the Cinéthique group.

Fred Forest sets up a video installation in an abandoned church (transformed into the Galerie Sainte-Croix) in Tours. The work, Interrogation 69, uses screens integrated into a wall (May).

Creation of the Atelier des Techniques de Communication (Communications Techniques Workshop, ATC), which organizes out the first video animation projects in cultural centers. The workshop directors, Jean-Marie Serreau and Guy Milliard, obtain a research contract from the Ministry of Cultural Affairs' Research Department (with equipment donated by the director of cultural action) (September-December).

Martial Raysse makes Camembert Martial extraterrestre with the support of the German TV station ZDF. Shooting in video, he uses Francis Coupigny's "truqueur universel" synthesizer and later transfers Camembert Martial onto film.

Gerry Schum opens the TV Gallery in Berlin and, shortly afterward, inaugurates the Videogalerie in Dusseldorf, the first in Europe. The videotapes he shows include not only his own productions (he invites, among others, Daniel Buren for a video installation produced in 1971, Wolf Knoebel, and John Baldessari), but other works as well (Bruce Nauman).

Werner Höfer, manager of WDR, allows the broadcast of memorable conceptual projects. From 11 to 18 October, the English artist Keith Arnatt, in an intervention entitled TV Project Self-Burial, shows an image of his own photograph for two seconds, either just after the news or during prime time. During Christmas week, Jan Dibbets' TV as a Fireplace, shows the slow end of a hearth fire at the end of the evening's programming.

Harald Szeemann organizes the exhibition "When Attitudes Become Form" at the Bern Kunsthalle. Among the 69 artists invited to this key event for the 1970s are Joseph Beuys, Hans Haacke, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Dennis Oppenheim, Richard Serra, Lawrence Weiner, and Gilberto Zorio (27 March-27 April).

Analysis of the video medium is undertaken by artist-theorists like Jean Otth, René Bauermeister, Gérald Minkoff, and Muriel Oleson, who open the Galerie Rencontre in Lausanne. This gallery will present a vast international survey of video in 1974. The Swiss pioneers (in 1969) come from the French-speaking community: René Bauermeister, Gérald Minkoff, Muriel Oleson, Jean Otth, Janos Urban, and later Chérif and Sylvie Defraoui. Among the first German-speaking Swiss video artists are Urs Lüthi, Dieter Meier, Dieter Roth, and Hannes Vogel.

René Berger, director of the Musée d'art moderne in Lausanne, is one of the first Swiss theorists to deal with video and television at the University of Lausanne and in publications.

In Boston, WGBH-TV broadcasts "The Medium Is the Medium," a thirty-minute program produced by Fred Barzyck and the Public Broadcasting Laboratory and featuring the works of Allan Kaprow, Nam June Paik, Otto Piene, James Seawright, Thomas Tadlock, and Aldo Tambellini.

With the end of the decade, political video collectives, action groups, and research workshops are created in New York and San Francisco (Televisionary Associated, the Alternate Media Center, Open Channel, the Media Bus). Political and community organizations use video as a means of communication and activism (Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Gay Activist Alliance, Environmental Protection Agency, etc.).

In New York, John Reilly and Rudi Stern create Global Village, a collective video space seeking to explore video as a cultural, educational, artistic, and community-based medium. Global Village, funded by the City of New York and the Rockefeller Foundation, makes its technicians and equipment available to outside groups. Each week, Global Village broadcasts ten hours of programs on New York's public television stations (September).

Video Freex, an experimental video group, is set up in New York by Skip Blumberg, Nancy Cain, David Cort, Bart Friedman, Ann Woodward, and others.

Bruce Nauman shows his first neons, videotapes, and a closed-circuit video installation, Live/Taped Video Corridor, at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York.

The Howard Wise Gallery in New York organizes a video exhibition, "TV as a Creative Medium," with works by Frank Gillette, Charlotte Moorman, Nam June Paik, Earl Reiback, Ira Schneider, Eric Siegal, Thomas Tadlock, Aldo Tambellini, and Joe Weintraub.

Body Art is born in New York. Like their European counterparts, artists Vito Acconci, Dan Graham, Bruce Nauman, Dennis Oppenheim, and others begin to use their own bodies as a medium.