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Famous Video Artists
Top
contemporary artists involved in video art include the following:
Andy Warhol
produced a number of video films now regarded as part of the genre. Representative
sample of his works include: 'Sleep' (1963), depicting the 6-hour slumber
of the poet John Giorno; 'Empire' (1964), an 8-hour film of the Empire
State Building in New York City at dusk; and 'Eat', a 45-minute film showing
a man eating mushrooms. In 1966, he produced 'Chelsea Girls' consisting
of two films being projected at the same time, with a variable sound track
to update viewers on the twin plots. This use of multi-imaging echoed
Warhol's earlier multi-image silk-screen works like 'Twenty Marilyns'
(1962).
Peter Campus (b.1937), one of the
most important video artists of the 1970s, was a key innovator in studio
camera work and video technology. His work 'Three Transitions' employed
numerous processors, mixers and editors to record his own film-making.
Other works by Peter Campus include: Double Vision (1971), Interface (1972),
Three Transitions (1973), R-G-B (1974), Video Ergo Sum: Divide (1999),
Video Ergo Sum: Dream (1999), Edge of the Ocean (2003), Kathleen in Grey
(2004), Baruch the Blessed (2004). He is represented in private and public
collections around the world, including the Museum
of Modern Art, New York City.
The sculptor Joan Jonas (b.1936)
was an early exponent of video and performance art, who began filming
in natural and industrial environments and progressed to groundbreaking
Performance video. During the period 1972-6, her videos featured herself
as her alter-ego Organic Honey, in order to explore the complex female
image. 'The Juniper Tree' (1976) was mythological, while her 'Lines in
the Sand' (2002) was a performance installation based on a rework of Helen
of Troy that explored the self and the body. In 1994, Jonas was awarded
a major retrospective at the Stedelijk
Museum in Amsterdam, for which she recreated several of her performance
works into installations for the museum. This was followed in 2003 with
solo exhibitions at the Rosamund Felsen Gallery (Los Angeles) and the
Pat Hearn Gallery (NYC), and in 2004 by a major exhibition at Queens Museum
of Art (NYC). In 2005 she became Professor of Visual Arts at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.
Bill Viola (b.1951), a graduate
of Syracuse University's College of Visual and Performing Arts, has established
himself as one of the world's most celebrated video artists. Known for
his technical and creative mastery of the genre, Viola focuses on birth,
death, love, and emotion drawing inspiration from Zen Buddhism, Christian
mysticism and Islamic Sufism. His employment of very-slow motion video
allows the viewer to fully absorb the imagery and its meanings. For example,
his 'Nantes Triptych' (1992), records (on the left) a woman giving birth
in the arms of a man, while (on the right) an old woman dies. In the centre,
an image of a man moving in water suggests our helpless existence between
these twin facts of existence. In 1997, Viola was awarded a major 25-year
retrospective by the Whitney
Museum of American Art, and in 2000, he was elected to the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences. His work 'The Passions' - a collection of
Viola's Renaissance-inspired slow motion works - was shown in Los Angeles,
London, Madrid and Canberra, three years later, and in 2005, his new production
of Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde, debuted at the Opéra
National de Paris.
Other Important 20th
Century Lens-Based Artists
For other video and/or photographic artists,
see biographies of the following camera artists.
• Walker
Evans (1903-75) Social Realism photographer of Great Depression
• Henri Cartier-Bresson
(1908-2004) Noted for street photographs
• Robert Capa (1913-54)
War photographer
• Irving Penn (1917-2009)
Famous for fashion photos, ethnographical images
• Richard Avedon (1923-2004)
Fashion photographer
• Bernd and Hilla Becher
- Industrial camera artists.
• James Coleman (b.1941)
Irish video artist.
• Robert Mapplethorpe
(1946-89) Noted for nudes and still lifes of flowers
• Jeff Wall (b.1946) Specialist
in "staged photography"
• Nan Goldin (b.1953) Photographs
of marginalized groups; feminist issues.
• Cindy Sherman (b.1954)
Noted for her surreal self-portraits
• Andreas Gursky (b.1955)
Architectural and landscape photographer.
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