At the Leading Edge: Emily Watlington on Video and the Truth
In 1973, Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)’s founder Howard Wise self-published At the Leading Edge of Art, a 14-page prospectus outlining his philosophical approach to electronic art and the services EAI provides. As part of our 50th anniversary, EAI has invited a series of respondents to discuss the contemporary resonances of Wise’s words.
In the second response, art critic and Art in America associate editor Emily Watlington draws upon her experience reviewing contemporary video work to consider the current contours of the ever-elusive truth in moving image art.
Alongside this piece, EAI presents a two-week online screening of a selection from media collective Raindance’s Media Primers, an example of the guerrilla-style tapes produced by the group as an exercise in countering the unidirectional dynamics of television.
Still from Stuart Sherman, Newsbreak, 1994. Sherman kicks a newspaper vending machine.
The Truth About (and In) Today’s Video Art
By Emily Watlington
In 1973, Howard Wise had refreshingly sober ambitions for the then-nascent medium of video art. His manifesto from that year contains just a few moments of romanticization and utopian thinking. These are natural, necessary even, when imagining a future. But generally, his aims are humble and noble. He first and foremost saw video art as a tool that could be used to help reintegrate art with everyday life, reminding us that any separation of the two is a Western idea only as old as the modernist white cube. The point of this reintegration was to “provoke the viewer out of his complacency,” to “stimulate the viewer’s imagination,” and to “seek truth and make it visible regardless of the consequences.” It is this third aim—seeking truth—that we must revisit in 2022.
Today, video essays are the medium’s predominant genre, and as far as truth is concerned, the stakes are high. These works often string together and closely examine visuals in search of patterns that support an argument or theory with real world implications. And usually, the arguments are illustrated using visual juxtapositions with didactic voiceovers, in many cases inspired by the striking visual connections expertly woven together by the late German filmmaker Harun Farocki. Such videos can position the artist as a gifted seer. Those of the shocking exposé variety—which began gaining traction around the time that the Whitney hosted a solo exhibition by documentary filmmaker and Citizenfour director Laura Poitras in 2016, and live on in recent works by Forensic Architecture and Hito Stereyl—tend to create the most buzz. Video essays are powerful and seductive—and that’s what makes them sometimes dangerous.
While the earliest video artists adamantly worked against the medium’s spectacular qualities, many artists today take advantage of them. For Triple-Chaser (2019), Forensic Architecture’s splashy contribution to the latest Whitney Biennial, for example, the artists trained an algorithm on images of one type of tear gas can produced by Safariland, whose CEO Warren Kanders served as the Vice Chair of the museum’s board at the time. The bulk of the video, which was made in conjunction with Laura Poitras’s Praxis Films, shows the cans against bold backgrounds, demonstrating how the group trained the AI, and the whole thing succeeded in making viewers justly outraged, even though no conclusions are drawn from the algorithm. In a voiceover narrated by David Byrne, they also list the countries where they have found evidence of Safariland’s use, but never disclose what that evidence is, so it’s hard to know whether or not it’s conclusive. It’s easy to agree with the implication that violenceis entangled with the art world in all kinds of messed up ways, even though the video withholds a lot of the evidence it hinges on. But important as this message may be, we can’t ignore how this bears some concerning similarities to a few moves from the Fox News handbook of demagoguery.
Hito Steyerl’s 2019 exhibition at the Park Avenue Armory, which centered around a three-channel video about gun violence called Drill, similarly employed statistics, and activists familiar from the news. While reviewing the show, I found myself fact-checking many of Steyerl’s claims and noticed a few things that weren’t quite true. In Is the Museum a Battlefield? (2013), for instance, Steyerl states that a certain Frank Gehry-designed building in Berlin belonged to the aerospace arms developer Lockheed Martin, though it is in fact owned by a bank. This isn’t very consequential, and perhaps she was playing with the truth deliberately. Still, she does hinge her argument on it.
My point isn’t simply to insist that artists need fact-checkers, or to forbid them from dabbling in fiction; I don’t think Wise was simply referring to facts when he said “truth.” It’s more that the artist’s task ought to differ from the investigative reporter’s. Video, we know, is a frighteningly seductive tool. The proliferation of Steyerl’s misinformation in various sources outside of her exhibition testifies to her influence, and to the trust we put in artists to see and expose the truth. It also lays bare how the transition of media from print to web has slashed mastheads and privileged audience reach over rigorous fact checking.
Wise also astutely warned about the slippage between art and the commercially-motivated programming we might today call “content.” He described navigating between these two categories as both “an opportunity and a challenge.” A real artist’s advocate, he wanted to protect avant-garde makers from having to justify their work according to the logic of cable networks, who, for business reasons, needed to attract large audiences. Concerns over art fusing with content have been amplified exponentially by the internet, where controversy is the name of the game, and art institutions too face pressure to “do numbers” with their programming. But art is not a license to take liberties with journalism’s didactic, evidence-based approaches, unless these conventions are subverted with extreme thought and care. This is what video art’s early innovators taught us.
Shocking video essays tend to drum up quite a stir, garnering attention and debate online—which is to say, they perform well as content. It’s as if these artists, showing work in museums and biennials, are anticipating the headlines their works will elicit. Or to put it in Wise’s words, they face tremendous pressure to treat the bridge between media and museums as more “opportunity” than “challenge.” And though one might argue the ends justify the means if word is spread concerning pressing political issues, I still think video artists ought to resist, rather than exploit, their medium’s dangerous qualities.
Emily Watlington is associate editor at Art in America.
2021-2022 marks the 50th anniversary of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), one of the world’s leading resources for video and media art. As we celebrate this milestone, EAI will present a rotating series of video features from across our collection and publish a series of oral histories with key figures. To keep up to date on our anniversary activities, please sign up for our e-mail mailing list.