Barbara Buckner’s Selected Works I (1979-1981)
Barbara Buckner’s abstract, often silent video works, made throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s, explored the transformative properties of electronic image-processing technology. Three of these videos, Hearts (1979), Heads (1979), and Millennia (1981) are available to view through March 23rd.
Barbara Buckner, Hearts
1979, 11:15 min, color, silent
Viewing period for this work has ended.
Barbara Buckner, Heads
1979, 5:41 min, color, silent
Viewing period for this work has ended.
Barbara Buckner, Millennia
1981, 5:33 min, color, silent
Viewing period for this work has ended.
Barbara Buckner is an American video artist who was among the earliest to use electronic image processing tools, beginning in the early 1970s. Her approach included manipulating the video signal (luminance, hue, and sync) with voltage-controlled devices such as audio and video synthesizers, multi-layer keyers, cameras, colorizers, raster manipulators, and frame buffers. She has described her works as “structural narratives—lyrical, organic, and painterly.” Her videos are silent, initiating a focused and contemplative viewing experience that explores internal rhythms within the moving image. Elemental changes in color, shape, texture, luminance, and movement transform images and imbue them with psychological and spiritual meaning.
Buckner’s techniques predate the digital imaging we now take for granted. Her intention, she writes, was “to use technology-based imaging to evoke human and spiritual realities, to reveal vital forces within the sinuous forming power in the electronic image.” Her videos, she continues, “reveal spiritual undercurrents via video as an art form, coming from a spiritual desire that lives within the human heart and psyche.”
Poster for a video program at Anthology Film Archives, 1976. Drawing by Barbara Buckner. Image description: A line drawing of a creature and a woman in two separate caves. Drawings of a trumpet and a string instrument are in the upper right-hand corner.
In 1985, Barbara Buckner spoke with scholar Marita Sturken for an interview in Afterimage, republished on the web in its entirety via Experimental Television Center. Here, she describes the origin of the three pieces included in Selected Works I:
Marita Sturken: It seems that Hearts was really the culmination of a lot of work for you. Certainly it is the longest of your later work.
Barbara Buckner: It gives things time to develop, which is perhaps more aesthetically satisfying to some people. In Hearts, I am trying to express the integration of emotional energy over a period of time. It is a cycle that continues, beginning slowly, climaxing, and then transforming. So perhaps because of the subject matter it had to be developed as one single piece. The heart is this generalized icon not only of emotional energy but also the seat of consciousness, the heart-center that informs the whole psyche, which I depicted as a magnetic landscape. The heart issues forth many kinds of energies within the landscape. Following that, Heads was an effort to depict mental activity in various kinds of beings—animals, humans, and other-worldly creatures—to explore portraiture.
Marita Sturken: In Millennia, there is also a direct correlation between your primary imaging technique and your subject matter. In other words, you use the effects of sliding the image horizontally across the screen to depict the passage of time.
Barbara Buckner: Millennia used a Z-80 Cromemco computer, which can display a series of stored images as a consecutive sequence or in a multi-image grid like a "memory window." I guess that the essence of Millenia is plus pa change, plus c'est la même chose—the continuous occurrence of phenomena that is everchanging, yet finite within the material universe. So, it’s as if we zoomed out and are seeing this cycle in miniature. I chose five categories: geometry, for structural changes in matter; moons, for planetary changes; animals, for variables in the animal kingdom; men, which depicts the human state of consciousness in a slightly negative way because the figures look fearful, like they are defending themselves; and the dead. It's very hard to depict the dead. I used moths flying around a light source, which look like white flying circular bodies. I depicted the same phenomenon differently in Pictures of the Lost in a section called “Sight Among the Blessed.” I wanted to portray another plane of existence, and the light is so ethereal and radiant that you do get the feeling that you are somewhere else but that there are beings there. They are operating at another level of awareness; what we call death is simply life at a higher vibrational level, another set of frequencies.
Excerpts from “Light and Darkness in the Video Image,” a lecture given by Buckner at Collective for Living Cinema in 1978. Image description: Photocopies of a lecture and diagrams detailing scansion (the act of determining rhythm), Chinese character formation, and Buckner’s synthesizer set-up.
Barbara Buckner was born in 1950. She received a B.F.A. from New York University. She is the recipient of several National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a New York State Council on the Arts grant, and a WNET/Thirteen grant. She has been artist-in-residence at City University of New York; the Experimental Television Center, Owego, New York; and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, among other institutions, and has taught at the School of Visual Arts, New York, and New York University.
Photograph portrait of Barbara Buckner, by Deborah Kass. Image description: The artist Barbara Buckner poses against a white wall.
2021 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.