The Temporalities of Video: Extendedness Revisited

Abstract

In an article written for Artforum in 1980, MoMA video curator Barbara London situated the uneasy reception of early video art in its protracted temporality: “Video, more than any other medium, has been criticized for being tedious and self-indulgent. In the early ‘70s this was a valid criticism, because the length of many artists' … works were dictated by standard videotape length—30 to 60 minutes—which in some cases was much too long.”1 During the same period, Nam June Paik, one of the key pioneers of electronic arts, made his most famous claim: video is time. Although this suggests that Paik supported the first generation of video artists, whose work effectively conveyed a sense of extended duration to the viewer, he reproved it for its poor understanding of time: “What Godard says about cinema (‘truth 24 times a second’) does not hold in video. Because in video, there is no space (delimited frame) there is only time (lines without thickness). To produce color in video one has to translate color in time.

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