Take 5

Australian Video Art

Flinders University Museum of Art is currently exhibiting Between the Details: Video Art from the ACMI Collection (19 February – 19 April 2024). FUMA’s own audiovisual collection helps anchor this showcase of contemporary works from ACMI (formerly Australian Centre for the Moving Image) in a rich – but often hidden – history of video art in Australia. I teach a third-year Screen topic called Contemporary Screen Cultures and bring the students to FUMA to engage with the collections and the trajectory of video art. The history of the art form “has been relatively difficult to access,” notes art theorist Daniel Palmer, partly because “In Australia, until recently, our collecting institutions have been reluctant to build permanent collections of work that appear at once too technical, time-based and difficult to catalogue compared to conventional, object-based works of art” (2014, 89). We are fortunate that FUMA not only holds video works gifted by the Australian Experimental Art Foundation (AEAF), but has been digitising the magnetic tapes before Deadline 2025, keeping this history accessible. Alongside Australian works by artists such as Nat & Ali, Patricia Piccinini, Justine Cooper, and Shaun Gladwell, there are also international gems in FUMA’s collection, including some newly digitised video works by Laurie Anderson and Marina Abramović (artists who both featured in the 2024 Adelaide Festival).

These works draw on traditions in video art, self-portrait, and performance art in ways that raise interesting questions about the representation of the body on screen and how video ‘remediates’ other media and practices as it draws on various artforms from collage to choreography. The five works below date from the late 1990s to the early 2000s, a period when video installation in exhibition practice was becoming accessible in Australia. These works – and their acquisition by FUMA – speak to the “institutionalisation and historicization of video art in Australia” in the 2000s (Palmer 2014, 87), which was also marked by the establishment of ACMI in Melbourne in 2002. The works gifted by AEAF provide a record of Adelaide’s role as a hotspot of experimental and performance practice since the 1970s and serve as a resource for students and contemporary artists to understand and build on this legacy (for example, through the PhD candidacy of artist Sasha Grbich and Assemblage’s artist in residence program).

The documentation of performance art was a common use of video by early artists working with the medium, which is well captured by the video works in FUMA’s Post-Object and Documentation Art collection (in particular, recordings of performance art by Mike Parr, Stelarc and Ulay and Marina Abramović made by the Experimental Art Foundation). Deej Fabyc is an Australian artist working across performance, installation, photography and video, who has performed internationally since the 1980s. Six performance pieces documents works she performed in galleries in Sydney, Brisbane and Berlin in the mid-1990s, some of which also highlight the incorporation of video installation in her performances.

Shaun Gladwell rose to prominence with his early 2000s video portraits of a single body (usually the artist’s own) engaged in urban recreations such as bike riding, break dancing and capoeira. Unlike documentation of performance works that record often extraordinary actions of the body, Gladwell transforms everyday movement by drawing on the sensory qualities of video. With his Bondi Beach-set skateboarding video, Storm Sequence, where his various “tricks” are set against a tumultuous rainy beach and swelling soundscape, “Gladwell began to pursue his interest in the relation between body, space and time” (Pennings 2005, 16). Tangara similarly explores these relations, depicting slow-motion physical movement of the artist hanging from handrails aboard a Sydney train. The 180-degree inverted image creates a disorientating defying of gravity, pointing to how Gladwell’s video works reflect on the relationship between body and environment.

In Rapt, the artist similarly uses her own body as subject, but where Gladwell’s videos capture gestural movement in graceful slow motion, here the camera glides in and through the body to present an interior view. MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scans of Cooper’s body, assembled in rendering software, create hypnotic moving images of the layering and decay of the body. As Cooper describes it, “the work alludes to a conceptual shifting in our experience of both time and space, and how this is mediated by science and technology” (cited in Donohue 1999, 39). Cooper was the first artist in the 1990s to use MRI scans in her work, initiating an aesthetic experience of medical imaging that has since been used by other artists (now including Gladwell, who recently used brain scans in an extended reality [XR] work, Passing Electrical Storms [2023]).

Departing from the sublime and mesmerising portraits of the body in Gladwell’s and Cooper’s videos, Breathing Room presents an abject and intimate view of a breathing body, featuring a close-up of an unidentifiable nipple-like body part that expands and contracts in time with a soundtrack of quickening, agitated breath.  Piccinini’s work has similarly engaged with the intersection of art and medical science but presents a different kind of uncanny view of the body to Cooper’s – here a grotesque combination of natural and artificial bodies suggestive of biological mutation or genetic engineering. This video reflects anxieties about new technologies, particularly biotechnologies, inducing a panicky and destabilising effect regarding the specificity and familiarity of the human body.

Melbourne artist duo Nat & Ali began collaborating at art school, and this video captures aspects of their work such as kitschy humour and making themselves the central subject of their work – here a collage of cut-out photographs from their youth set against bright block colour backgrounds and a cacophony of party noises on the soundtrack. Described by Palmer as “something like an Australian, Gen Y version of Gilbert and George,” in this period these multimedia collaborators also produced “a hokey aerobic workout session in leopard print and fluorescent pink leotards; a makeover session with movie star mirrors incorporating a 'before and after' series; and… stencilling their names and faces around Melbourne’s walls and pavements” (2001). In this video, they connect what Rosalind Krauss famously described as the inherent narcissism of video art (1976) to their simultaneous critique and complicit construction of the cult of celebrity.

Claire Henry

Senior Lecturer and Discipline Lead in Screen, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Flinders University

March 2024

© Flinders University

Sources:

Donohue, Robyn. 1999. “Justine Cooper: RAPT.” Photofile 56 (May): 38–40.

Krauss, Rosalind. 1976. “The Aesthetics of Narcissism.” October 1 (Spring): 50–64.

Palmer, Daniel. 2001. “Nat & Ali [review].” Frieze, 5 May. https://www.frieze.com/article/nat-ali

Palmer, Daniel. 2014. “Australian Video Art since 2000.” In Video Void: Australian Video Art, edited by Matthew Perkins, 83–109. North Melbourne, Victoria: Australian Scholarly Publishing. 

Pennings, Mark. 2005. “Out of Place, Out of Time, Out of Mind: Shaun Gladwell’s Aesthetic Explorations.” Eyeline 58 (Spring): 16–18.