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The way artists (painters, musicians, performers and poets) used video in the 70s, is quite unlike the ordinary commercial use made by television, then and now, even if many elements of artistic research have penetrated into the language of the mass media especially in the video-clips of rock music, where the performative and visual aspect have become indispensable to every sound performance. The artistic video has always been part of a circuit of experiences inside art, providing a possibility of extending the language of art. This opening, characterized by the prevalence of the logos over the mythos and the concept over the work, also implied a powerful extra-medial tension towards modern technological instruments (video, but also computer, laser and photography) which were well suited to translate the artist's strong impulse towards the environment, or society, considered as places where events occur. The crisis of this attitude, which must not be confused with the crisis of research in toto, returned the function of the language to its specific fields, and art to itself and to its destiny, in a highly computerized world of industrial ruins. Nevertheless art can only rediscover its identity if it reveals itself to the abyss of time, by a complete examination of its modern myth, drifting bravely like a ghost ship on electromagnetic waves. If that is how things are, as I believe, then the most significative continuation of extra-medial research in the 70s, perhaps consists in precisely this renewed nomadism of painting, in its erratic journey, where ancient preciousnesses and fluctuating roots combine with the acid and syrupy colour of television and videogames, the light of sky and of water mingles with laser beams, and a romantic feeling of decadence intertwines with a feeling of the future, in an authentic post-modern synthesis. |
AUDIO/VIDEOGRAPHY
Audiotapes
1977
Voyage, Venezia-Torino
A'tra/verso il Nero, Bologna-Trieste
Interphonic Diamonologue, Bologna
Abschied (ah si?) vom Hashish, Paris-Trieste
1978
Evening Madrigal, Ferrara
1979
Il sogno di Norwid, Genova
Videotapes
1975
Diario pubblico e segreto, b/w sound 20'
Cancellazioni, b/w sound 20'
1976
Identity as identification, b/w sound 3'
Fall and loss of a dear family, b/w no sound 2'
Taking place, b/w sound 2'
Who is Luigi Viola?, video b/n sound 12'
1977
Temporidentitàs, b/w sound 10'
A 5' writing, b/w sound 5'
1978
Video as no video, b/w and colour sound 3'
1979
Urlo (groaning), toned sound 5'
Do you remember this film?, colour sound 4'
1980
Fragments of an interior space (with P. P. Fassetta), colour sound 4'
Produced by :
C. A. V. and Galleria del Cavallino, Venezia
Archives:
Galleria del Cavallino, Venezia;
London Video Arts, London;
M.O.M.A., New York;
Art Metropole, Toronto;
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa;
A.S.A.C. La Biennale, Venezia.
For more information please
Luigi Viola
