Riding on the wakes of the giant “California Video” exhibition held at the Getty, Cal State Long Beach’s University Art Museum opens a smaller but extremely relevant video exhibition. art/tapes/22, curated by Alice Hutchinson in collaboration with Maria Gloria Biocchi and the Venice Biennale, is chock full of early 70′s video projects by artists exploring the medium in its early stages.
The title of the exhibition, art/tapes/22, borrows its name from the pioneering video studio in Florence, which produced over 150 videotapes from 1973 to 1976.
The show presents video work by artists such as Vito Acconci, Eleanor Antin, John Baldessari, Joseph Beuys, Christian Boltanski, Chris Burden, Daniel Buren, Gino De Dominicis, Allan Kaprow, Jannis Kounellis, Urs Lüthi, Giulio Paolini, and Bill Viola.
It just so happens, that Long Beach’s Bill Viola served as art/tapes/22 technical director from 1974-76. What brings even more relevance to the Long Beach exhibition is the fact that the last show of these tapes, curated by David Ross, was at the Long Beach Museum of Art.
Most of the works in the exhibition are black & white, with a few exceptions. The videos are presented on TV sets reminiscent of the 70′s. Larger works are projected on the wall, and sixteen of the works are viewed on CRT studio monitors set up in rows of four.
A highlight of the exhibition is a Chris Burden work “The Guru of Detroit” (1975) in which two sitting figures are half cropped out of the frame. One of them, “The Guru”, rambles on about machine parts and how Detroit fits into the industrial revolution.
One of the only color works was the first reconstruction of a 1974 work conceived by artist Daniel Buren. The installation consisted of 5 images displayed on different monitors but transmitting a simultaneous pattern.
The show will be open until October 19th at UAM – University Art Museum at CSLUB.
