Video Times, 1965-2005

Finally saw Video Times in la Caixa Forum at the last day. There is little video art that grabs me. Thats what it should do preferibly, grab you the first moment you walk in and keep you fascinated for as long as the video lasts. Every frame should make you want to stay. Therefore it is such a difficult medium and very often it bores people because of being too long, too obvious, pretentious or simply incomprehensible.
A pioneer and a bit of a genius is artist Nam June Paik. He was the first to introduce TV images into a museum space, in 1963. Two years later, he created 'Moon is the Oldest TV'. A simple adjustment to one of the black-and-white televison tubes of the time produces an image that seems like a shot of the moon, and also appears in a sequence of phases when the deflector magnet is shifted.

Moon is the oldest TV

There were about 30 artists so impossible to hightlight them all but another piece I thought to be very strong was the piece by Isaac Julien, Baltimore.

Starring veteran actor Melvin Van Peebles, BALTIMORE was designed in part as an homage to Van Peebles' movies. The film installation includes three Baltimore institutions - the Walters Art Museum, the Peabody Library and the Great Blacks in Wax Museum. As in previous series, Julien uses museums as a key location and theme, uniting these cultural institutions with blaxploitation cinema as a symbol of black empowerment, which Van Peebles helped usher in in the 1970s.

Text coming from the Progressive Art Collection.