| This dissertation, "'A Broken Piece of an Absent Whole': Experimental Video and its Spaces of Production and Reception" presumes that where video is found---as the glass eye and window of broadcast network television, as an integral component of contemporary architecture, as one more medium in the museum, and as the newly primary visual interface of the internet---determines its form. Video also has a formative influence on the spaces into which it is inserted. The recently expanded field of video is divided in two: by "broken piece" the art historian Ann Wagner refers to experimental video and video installation art; by "absent whole," the rest of media culture. Why this break occurs, and how it is both policed and undermined is my dissertation's project.;In the late 1960s, experimental or avant-garde video's space was assumed to be broadcast television, and secondarily the artist's studio, the art gallery and the movie theater. Chapter 1 looks at the avant-garde strategies for accessing and altering broadcast television, which consisted of multipronged attacks on its complex of industry programming, audience and technological form. Its failure to maintain a lasting presence on television is used to support the argument that television's vigorous and highly militant avant-garde did not produce any lasting cultural assets. I argue otherwise, by looking at some of the unresolved "problems" of avant-garde television that return over the ensuing decades. Following its release from the television set, video has appeared almost everywhere, on screens the size of buildings that form a backdrop for people carrying screens that fit into their hands. Through a consideration of public video art, chapter 2 analyzes how the dismissal of broadcast television audience by the avant-garde is repeated in later responses to the newly expanded spaces of "television." Chapter 3 looks at the changes to video's temporal form that take place after its successful introduction into the museum in the 1990s. Chapter 4 historicizes the rhetoric dividing high art from mass culture through an analysis of attempts to split the virtual from the phenomenological in the reception of projected video environments. |
