CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — In the age of YouTube it’s hard to imagine, but once there was a day when video was something new and rare outside of broadcast studios, and so was video art.
“Angel Soldier,” by Korean video artist Lee Yongbaek, will be one of 12 videos on view during in the exhibition. | Image courtesy of Krannert Art Museum
Starting Oct. 17, Krannert Art Museum will celebrate the art form’s early beginnings and its first major practitioner, Nam June Paik (1932–2006), with the opening of “Global Groove 1973/2012.”
The exhibition features one of Paik’s seminal works, “Global Groove,” from 1973, and uses it as a jumping-off point for 11 other videos in the exhibition, representing current international trends in video art. All 12 pieces – the shortest is two minutes and the longest nearly half an hour – will show continuously on 12 different viewing kiosks in the museum’s East Gallery through Dec. 23.
Paik’s “Global Groove” is described as a “fast-paced barrage of images and sounds” and a “prophetic statement about the future ubiquity of video,” anticipating both the quantity of video and the giant video screens that now dominate entire city centers.
The other, more-recent videos in the exhibition were created by artists in Asia, Africa, Europe, the Middle East and the United States. They highlight various artistic approaches, from low-tech to highly cinematic, and from the personal to the highly political. Some of the artists did their work under difficult political constraints.
“Video and film are distinctive mediums with different histories, and the works in this exhibition explicitly engage with the history of video,” said Amy Powell, KAM’s curator of modern and contemporary art. “While film requires a long delay between the time of filming and viewing, video has been appealing for its ability to play back images immediately, even simultaneously, while the camera is recording. Paik and other video artists also have experimented with video apparatuses – live playback, monitors and television among them – in order to pose larger questions about power dynamics and who controls the image, and about image-saturated and image-obsessed culture.”
“Global Groove 1973/2012” is organized by the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University and is curated by Broad director Michael Rush.
Also coming to Krannert Art Museum, and just in time for Halloween, will be a free showing of the silent Japanese vampire film “Sanguivorous” (“Kyuketsu”), by Naoki Yoshimoto, with live musical accompaniment by percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani and saxophonist Edward Wilkerson Jr., as part of the Sudden Sound Concert Series.
Showing at 7:30 p.m. on Oct. 30 in the Gelvin Noel Gallery, the 2011 film features avant-garde butoh dancer Ko Murobushi in a stylized portrait of a young woman suffering from mysterious physical ailments who is horrified to discover that she’s descended from generations of vampires. Nakatani and Wilkerson will add a cutting-edge blend of sound art and progressive jazz to complement the striking visual elements in the film.
Also showing Oct. 30, at 7 p.m. in the KAM Auditorium and free of charge, will be Peter Weir’s “Gallipoli,” moved up from its original date in November as part of the semester-long film series commemorating the 100th anniversary of World War I. It tells the story of two Australian sprinters forced to face the brutal realities of war when they are sent to fight in the Gallipoli campaign in Turkey.
(Story by Craig Chamberlain, Social Sciences Editor, University of Illinois News Bureau | Full Coverage)