La vídeo-«performance»

Abstract

The cinema of the Russian director Dziga Vertov seen as a cinema-eye, as an attempt to bring cinema and the new technological view near reality, and considered to be a counter-cinema, an anti-cinema, a cinema of information and expression, might be the most immediate precedent of video-art, precisely as an anti-artistic, anti-commercial, anti-aesthetic option, too. The video-art of the sixties is an anti-television video. Television has been compared to the cinema of the twenties. A video- art of happening, documentation, lucubration, poli tic agitation: a video-art containing much performance.

Real-time, on-live, action, those are three of the main principies which characterize both the twenties in the Soviet Union and the sixties in the United States. The avant-garde cinema and the video-art: Vertov and Paik. Nam June Paik's drive in a taxi in October 4th, 1965, performance recorded in video, was the beginning of a long series of experiences: his collaborations with Charlotte Moorman, for exemple, without forgetting that at that very moment Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, Allan Kaprow, Jim Dine, Yoko Ono, Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer,... were taking part in the creation of a complex and many-sided video-performance.

Later on, in full conceptual period, other people would devote themselves to it: Les Levine, Aldo Lambellini, Keith Sonnier, Joan Jonas, Vito Acconci, Dan Graham, Rebeca Horn, General Idea, Ant Farm,...