CCJ x Electronic Arts Intermix: Works from the 1975 Video Art Exhibition

As part of our Community of Images exhibition this summer, we were fortunate enough to host an in-person screening, Magnetic Resonances: Japanese and American Artists in the 1975 ICA Video Art Exhibition, programmed by Nina Horisaki-Christens, Julian Ross and Ann Adachi-Tasch and presented by the curator of the original pioneering exhibition at the Philadelphia ICA, Suzanne Delehanty. This November we are thrilled to partner with Electronic Arts Intermix to present two more works from the exhibition.

The Video Art exhibition was an international survey of the then nascent video art medium that took place at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia in 1975. Through its four-city tour, this exhibition was the first time for US audiences to see an international survey of video, including the work of groundbreaking Japanese practitioners. However, it also became the basis for the US presentation at the 1975 Bienal de São Paulo and many of the American artists in the show became the key art historical references for the medium in the decades that followed.

Our November Members’ Viewing is a counterpoint to our earlier screening: we are thrilled to collaborate with EAI to include host two more foundational works of video by US artists that were included in the original exhibition, Richard Serra and James Byrne. Their themes and theorems resonate with those taken up by Japanese video artists of the time, many of whom also participated in the ICA exhibit, including Hakudō Kobayashi, Mako Idemitsu, Katsuhiro Yamaguchi, Nobuhiro Kawanaka, Seichi Fujii, Sakumi Hagiwara, Morihiro Wada, Kyoko Michishita, Toshio Matsumoto and Keigo Yamamoto.

Recently added to EAI’s distribution library, Richard Serra’s Television Delivers People (1973) is a spare critique of mass media’s circuits of consumption and the frenetic visualities of television. Structured as a series of second-person aphorisms scrolling as if on a teleprompter, the text’s blunt address to the viewer parodies the interpellatory tactics of television advertising while attempting to reveal rather than conceal the hypnotic workings of the apparatus on its subjects.

Serra’s visit to Japan to participate in the 1970 Tokyo Biennale came a short time before the rise of its video art scene around 1971, but reacting against mainstream television and the hegemony of mass media was central to the early days of video art on both sides of the Pacific. Fujiko Nakaya, a founding member of Video Hiroba and translator of Michael Shamberg’s Guerilla Television, called Japan an ‘information-polluted archipelago,’ and experiments with alternative broadcasting and CATV were essential to collectives of the ‘70s like Kō Nakajima’s Video Earth and Ichirō Tezuka’s Video Information Center. Works such as Image of Image - Seeing (1973) by Tatsuo Kawaguchi, Saburo Muraoka and Keiji Uematsu investigated the act of television watching and were also, like Serra’s work, broadcast on live TV. Similarly, as Haeyun Park writes, the work of Norio Imai was focused on the act of ‘rerouting’ and intervening in the closed circuits of mass media, as seen in his 1980 work, On Air.

In James Byrne’s Both (1974) we are one step removed from the television monitor, which is instead used as a frame for the human body. Moving in-sync with the image on the screen, Byrne shifts around and lifts up the monitor, appearing to scan the absent body as through a portable window. The gestural quality of this work resonates with that of Keigo Yamamoto, another artist included in the ICA exhibition, particularly his Hand No. 2 (1976) in which the artists balls and outstretches his fist while its image is fed into a video monitor. These two works were shown together in the program Vital Signals: Early Japanese Video Art, presented by Electronic Arts Intermix in 2009 and curated and produced by CCJ’s Ann Adachi-Tasch.

Founded in 1971, Electronic Arts Intermix is a nonprofit resource that fosters the creation, exhibition, distribution and preservation of media art. EAI's core program is the distribution and preservation of a major collection of over 5,000 new and historical video works by artists, supported by public programming, preservation, education, and publication initiatives. EAI works closely with educators, curators, programmers and collectors to facilitate exhibitions, acquisitions and educational uses of media artworks.

THE PROGRAM WILL BE AVAILABLE FOR VIEWING ON CCJ’S VIEWING PLATFORM.

Become a member for just $5 a month to access our monthly programs, and share your thoughts on our screenings with us via Twitter, Instagram or Letterboxd.

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Program

Richard Serra, Television Delivers People, 1973, 6:28 min, color, sound

James Byrne, Both, 1974, 3:38 min, b&w, sound

Richard Serra

Richard Serra is an American artist known for his large-scale sculptures made for site-specific landscape, urban, and architectural settings. Since his emergence in the mid-1960s, Serra has worked to radicalize and extend the very definition of sculpture, beginning with his early experiments with rubber, neon, and lead, to his celebrated large-scale steel works. Across media, Serra’s work offers a meditation on the relationship between the human body and its historical, embodied relationship to raw materials. From 1968 to 1979 Serra made a collection of films and videos in collaboration with several artists including Joan Jonas, Nancy Holt, and Robert Fiore. Although he began working with sculpture and film at the same time, Serra recognized the different material capacities of each and did not extend sculptural problems into his films and videos.

Serra’s first films, Hand Catching Lead (1968), Hands Scraping (1968) and Hand Tied (1968) involve a series of actions: a hand tries to catch falling lead; pairs of hands move lead shavings; and bound hands untie themselves. A later film, Railroad Turnbridge (1976), frames the surrounding landscape of the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon, as the bridge turns. Steelmill/Stahlwerk (1979), made in collaboration with the art historian Clara Weyergraf, is divided into two parts. The first part is made up of interviews of German steel-factory workers about their work. The second part captures the forging of Serra's sculpture Berlin Block (for Charlie Chaplin) (1977).

Serra began showing his work with Leo Castelli in 1968, and his first solo exhibition in New York was held at the Leo Castelli Warehouse the following year. His first solo museum exhibition was held at the Pasadena Art Museum, California, in 1970. Two retrospectives of his sculpture and drawings have been held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York: Richard Serra/Sculpture (1986) and Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years (2007). A major traveling retrospective dedicated to Serra’s drawings was presented at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Menil Collection, Houston, from 2011 to 2012.

Survey exhibitions and screenings of his films were held at the Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland in 2017; Anthology Film Archives, New York, October 17–23, 2019; and Harvard Film Archive, January 27 – February 9, 2020. In 2019 Serra donated his entire film and video works to The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Richard Serra was born in 1938 in San Francisco. He lived and worked in New York City, Cape Breton, and later the North Fork of Long Island, where he died in 2024.

James Byrne

In the 1970s, James Byrne developed a distinctive, body-based method of image making, in which he used the hand-held portable camera as a gestural extension of the body in a physical exchange with his subject. Byrne explored this aesthetic primarily in innovative video dance collaborations that were choreographed and performed specifically for video. Intense physicality, performance, and the human figure are central to these works.

Byrne's early, performance-based tapes investigated the formal and conceptual parameters of the video medium, a phenomenological inquiry into the artist/viewer relationship, perception, and the artist's identity. One Way (1979) is a droll exercise that explores physical gesture and point-of-view in relation to the portable video camera.

Byrne later produced multi-monitor installations that refer both to urban architecture and the sensuality of natural landscape, elements that recur throughout his work. He then focused on an inventive fusion of dance, performance art and video, in which the physicality of his gestural camera work (camera and dancer often move as one) is used to "sculpt" the dance within video space.

Byrne was born in 1950. He received his M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and studied in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. The recipient of fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bush Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts, among other organizations, Byrne is an associate professor of media arts at Jersey City State College, and is the director of Byrne Studios. His work has been exhibited at festivals and institutions including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh; P.S. 1, New York; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Dance Theater Workshop, New York; Montreal International Festival du Nouveau Cinema et de la Video; Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Byrne lives in St. Paul, MN and teaches filmmaking and screenwriting at Metropolitan State (MN). His recent work "Mist On the River" premiered in 2016 at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival. His work was also part of the exhibit "Scale Drawing" at Walker Art Center in 2017.

Suzanne Delehanty

Suzanne Delehanty is the curator of the 1975 Video Art exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, where she was its Director from 1971 through 1978. Currently, her consultant firm, SUZANNE DELEHANTY LLC provides provides strategic planning and art advisory services for initiatives that bring art, artists, and communities together. Founded in 2006, the firm serves an international roster of clients, including museums, foundations, government agencies, and other nonprofit organizations as well artists’ estates, individuals, and corporations.

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Related

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Community of Images: Japanese Moving Image Artists in the US, 1960s - 1970s

Community of Images: Japanese Moving Image Artists in the US, 1960s-1970s is an exhibition of experimental moving images created by Japanese artists in the U.S. during the 1960s and 70s, an area that has fallen in the fissure between American and Japanese archival priorities. Following JASGP's Re:imagining Recovery Project and its mission to support and engage diverse audiences through Japanese arts and culture in collaboration with local organizations, this project aims to discover, preserve, and present film and video works and performance footage by Japanese filmmakers and artists to the wider public.

This exhibition ran at Philadelphia Art Alliance from June 14 - August 9, 2024.

The project and its online programming is generously supported by the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage & the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Toshiba International Foundation and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts’ Preserving Diverse Cultures grant. 

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