One of video’s most interesting attributes is that it lives in the sphere of mass communication that shapes collective ideology. Journalism, advertising and drama rely on video to inform and entertain audiences, as well as construct narratives and myth. It is video’s presence in popular culture/public discourse that attracted video artists, who unapologetically appropriated clips as raw materials and recontextualized them in their art making. Martha Rosler’s work, Semiotics of the Kitchen, evokes cooking television programs that are usually hosted by housewife characters, but this piece presents a non-stereotypically grumpy and violent domestic female. I’m not sure about Rosler’s intention of shedding light on the absurdity of female stereotypes, but my interpretation is undoubtably achieved through the mediation of a shared memory of television culture. Rosler’s work also reminds me of Zhang Peili’s Water, Standard Version from the Cihai Dictionary, in which the artist also cunningly borrow the image of a well recognized and iconic anchor in television journalism, the “spokesperson” of new media in China, and ask her to seriously read an excerpt from the dictionary, which is nonsense to audiences. The artifice of appropriation is adding a layer to the preexisting meaning, and by doing so, distorts or reveals something in the original subject. I found this technique to be well aligned with video art’s early subversive and confrontational intention, both in western and eastern countries. Martha Rosler used video art to express feminist ideologies, a then marginalized agenda in western modern art, and Zhang Peili sought to “dethrone existing power structures and standards of taste.” (Yao, 2017)

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Other use of video art focuses more on the exploration of the medium’s expressive potential. As John Hanhardt elaborated in Film Image / Electronic image, many artists in the 1960s liberated moving image from the linear narrative and explored film’s diverse expressions. What struck me most was Stan Barkhage’s The Dante Quartet, whose sensuous and vibrant image refreshed my impression of early video art, recalling Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie-Woogie, but in a freer and more expressive ambience. Other works such as Mothlight interestingly reveals the materiality of film, reminding me of those photography works that consciously shot the corner of the studio. This consciousness of objecthood seems to wane in recent digital art whose materiality is negligible. Nam June Paik’s works also breaks the linear narrative through adding randomness and arbitrariness, making Magnet TV almost an autonomous, living creature. Although these works presents “a poetics of abstraction” (Hanhardt, 2015), I believe the it is the postmodernist approach mentioned in the first paragraph that should be celebrated. As technology evolves, we will see more video works that appeal to sensual   pleasure and adopt alternative narratives - although what is considered alternative may become traditional in a blink - and those works more and more speak for a capitalism, consumerism and elitism ideology (in the form of advertisement, mostly). It is the duality of video works in both art medium and mass communication that allows it to undertake the responsibility of challenging existing system with parodies and metaphors, to create the cynical, challenging, and ungraceful art. 

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Of course, the tension between modernism (how can we make beautiful and innovative videos with its time-lapse nature and visual tricks) and postmodernism(how can we use videos to better convey ideas) is probably not binary but a spectrum with ontology on the one end, and epistemology on the other. This consideration might inform curatorial decisions in terms of how audiences interact with these works. Zhang Peili’s Lowest Resolution can be a good example of how curatorial arrangement influences audiences’ viewing process, since the video is considered both an illusional plane with moving images and an object whose distance with audience is part of the viewing experience. The same could be said of Nam June Park’s Family of Robot, in which the materiality of the screen is emphasized. Conversely, Lu Yang’s digital avatar can exist anywhere, whether on the super thin screen on the gallery wall or in metaverse. I wonder, is gallery the best place to exhibit her work?