Skip to main content

Viewpoints on Video: Open Channels Five Year Survey

Long Beach Museum of Art

1990 00:56:00 United StatesEnglishColorStereo4:3Video
Tags:
Art Criticism, Artist Portraits, Interview

Description

 

This tape surveys the works supported during the first five years of Open Channels, a grant program sponsored by Long Beach Museum of Art that gives artists production facilities at local cable stations, critical feedback from staff, and exhibition at the museum and on cable. Although essentially a promotional video, this tape offers insight into the important but rarely portrayed issues of artist funding and residencies. This retrospective offers excerpts from and context for 24 tapes, including Open Channels I: Mary Daval’s 5 Dances for Small Spaces, Scott Rankin’s Fugue, Aron Ranen and Kevin Bender’s Television Believers, Sherry Millner’s Scenes from the Micro War, and Ezra Litwaks’ Stranded; Open Channels II: David Stout’s Prisoner of Light, Ed Jones’s Bemused in Babylon, Jeanne Finley’s Common Mistakes, John Arvanites’s Blues for Piggy, and Tony Labat’s Mayami: Between Cut and Action; Open Channels III: David Bunn’s The Torrid Zone, Jim Shaw’s Billy Goes to a Party #4, Paul McCarthy’s Family Tyranny, Donna Matorin’s Quickening, and Paul Kos’s Tower of Babel; Open Channels IV: Lynn Kirby and Erika Suderburg’s Memory Inversion (Los Angeles), Bruce and Norman Yonemoto with Jeffrey Vallance’s Blinky, Jayce Salloum’s Once You’ve Shot the Gun You Can’t Stop the Bullet, Victoria Bearden’s There Is No History in Heaven, and Hilja Keading’s Let Me (Entertain You); and Open Channels V: Lawrence Andrews’s Strategies for the Development of/Redesigning the Purpose Served, Art in the Age of … aka, The Making of the Towering Inferno, Nancy Buchanan’s Mouth(Piece), Fu-Ding Cheng’s The Winged Cage, and Paul Tassie’s Remember Flavor.

From the mid-1970s to the 1990s, the Long Beach Museum of Art provided invaluable support to the growing video art field by exhibiting, co-producing and collecting video art. The museum’s official video program began in 1974 under the direction of David Ross, who later became the director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.   The Long Beach Museum of Art was among the first to focus on video as an artistic medium, spurring similar efforts throughout the United States.  Beginning in 1974, the museum began collecting and exhibiting video art, developing one of the most creative and ambitious video exhibition programs in the world.  The museum actively encouraged the development of video art by offering editing facilities to artists, and pursued innovative approaches to the display of video art, including several experiments with broadcast television. VDB’s holdings represent a few of the titles that were produced in this period.

“In 1976 Mr. Ross, working with a Rockefeller Foundation grant, opened a postproduction art video studio — the first in Southern California — and invited artists to work with its cameras, equipment and editors, initially free of charge. Over the years, and long after Mr. Ross’s departure in 1978, a striking roster of videos was produced there, including Ms. Rosler’s “Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained” (1977), a critique of the objectification of women; Jim Shaw’s psychedelic fantasy “Billy Goes to a Party #4” (1987); "Family Tyranny” and “Cultural Soup,” hilariously disturbing familial dramas enacted in 1987 by Paul McCarthy with Mike Kelley; and the Kipper Kids video. A copy of almost everything that was ever shown, produced or edited at Long Beach went into its archives. Along the way it also absorbed the video holdings of the storied Woman’s Building, a feminist arts center in Los Angeles that closed in 1991.”
- Carol Kino, "The Getty Gets Serious about Video" New York Times (December 9, 2007)

In 2005 the Getty Research Institute acquired the video collection of the Long Beach Museum of Art.