"The role of Photography"
Commissioned by the National Swedish Television year 1964. B/w.
Multimedia/electronic experiment. 30 minutes. And an outdoor exhibition on giant
bill board in the City of Stockhom plus indoors exhibitions at Lunds Konsthall
and Gavle Museeum among other Gallerys. Represented as an installation 80
dia/slides projected on canvas purchased by Pontus Hulten at Moderna
Museet Stockholm 1966.
1966
"TIME" - b/w, Commissioned by the National Swedish Television.
Electronic paintings televised in September 1966. 30 minutes. A video
synthesizer was temporarily built, in spite of the TV-technicians apprehension. (Same technical
system was later used to create MONUMENT one year later, 1967.) See letterfrom RUTT ELECTROPHYSICS, NY, USA dated March 12,
1974, below *. "In principle this process is similar to methods used
by Nam June Paik and others, some years later." Rutt&Etra . Nam June
Paik visited Elektronmusic Studion in Stockholm July/August 1966 , during
the Stockhom Festival; "Visions of the Present". Static pictures from TIME was
demonstrated for Paik at this point in time and on the national television
and other media at the same time. A rich documentation is available from
the main news media in Sweden about "TIME". Parts of "TIME" was planned to be
send via satellite to New York, but the American participants, E.A.T. - Billy
Kluver and &, pulled out. (See E.A.T.s and Billy Kluver's biased USA history
page from Aug. 1966) "TIME" is the very first 'videoart'-work televised
as an ultimate exhibition/installation statement, televised at that point in
'time' for the reason to produce an historical record as well as an evidence of
'original' visual free art, made with the electronic medium - manipulation of
the electronic signal - and 'exhibited/installed' through the televison,
televised. Other important factors for the creation of TIME was our awareness of
the fact that the "electron" was, at this Time, the smallest known particle and
that all traditional visual art, up to this Time was created with light -
material/colour reflecting the light - (lightpainting) and the description of
our new concept should be "Electronic
painting". Pontus Hulten and his associates launched the term "Machine"
art as an attempt to describe the Time movement. Pierre Restany was using the
term "Mec Art", later. The work was commenced early 1966. (Soundtrack by Don
Cherry, USA) Paintings on canvass and paper was made from the static material,
and in silk-screen prints, for a large numbers of Fine Arts Galleries and
Museums 1966, ironically in a 'limited edition', signed and numbered by the
artist; Ture Sjolander/Bror Wikstrom. (See National Museeum Stockholm, Sweden).
1967
"MONUMENT" - b/w. Electronic paintings televised in 5 European
Nations; France, Italy, Sweden, Germany and Switzerland, 1968. Monument
reached an total audience of more than 150million people. The
work surpassed the limits of "videoart" - a word first used in the beginning of
1970 - 73 - and was developed into an extended communication project, involving
other visual artists, by invitations, multimedia artwork including the creation
of tapestries, (Kerstin Olsson) silk/screen prints on canvass and paper - first
edition, by Ture Sjolander/Lars Weck, posters, and an LP/Record Music,
(Hansson&Karlsson) and some years later paintings on canvass, (Sven-Inge),
and a book among other things, exhibited in several international Fine Arts
Galleries.
Catalogue text for Ture Sjolander by Pierre
Restany, Paris Oct.31, 1968.
"SPACE IN THE
BRAIN" - 30 minutes. Televised 1969, in
direct connection with the moonlanding project by NASA. in Swedish Television.
Soundtrack by Hansson&Karlsson. First colour electronic original painting
where the electronic signal where manipulated. Described in media as an
Electronic Space Opera. Based on authentic material directly delivered from
NASA. Space in the Brain was a creation dealing with the ; "space out there" -
the space in our brains and the electronic space, (in television) Contemporary
to Clarke's 2001, except that the Picture it self was scrutinized and
the subject, and focused, in Space in the Brain. The Static material from the
electronic paintings was worked out into other medias and materials; tapestrys
made in France among other objects was made in large size, 3 x 2 meter, for
Albany Corporation USA and for IBM, Sweden, as in "TIME" and "MONUMENT", see
above.
And a serie of international bestseller posters
was produced, and world wide distributed, by Scan-Décor Upsala, Sweden.
"Man at the Moon". is the name of
the LP Record.
"HISTORIC
INNOVATION"
RUTT ELECTROPHYSICS, NY,
USA.
Letter from: RUTTELECTROPHYSICS, 21-29 West 4th Street, New Yourk,N.Y., 10012.
March 12, 1974.
Signed by Sherman Price.
To: International Section of Swedish
National Television, Stockholm, Sweden.
Extracts;
"I am writing a detailed magazine
article about the history of video animation.
From literature avaiable I gather that
a videofilm program, "MONUMENT", broadcast in Stockholm in January, 1968,
was the first distortion of video scan-line rasters achieved by applying tones
from wave form generators.
This is of such great importance -
historically - that I would like to obtain more detailed documentation of the
program and of the electronic circuitry employed to manipulate the video
images.
I understand from your New York office
that there may have been a brochure or booklet published about the program.
I will be happy to pay any
expense for publications, photcopies or other documents about the program and
its production -particulary with regard to the method of modulating the
deflection voltage in the flying-spot telecine used.
"Video synthesis" is becoming a
prominent technique in TV production here in the United States, and I think it
will be interesting to give credit to your broadcasting system and personal for
achieving this historic innovation."
Sherman Price
( A number of authentic
documents/letters from this communications is avaliable)
No "detailed article" or even
magazine was never reported or later presented after receiving the vital
information from the Swedish Broadcating Company, by
Rutt Electrophysics)
Letter from the Manager of
THE PINK FLOYD.
Stockholm, Septembre 11th
1967.
Dear Messrs Sjolander &
Weck,
Having seen your interesting
Stockholm
exhibition of portraits of the King of Sweden made with
advanced electronic techniques I have been struck by the connection between this
new type of image creating and the music-and-light art presented by The Pink
Floyd.
I think that your work could and should
be linked with the music of The Pink Floyd in a television production, and I
would like to suggest that we start arranging the practical details for such a
production immedialtely. With all his experiences from filming in the USA and
elsewhere I also feel that Mr. Lars Swanberg is the ideal man tp help us made
the film.
We create pictures. We form conceptions
of all the objects of our experience. When talking to each other our
conversation emerges in the form of descriptions. In that way we understand one
another.
Instantaneous communication in all
directions. Our world in television! The world in image and the image in the
world: at the same moment, in the consciousness and in the eyes of
millions.
The true multi-images is not substance
but process-interplay between people.
"Photography freed us from old
concepts", said the artist Matisse. For the first time it showed us the
object freed from emotion.
Likewise satellites showed us for the
first time the image of the earth from the outside. Art abandoned representation
for the transformational and constructional process of depiction, and Marcel
Duchamp shifted our attention to the image-observer relation.
That, too, was perhaps like viewing a
planet from the outside. Meta-art: observing art from the outside. That
awareness has been driven further. The function of an artist is more and more
becoming like that of a creative revisor, investigator and transformer of
communication and our awareness of them.
Multi-art was an attempt to widen the
circulation of artist's individual pictures. But a radical multi-art should not,
of course, stop the mass production of works of art: it should proceed towards
an artistic development of the mass-image.
MONUMENT is such a step. What has
compelled TURE SJOLANDER and LARS WECK is not so much a technical
curiosity as a need to develop a widened, pictorially communicative
awareness.
They can advance the effort further in
other directions. But here they have manipulated the electronic transformations
of the telecine and the identifications triggered in us by well-known faces, our
monuments. They are focal points. Every translation influences our perception.
In our vision the optical image is rectified by inversion. The electronic
translation represented by the television image contains numerous deformations,
which the technicians with their instruments and the viewers by adjusting their
sets usually collaborate in rendering unnoticeable.
MONUMENT makes these visible, uses them
as instruments, renders the television image itself visible in a new way. And
suddenly there is an image-generator, which - fully exploited - would be able to
fill galleries and supply entire pattern factories with fantastic visual
abstractions and ornaments.
Utterly beyond human
imagination.
SJOLANDER and WECK have made silkscreen
pictures from film frames. These stills are visual. But with television, screen
images move and effect us as mimics, gestures, convultions. With remarkable
pleasure we sense pulse and breathing in the electronic movement. The images
become irradiated reliefs and contours, ever changing as they are traced by the
electronic finger of the telecine.
With their production, MONUMENT,
SJOLANDER and WECK have demonstrated what has also been main-tained by
Marshall McLuhan: that the medium of television is tactile and
sculptural.
The Foundation for MONUMENT was
the fact that television, as no other medium, draws the viewers into an intimate
co-creativity. A maximum of identification - the Swedish King, The
Beatles, Chaplin, Picasso, Hitler etc, -
and a maximum of deformation.
A language that engages our total
instinct for abstraction and recognition.
Vital and new graphic communication. A
television Art.
Kristian Romare, Sweden
Quotes about Ture
Sjolander
Video Report
David Hall on Artists
Video at The Galleries, Washington Tyne and Wear, 18-30 October
1976.
Driving into
Washington New Town, just a few miles south of Newcastle, is
peculiarly out of context when compared to my other experiences of
old Geordieland. It is almost a Little Los Angeles. A network of de
luxe new highways interconnect scattered buildings over a vast area,
and everyone appears to travel by car (public transport seems to be
incidental rather than an absolute necessity at present). In the
town centre most social and commercial amenities are provided in one
giant enclosed precinct called The Galleries. This includes shops,
pubs, legal advisers, libraries, local government offices - the lot.
It also includes the town's Information Centre, part of which was
taken over by the local Biddick Farm Arts Centre to stage the
Artists' Video exhibition. The Biddick Centre is grant-aided by
Northern Arts, Sunderland Borough Council and the Arts Council of
GB, and Brian Hoey and Wendy Brown, its present Artists in
Residence, were the initiators of this show. Hoey, Brown and
Rosemary Herd, the Visual Arts officer of the Biddick Centre,
undoubtedly worked very hard -in a climate not particularly
well-attuned to art shows of any sort, let alone video- to produce
one of the few shows of this kind to appear anywhere in
Britain.
Even though the show
was very much an international affair (including tapes from the US,
Canada, Switzerland, Sweden and some of the best from Britain), the
national press typically ignored it, presumably on the grounds that
it was in such an 'obscure' locale. This is ironic at a time when
everyone is clamouring for greater attention to art activities in
the regions. Even William Feaver, who wrote the catalogue foreword
(blundering a little-but acceptable), made not the slightest whisper
of a mention of it in his Observer column. The local press,
forever looking for a cheap thrill and a quick sell, made no serious
attempt to discover what it was all about but instead jumped
headlong into a totally unfounded Customs' suspicion that they were
importing a blue movie from Sweden in the form of Ronald Nameth's
tape The Adventures of Energy (music by Terry Riley). The
local radio did a hurried two-minute interview with Hoey and Herd on
an early morning breakfast show, and local TV was nowhere to be
seen. Despite this dearth of media publicity audiences were quite
good, showing a lot of interest and asking a lot of
questions.
A fair proportion of
the tapes on show had that seductive, though mostly cosmetic, appeal
of electronic trickery produced with colourisers, complicated
special effects generators, chroma-key circuits, video-synthesisers
and the like. In fairness to those artists who are aware of the
dangers, I must say here that it is extremely difficult to offer a
generalised complaint about work such as this- only that much of it
truly reads as the now proverbial moving wallpaper. The intention so
often seems to be based purely on exploring kinetic image invention
for its own sake, where the prime objective appears to be to gain
access to more and more sophisticated means with less and less
concern for the implications of doing it. Certainly it rarely does
anything to extend the now well-established 'principles' peculiar to
institutionalised TV. To quote from an earlier article: 'Almost
without exception tapes in this genre present complex synthetic
imagery which, while not a normal experience on broadcast TV, tends
if anything to corroborate the mystique convention by the
(obsessive) development, deification and utilisation of increasingly
sophisticated hardware available to, and operable by, only a few.
Equally, this in turn produces the inevitable obscuration of any
immediately perceivable evidence of the creative
process.'[1]
Woody and Steina
Vasulka (US) were the two artists in the show perhaps most totally
absorbed in electronic wizardry, and since I am so diametrically
opposed to their work let it suffice to quote their catalogue entry
for one of their tapes as an illustration of my point: 'The
Matter’-a dot pattern with its raster is displayed on a scan
processor. Three basic waves, sine, triangles and square, generated
by a locked waveform generator, are applied to shape the display. A
slow ramp generator controls the size and image drift.'
Alternatively, Doron Abrahami (GB), avoiding this technical
jargonese, commits himself to the core of the matter (inadvertently
aligning his intentions with the dictum of the broadcasters) by
stating: 'I have tried to explore the possibilities provided by
sophisticated TV equipment, to create a kinetic entertaining
video-tape, set to music.' Pleasant, but highly soporific. However,
it would be quite out o place to hint at a general condemnation of
the show on the strength of my comments so far. Tapes by John
Freeman (Canada), Genevieve Calame (Switzerland), Brian Hoey (GB)
and to some degree Cliff Evans (GB) all involved synthetic
'abstraction', which proved with careful consideration that it is
possible to manifest ideas which extend beyond the eclectic
amorphous dream-state of outmoded psychedelia (Dewitt, Donebauer),
or glossy and hard-edged 'computed' animation (Vasulkas,
Emschwiller).
Moving on from the
synthesised work, I was very disappointed in Ira Schneider's (US)
tape More or Less Related Incidents in Recent History .
However hard I tried I could not see it as more than an ad hoc
compilation of off-air shots of Nixon, Vietnam, Cambodia, Rock stars
and, as he states, 'other brief clips from broadcast TV which typify
our age'. These were interspersed with colour portapak shots of a
New York boutique being decorated. As a rather slender insight into
the American 'media/political/rock/alternative culture' I suppose it
was OK. But for a video artist of Schneider's reputation to get off
on the 'junk footage and roving camera routine' was in my view a
slight on his proven capabilities.
Ture Sjölander and Bror Wikström (Sweden) showed three tapes:
Time, Monument and Space in the Brain . I was
particularly interested to see Time (1965-6) since this was one of
the first experimental tapes to be broadcast. And their subtly
structured nudging and twisting of familiar broadcast imagery (by
carefully distorting the video scan-line raster) induces a very
particular reappraisal of the Telly conventions. It is certainly an
historical landmark in the development of video art. Their statement
about broadcast TV is as applicable now as it was then: '...pictures
have not attained more than a purely illustrative function ...
because most of the pictures are created by Word-people. In fact,
roughly half the items on TV today could just as well be broadcast
on radio instead.'
John Hopkins and Sue
Hall (GB) presented a compilation entitled Albion Free State
which included one or two slightly bizarre experiments and some
important controversial documentation (which I have always suspected
they are better disposed towards than the former) like Squat Now
While the Stocks Last . Other British work included
Aidanvision's Figure in an Interior which was the record of
a staged situation in which an (unmistakable) actor was confronted
with a Logan's Run simulated-computer-style interrogation.
The initial concept suggested many of the inherent psychological and
philosophical issues which have emerged with the one-way systems of
present-day media presentation. In its realisation the resultant
tape employed too obviously the very tactics and traditional
techniques of those systems which I assume it sought to question.
Viewers remained passive and external to the performance-voyeuristic
rather than integral to the process.
However, that
particular tape aside, Aidanvision (situated in Carlisle) is headed
by Roy Thompson and is one of the rare independent studios in this
country which, to quote, 'concentrates on the experimental use of
the medium, in the context of commitment to art'. Artists in that
region and from beyond are apparently welcome to use its
facilities.
Tapes were also shown
by Tamara Krikorian, Steve Partridge, Stuart Marshall, Tony Sinden,
David Critchley, and myself. Some of these I have discussed before.
Krikorian showed an adaption for single screen of her multi-monitor
installation Breeze (1975). Partridge presented five works,
the most successful being Interlace (1975) which, by
systematically over-modulating, rolling, mixing, freezing, etc the
video image from an off-air discussion, insists on the viewing
experience having a 'televisual autonomy' bringing into question the
re-presentation convention as adopted by broadcasters.
This is very much an
extension of Sjölander and Wikström's concern, hinted at ten years
earlier in their tape Time . Stuart Marshall, though handling his work somewhat
differently, comes to similar conclusions when he says that his
tapes called Go Through the Motions , Just a Glimpse
and Arcanum all examine the interrelations of the
image and sound tracks and challenge the notion that any system of
representation can simply re-present'. Go Through the Motions
(1975) is probably the earliest of his tapes shown, yet for me
remains one of the strongest. Briefly, it shows a close-up of his
mouth throughout the duration apparently repeating the words 'Saying
one thing and meaning another' (in fact he is miming to a
pre-recorded sound loop). As his lips attempt to synchronise with
the sound they purposefully move almost imperceptibly in and out of
phase with it. The viewer is, almost hynotically, induced into at
once attempting to assimilate sound and vision according to his
preconditioned subconscious, yet simultaneously conscious of the
purposeful disparity, not only of sound and vision but of system and
actual context.
Notes
1 David Hall. 'British Video Art',
Studio International, May/June 1976.