Journal of Visual Culture

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Book Review: Video Art: a Guided Tour

Maria Walsh
Journal of Visual Culture 2006; 5; 422
DOI: 10.1177/1470412906066915
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journal of visual culture 5(3)

But if not dealers, who else might be credited with having defined modern
art? Academics? Collectors? Critics? The little band of star curators jetting to
and fro collecting works for public museums to stage the kind of attentiongrabbing, crowd-pleasing shows that nowadays are demanded of them? Yes,
perhaps any or all of these. Nevertheless it is hard to see any of them having
quite the same say as dealers. Look at how art fairs and biennales have
proliferated in the last 50 years. Look at how public museums in the period
have come to internalize the values and methods of the business world. It is
as if dealers have gradually persuaded everyone else in the field to dance to
their tune. Nor of course is it surprising that they have. After all, the art world
has long since served as a kind of Derridean supplement of the capitalist
system and it is clear that in the course of the last 50 years that system has
managed to throw off almost every restraint upon it that there ever was.
References
Becker, Howard S. (1982) Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press.
ODoherty, Brian (1999[1976]) Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of Gallery Space.
Berkeley: University of California Press.

Paul Usherwood
University of Northumbria at Newcastle, UK
[email: paul.usherwood@unn.ac.uk]

Catherine Elwes, Video Art: A Guided Tour, foreword by Shirin Neshat.

London: I.B. Tauris, 2005. 212 pp. ISBN 1850435464. DOI: 10.1177/
1470412906066915
Tour guides are generally trained to be enthusiastic about their subject and
not to let their prejudices and opinions get in the way of a clear dissemination of information. No one could accuse Catherine Elwess guided tour
of lacking enthusiasm, but in being coloured by her vested interests and
background in oppositional video, i.e. video as a countercultural force, the
information presented wears its biases on its sleeve. In one sense, there is
nothing wrong with this. In fact, the views of a practising video artist on the
history of video could lend themselves to a refreshing take on the subject.
However, Elwess personal predilections, which rail against prevailing
consumerist trends in contemporary video and against the success of artists
such as Nam June Paik and Sam Taylor-Wood, whose personas put them in
the art world spotlight, pepper what is otherwise written in the ostensibly
neutral tones of the tour guide. But even here there are problems.
Foregoing an outmoded chronological ordering of historical material, Elwes
opts for a thematic approach which has the merit of clearly sign-posting the
tours trajectory as she moves from chapters such as Disrupting the Content:
Feminism to Language: Its Deconstruction and the UK Scene. However,

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Books

within these demarcations there are not only inevitable overlaps, which are
forgivable, but also historical untidiness. In the aforementioned chapter on
Language, Elwes coins the rather clumsy term new narrativists to describe
artists who were determined to find politically acceptable ways of reintroducing content, humour and pleasure into independent work after the antinarrative period of structural film (pp. 845). While the term initially seems
to refer to UK practices in the 1980s, as the chapter proceeds and the
references to a variety of artists works accumulate, it transmigrates to
include work from the 1970s and 1990s, making the terms spurious claim to
categorization redundant. This was one of the many places where a reader
or, perhaps more fittingly, a browsing tourist might get lost in what is
ultimately a wealth of information, but delivered in such a way that
illuminating gems get bypassed.
The selection of artists and the amount of copy devoted to some but not
others are mainly determined again by Elwess vested interests. As Director
of the UK/Canadian Film & Video Exchange, Elwes is undoubtedly familiar
with Canadian video artists works, references to which are fluidly interspersed with examples from the UK and the US. This lack of contextualization makes for strange reading in an Anglo-American context where
Canadian Stan Douglas has international visibility whereas a name like Lisa
Steele signifies little. Coincidentally, I have had the pleasure of seeing Steeles
work at one of Elwess London DVD screenings of Canadian Film & Video
work and her investigation of aspects of gender performativity deserves more
specific consideration and contextualization than is given on this tour. Later
Elwes refers to how some Canadian video artists, the recombinants, are
refusing the established narrative traditions of Canadian video (p. 184). It
would have been nice to know more about these established traditions.
Airtime is given to artists work that Elwes has either seen or likes and here
the book is engaging, but this approach would have been better served by a
series of critical reviews rather than magpie-like thematic chapters. Stuart
Marshalls video experiments, which deployed strategies of anti-acting to
scrutinize the televisual and cinematic conventions that we take for granted,
are described with a verve that must have something to do with the fact that
Elwes was a participant in one of Marshalls videos. All of these criticisms
point to what could have been the strength of this book had it made no
bones about foregrounding Elwess point-of-view in terms of her lived
proximity to developments in video art, in theory as well as practice. This
emphasis combined with her access to an oral history of those times would
have made for a much more absorbing read. Elwess claim in the
introduction to tell the story of video art from the perspective of a witness is
unfortunately not upheld in the way she actually disseminates most of the
information, which smacks of the spurious objectivity she claims to be at
pains to avoid (p. 2). One of the best chapters is Video Art on Television
which is informed by conversations Elwes had with Rod Stoneman,
commissioning editor of Channel 4 in the 1980s, as well as animated by the
fact that Elwess work was not only supported by Channel 4 funding in the
1980s but that she was also a member of the Arts Council of England (ACE)

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423

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journal of visual culture 5(3)

panel convened to select ACE/Channel 4 co-funded commissions in the mid

1980s. Elwes is also particularly good on the technological developments of
video, at least in its early years, when debates raged about the immateriality
of the medium and/or whether it could be foregrounded as a signifier.
However, recent technological developments where video takes on the high
production values of cinema in the gallery installation are considered with
deep cynicism. As Elwes bemoans, even Bill Viola is polishing his act
(p. 188). Gillian Wearings Dancing in Peckham, 1995, is dismissed for its
lack of critical context, i.e. a social and political milieu in which the artist
bopping away in a shopping centre might mean something other than
solipsistic narcissism. Elwes has definitive views about the role of the video
artist in society. How can the twenty-first-century video artist combat both
the insidious narcissism of western culture and the undifferentiated information overload to which we are all subjected?, she asks (p. 191). Elwess
evangelical lineage stems from 1970s countercultural ideals where artists
could posit their practices in opposition to the mimetic lies conjured up by
broadcast television, for example, as representative of dominant cultural
interests (p. 24). However, Chrissie Iless (1996) statement on video practices
as to just how oppositional the avant-garde strategies of the sixties ever were
to the art world could be extended to refer to oppositional videos relation
to dominant forms of art and popular culture. Even Elwes hints as much in
her account of the influence of video artists work on broadcast television,
e.g. scratch video. While she emphasizes televisions appropriation of artists
deconstructive strategies, she also hints at the mutual influence of broadcast
television on video artists and the fact that television doesnt need artists in
order to deconstruct itself.
I wonder whom this tour might attract? Elwess facility to breeze through
various theoretical positions from feminist and identity politics to
poststructuralist decentring of the subject makes the tour too speedy for
undergraduates, the usual addressees of the guided tour. Statements such as
Wearing, Smith and Stewart belong to a postmodern era in which the old
oppositions are no longer felt to be sustainable in theory or in life (p. 186)
would seem to demand unpacking rather than acting as an addendum to
descriptive paragraphs on their work. For me, the interest of the book lies in
its symptomatic nature. It evidences a minor crisis of how to engage critically
with (video) art in an era in which the margins have moved centre stage
without effecting the sweeping social change dreamed of by 1960s and 1970s
counter culture. Where once Jacques Lacans concept of the mirror phase
could be used as a critical tool, it has now become a descriptive one (p. 89).
Theoretical concepts that can be and were aligned with traditions of video
practices are now the lingua franca of art critical writing in this supposedly
post-theoretical age. Elwess fluency with this lingua franca unwittingly
militates against her belief in arts subversive capacity. The impetus to explain
is always in danger of explaining away, whereas the witness is always in the
process of trying to understand.

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Books

Reference
Iles, Chrissie (1996) Luminous Structures, COIL 3: unpaginated.

Maria Walsh
Chelsea College of Art & Design, London, UK
[email: m.walsh@chelsea.arts.ac.uk]

Alyce Mahon, Surrealism and the Politics of Eros 19381968. London:

Thames & Hudson, 2005. 240 pp., 180 illus, 71 in colour. ISBN
0500238219 29.95 (hbk). DOI: 10.1177/1470412906066916
Today in the popular imagination, Surrealism is all too often fetishized and
stripped of politics (p. 215). This, the sentiment that closes Alyce Mahons
book, has been a consistent, albeit thin thread in recent scholarship on
Surrealism. David Bate (2004, 2005) and Vincent Gille (2005) have both
declared that it is important to understand the political positions of
Surrealism if we are to grasp the nature of the movement and of the works
that it gave rise to. This contribution from Mahon is a move towards establishing the political credentials of the Surrealists in the post war period. The
fact that the author focuses on the three decades after 1938 is also novel as
many accounts of Surrealism regard the movement as obsolete in this period.
The central thesis of the book is that the Surrealists recognized the tradition
in French cultural history of the represented body as being allegorical of the
state and chose to engage with political and moral issues through these
representations, particularly those of the female erotic body. Mahon explains
how the movement adopted a Freudian understanding of Eros for a
revolutionary end; Freuds interpretation of Eros was political in that it was
conscious of the social nature of sexuality and recognized societys need to
control Eros for the good of civilization. The Surrealist exploration of Eros
however harnessed an aesthetic indebted to the Marquis de Sade and
therefore celebrated excesses of desire and destruction in an attempt to
subvert traditional bourgeois taboos. The work of de Sade had always been
central to Surrealism and was read by Andr Breton as being allegorical
rather than literally obscene. Mahon suggests that after the trauma of World
War Two, a Sadean eroticism became especially pertinent as it provided an
ideal language of obscenity with which to address the violence of war and
questions of nationalism, power and morality.
The author argues that Surrealism experienced a philosophical renaissance
after 1945 in which new blood, cutting edge artistic practice and this radical
morality ensured that the group played a vital role in the culture of the
period. The book attempts to show how this develops and is manifest in the
exhibitions of 1938, 1942, 1947, 1959 and 1965. The first two chapters
provide visual and verbal descriptions of the shows in 1938 and 1942, and
although Lewis Kachur (2001) covered these in detail, there is a dearth of

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