E-Flux Video Experiment Closes Up Shop

Type “da Vinci” into Google Image Search, and you get about 2,330,000 hits. “Michelangelo” yields about 650,000, and “Botticelli” about 70,000. But try “Nam June Paik”—one of the fathers of video art—and you find a measly 11,800 images, and only 50 video hits. Even with the emergence of potential resources such as YouTube, video art remains obscure for those not plugged in to the art world.

E-Flux Video Rental, a video art exhibition in the Carpenter Center’s Sert Gallery set to conclude on April 13, has tried to rectify that situation, with some measure of success.

“E-flux was an intervention that called attention to this medium that was supposed to be really cheap and easy to circulate,” says Carrie Lambert-Beatty, assistant professor of Visual and Environmental Studies and of History of Art and Architecture, who spearheaded the effort to bring the exhibit to Harvard. “Artists liked it in the ’70s because they weren’t considered precious objects.”

The project contains approximately 700 works of video art, all on VHS tapes and cataloged by title and artist name, available for free to watch in the gallery or to check out and watch at home.

Longtime collaborators Julieta Aranda and Anton Vidokle first put together the video rental project in 2004, as an artistic experiment in circulation models.

Vidokle owns the E-flux Corporation, an online information site that publicizes shows and periodicals about contemporary art. When they put together E-flux Video Rental, they were concerned less with the videos themselves than with the situation in which they were presented.

As Lambert-Beatty put it, “It’s not like Netflix.”

Their goal was to interact with the community around them—New York’s Chinatown—by presenting high art material in a format that most people were familiar with. Therefore, they modeled their “social sculpture” on the neighborhood video rental store, and the work of art was that people could walk in, check out a video for free, and watch it in the comfort of their own homes.

One of the artists’ few mandates is that the exhibit must stay for at least three months in each of its destination cities, and the host gallery must organize free public screenings. Several Harvard professors and students, as well as visitors from MIT and the New York-based magazine Bidoun have or will organize screenings.

Harvard’s screening series began on March 14, with an examination of Polish videos from the 1970s and 1990s curated by History of Art and Architecture professor Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, who participated in Poland’s underground art scene in the 1980s before moving to the United States. When Lajer-Burcharth was asked to curate her evening, she began by looking in the catalog, and was surprised to find so many Polish works.

“The show was obscure for an American audience,” Lajer-Burcharth says. “You look for 1970s experimental video art in Poland, and there you have it.”

The exhibit collects works solicited from local artists in each host city, which explains its somewhat quirky contents. As a result of the collection’s organic growth process, its contents do not reflect a “Who’s Who” of the video art world. Nam June Paik, for instance, is nowhere to be found.

But in spite of the esoteric subject matter, the gallery has seen a steady flow of visitors, and Lambert-Beatty is pleased with how it has been received.

When Aranda and Vidokle first created the video rental scheme, they had no idea that it would last as long or travel as widely as it has—since the exhibit debuted on Ludlow Street in New York, it has traveled all over the world, everywhere from Seoul to the Canary Islands.

As Lambert-Beatty prepared to bring the show to Harvard, she sought interns from Harvard and from Boston-area art schools, and wound up with nine regular interns and four subs who staff the gallery and choose videos to play throughout the day on the gallery monitor.

“The interns are the curators of that moment,” intern Alexandra M. Hays ’09 says. “We provide a service to the Sert Gallery, but in exchange, it’s a completely invaluable learning experience for us.”

Lambert-Beatty calls E-flux Video Rental a “funny anachronism” that takes video art back to its more carefree beginnings.

“It helps give the sense that there’s something about the way this medium used to work that we’re trying to reaccess,” Lambert-Beatty says.

E-flux attempts to lower the stakes of video art, and regain the excitement of discovering new artists and sharing them with the art community. All that Aranda and Vidokle wanted to do, they say, was to get art circulating.

As Aranda puts it, “This video art could also have been Renaissance paintings.”

—Staff writer Jillian J. Goodman can be reached at jjgoodm@fas.harvard.edu.