Videotexts - Softcover

Gale, Peggy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0889202524 ISBN 13: 9780889202528

Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1995

Synopsis

When the video camera first appeared on the market, artists hailed the newly available equipment as the new pencil, the better canvas, the best eye of all. The medium was exciting and revolutionary: low-cost and low-tech; “everybody” was curious as galleries and museums hastened to program new video works in festivals and exhibitions. However, little aesthetic or critical material was available on either artists or issues: it was generally assumed that artists’ video was just some kind of wannabe television ― its concerns and achievements, and its relationship to the visual arts generally were too often undervalued. But video artists continued to explore and advance in the medium and works produced in the seventies are strikingly different from those of today.

Videotexts is an invaluable collection of essays ― a comprehensive guide to Canadian video artists and their works. The essays focus on important individual tapes and artists and on the development of narrative forms: to construct meaning and confirm memory. Revised and updated, they offer a “present-tense” assessment of key works from the last twenty-five years, and of artists’ ideas and processes as they were unfolding. Everyone interested in video and contemporary art and culture will want to read them.

About this title

About the Author:

Art historian Peggy Gale was one of the first people to write about artists’ video in Canada. She has held positions at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada Council, Art Metropole and elsewhere. Since 1974 she has also been an active independent curator and writer specializing in artists’ video and media/ time-based works. She has published extensively in museum catalogues, anthologies and magazines in Canada and abroad. In 2006 Peggy Gale was among the winners of the Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts.

Review:

"Gale should be commended as one of the first critics to write about video art in Canada.... Videotexts provides an excellent introduction and raises questions which could serve as the basis for further research."

About this edition

• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0889202524
• ISBN 13: 9780889202528
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 108