VIDEO DATA BANK – BUILDING STABILITY, MAKING ROOM FOR FLUX
Paper by Abina Manning/ Interim Director/ Video Data Bank The Video Data Bank was established in 1976 by two graduate students of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Lyn Blumenthal and Kate Horsfield. The two women were first hired by the school to restructure and re-catalog a small collection of work by students and faculty, a tape collection that had become known as the “Video Data Bank.” I think it is fair to say that they did not realize then that they were laying the foundations of an organization that would go on to house one of the most important historical archives of video art in the world. In 2006 Video Data Bank celebrated thirty years of video art distribution. The early beginnings of the art form had already been established when Lyn and Kate first borrowed a camera kit from the school’s video department. Early video pioneers were using the Sony Portapak to record street action, studio experiments, and their own bodies in performance. Armed with this equipment, Lyn and Kate began a series of interviews with artists, often seeking out female artists, who were underrepresented and overlooked by the art world. Aside from that, as young artists unsure about what to do with their lives, they were interested in the power of the artist: curious as to what inspired these artists to make work, the techniques they used, and the lives they led. These early interviews, with artists and cultural figures such as Agnes Martin, Sol Lewitt, Louise Bourgeois, Elizabeth Murray, Buckminster Fuller, and Lucy Lippard went on to become the foundation of one of the VDB’s three major collections, On Art and Artists. Originally intended as an educational resource for students and scholars, this collection of interviews has grown to number over 400 titles, and has become a significant art history resource. The VDB continues to record interviews with artists, most recently adding Miranda July, Raymond Pettibon and DJ Spooky to the collection. In 1980, in response to the demands of the growing media arts field, VDB began to additionally distribute the work of U.S. video artists. The acquisition of the famous Castelli-Sonnabend collection of early video art in 1985, including works by artists such as Vito Acconci, Lynda Benglis, Joan Jonas, and Bruce Nauman, provided the original impetus for the VDB to begin an ongoing preservation program, enhancing the image quality of the tapes and ensuring their continued availability. VDB continues to promote the growth of video-based art, acquiring the work of emerging and established contemporary artists who have gone on to achieve considerable prominence, including Sadie Benning, Mona Hatoum, Paul Chan, Jem Cohen, Coco Fusco and Walid Raad. The total holdings of the VDB now number more than 5,000 titles, some sixty per cent of which are in active distribution. The main criteria when acquiring titles to the collection is that they be primarily experimental in nature, whether that is addressed through formal, technical, theoretical, or aesthetic means, or in the subject matter. At this point, the VDB collection is particularly strong in certain areas: performance, feminism, alternative media, and identity politics.
Distribution: the Archive Lives
Video Data Bank distributes the collection nationally and internationally, to festivals, cinemas, microcinemas, museums, galleries, universities, broadcasters, media centers, and libraries, throughout the U.S., Europe, Asia, Australia, and beyond, generating sales and rentals of the work on various formats, and collecting royalties for artists. The VDB has established strong relationships with international festivals and curators, and new titles are often shown on the art fair and festival circuit. As a title gains attention from critics and programmers, educational institutions and librarians will often purchase them for their collection. We work closely with museums, seeking to inform curators in the particularities of the art form and the importance of including video art in their collections. This is something of an ongoing battle, as we find ourselves up against the very nature of video: its immateriality, its non-exclusivity, and its capacity to be infinitely duplicated. And as soon as we are able to convince one curator that these artists and works have an important place in their collection, they move on, leave the institution, and we have to start all over again! Due in part to these efforts, works from the Video Data Bank are in the collections of most major art museums, including the Centre Pompidou (Paris), Museum of Modern Art (New York), Tate Modern (London), Museo de Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid), Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Generali Foundation (Vienna), and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (Melbourne). Unlike many western European countries, there is little government subsidy in the U.S. for distribution activities, or for video artists themselves. Fortunately, through the efforts of VDB, many art schools, universities and libraries have established strong collections of video art for use by their faculty and students. U.S. distributors have through necessity developed strong marketing skills and have been able to generate enough revenue to stay buoyant during several lean periods in arts funding that have occurred since their inception. The VDB staff team is constantly looking to find ways to continue to engage our clients, and to offer them insight into the history of video art and the work of the artists we represent. Whether or not we like to admit it, we have developed a strong entrepreneurial spirit that has enabled us to produce several important projects that have provided increased insight into the art form for audiences, arts professionals and educators.
Exhibition and Programming: Content and Context
VDB provides audiences with curated programs and packages of work that are conceived either by staff or by experts from within the field. There are several reasons why we are committed to this type of programming: first, this is a method by which to provide context and an historical background to the works in question, often supported through the commissioning of written texts; second, it allows for collaboration and the representation of a broader point-of-view and artistic sensibility; third, it gives us the opportunity to introduce lesser known works alongside more familiar titles, thus broadening the video art cannon; and lastly, it allows us to offer a financial benefit to our clients, whose budgets are often stretched, as the packages usually give savings over purchasing the included titles singly. One such example is Surveying the First Decade: Video Art and Alternative Media in the United States, a comprehensive package on the history of experimental and independent media totaling 19 hours of full length and excerpted videos from the 1970s, and including 68 titles by 50-plus artists. Released in 1996 on nine VHS tapes, the package is now in the collections of many art schools, universities and libraries around the world, and has introduced a new generation to the diverse work of video artists. Curated by independent scholar Chris Hill, and produced by the Video Data Bank, the anthology is accompanied by a 200-page study book that includes essays, program notes, tape descriptions, artist biographies, and more. We are currently working on the production of a DVD version of Surveying the First Decade, which has involved going back to each artist to request an extension of the original contracts which did not include rights to distribute on digital formats; these were simply not envisaged when the project was first conceived. Other VDB programs examine the video work of performance artists (Endurance), collaborations between artists and scientists (Soft Science), and the work of Rockefeller Media Arts Fellows from the U.S. and Latin America (Frames of Reference: Reflections on Media) A recent initiative is the development of a number of artists’ compilations, published on DVD with an accompanying book. Working with the artist, we curate their works into a comprehensive program and package them alongside biographical texts and specially commissioned essays. As we seek to encourage more critical writing on video art, and in order to better contextualize the work, efforts are taken to include essays by younger writers. To date, we have published box sets featuring the work of Yvonne Rainer, Peggy Ahwesh, George Kuchar, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and Paul Chan; upcoming publications will highlight single channel work by artists Tran T. Kim-Trang, Jem Cohen, and Ximena Cuevas. Video Data Bank regularly participates in screening programs, festivals, art fairs and exhibitions both in the U.S. and internationally, presenting work from the collections to a wide range of audiences. A major initiative in the early 1980s was the Video Drive-In, a play on the drive-in movie houses which combined America’s love affair with both cars and Hollywood cinema. Video Data Bank produced a spectacular walk-in version that took place in Grant Park, Chicago in 1984. The purpose of the project was to make experimental and independent video available to a broad-based audience who might not be familiar with contemporary art events. The Video Drive-In was a huge success, playing for two nights in Chicago to more than 10,000 people before touring to New York’s Central Park, and then on to Portugal and Spain.
Archiving and preservation: Safeguarding the future of video art
At VDB we catalog and archive every tape that is acquired for the collection, following standard practices as supported by AMIA (the Association of Moving Image Archivists), and protocols established through ongoing discussions with fellow distribution organizations from the U.S. and abroad. Duplication sub-masters are dubbed from the artists’ original Betacam SP or Digital Betacam master tapes, which are then shelved as part of the archive. This has proven to be of real benefit to artists (and to the history of video art) especially when original copies become lost, or at times when the artist is seeking to preserve their videos and desires to work with the best possible quality copies, which might well be the copy we have archived. There is an ongoing issue of preservation. While a small number of individual artists are preserving their own work, many are unable to do so, and it would be very difficult for any one organization to preserve such an enormous archive without support. Many questions need to be asked: how are the resources to be found to undertake the mammoth project of ensuring that all artists and works in the collection are treated equally? How do we decide which works receive the most urgent attention? Which are saved in perpetuity to become part of video art’s historical canon, and which titles might be lost forever? While we seek to spread the message to anybody who will listen that videotapes degrade and that the video signal can be lost for eternity, it is an ongoing struggle to engage the funding institutions to the extent that is necessary in order to safeguard the entirety of any collection. So what do we do when a thirty year-old tape is in need of attention? We talk to artists and ask them for their best possible masters for us to make a duplicate from. We encourage them to preserve their videos, to keep back-up copies off-site, and to store them in optimum conditions. And when necessary, we work with the artist to restore their titles, consulting experts in the field to advise us on best remedies. Not only is this a problem for the VDB distribution archive, but there are hundreds (perhaps thousands) of video archives out there, be they records of sporting events, university visiting artist programs, performance programs, etc, etc., often at risk of being lost forever unless some urgent remedial action is taken. One such archive that recently came to the attention of the VDB is that of the Videofreex, an early video collective operating out of New York state, that produced a pioneering range of programming including artists’ tapes, performances, happenings, and behind-the-scenes coverage of national politics and alternate culture. In the 1970s, the Videofreex operated the first pirate TV station in the U.S., and interviewed major political figures such as the Black Panthers’ Fred Hampton and Yippie Abbie Hoffman. The Videofreex archive numbers some 1,700 tapes, mostly on the 1/2 inch open reel format. These were scattered in various attics and basements until VDB staff physically went and packed them up in a truck and bought them back to Chicago, cataloged and archived them, and shelved them in a clean and safe environment. Much work remains to be done on this unique collection of videos: we have been working with San Francisco based BAVC (the Bay Area Video Coalition), who have the necessary equipment to clean and restore the tapes, and we recently released 25 of the Videofreex titles into distribution: we hope to preserve a further 25 this year. We are producing interviews with former members of the collective, and we plan to produce a DVD compilation of the work; we will use the VDB percentage of royalty income from sales to preserve further titles. Recent screenings featuring Videofreex titles have proven there is an audience eager to see the work, many in their teens and twenties.
Future trends: threat or promise?
One thing that we can be certain of is that nothing stays the same. To quote Arthur Schopenhaur, “Change alone is eternal, perpetual, immortal.” For organizations like ours, keeping up with constant transformations in the field, be they of a technological or cultural nature, audience-led, or fluctuations in the art market, can be challenging. For instance, difficult as it is to imagine, even as recently as three or four years ago, most of our sales were on the VHS format! Dealing with the ever-increasing demand for DVDs, and the virtual death of VHS is not easy when you are a small not-for-profit with limited resources. Over the last four years, we have been working to digitize our collection of 5,000 titles. This mammoth task moves slowly, and despite our initial moves to prioritize works that also needed preservation, the pace of progress is in fact often dictated by client orders: if a library or museum orders a certain title on DVD, then that title moves up the digitization list. As well as single titles, we are striving to make all of our existing compilations and anthologies available on DVD. Independent of that, we are addressing the fact that many of the early On Art and Artists interview tapes need restoration or editing: when they were first recorded in the 1970s and 80s, there were seldom the funds to do more than make them available, unedited, for educational research purposes. Over the years, these interviews have taken on a special significance: artists who were just emerging at the time of the sitting have oftentimes become well-established in their fields, and the intimate conversations in informal settings can reveal the seeds of their oeuvre. In recent years, we have been working to edit all of the interviews, and have established a procedure that includes preserving the master tapes, and utilizing written transcripts in order to focus on the key points of each artist interview. We are seeing a new audience for these insightful documents: earlier this year the Museum of Modern Art, New York, programmed a wonderful retrospective series consisting of eleven screenings of artist interviews and single channel works from the Video Data Bank archive, Feedback: The Video Data Bank, Video Art, and Artist Interviews. During its thirty-one years of existence, Video Data Bank has experienced many shifts and changes. We are now seeing a growing demand for download and streaming delivery of our distribution collection, and the need for digital lossless video archiving. We are currently researching the best methodologies so that we can fulfill these demands, bearing in mind that our limited resources often mean that we need to exercise patience until the technology is less experimental and more established, and that equipment prices are at a level that we can buy into. In addition, we will be looking for support for these endeavors from funding bodies and supporters of the media arts. Other current “trends” worth mentioning as we look to build the future capacity of the organization are: second wave start-ups seeking access to our “content”; the bootlegging of artists’ titles, which often then show up on sites such as YouTube and UbuWeb; and the emergence of a younger generation of video artists producing limited editions for the gallery system. In the constantly shifting media arts environment, keeping abreast of developments in the field and responding to the challenges are all part of the territory. In the meantime, there is a growing demand for the work of video artists from universities, libraries, museums and galleries, collectors and events organizers, and a growing acknowledgement of the significance of the field. The Video Data Bank will continue to work to fulfill these demands, using its expertise to ensure the wellbeing of the archive, and its ongoing programs to ensure the historical legacy of the art form. Chicago, October 2007
