"Haven't you ever wanted to put your foot through your television?"

Today, after class, my internship, and a four-block walk in cold rain, I went to an appointment at a place called Electronic Arts Intermix. EAI is a non-profit organization that has a large collection of video art. You can make an appointment to watch whatever you want in a private viewing room for free. This was really great for me. Video art is something I've been interested in for while, but it's difficult to know what's going on without actually seeing it. Books can be bland or confusing, and the web tends to only show very small, short samples. And we all know that Grand Rapids galleries are not exactly steeped in contemporary media art. So I finally got to see some stuff today, which was long overdue (I once wrote a paper at Calvin about Swiss video artist Pippilotti Rist without having seen anything but still frames in books! That's just not right!). I only had two hours, so I couldn't see everything I wanted to. Some of my favorites that I did see were works by a collective called Ant Farm.

These guys did a great job a critiquing the media THROUGH the media. They staged an event where they crashed a modified Cadillac through a wall of burning TVs, where they invited the local news media. Before the stunt, the "Artist President", one of the members dressed as JFK, gave a speech in which he condemned the mass media, among other things.

It was also good to see Nam June Paik's legendary video "Global Groove."

It is really mesmerizing. It's great to see the way he really broke down the medium in order to explore it. There's a finality to it, like looking at a Jackson Pollock painting. It almost makes you say, "Wow, he just ripped the guts out of that medium and put them on display, I guess we'd all better move on to something else." While I don't think that Pollock ultimately ended painting and I don't think that Paik ended video art, they definitely changed the playing field in major ways.