Before Projection: Video Sculpture 1974-1995

Before Projection: Video Sculpture 1974-1995 shines a spotlight on a body of work in the history of video art that has been largely overlooked since its inception. The exhibition explores the connections between our current moment and the point just before video art was transformed dramatically by the entry of large-scale cinematic installation into the gallery space. Before Projection, which debuted at the List Visual Arts Center at MIT last spring, presents a re-evaluation of monitor-based sculpture since the mid-1970s with a tightly focused survey of works that have rarely been seen in the last twenty years.

"Before Projection charts a history of video art that is coextensive with some of the most important developments in sculpture in the late twentieth century," said Mary Ceruti, Executive Director and Chief Curator of SculptureCenter. "By presenting canonized figures alongside artists who have rarely exhibited in the United States, this exhibition provides a new look at the historical context for artists working in sculpture, video, and installation and across media today. I am thrilled to bring this important history and many of its under-recognized exponents to audiences in New York City."

From video art's beginnings, artists engaged with the sculptural properties of the television set, as well as the possibilities afforded by juxtaposing multiple moving images. Artists assembled monitors in multiple configurations and video walls, and from the 1980s onward incorporated TV sets into elaborate environments and architectural settings. In concert with technological advances, video editing and effects also grew more sophisticated. These video works articulated a range of conceptual and thematic concerns related to the television medium, the still and moving image, seriality, figuration, landscape, and identity. The material heft of the cube monitor (before the advent of the flat-screen) anchored these works firmly in three-dimensional space. 

Before Projection focuses on the period after very early experimentation in video and before video art's full arrival—coinciding with the wide availability of video projection equipment—in galleries and museums alongside painting and sculpture. 

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website

Nam June Paik, Charlotte Moorman II, 1995, installation view, Before Projection: Video Sculpture 1974-1995, SculptureCenter, New York, 2018. Nine antique TV cabinets, two cellos, one 13-inch color TV, two 5-inch color TVs, eight 9-inch color TVs, and two- channel video. 92 x 68 x 24 inches (233.68 x 172.72 x 60.69 cm). The Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA; Hays Acquisition Fund. Photo: Kyle Knodell

Maria Vedder, PAL oder Never The Same Color, 1988, installation view, Before Projection: Video Sculpture 1974-1995, SculptureCenter, New York, 2018. Video installation with twenty-five monitors, sound. 7.6 x 13.7 x 1.2 feet (2.33 x 4.17 x 0.42 m). 5:32 minutes. Courtesy the artist Photo: Kyle Knodell

Whether or not you go, the exhibition catalog, Before Projection: Video Sculpture 1974 – 1995, showcases selections from a generation of artists who used monitors as sculptural objects before they were replaced by video projectors in the gallery and long before we carried screens around in our pockets. Before the days of smartphones, MacBooks, and Netflix, and even before AOL, Giga Pets, and Game Boys, there was a time when monitors were enormous, clunky, and utterly novel. Shedding light on a body of work in the history of media art that has been largely overlooked, Before Projection offers a focused and entertaining survey of artworks on the cusp of the digital age that have been rarely seen in the last twenty years. By recovering a number of noteworthy historical works the volume explores connections between our current moment and the point at which video art was transformed by the entry of large-scale, cinematic installations.

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