Lynda Benglis and Her Contemporaries

Analog video was not only an alternative to more expensive motion picture film for artists. It was also a viable new medium with specific attributes all its own. In On Screen, characteristics such as video snow and audio static become more pronounced and distorted with each subsequent version of the artist within the “TV” frame. As Lynda Benglis performs a sequence of pulling faces for the camera in triplicate, we become aware that the performance is based on memory, sometimes faulty—a kind of symbiotic conflation of artist and machine. (Lynda Benglis, 1972, 8 minutes)

An early video exploring the intimate and immediate proclivities of video, Joan Jonas shares her perception of self, her image, mark making, and her relationship to the camera. “Creating a series of inversions, she splits her image, splits the video screen, and splits her identification within the video space, playing with the spatial ambiguity of non-reversed images (video) and reversed images (mirrors). Though Jonas’ approach is formalist and reductive, her performance reveals an ironic theatricality.” —Electronic Arts Intermix. (Joan Jonas, 1972, 9 minutes)

Two disembodied male colleagues direct Lynda Benglis, who sits between a monitor and a camera lens loudly exclaiming her vision for the video we’re watching. Playing with the idea of originality and how the reproduction of images troubles fine art categories, Benglis affixes a double portrait of herself to the monitor screen and draws moustaches on both likenesses. Document ends with Benglis writing the video’s title and “copyright, Dec. 1972” directly on the monitor underneath the photograph, validating this video accomplishment as an original artwork. (Lynda Benglis, 1972, 6 minutes)

Shigeko Kubota was one of the first artists living in New York City with access to the Sony Portapak, a portable video camera released in 1967. A Japanese sculptor, video artist, and performance artist associated with the Fluxus movement, her practice was closely tied to her personal experience as a woman as well as to her commitment to the avant-garde. She sometimes collaborated with her husband, Nam June Paik, himself another video pioneer. My Father is an example of Kubota’s exploration of the video diary form, wherein she memorializes her dad and confronts her own grief and regret. (Shigeko Kubota, 1973, 16 minutes)

Perhaps more than with other examples of Lynda Benglis’s video art, Collage explores the effects of sound distortion and audio loss across generations of video tape. Tape hiss dominates a limited color palette where images of hands, oranges, and a profile of Benglis peeling an orange with her mouth revolve and seem to replicate as the sound grows less audible. (Lynda Benglis, 1973, 10 minutes)

Lynda Benglis was a visiting artist at CalArts in 1973 when she encouraged then-student Susan Mogul to explore video as a medium. Big Tip/Back Up/Shout Out is a direct monologue to the camera about the economic impossibilities of being an artist, especially as a woman. “Her extroversion is so extreme that her story leaps from the vacuum around her, over the camera and off the screen entirely.” —Artforum, from a review after the premiere of this video at Anthology Film Archives in 1976, as part of a program curated by Shigeko Kubota. (Susan Mogul, 1976, 10 minutes)