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.
