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THE NEW YORK TIMES

Videotape Is Replacing Paint and Canvas for Artists

Continued from Page 33

involved with his subjects. In "One-Eyed Bum", for instance, he persuades a Bowery bum to talk revealingly about his life and his street philosophy.

Not all tapemakers work in broadcast video. Some, for whom the medium is still best suited to gallery viewing, prefer installations in which multiple images are seen simultaneously on a number of monitors placed around the gallery. One of these is Beryl Korot's "Dachau," a four-screen study of the German concentration camp in which the camera takes a deadpanned "tourist" point of view.

Miss Korot, who with another tapemaker, Ira Schneider, founded and edits the video magazine Radical Software, does not see her work as geared to a mass "broadcast" audience. "I want a more intimate gallery situation," she says.

Some artists work well in both gallery and broadcast modes, however. An elaborate recent environment by Mr. Paik had as one feature a closed-circuit color filming of live fish suspended in tanks from the ceiling, then projected across the ceiling as fleeting images. Mr. Campus's most recent work at the Bykert Gallery comprised live video installations that, activated by the viewer's presence, projected psychologically unsetting images of him on the walls.

The short history of video—the term as used by tapemakers differentiates their work from commercial TV — goes back only to about 1968 and the development of half-inch tape, which allowed for cheaper and more portable equipment than the two-inch and one-inch broadcast tape in studio use. The "portapak" device for using the tape, comprising a hand-held camera and a battery-operated videotape recorder, gave artists instant mobility.

At about the same time, some experimenters were fooling around with the commercial TV imagery, notably Mr. Paik, a Korean-born musician known as "the father of video." With such devices as electromagnets and signal interceptors, he broke up images on the screen, melting performers into iridescent puddles, and exploding deodorant ads into geometric flowers.

Mr. Paik showed some of his "adjusted" TV sets at the Howard Wise Gallery in 1969, along with such other videomakers as Mr. Gillette and Mr. Schneider, co-creators of a multi-image, delayed-feedback piece called "Wipe Cycle." The Wise show is generally credited as the first gallery presentation of video art (the first museum show was staged by Russell Connor, now director of the Cable Arts Foundation, in 1970 at Brandeis University's Rose Art Museum).

Later, with the Japanese engineer Shuya Abe, Mr. Paik developed the Paik/Abe Synthesizer, a complex device that allows for highly sophisticated manipulation of TV signals.

Meanwhile, the future of video art does not seem unpromising. A crop of young videomakers is already emerging from art schools. Funding agencies, such as the Rockefeller Foundation (which gave money to establish, and has since given large grants to the Television Laboratory at Channel 13), the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment on the Arts are now providing money for "alternate" video, including work by artists.

Centers for video experiment and theory, such as the Channel 13 Laboratory, the WGBH New Television Workshop in Boston and the National Center for Experimental Television in San Francisco, are providing artists with technically sophisticated facilities in which to work. And the new Long Beach (Calif.) Museum of Art, now under construction, will incorporate an experimental television station, directed by David Ross, a young video theorist and curator.

A small distribution system is also burgeoning, geared to getting tapes out to school, libraries and even individual collectors. In Manhattan, two distributors, Castelli-Sonnabend Tapes and Films, Inc., coordinated by Robert Stefanotty in collaboration with Anna Canepa, sell and rent from a large stock of artists's tapes. A third, Electronic Arts Intermix, Inc., run by Howard Wise, rents tapes on a nonprofit basis.