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Art and Film and Video and Synapse

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This was first published (May 18 2024) as a note to Tom Sherman, replying to a posting he made about Syracuse University’s VPA and Newhouse Schools.

Tom,

Well-thought, and well-written. This is a huge subject, one that has a long and important history at Syracuse, and one that is still developing at the speed of light.

I have a lot to relate about the subjects you bring up here. And even more in the doing, every stroke of the way. I will respectfully keep it as brief as I can, as your text already invokes so much. I’ll provide some teleological history, about the early cleaving between film and video at Syracuse University. It’s personal, as I’m describing what was happening while I was part of it.

I entered Syracuse in 1970, in liberal arts. Within a month I switched to VPA, as I couldn’t stand the huge lecture class format. I entered VPA with an Independent Study major… I was the only person I knew with that designation. I took a film class from Newhouse, as Newhouse had the only film equipment. In the class we used 16mm film and equipment. My learning was primarily through hitchhiking down to Manhattan, where Anthology Film Archives had just opened, and my high-school friend Robert Polidori worked, and would show me hours of films during my visits… augmented by the formal shows at night.

In a couple of years VPA hired Owen Shapiro and announced its own film major. We continued to use Newhouse’s 16mm equipment (and B&W processing). Owen showed us hours of Godard films, which we’d never see through Newhouse. While in New York I’d visit the Kitchen and hear early Steve Reich and Phil Glass performances, my Newhouse film teacher contemptuously referred to them as the “maniacal edge” of music. No one at Newhouse would know who Michael Snow or Paul Sharrits were.

Meanwhile, a handful of brilliant, late-1960s Syracuse alumni (Lance Wisniewski, Bob Burns, Carl Geiger, Gail Waldron) put together a project proposal to simultaneously offer the University a plan to build and manage a local cable system that would offer students, staff, and faculty their own access to video production and presentation; and an offer to the New York State Council of the Arts to provide access to video production facilities and services to artists in New York state who want to get involved in the new video medium. Note that up to that moment, video production required access to television studios and their procedures, which was prohibitively expensive, not open to outsiders, nor accommodating to experimentation with the equipment.

Thus Synapse Video was born within Syracuse University. Newhouse provided access to 2” tape facilities for broadcast-quality production, and the cable head end provided access to ½” portable and 1” studio-based equipment, along with both portable and studio cameras. Here’s a link to a post by Synapse editor Paul Daugherty about the Newhouse side: https://avideolife.wordpress.com/…/editing-area-used…/

and a link to an early announcement of the Synapse visiting artist program: https://www.vasulka.org/…/MediaPoli…/VisitingArtProg.pdf

At the beginning of the program, there were three of us who were both SU VPA students and part of Synapse: myself, Pam Shaw, and Bill Viola. For my part in this, I designed and taught two classes offered through VPA: a visiting artist class that trained and provided crew for the visiting artists, and a class in “Video Aesthetics” which was a hands-on class where we all experimented with the equipment and tried to understand what we were doing in relation to the history of art.

Film majors had very little to do with Synapse, which was purely video-based. I was really the only one with a foot in both. In 1972 VPA created a Film Major, and I switched from an Independent Study major to a Film major. However, my daily practice was in both: video art (or, as you say, art video) at Synapse, and film art through my major. Note that after graduating with the first VPA Film Majors in 1974, Synapse paid my tuition for the next two years, so I continued to teach the two video courses as I was then one of the first group of students who earned a Film graduate degree through VPA. Again: a foot in both worlds, but both were in VPA.

The thing is, this all happened so fast, and the media were developing so quickly, that the University gambled that it was doing the right thing. We all did the same thing—it’s easy to see that people involved at the time in film or video art were not looking at their long-term financial prospects. There wasn’t a business there to be learned. There were just lives to be invented.

One more historical note: all of us at that time were informed by the ever-present art education department, which insisted that art education focus on the first six years of life… before the child learned to read. And the title of that department was Synaesthetic Education. VPA put an end to that a few years after I left.

aesthetics, Frances Yates, Manifesto, Richard Foreman

Not What, But How

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Back in the 1970s I made my first trips to New York city as an art student, and one of the artists who attracted me most, and who has remained a major influence for me, was Richard Foreman. I bought a copy of his book Richard Foreman, Plays and Manifestos (NYU Press, 1976), and couldn’t help but notice that there on the cover of the book was an illustration of a theatre by Robert Fludd, one that I first saw in The Art of Memory by Frances Yates.

Now, the image on the cover would have been enough to sell me on the book, but Foreman’s texts were so focused on exactly where I wanted to focus, on that moment where one notices. It isn’t a scientific type of focus or noticing. It’s a noticing where one suddenly finds oneself aware that one had been carrying around a conceptual frame that was not synched with what one was confronting, and then one notices that frame shift so that one is suddenly resonant with that confrontation. What happens in this type of noticing, is that one is not so involved with WHAT something means, as one is with HOW something means.

After a lifetime of focusing on how things mean, it is a response that is always ready to erupt. If one continually had that as an initial reaction we would not survive–we’d get hit by cars while staring at the walk/don’t walk signs, instead of just waiting for the proper sign to blink on. But it is a response that occurs enough with me that it is my main source of humor, and I’m sure I annoy many people with my deliberate misinterpretations of statements. It’s not that I think I’m clever, my mind is just constantly looking for the pun, the parallel meaning, the unintended wordplay, and it goes there first. I live in an alternative universe.

Here is a note in one of Foreman’s “manifestos” from the book: “Write by thinking against the material. Since you don’t want to convince self of your vision, etc.–but to let it be informed by the disintegrating non-moment”.

For me his plays throw everything at each other so that all of us–and I believe Foreman himself as a viewer–is actively engaged in trying to find anything that makes sense. With no traditional story or narrative, objects are present as objects, and only on occasion, seemingly unconsciously, they collide with the right object and a symbol radiates from the crash. And as the symbol emerges from our suddenly noticing, from an otherwise noisy but meaningless stage, we are able to better notice elemental aspects of our “making sense”.

In October, Foreman premiered a new film “Once Every Day” at the New York Film Festival. He was interviewed by the critic Amy Taubin. Here it is:
http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff2012/blog/nyff-qa-once-every-day

Enjoy.

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aesthetics, art, Jack Burnham

Last Mistake -> Next Content

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Narratives are interesting because as we go through life, we’re always looking for navigational strategies… how do we move from what we’re doing to what to do next?

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Narratives, and (with language) syntax, and (with painting) edges, and (with music) modal and rhythmic modulations–these are all models for how we can change our lives. They let us sample the feel of the change before we try them.
And so we look at the form and map it, and the map becomes the cognitive model–as well as the model in sensory memory–and we use the hints from those internalized maps to navigate the now time.
Of course, acting in the world isn’t entirely a matter of conscious choice. Even navigating using such models isn’t necessarily conscious, any more than a syntactical map is conscious, or our reaction to a sensory stimulus.
Art working provides an opportunity to consciously examine media for models of action that we can use outside of those media.
In his 1970’s book Beyond Modern Sculpture, Jack Burnham wrote about a goal of art being to make a model of what it is to be human. He noted that there had been a change in how that was handled, moving from an image/icon of a human, to a model that acted in the manner of a human. There was a shift, for a while at least, from picture of to art-as-process. This certainly extended to areas of robotics, and to algorithms.
I’d like to postulate an art-making  model derived in part from Burnham’s text. It’s this:
The artist models what it is to be human. The artist, through experiencing the piece and its reception in the world, finds a part of the model that didn’t work. That mistake becomes the subject of the next piece.