Film Image/Electronic Image: The Construction of Abstraction, 1960-1990

Abstract

John Hanhardt interrogates the interrelation between video art and the history of abstraction during our century. His thesis is that a specific body of film and video works has explored the issue of abstraction as a means to define their respective media. This has been done, Hanhardt points out, "by choosing the basic temporality of the moving image and the material basis of the image itself as sites for an epistemological inquiry into the viewing experience, thus exploring the perceptual transaction between spectator and text." Whereas critics like Kuspit and Jameson have seen video as marking an epistemic break with modernism, Hanhardt shows some of the fundamental interconnections between video art and the history of avant-garde abstractionism, for example, as reflected in the work of experimental filmmakers like Stan Brakhage.