A Talk On The Video Talk Show: A Panel Discussion
Please join in this special panel discussion co-organized by the Shigeko Kubota Video Art Foundation and Collaborative Cataloging Japan, with speakers Barbara London, Suzanne Delehanty, Rebecca Cleman, and Nina Horisaki-Christens. The discussion will revolve around the Video Art Talk Shows, a program series organized by Shigeko Kubota at the Anthology Film Archives in the mid-1970s. In the Community of Images exhibition, documentation of two events were digitized and will be presented.
We are thrilled to welcome two of the original guests—curators Barbara London and Suzanne Delehanty—who will be in conversation with Rebecca Cleman, Executive Director. and Nina Horisaki-Christens, scholar specializing in circulation of video art of the 1970s.
In 1974 Kubota founded the video program at Anthology Film Archives at the request of Jonas Mekas. From 1974 to 1982 she served as Anthology’s first Video Curator, where she played an instrumental role in showcasing emerging video art. In 1974, the same year Kubota took on this curatorial role, The Museum of Modern Art held the Open Circuits: An International Conference on the Future of Television conference. Organized in response to an increasing resistance to video art by the museum’s community, the conference sought to present an international perspective on the vibrant experimentation happening in this new medium; Kubota was enlisted to present on women’s contributions to the field. Alongside her curatorial work at Anthology, Kubota organized Video Talk Shows, a forum for discussion, starting in 1976. The series serves today as a window into video art’s development in New York from the mid-1970s through the early 1980s. Early in the series, the most urgent topic was the impact of the emergence of video on the film-dominated field of moving-image production, with participants musing on video’s future direction. The theme of the December 1977 Video Talk Show was “The Future of Video”—an examination of the state of video within museum institutions, which were represented by speakers on staff at MoMA, the Whitney Museum, and the University Art Museum at UC Berkeley. By the early 1980s, however, the series’ themes were primarily dedicated to the economics of producing video art and formal and aesthetic directions for video (themes included “Economics and Video Art: Problems and Opportunities” moderated by Jaime Davidovitch, July 28, 1981; “Video Editing and Video Animation Workshop,” April 17, 1983; “Video and Photography,” January 16, 1982). A total of three Video Talk Shows have been digitized by the Shigeko Kubota Video Art Foundation to date, from which we will present the opening remarks of two events (March 1977 and December 1977 events):
May 22, 1976, with David Ross and Hollis Frampton
March 23, 1977, with Suzanne Delehanty and Gerald O’Leary
December 18, 1977, with David Ross, Barbara London, John Hanhardt, and Jonathan Price
This program is co-organized by the Shigeko Kubota Video Art Foundation, and Collaborative Cataloging Japan.