Robert C. MORGAN

In this essay, I would like to reverse the paradigm that the tactile body operates within a virtual space. The general consensus appears that we function more expediently in the twenty-first century by acculturating to the fact that although we are tactile beings we have been thrust into a virtual world of information that is altering our predatory rituals and therefore altering our dispositions. In previous decades, at the conclusion of the Modernism, it was announced by theologians that the death of God is upon us. It was further advocated by conceptual aestheticians that the art of painting is dead. Thirdly, it was proclaimed by poststructural philosophers that metaphysics was no longer a viable source of philosophical inquiry, an idea that had its origins in the work of Wittgenstein at the outset of the twentieth century. So God, painting, and metaphysics have been proclaimed as dead. Yet, at the same time, all three areas of knowledge have advanced to new and provocative levels of inquiry. Rather than diminishing the authenticity of God, painting, and metaphysics as having been terminated, would it not be more profitable to suggest that these areas of inquiry are in a state of temporary suspension and that they are in search of a re-generative form?

The term “video art” has been used for more than four decades to describe works in which electronic (or digital) images are seen either in contrast to material objects or images or, in some cases, as complementary to them. “Video art” describes many kinds of works, including those produced for single-channel viewing and those seen in the context of an installation. Other formats include video-sculpture or works intended to be viewed as DVD projections. The content of “video art” can be narrative, documentary, formal, ideological, conceptual, or – as I will argue here – neo-metaphysical.

Video art has changed over the years. It has changed not only because of the advances in information technology, but also – and more importantly – because of the shifting points of reference and cultural attitudes accompanying the rise of globalization. In view of these changes, I would like to discuss three formal attributes prevalent in advanced "video art" that have evolved over four decades: 1) the direct subject/object relationship between the viewer and the image as it references an external representation of reality; 2) the relation between narrative time and distance as a precondition for the temporality of experience; and 3) metaphysical video in which the kinesthetic momentum of the human body is made virtual within a tactile space. Rather than vacillating between idealism and entropy, the neo-metaphysical image offers another kind of contemplative order that is more about the tactility of the physical world as recreated in space/time. The focus of the paper will be devoted to a discussion of the third category, arguing the importance of reconsidering metaphysics as transformed through the video medium.

In contrast to static metaphysics as practiced by painters in the late nineteenth century, culminating in the pittura metafisica of Di Chirico in the early twentieth, where reality shifts from idealism to entropy, the neo-metaphysical image offers another kind of contemplative order, more connected to the fiction of the physical world as recreated in space/time. Some theorists will deny the validity of a revival of metaphysics as untenable in relation to more rigorous semiotic constructs. Even so, I would insist that it plays a significant – that is, signifying – role in how we think about video art today. In the past, metaphysics has been represented in static terms – as painting and sculpture. Today we are no longer limited by the Aristotelian or Confucian regard for stasis. We can easily venture into the realm of kinesis or of the kinesthetic momentum of the human body made virtual as it operates imaginatively within the practical world of tactile effects. The old metaphysics relied on static arrangements in space; but through the medium of digital video, time and temporality (both intrinsic to the medium) have altered the way we understand the metaphysical in art. Rather than being isolated in a Classical world, vacillating between idealism and entropy, the neo-metaphysical image offers another contemplative order where the tactile and virtual dimensions of reality converge as an overlay, a kind of erotic dialogical dematerialized encounter.

In reviewing work from the early 1970s, I found the video artists associated with the Film Forum Workshop in Lodz of particular interest as an antecedent to what I am calling today’s “neo-metaphysical video”. In the tapes of Józef Robakowski, Ryszard Wazko, Wojciech Bruszewski, Zbigniew Rybczyzski, Pawez Kwiek, and Kazimierz Bendkowski, I find a subliminal reversal of the image-sequence that transgresses the literalness normally seen in the video medium today. By this I mean that the normal progression of images no longer holds the same kind of expectation that we find, for example, in Hollywood films, or in standardized news programming on television. The Clapper by Wojciech Bruszewski (1971) would be a clear example. Here the appropriated footage of wartime Poland, juxtaposed with unidentified incidents of rioting and other political manifestations run in complete dissonance and unpredictability in relation to one another. Repetitions and reversals of image sequences include bombings, riots, beatings, and crowd dispersals, yet they are never seen as logical in their sequential relationship to one another. Their logic has been transgressed into the realm of a new metaphysics, a reaching for some kind of truth beyond the normative (conscious) structure of visible documents.

In each case, the videotapes by Bruszewski, Robakowski, and Waśko represent a kind of temporal suspension, a sequence of images that goes beyond the literal documentation of things observed in the everyday world, and takes us to another level of metaphysical viewing. We perceive these images not according to the logic of everyday reality, but according to what the medium offers through the artist’s manipulation as a form of extended sensory perception. This suggests a new kind of metaphysical time facilitated through the medium according to where reality and perception are constantly pulling against one another, testing the ground of Being in relation to Non-Being. The reference to Heidegger is apparent as the “discourse on thinking” extends beyond the realm of certainty into a condition of time that is perpetually altering our sensory response to matter. We are, in a sense, dependent on the virtual world in order to retrieve a course toward stability.

In recent years, I find it difficult to ignore the neo-metaphysical component in the works by other artists living in the distant corners of the globe, such as the late Korean video artist, Hyun-Ki Park (1942 – 2000), an exemplary neo-metaphysical artist with an inventive perception and an inventive means of applying that perception to the medium. His Mandala (1997) suggests a phenomenology of experience, not only through the act of seeing but through the interception of a new abstract semiotic structure in relation to how we see. The Mandala functions as a labyrinthine Buddhist icon where the subject enters from the periphery and gradually moves inward. There is a certain logic at the beginning, but as the “narrative” progresses, the logic begins to form paradoxes so that the actual center is never apparent; that is, the center does not exist in literal terms. The subject is compelled to go beyond the logic in order to get to the center; but, in fact, the center is always intuited. What the subject is doing is moving into him/herself. Hyun-Ki Park’s Mandala is essentially an outer guide to the inner self. This aspect of Hyun-Ki Park’s work is not about separating the retinal from the non-retinal, to borrow Duchamp’s terminology, as much as revealing their contiguity. It is about restoring a sense of tactile metamorphosis through the virtuality of perception in an increasingly simulated, mediated, and dematerialized world. At the same time, Park is equally in favor of testing the limits of the tactile world. It would appear that he wants the truth from the manner in which we experience perception; and in wanting this truth, he desires the illusion of things to reveal themselves for what they are.

Today one might refer to video art not according to its mediumistic parameters, as in the Modernist paradigm, but as an ideogrammatic structure in the sense that language contains the image. According to the early twentieth century scholar Ernst Fenollosa, who studied Chinese language extensively, the ideogram is an idea-picture. This being the case, video is an idea-picture in time, or, more accurately, a sequence of pictures that dematerialize in relation to one another. This kind of overlay and flow between images has an apparent irrationality, as in recent video projections I have seen by Diana Thater, but it is precisely this effect that ultimately gives the work coherence. There is a kind of phenomenology here -- a Gestalt field -- within a time/space fluidity, digitally manipulated, yet without a clearly defined context.

In this sense, neo-metaphysical video becomes a discourse on time. By acknowledging time as relative, the viewing subject and the viewed object are combined through a singular approach to cognition. Time changes what we see, and consequently our perceptions of time change as we acculturate to the media. One of the most startling and successful examples of this process is an early video by Bill Viola, Hatsu-Yume (1980), where the slowing-down of time in relation to both image and sound produces a shifting interior/exterior fluctuation of perception. By slowing down the speed of the camera, the components of the landscape and the rain-soaked nocturnal cityscape enter into a single continuous perception. To understand the flow of the images is to arbitrarily position oneself within the context of the flow, the shifting realities that Viola captures through the poetics of his imagery.

How to give the video language a new kind of resonance, a reverberation between the passage of images, within time itself? It is within the context of language that images achieve a purpose, a sense of flow, a fragmented contiguity. It is the place where images pass by our receptivity, our conscious bearings. There is the assumption that they will appear and disappear in a virtual context. But what if video images were so inscribed on our consciousness that they appeared to stand still, even for a fraction of a second, so as to question their veracity in relation to our act of perception? This is a method that both Viola’s Hatsu Yume and Gary Hill’s Learning Curve (1993) have employed consistently, and it is the kind of directed self-examination within the context of language that gives their works a tension that exerts evidence of metaphysical speculation.

To get into the temporality of experience through video or any form of electronic or digital image is a matter of rediscovering the poetics of image making by re-configuring the way we think about the medium. Video is less a technical tool that will produce technical results than a technology with the potential to enhance our virtual understanding. Virtual reality is no more infinite than tactile reality. Each possesses its own limitations. Only by understanding the finite structure and the interactive capabilities of these two realities as a paradoxical unity can the metaphysical experience emerge as a preeminent aspect of our viewing experience. The challenge for the future is less about how far we can extend the virtual on a technical level, but how we may achieve a balance and a greater degree of fluidity between the virtual and tactile realities of our everyday lives. This e-mergence is not directly a metaphysical problem, but a practical one. What I am calling neo-metaphysical video is the point where art intervenes as a form of tactile contemplation within the discourse of our quotidian practicality.

Neo-metaphysical video is not merely about the deployment of electronic and digital imagery in an institutional setting, but is founded on both imaginative and practical representations. Today it can function as a paradigm within a mediated environment where the sublimation of conflict and denial presides on the edge of the subconscious. Thus, the experience of neo-metaphysical video is not as neutral as it would seem. As in the case of any other form or medium given to artistic expression, our experience is contingent on how we conceptualize its inherent structure – how we discover the metaphysical language of the ideogram: the idea/picture that transports us from the practical realm to one of contemplation. But this is contingent not only on how we choose to see, but on our ability to read what we see as having a simultaneous affect upon consciousness.