The Relationship between New American Cinema with the American and European Video Art Movement: A Flow of Ideas

Abstract

The Relationship between New American Cinema with the American and European Video Art Movement:A Flow of Ideas Alessandro Amaducci (bio) In 1962 experimental filmmaker Jonas Mekas established the New American Cinema Group and The Filmmakers' Cooperative in New York, while in 1963 two significant events took place from an artistic point of view, but above all geographically. In one event, Nam June Paik, a South Korean musician who was experimenting with electronic music and the first electronic image production systems in the studios of the WDR radio broadcaster in Cologne (where he met composers Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage, the artist Joseph Beuys, and the architect George Maciunas, who had recently founded the Neo-Dadaist art movement Fluxus), inaugurated the exhibition Exposition of Music—Electronic Television (DE) at the Parnass Gallery, Wuppertal (Germany). Two, the German painter and sculptor Wolf Vostell, co-founder of the Fluxus movement, inaugurated the 6 TV Dé-coll/age (US) exhibition at Smolin Gallery in New York. From one year to the next, New American Experimental Cinema and Video Art were officially born. In 1964, Nam June Paik moved definitively to New York, having become a very active member of the Fluxus movement but paradoxically contributing to the organization of the event that provoked an irremediable break within the group: the "scandalous" concert held in 1964 by Karlheinz Stockhausen in New York, Originale (DE, 1961), opposed by George Maciunas, who shortly after sent a postcard to Nam June Paik with the message, "Traitor. You left Fluxus." Nam June Paik, once the experience of the Fluxus movement was over, became within a few years the reference point of the American Video Art movement. Nam June Paik was not the only video artist active: around him there was already a rich and dynamic environment [End Page 196] made up of many artists, such as, among others, Dan Graham, Aldo Tambellini, Steina and Woody Vasulka, Eric Siegel, Frank Gillette, and Ira Schneider, and soon Video Art would find its home in the United States between Boston and New York. The birth of American Video Art can be placed in 1969 with a double event: the broadcasting of the anthological program The Medium Is the Medium. Video Visionaries (US) of Boston-based WGBH-TV and the exhibition TV As a Creative Medium (US) at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York. In 1970, Wolf Vostell, who had never permanently moved to the United States and who had a rich artistic activity in Europe unrelated to the initiatives of Fluxus, decided to settle in Berlin. All these events lead us to reflect on the fact that between the 1950s and 60s there was an intense proliferation of ideas from Europe to the United States. This process was the consequence of a phenomenon that spanned the entire History of Art from the Second World War onwards, a period in which there was an intense migration of European avant-garde artists, musicians, poets, writers, and choreographers who decided to settle more or less permanently in the United States, especially in New York. This migration included, to name a few, Salvador Dali, Fernand Léger, the definitive return of Man Ray from Paris, Hans Richter, Robert Sebastian Matta, André Breton, Max Ernst, André Masson, Yves Tanguy, Louise Bourgeois, Piet Mondrian, Arnold Schönberg, Hans Hoffmann, Josef Albers, Moïse Kisling, Kiki de Montparnasse (Alice Prin), Georges Antheil, Georges Balanchine, Hanya Holm, Le Corbusier, Jean Cocteau, Paul Bowles, Marcel Duchamp, Hans Arp, Raoul Hausmann, Richard Huelsenbeck, and Kurt Schwitters. But there was also another unstable geographical front: Eastern Europe. Igor Stravinsky, after the October Revolution, emigrated from Russia to Europe and then, before the Second World War, settled in the United States. Many Jewish families from Eastern Europe fled to the United States, such as Maya Deren from Ukraine, Mark Rothko from Russia, and Hedda Sterne from Romania. From Nazi-occupied Lithuania came George Maciunas and Jonas Mekas. The group of Surrealist and Dadaist artists who emigrated to the United States due to the Second World War was welcomed by the art collector Peggy Guggenheim, who through her Gallery promoted the diffusion of this avantgarde art in the United States. One artist in...