
Softcover, 6.5 x 9.5 in.
240 pp.
Published by YYZBOOKS and The Centre for Research on Canadian Cultural Industries and Institutions (McGill University)
Toronto/Montreal, 1995.
Janine Marchessault is a Canada Research Chair in Art, Digital Media and Globalization at York University, Toronto. She is the director of the Visible City Project and an online archive at York University, which examines urban art cultures and citizenship in the context of globalization. She is a founding member of the Public Access Collective and the journal Public: Art/Culture/Ideas. This anthology examines the relation between identity politics and independent video practices in Canada. From different vantage points the contributors carve out a central problematic: video as a technology that has challenged and extended not only the parameters of modern art but the very possibility of cultural
resistance in the age of global television. The essays explore video's representational vocation shaped both by institutional supports (National Film Board, Canada Council, cable, etc.) and by community needs for agency and voice.
This anthology examines the relation between identity politics and independent video practices in Canada. From different vantage points the contributors carve out a central problematic: video as a technology that has challenged and extended not only the parameters of modern art but the very possibility of cultural resistance in the age of global television. The essays explore video's representational vocation shaped both by institutional supports (National Film Board, Canada Council, cable, etc.,) and by community needs for agency and voice.
Contents
Preface
Janine Marchessault
1. INSTITUTIONAL CONTEXTS
Amateur Video and the Challenge for Change
Janine Marchessault
Cultural Democracy and Institutionalized Difference: Intermedia, Metro Media
Nancy Shaw
Interstitial Aesthetics and the Politics of Video at the Canada Council
Kevin Dowler
2. DISCURSIVE HISTORIES
A History in Four Moments
Peggy Gale
The Body-That-Disappears-Into-Thin-Air: Vera Frenkel's Video Art
Kay Armatage
How to Search for Signs of (East) Asian Life in the Video World
Monika Kin Gagnon
Mirroring Identities: Two Decades of Video Art in English Canada
Dot Tuer
3. ONTOLOGY
The Lamented Moments/Desired Objects of Video Art: Towards an Aesthetics of Discrepancy
Christine Ross
Video Space/Video Time: The Electronic Image and Portable Video
Ron Burnett
4. Community, Communication
Subjects on the Threshold: Problems with the Pronouns
Renee Baert
Process Video: Self-Reference and Social Change
Jennifer Kawaja
Aboriginal Voices: Entitlement through Storytelling
Marjorie Beaucage
Deregulating Identity: Video and AIDS Activism
Tom Folland
Contributors
ISBN 0-920397-13-1 / 978-0-920397-13-8