criticalartware



	/ (.kH) Kate Horsfield of the Video Data Bank @ The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (http://www.vdb.org) / ======================================================================= / v.1.0.1.kH / ======================================================================= / "Everything was new, I mean the world of video. You could count it, maybe 100 people tops, maybe that's too many," - Kate Horsfield, Executive Director of the Video Data Bank. http://www.vdb.org / =============================KATE_HORSFIELD============================ / Kate Horsfield http://www.vdb.org // interviewed by criticalartware criticalartware: How did your involvement with Video Art begin? Kate Horsfield: I don't really have glamorous answers to all of this. The truth was that in the fall of 1973, my friend Lyn Blumenthal , who was a taxi driver at the time, finally accumulated enough money to buy a half inch open reel PortaPack. I remember, we went to Lincoln Park and we were hanging out trying to do interviews with guys laying on the park benches, and somehow it didn't seem very gratifying to us. We really didn't know what we were doing. In the spring of 1974, Artemisia Gallery had just formed in Chicago and they had invited Marsha Tucker, who at that time, had just quit her job as curator at the Whitney Museum and was about to found the New Museum in New York. She was in town and she was giving a lecture about women's work, different, new work that was being done, mostly painting. So we went and asked if we could do an interview with her or if we could tape what she was talking about. She said sure and we did it. It was really interesting because this was the era of Feminism. Lyn and I had a kind of intuitive interest in knowing what women were doing as artists. So, Marsha gave many examples of work that a lot of people weren't familiar with, all done by youngish women. At the end of the taping she wanted us to bring it to New York so she could look at it before we played it for other people. We were very excited and a month or so later we went to New York to show her what we had shot. She thought it was interesting and suggested we shoot Joan Mitchell, who had a show up at the Whitney. We thought "Oh that is so groovy, we'll do it." We didn't realize that a trap had been set. Joan Mitchell was a very fierce woman. She was a 50's abstract expressionist. She had to fight her way up through a forest of men. She wasn't taken seriously and she was one tough cookie. And we were these little kids who had no idea what we were doing. I was 30 years old and Lyn was 26, so we didn't have a clue. Of course Marsha never said that Joan Mitchell was a very severe alcoholic. She just told us to call late in the day because she doesn't get up early. So we called her late in the day and we made a appointment for a week or so later at 11:30 at night. So we arrived at her house around 11:30 and knocked on her door and she opened it and said, "what do you want?" And we were like "Um, well, we're here to do the interview with you." She said "I never made an appointment with you to do an interview." Then an odd thing happened because there was a woman upstairs who was yelling in the background "Joan I remember when you made this appointment!" So, Joan said "Alright, come on up." And we went up and we were terrified. Lyn had prepared to do the interview and I was going to do the camera work. And she took one look at Joan Mitchell and said to me, "You do the interview, she likes you better." I said "I cant do it. I didn't prepare to do it." She said " She likes you because you are deaf and her mother was deaf." So, somehow at the last minute all the questions were thrown to me and I had to figure out how to manage the situation in a very short time. So that's how we started. criticalartware: What were your initial concerns? Kate Horsfield: We were really just interested in what women thought about their own work and how they managed to keep doing their work with the odds so much against them. We only interested in women artists in the beginning.That's all we did. Right after we started, in spring of '74, we decided to apply to graduate school a the School of the Art Institute. Both of us were rejected, Lyn was rejected from sculpture and I was rejected from painting which created a dilemma. At the time the school had a brand new video department. It was only two years old and the man who was the head of the department was very much a radical so we appealed to him. We said, "We want to do video." And he said ok and accepted us into his department. It was kind of like a Trojan Horse in a sence, because we weren't really thinking about being video artists. We were the two weirdoes of the department because we weren't into tools, we weren't interested in technology, we weren't interested in video art. We were just interested in doing our interviews. criticalartware: Can you describe the community at the time ? Kate Horsfield: The department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago was a leading department in terms of tool building, not only because Dan Sandin was in Chicago, but there was a very close relationship between Sandin and Phil Morton. There were a lot of exchanges between students at UIC and SAIC, it was like a small community with everybody working together. criticalartware: Did it take long, while entering the program, to find a way for you and Lyn to work in a way that broke down the initial barriers or did they remain? Kate Horsfield: It was an interesting department; it was very small. Everything was new, I mean in the world of video. You could count it, maybe 100 people tops in the 70's, maybe that's too many, and that's a national number. It was an unformed area; everything was new. There was no script to follow like there was in film production or in painting. So, it was very loose and very connected to the ideas of the counter culture. We were all interested in alternate mind spaces. Whether it was Gene Youngblood or Buckminster Fuller or whatever, we were interested in creating a new way to look at the world and that included a spiritual perspective. criticalartware: That ties into some of the concerns that Radical Software had about cybernetics and the remapping of consciousness. Kate Horsfield: Absolutely, those things went totally together. criticalartware: For the first time you had ways of looking at yourself that were unpredictable, and you hadn't had that before. Kate Horsfield: Totally, the hardware, the PortaPacks were, basically, used to create a record of the counter culture. Don't forget that this was an era when there was a whole generation that thought it was going to make dramatic social change. The appearance of the PortaPack in the middle of this was confirmation that, finally, the tools had arrived that would help us create a new consciousness for everybody. It was not just political; it was also spiritual. I think what was really interesting for me, was the tiny community that was involved with video. There was something enormously gratifying about being a part of such a very small group of people, all of who, were a part of creating something new. criticalartware: How was work distributed or seen? How did the early festivals begin? Kate Horsfield: The only way you were able to see anybody's work wasn't through festivals. There weren't any festivals then, it was through what everybody called "bicycling." Somebody would send Phil Morton a tape and he would invite everybody over to his house to look at it. criticalartware: How did funding change the situation? Kate Horsfield: The first big funding shift for video that had a huge impact was in 1970, when the New York State Council for the Arts somehow got a windfall of some huge amount of money that they didn't know what to do with. So, they started funding video as an artform. That was a very significant event because, A. it validated it as an artform and B. it encouraged artists to keep doing it because there was money available for production. I think that was one of the most important events in the 70's. Then things started to pick up, once NYSCA did it, then the National Endowment for the Arts did it and then other state councils did it. It was an era of building blocks. All the little pieces started to fall together to make it possible for people to continue to do their own work in video. criticalartware: How did the Video Data Bank begin? Kate Horsfield: In order to tell the story, we have to back up and tell you what the Video Data Band actually was. It already existed and I think it probably started in 1972. When visiting artists or thinkers came through the school recorded interviews with them. And so, all of the tapes were being kept in a small collection called: the Video Data Bank. What that was at the time was a wooden box, built out of plywood between video and the performance space. Inside it, it had red carpet, a pillow, a playback deck, a monitor, a light and a lock on the door. The Video Data Bank was a funny little entity because it was used for all kinds of things, I won't go into detail. Students would also go in there to view tapes. My date of employment was September 1st, 1976. The collection was sitting in a stack, we had a little room that was 9'x12' located in the new library. We walked in a looked at it and thought, "Uh, where are we going to work?" We looked around and there were tapes on the floor. Nobody had thought about where we were going to sit or how we would make a telephone call. So, we went to the librarian and told her that we needed a workspace. She said that they didn't have one, the only thing they had was a closet that we could work in. It was a room for some kind of film editing machine and it was literally 2'x2'. We said, "ok, we'll take it," and we got them to put a telephone in there. Only one of us could sit in the office at a time. That's how we started. We had, maybe, 200 tapes that were on 3/4" and we started from that point. criticalartware: What are the issued that currently concern you, relative to archives and emerging technologies Kate Horsfield: There is a really interesting junction, right now, between preservation and putting things on the web. If you look at Woody and Steina's web site, <http://www.artscilab.org/> it is awesome in terms of the preservation component and also the access component. Taking this 35 year history and making it accessible to a new generation via the web is really awesome. There are certain parts of that which are our goal for now. It is easy to preserve the work of famous artists because someone will always put up the money for that. When you get into the second/ third/ fourth tear, its not so easy. Everybody is worried about the work produced in the 80's. We somehow know that we'll get the money for the work done in the 70's. Will we get it for the 80's? I'm not sure, so, we have to do that. We have all this web based stuff that is surrounding and spreading across the world that has created a new model of presentation with no cost what so ever. While we are all so busy setting up our web streaming servers to offer something for nothing, in the art world they are trying desperately to try to hold on to a commodity system. Hollywood is trying desperately to hold back the technology so that people will not be downloading films. It's a very interesting struggle that's not surrounding just video but all of technology. Technology can now deliver anything for free; but do we want it to and how are we going to manage it? It is really fascinating, and it all started in the 70's. It started because, at that point, artists wanted to get out of the commodity system. There were a whole group of people who thought, "I don't want to make paintings because paintings end up above rich people's dining room tables, and that's not how I want to spend my life." And so, that was the whole inception behind making video or performances to start with. The circle has completed itself, but not totally, I am sure it will shift back again. criticalartware: What precedents were set by the Video Art movement? Kate Horsfield: Video had a promise connected to it, it was a promise of looking at the world through a different perspective that was absolutely anti-television. It was where people could discuss complex issues of identity and race and economics or experiment with radical visual forms, like Woody and Steina have. The radicality was at the center of it, weather it was political radicality or creating something extreme in terms of this visualization. In the 80's video tried to behave nicely so that it could be more popular, particularly among television viewers. That was a stepping stone into wanting an acceptability, where even video artists were trying to get rid of this radical history. There has always been this struggle. I think the most interesting thing about video is that it has always lived on a peripheral edge. It has always been an orphan. Periodically it is accepted by someone but later rejected because it is not quite right. A lot of interesting things can happen when you are right there on the edge, when you haven't been totally absorbed by anybody. Right now we are in an era where they are trying to dress it up and make it an art world forum. Who knows what will be next? We have no clue. criticalartware: Can you discuss your role in terms of historicization? Kate Horsfield: I talked about how galleries in 1995 were sort of reinventing video and stripping off the history. This was the reason I got involved with Surveying the First Decade. It was revenge, really. Maybe they can claim that there is no history, but there is a very rich history. So, I spent 5 years working on that project with Maria Troy, Deirdre Boyle and Chris Hill. It's a 17 hour VHS project that shows exactly what the history was, including all of the radicality of it. What is interesting about that, is that it has been a huge sales item. It wasn't the sales that I cared about. What I wanted was for every educator who was working with a younger generation of video artists to show them what the history was, to not let it totally disappear. As long as that project is circulating, it won't. criticalartware: How will the Video Data Bank change with developing technologies? Kate Horsfield: I see streaming as kind of an electronic equivalent of the Video Data Bank. It gives us an opportunity to use both the interviews and artist work. Since we make money off distributing artists' work and our interviews. We can only use parts of it. The reason for doing it is because we want to stay abreast of technology in the sense that we are hoping in 5 years all of our clients will be downloading files and we won't be shipping. The whole system of bicycling tapes will have gone through a whole process and will end up as an electronic click. We are hoping that is going to happen. Video streaming is extremely interesting to me. In a way, I wish I had more time to work on it myself and to have more staff on it because it is amazing what can be done. I think the DSL thing didn't turn out to be what everyone thought it was going to be. That was going to be our new audience, people who were surfing at home looking for interesting/ strange things to look at. This is another revolution that's not going to pan out exactly how we expected. Probably the same people who will use our streaming will be the same people who buy our stuff. It's really fun to experiment with because the possibilities are so extraordinary. criticalartware: How do you see these current possibilities relating to theinitial promise of video? Kate Horsfield: Its interesting when you read all of the historical documents, to see how many people understood digital technology in the 70's. There were a lot of them; they could see it coming. And I think that is the final step and I am happy to still be here working on this. When you heard them conceptualize it in the 70's you would think that it was totally visionary stuff that would never happen. When you see it rolling up as a possibility you can't help but be excited by seeing the different ways of plugging into it and making it happen. That's where we are at this moment, you know, with the dot dot dot. What will happen next? Kate Horsfield interviewed by criticalartware coreDevelopers: jonCates and Blithe Riley @ the Video Data Bank @ the School of the Art Institute of Chicago http://www.vdb.org CHI IL .US 2002.06.26 video edit by: jon.satrom ++ jonCates interview transcript by: jon.satrom http://www.criticalartware.net this criticalartware interview is a shared cultural resource released under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike version 2.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/ /