Over a quarter century of small-format video production by artists and independents in Canada has generated unique works in the medium and a vocabulary unlike any other. This essay focuses on four characteristic moments in the history of Canadian video art as seen from the vantage point of the 1990s. While numerous other roads cross the same terrain perhaps a map as simple as this one can offer clarity.

Central issues for video artists working in English Canada have in turn been conceptual, narrative, dramatic and social. A history of francophone work is characterized by similar concerns but in altered order and to different ends, of which more later.

1.

Artists’ use of small-format video appeared alongside, and under the influence of Conceptual Art of the late 1960s and early 1970s. This is a period during which the visual arts turned away from the commercial gallery/museum/dealer/collector systems that had been so central to the post-war art market of Europe and America. Sol Lewitt, writing in Artforum in 1967, outlined the term, affirming that:

In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art it means that all the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art. This kind of art is not theoretical or illustrative of theories; it is intuitive, it is involved with all types of mental processes and it is purposeless… Conceptual art is made to engage the mind of the viewer rather than his eye or emotions.2

In practice, much of this work took the form of written or drawn statements, proposals and photographic documentation. Lawrence Weiner and Joseph Kosuth in America, or Daniel Buren, Yves Klein or Piero Manzoni in Europe, established important bodies of work linked with this conceptual art, drawing in elements of theory, confrontation and play. Such ideas led in turn directly to performance and body art, as evidenced in works by Vito Acconci and Dennis Oppenheim in the United States or Amsterdam-based Marina Abramovic and Ulay, whose concerns were grounded in the idea but informed by physical limits and psychological parameters. Many artists, working first with sculpture or painting, moved to investigate more ephemeral and time-based issues through video and film at this period; others, younger, especially in Germany, Britain and North America, began at once with performance and media work. Shifting away from the marketplace and production of a ‘precious’ object, the avant-garde sought to revalue intellectual engagement, to put process over product. Simultaneously, the role of the audience was redefined, to play a part in the completion of the work through their response and feedback: the video model of simultaneous record and presentation, objectification and immediacy, was in effect reiterated.

With Canadian video of the early 1970s, especially in Toronto and Halifax, the idea generated and informed the work, and remained its most important aspect, very much in keeping with Lewitt’s definition of Conceptual Art. The artist’s intention (ie., the idea) was central, so the video monitor tended to function as a mere channel for conveying the image/experience. In that situation artists virtually never prepared a script, or used a set or crew; most often, the artist him/herself was responsible for every aspect of the piece, even to the point of being the single figure on-screen. Editing was seldom considered for these black and white recordings on half-inch open reels. It was generally assumed that videotape had a physical life of less than a decade. Permanence seemed inadmissible; video was as ephemeral and emphatic as speech, its temporary capturing on monitor or tape, a mere wisp of memory.

Video had no obvious public, certainly no purchaser. In those first years, the fact that video was “not television” was crucial for artists; TV invariably suggested the gross commercialism, the predictability of subject matter, format and faces, that were intellectual anathema at the time. Video was taken up by individuals for what-could-be-discovered, what-could-be-experienced. It found its audience in other like-minded individuals rather than any ‘general public,’ often other artists and usually the young intellectually inclined. For many, it was simply ‘boring.’

Fill (1970) by David Askevold and Colin Campbell’s Sackville, I’m Yours and True/False (both 1972) or such process/demonstrations as Insertion (My Mouth) by Eric Cameron (1973) are all quintessential for the period. As Askevold has described his twelve minute black and white piece:

Fill is my earliest video work; besides the obvious filling of the screen with sheets of aluminum foil over a microphone on a stand, connoting an additive formal sculpture reading, the title also refers to filling time or a ‘filler’ on TV shows. The audio implodes during the wrapping of the foil and is more time consuming than the unwrapping, during which, the audio explodes as the sheets are pulled away from the microphone.3

The stationary camera was fixed to a tripod, its view centered on a microphone being covered then revealed. As Lewitt noted, the planning was done beforehand, the process intuitive and purposeless. An experiment.

In a similar manner, Colin Campbell’s True/False is recorded in a single fifteen minute take. We first see the artist’s head in profile as he makes a series of sixteen statements:

I like Sackville. True. False.
I have false teeth. True. False.
I smoke grass. True. False.
I still masturbate. True. False.
I am part Jewish. True. False.
I am seeing a psychiatrist. True. False.
I have had crabs. True. False.
I snort coke. True. False.
I collect pornography. True. False.
I recently attempted suicide. True. False.
I am heterosexual. True. False.
I am part Indian. True. False.
I want to be a star. True. False.
I have committed bestiality. True. False.
I am an exhibitionist. True. False.
Colin is my real name. True. False.4

Then he turns to us directly, and repeats the same list. This time, however, he establishes eye contact with the camera lens, and thus, apparently, strikingly, with the viewer. The tone of the statements is matter-of-fact, as are the affirmations and denials, but the information itself seems potentially volatile; the statements—either true or false—could be understood only too readily as confession or self-portrait. Campbell is performing his lines, yet the starkness of his presentation as he faces the camera alone, and the nature of the information itself, lead the viewer to a position approaching that of a voyeur-or confidant. What are the viewer’s motives or responses, after all? The ambiguity of that position is to evoked often in the years to follow.

For the thirty minute duration of Eric Cameron’s Insertion, the camera lens is rhythmically and repeatedly engulfed by Cameron’s mouth, with attendant synch sound recorded in-camera. The viewer, identified with the camera lens, takes a ‘personal’ part in this violation, being in effect swallowed up-implicated in the artist’s test of will or endurance, his intellectual curiosity, or possibly his desire. The tape functions as a sculpture in time, the enactment and repetition of a single idea, playing on oral satisfaction and the penile presence of the searching lens. It is a sexual metaphor without erotic connotation, yet filled with (viewer/voyeur and applied/implied) guilt.

2.

The use of narrative grew from Conceptual concerns; here the script was foregrounded as central to a video work’s construction. Experiments with narrative included performance-based pieces as different as Vincent Trasov’s My Five Years in a Nutshell (1975) and General Idea’s (G.I.) Pilot (1977)-tapes having little in common with Eric Cameron’s performative gesture shortly before. Pilot was commissioned by TV Ontario (TVO), the local educational network, and General Idea, tongue-in-cheek, presented their programme as a “pilot” for a long-running TV series (never intended by anyone to materialize):

This is the story of General Idea, and the story of what we wanted. We wanted to be famous; we wanted to be glamorous; we wanted to be rich…

General Idea is basically this: a framing device within which we inhabit the role of the artist as we see the living legend. We can be expected to do what is expected within these bounds.5

Pilot used a full inventory of recognizable and appropriate TV tricks, playing onscreen hosts themselves-or anchormen-to a panoramic collection of slides, photos, film clips, interviews, voice-over text and glib background music. G.I. used this air-time opportunity to quote their own earlier work, but more importantly they were quoting the formal and conceptual vocabulary of television itself, their understanding sophisticated and tone polished. It might be noted that TVO was delighted with Pilot, and programmed it regularly for some months.

John Watt’s Two-Way Mirror (1980) is a further example of the centrality of narrative construction, and another reminder that the formats and audiences of the commercial media had begun to intrigue certain artists. This is not to assume, however, that these artists at this time wished to make commercial television with its (automatic, necessary) attendant demands on both form and content: the ability to sell products. These quasi-TV works were more playful and mischievous in their commentary.

In Two-Way Mirror, a man sits in his living-room. He recounts, without prompting or hesitation, a seven-year history of The Young and the Restless, the popular daytime soap-opera which had been his daily companion. The mirror behind him reflects portions of his apartment, at times taken over by scenes from the soap, the two realities converging as thought bubbles or flashback memories. Watt had made the work for local cable broadcast in the Television by Artists series for which he was an originator and producer (through A Space, Toronto, and the artist-generated Fine Arts Broadcast Service). The series was an important recognition of the new desirability, in artists’ eyes, of an expanded audience and open context for video.

Vera Frenkel’s work considered rather different aspects of popular culture and audience. By the late 1970s her performances and installations were interrogating the ‘whodunit” tradition of fiction. A new group of works centered on the mysterious disappearance of (fictional?) expatriate Canadian novelist Cornelia Lumsden for Her Room in Paris of 1979. Frenkel plays four stereotypical roles in turn as she appears as Lumsden’s Friend, her Rival, the Expert on her life and work, and the CBC Commentator. With …And Now, the Truth (A Parenthesis) the following year, the story took an unexpected turn as Frenkel is confronted on-screen by a young woman from the audience claiming to be Lumsden herself. Frenkel relishes the storytelling mode with its twists of plot and character; her productions all play ironically with literary conventions, period phrasing and manners. But her work carries additional agendas enmeshed in the narrative: the artist as exemplary exile;7 the intrusiveness of watchdog government ministries: the oddities and sly effectiveness of consumerism and capitalism-as-religion; the invisible persuaders everywhere present in daily life. Stories are her form, and narrative is her means.

There is another narrative mode most unique at this juncture to the video medium. A genre less text-based, less concerned with broader consumer and culture-bound issues, and more dependent on visual intuition and a sense of subjective interiority. This form emerged first in Toronto, perhaps most notably in the poetic language and intimate subject matter in works like Facing South (1975) and Waiting for Lancelot (1977) by Lisa Steele, or tapes by Colin Campbell after 1974 (including The Woman from Malibu series 1976-1978). Steele and Campbell were the first to define a new place for a visual and personal (intimate) narrative material—usually with open and non-linear, inconclusive storylines—that suffused the whole field, though their influence did not lead to imitation by others. Somewhat related, perhaps, is Delicate Issue (1979) by Kate Craig, where the artist’s camera roamed over her own nude body in extreme close-up, while her quiet voice-over mused:
The closer the subject the clearer the intent.
The closer the image the clearer the idea.
Or does intimacy breed obscurity?

In this work she combines consciousness of a media context, as seen in Watt or Frenkel, with the intimacy and private revelation of Steele. In the larger picture of Canadian video history, these narrative pieces have offered unusually individualized works, the most singular voices and specific characterizations.

3.
Drama evolved naturally from these experiments with narrative, grafted onto a further valuation of television modes. In this way, the first identified ‘dramatic’ works may be seen to have evolved out of such text-based pieces as G.I.’s Pilot, or, more closely, through Frenkel’s unusual enactments. Theatrical or cinematic traditions at this time became more consciously utilized or applied, and scripts became more elaborate with complicated plots and linear storylines. Crime Time Comix Presents Steel and Flesh (1980) by Eric Metcalfe is an early quirky example of the developing dramatic mode, as if Noel Harding’s ironic Out of Control (1981), or Hygiene (1985) by Jorge Lozano and Andrew James Patterson. Colin Campbell, perhaps in preparation for his move to film production, expanded his concerns with scripting, cast and dialogue in No Voice Over (1986) and his hour-long Black and Light (1987).

Dialogue and plot are the most characteristic elements of this period, further elaborated with pointed quotation of cinematic genres and themes. Metcalfe, for example, comments that:
Steel combines the format of the comic strip and the likeness of a “B”: movie from the 50s, but discards the narrative and adopts the TV commercial’s fast editing technique-packing it full of visual information of well known classic images that can be understood universally.

…Film references are to early Kenneth Anger films and the staircase sequence is almost a direct quote from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.8

Similarly, Noel Harding’s tape is described as: “A fast-paced, hard-boiled tale of sex, power and intrigue in high places, as inspired by G. Gordon Liddy.”9

And in the Lozano/Paterson work:
Hygiene is visualized in terms of both prime-time soap operas and the Sirkian/Fassbinderian melodrama. But the melodramatic formula is deconstructed by the juxtaposition of the heroine and provocative external information.10

Though this fascination with film history and the elaborated stereotypes flourished over several years, the central position given to the visual quote and knowing reference gives a family resemblance to the genre, and a certain clever superficiality. When the individual works were first released, the complexity of the plots, the highly developed dialogue combined with the new attention to mise-en-scéne, seemed to bring together several loose threads developing in the fabric as a whole, and these works were met with pleasure and general congratulation. The results however are often overly self-conscious, a search for something new that remained incomplete.

4.
By the end of the 1980s performance, narrative and dramatic genres had prepared the way for a new concern for social imperatives and public conscience; a political awareness that spread into many levels and areas of the arts as a whole.

The issues to be addressed varied widely. As early as 1984, Robert Morin and Lorraine Dufour (Montreal) filmed Tristesse modéle réduit (a dramatization of growth towards independence for a mentally handicapped young man), and in 1986 Norman Cohn completed Quartet for Deafblind. Both were impressive feature-length works that had developed out of an ambitious rethinking of their makers’ ongoing concerns and artistic means. In Vancouver, Lorna Boschman made Scars(1987), a tape about self-mutilation, and Doing Time (1990), a study of women in prison. Also on the west coast, Sara Diamond completed Ten Dollars or Nothing (1989) which utilized voice-over interviews, archival footage and photographs to discuss the lives of native women in coastal fish canneries of the 1930s. Diamond’s The Lull Before the Storm (1990) explores the histories of working-class women and the changing definitions of femininity since World War II. Political issues, obviously, are central to all these works.

But these investigations of social change are not necessarily presented as dogmatic, distanced or objective ‘truth.’ In a notable departure from his earlier work, Paul Wong’s Ordinary Shadows, Chinese Shade (1987) is a study of his own cultural and family origins, recorded on location in China, as is Richard Fung’s The Way to My Father’s Village (1988). Chinese Characters (1986) also by Fung, examines the ambiguous relationship between gay Asian men and white gay porn. Michael Balser, Andy Fabo and John Greyson (all Toronto-based) have made several tapes around the spread of AIDS and its effects, or produced work concerned, in more general terms, with sexual identity.

The tapes include every variety of form and content, and continue to grow in ambition and scale. In 1991 Zacharias Kunuk of Igloolik completed the hour-long Nunaqpa (Going Inland), second in a series recreating traditional Inuit life in the eastern Arctic over the cycle of a full year. The same year, Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak premiered their feature-length Legal Memory, a dramatization of events leading to the last death by hanging carried out in British Columbia (1959), capping an era of concerted prosecution of homosexuals in the Canadian navy of which this story formed a part.

To a significant extent, these are elaborate fictions based on fact. They mark an important coming-of-age for many longtime workers with video. The issues are big ones: sexuality, race, the law, the family. The tapes continue to reveal two constants characteristic of Canadian video production: the presence of people and the importance of verbal exchange. In the productions of the 1980s and 1990s, the “aesthetic” is a category whose significance is often downplayed in favour of issues though, as always, the finest works retain allegiance to form, flow, content and beauty.

*4*1*2/4*5*
The history of video art in Quebec is radically different from that of the rest of Canada, with language by no means the only distinguishing feature. Where artists in other parts of Canada (centered principally in the urban areas near Vancouver, Toronto and Halifax) have approached video as individuals, interested in experimenting with imagery and the construction of ideas, artists in Montreal and Quebec City have used video principally as a means to investigate cultural issues and analyze national identity. Access to video tools emerged first through the Groupe de recherché sociale and the National Film Board’s Challenge for Change/Société nouvelle and, from 1971, through Vidéographe (Montreal) which enabled production, exhibition, distribution. The use of the new medium coincided closely with the October Crisis of 1970 and the growing separatist movement; into the mid-1980s a socially-conscious agenda was paramount in québécois production.

Especially noted works from Montreal include Qu’est-ce qu’on fait au bon Dieu (1971) by Yves Chaput, a documentary on the official inquiry into the War Measures Act, and its querying of “the so-called October Crisis,” Pierre Falardeau’s Continuons le combat (1971) which brings a sociological or semiological analysis to the world of professional wrestling particular to Quebec, and Le temps d’une priére (1972) by Jacques Benoˆit and Jean-Claude Germain, which presents a critical study of the Catholic Church and its place in Quebec families and education. In 1978 Pierre Falardeau and Juliean Poulin completed their 90-minute Pea-Soup, five years in production, a study of what they saw as national oppression, a dying culture complacently accepted in Quebec, “cultural hegemony at work.” In 1979, Jean-Pierre Boyer’s hour-long Mémoire d’octobre was a militant re-reading of the events surrounding and following the invocation of the War Measures Act in 1970, and preparatory, no doubt, to the referendum in 1980 for Quebec independence. Produced by the Comité d’information des prisonniers politiques, it was intended as a “tool for analysis and struggle in the process of transformation for Quebec society.”

Not all early video in Quebec, however, was based in cultural politics so allied with national identity. Frank Vitale’s Hitch-Hiking(1972) is recognized as one of the most important early works in Canada, the result of a trip across the American border with a portapak under his arm. His use of video as unobtrusive eye and ear, his secret recording of conversations with others, including highway patrol and customs officials, marks it as a classic in the ‘underground’ tradition. More characteristic of independent work from the 1970s in Quebec, however, are such socially concerned works as L’amiantose tue (1973) by Claude Belanger and others, an indictment of health and safety practices at such mines as Atlas Asbestos. At the end of the decade came landmarks such as Chaperons rouges (1979) by Héléne Bougault and Helen Doyle, a dramatization of violence against women, and Norman Thibault’s Joe(1982) a docu-drama on alcoholism in the workplace.

But, as might also be expected, other threads appeared. The seldom-seen Réaction 26 (1971) by Claude Biname, was an early black and white experiment with electronic feedback, in line with other technical research around editing and sound recording being carried out at Vidéographe. Jean-Pierre Boyer’s more typical early work in the early 1970s experiments with computers, feedback and manipulation of the screen raster, coinciding with his teaching in Toronto at the Ontario College of Art and in Buffalo at SUNY Buffalo where he was working with Steina and Woody Vasulka. Boyer remained virtually unique in Canada with his studies in such medium-specific areas. Interest in image manipulation were to resurface much later in such experiments as Distance (1984) by Luc Bourdon and Francois Girard, a study in slow-motion movement; or Girard’s Tango Tango (1988), a dance work recorded in elegant black and white, with social implications. We find a compendium of all four of our categories in such works as Le train (1985), also by Girard, an allegory of memory and imagination, where “the life of a railwayman has come to a halt at just the same place as his locomotive,” or the langorous Reminscences carnivore (1989) by Marc Paradis, a poetic recollection of sexual pleasures and personal memories.

At this point the categories collapse in Quebec. By the late 1980s, video works seem to coalesce around production groups in Quebec City (Vidéo Femmes) and Montreal (Vidéograph, PRIM, Coop Video, Groupe Intervention Video, Agent Orange), each with access to different equipment, and each with own look and agenda. To a visible extent, each group seems to deal cautiously with the others. There is a lot of new work, with video enjoying a notable resurgence. But generalizations are applicable only to individual careers, and no longer relate to community identity. Indeed, with widely varying aspirations for audience and production values, new video coming out of Quebec may be considered a whole only insofar as French forms a common language. Even at that, several artists have moved away from dialogue of any sort, preferring the versatility and portability of images-on-their-own.

Early Quebec video was marked by social conscience and a desire to investigate national identity. This has turned to narrative and a striking mix of dramatic imagery with social awareness. The continuing interrelation of these concerns is producing a new and unpredictable moment not only in Quebec but in the rich and varied terrain of Canada.

Notes
Previously published histories include my own early essays, “A New Medium,” Videoscape (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1974) and “Video Art in Canada: Four Worlds,” Studio International vol. 191, no. 981 (May/June 1976): pp. 224-229. See also Andrée Duchaine, “Historique de la video au Quebec” and Renee Baert, “Video in Canada: A Context of Production,” both in OKANADA (Berlin: Akademie der Kunste, 1982), and Renee Baert, “Video in Canda: In Search of Authority,” Vidéo, ed. René Payant (Montreal): Artextes, 1986). See also Sara Diamond, “Daring Documents: The Practical Aesthetics of Early Vancouver Video,” Vancouver Anthology: The Institutional Politics of Art, ed. Stan Douglas (Vancouver: Talon Books, 1991) For much of this activity, artist-run production/exhibition facilities, usually with government support, have provided an important backdrop. Major related events are listed/discussed in From Sea to Shining Sea, ed. A.A. Bronson (Toronto: The Power Plant, 1987)
Sol Lewitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Artforum vol. 5 (Summer 1967): pp. 80-81.
Art Metropole Video Archive Catalogue 1991 (Toronto), p. 4.
All quotations from artists’ tapes are transcribed by myself from the video, unless otherwise noted.
General Idea’s statements reappear in numerous works and publications, as noted in their retrospective catalogue General Idea 1968-1984, ed. General Idea and Jan Debbaut (Eindhoven: Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, 1984).
Her Room in Paris (1979) exists as a single-channel videotape but also as one element in the larger installation work of the same year, where the tape plays on a monitor sitting on Lumsden’s partially-painted bureau, and surrounded by evidence of interrupted habitation.
A text-and-photo work including references to several of these themes, mixed with elements from Frenkel’s videotape Stories From The Front (&Back): A True Blue Romance (1981) appears in Vera Frenkel, “Stranger in a Strange Land,: Impressions 28-29 (Winter 1982): pp. 13-19
Eric Metcalfe, Catalogue Western Front Video (Vancouver)
A Art Metropole Video Archive Catalogue 1991 (Toronto), p. 20.
The 1991 Catalogue of Catalogues, Vtape (Toronto), p. 40.

Originally published in Mirror Machine: Video and Identity ed. Janine Marchessault (Toronto: YYZ Books and CRCCII, 1995)