Mini-Video: Moving Pictures Under Glass

Pocket watches, invented around the turn of the seventeenth century, were popular status items among the European rich by the year 1625. Like other small, hand-held personal items, such as the miniature portrait cases which preceded them, (the faces of loved ones exchanged for the face of time), watch cases too were soon opulantly decorated. By 1670 they were almost all circular in design; in the following decades such innovations as settable alarm bells and glass or crystal covers were invented. By the period of 1690 to 1710, a fad for a truly remarkable innovation developed: watches had rotating faces which revealed the changing image of the sun and moon as appropriate to the time of day. Even more spectacularly, a watch was marketed with an aperture to show a series of small portraits or other pictures such as landscapes which were slowly revealed (under the new glass cover) as the day progressed, and which could be changed by pressing a button releasing the plate to be replaced by another. While it is fun to think of this as an early intuition for the consumer delight of channel-hopping 300 years later, what is of note is that the urge to carry with oneself a portable, technologically innovative prestige consumer item which has both utilitarian, fad and entertainment value is not new to us. In Mini-Video we have invited four artists to explore the most recent of these marketed fetishes, the personal television. Each artist will create a particular viewing environment as appropriate for their sense of the form.

Along with the above outlined phenomena comes one more crucial element: advertising. For example, fans were introduced in Europe from Asia in the 18th century. They were soon hand painted with scenes of famous places and buildings (TV's You Are There function), as well as historical scenes, operas, and general images of social and historical interest. This function was elaborated into the notion of souvenirs for tourists, so that by the 19th century, any notion of a contemporary media like educational function was lost in the advertising of political and commercial interests. Similarly, watch papers, tiny round slips of paper used to protect the works of a watch, began as individual owner's designs in the 1750's: women embroidered flower patterns of silk or made cutouts or pinpricked designs of hearts, doves, forget-me-nots or wreathes. They were also made of woven hair or were crocheted from fine silk thread or quilted. Hand stitched monograms in wreaths of laurel or moss roses were common, often serving as valentines, birthday greetings or memorials for the dead. Some contained the prototype folk art gesture of the Lord's Prayer, or miniature maps of the United States. By the early 19th century the practice had been replaced by the watchmakers and repairers inserting watch papers advertising their businesses. Often noted artists of the day were hired to design these papers, just as professional penmen came to be an itinerant trade in the heyday of personal visiting cards. (Photos were also coming into vogue for visiting cards right before the custom died out.) Snuff handkerchiefs were used from the late 17th century until the turn of the twentieth when pipes came in. After the homemade decoration stage passed, cartoons were often commercially available in printed form on these handkerchiefs. Two noted early 1800's examples include one titled A Vision of the World in 200 Years, predicting paratroopers, air trips before breakfast, and restaurants in the sky, and even more remarkably, one titled 1981 in which the world is in chaos because of "women's rights and what came of it." Which is, of course, women as judges, in the armed forces, as lawyers, and in politics, while men stay home and raise children.

The handcrafted tradition of watchmaking was dead in Europe by the outbreak of WWI, killed after 300 years by American mass manufacturing and machine fabrication of parts. The American industry in turn was defeated by the Swiss invention of wristwatch technology in the years after the First World War. In researching this field one comes upon numerous pictures of 19th century English watch factories standing abandoned, evidence of the economic dislocation of innovation even in this microsystem; similar buildings no doubt have been abandoned in America as market changes continue from the manufacturing in Asia of inexpensive digital and liquid crystal display watches, a technology that has in part also made possible small screen television.

Whether we look at miniature paintings for lockets, at hand-carried lady's fans, at visiting cards and card cases, at snuff boxes or handkerchiefs, or at the tiny world of watch papers, what is revealed is a process of folk iconography of a personal and intimate nature, appropriate for the mediums, being taken up first in an increasingly stylized and elaborate form for the upper classes' use, and then finally becoming a commercially available mass produced product for the middle class. With television comes a reversal of this process wherein innovation is totally from the top or manufacturer down to the grass roots, in a literal one way broadcast: tv's are only receivers. Video art gives artists the opportunity to either supply their own content to the technological form, breaking the one-way nature of the system, or to decontextualize broadcast television by incorporating it into sculpture, or both, thus reexamining the power relationship and questioning cultural meaning and assumptions.

What we see then is the transformation of personal iconography derived from family and family occasions into economically inaccessible items and finally mass marketed in a debased advertising context. An inexorable human drive for visual meaning is made impossible by the use of such imagery for ideological ends. In addition the realm of the private is weakened and cut back. Mini-Video is part of a range of contemporary artmaking practice which seeks to examine this phenomenon and perhaps approach an alternative strategy.