Steina and Woody VASULKA
Video Works

July 17 to August 30, 1998
ICC Theater

"Video Works: Steina and Woody VASULKA" is a screening of 32 videos that the VASULKAs created between 1970 and 1997, presenting a retrospective of the path by which they acquired their electronic imaging vocabulary and descriptive techniques.

Steina VASULKA, who started off as a musician, does image processing as a pure visual effect produced by music. Her work structures images from the aesthetic point of view of an "eye" scanning the media and includes [Voice Windows] (1986) and [Orka] (1997), in which images are manipulated by sound--both striking music and natural sounds. Her [Violin Power] (1970-1978) has a dual existence both as documenting the early performance of that title and as the actual performance, which was restaged at the ICC in connection with Woody VASULKA's The Brotherhood exhibition. Steina calls [Violin Power] "a demo tape on how to play video on the violin."

Woody VASULKA's 1987 [Art of Memory] reaches a pinnacle of video art, encompassing a critique of technology that is also self-critical, the result of countless video experiments. While in recent years VASULKA has shifted to installations as his main format for presenting work, he continues, while skillfully manipulating technology, to engage the concept that provides the title of our special exhibition, "brotherhood," and its essence--violence and war.

[HATANAKA Minoru]