Video Data Bank

Video Data Bank (VDB) is an international video art distribution organization and a resource in the United States for videos by and about contemporary artists. Located in Chicago, Illinois VDB was founded at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1976 at the inception of the media arts movement.

VDB provides experimental video art, documentaries made by artists, and taped interviews with visual artists and critics for a wide range of audiences. These include micro-cinemas, film festivals, media arts centers, universities, libraries, museums, community-based workshops, public television, and cable access centers. Video Data Bank currently holds over 2,000 titles in distribution, by more then 400 artists, available in a variety of screening and archival video formats. It also actively publishes anthologies and curated programs of video art.

The preservation of historic video is an ongoing project of the Video Data Bank. The total holdings, including works both in and out of distribution, include over 5,000 titles of original and in some cases, rarely seen, video art and documentaries from the late 1960s on. The VDB functions as a Department of the Art Institute of Chicago and is supported in part by awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Illinois Arts Council.

History

In 1974, VDB co-founders Kate Horsfield and Lyn Blumenthal, graduate students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, began conducting video interviews with women artists who they felt were underrepresented critically in the art world. After buying a Panasonic Portapak and successfully conducting talks with painters Joan Mitchell and Agnes Martin and curator Marcia Tucker, the pair decided to continue the series. "It was really a kind of accident,” noted Horsfield in a 2007 interview. “We were looking for inspiration for ourselves, but we were also looking for information on what was happening. If you read art magazines in the early '70s, it was very rare to see any real coverage of any women artists." [http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0704,halter,75625,20.html] In 1976 Horsfield and Blumenthal officially founded the Video Data Bank, taking over a small collection of student video productions and interviews that was begun by Phil Morton at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They went on to add to the archive, conducting talks with prominent artists of the period such as Alice Neel, Lucy Lippard, Lee Krasner, Barbara Kruger, and the Guerilla Girls, who appeared wearing their trademark gorilla masks.

Lyn Blumenthal passed away in 1988 and the VDB maintains the Lyn Blumenthal Memorial Fund for independent video. Horsfield remained director of the collection until her retirement in 2006. The current director, Abina Manning, was named in December of 2007. In 2007 the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture (NAMAC) named Video Data Bank as the year's "Outstanding Media Arts Organization"

Collections

The Video Data Bank maintains three collections of video produced from 1968 to the present:

"Early Video Art" includes many titles from the Castelli-Sonnabend collection, the first and most prominent collection of video art assembled in the United States. All of the work in this collection was produced between 1968 and 1980. These works represent examples of the first experiments in video art and include conceptual and feminist performances recorded on video, experiments with the video signal, and 'guerilla' documentaries representing a counter-cultural view of the historical events of the 1960s. Artists included are Vito Acconci, Lynda Benglis, Dara Birnbaum, Joan Jonas, Bruce Nauman and William Wegman.

"Independent Video and Alternative Media" is a collection that includes works made since 1980. These works represent the next generation of video makers and younger artists, and largely address post-modern themes in contemporary art such as feminism, AIDS, gender studies, guerilla television, technology, and multi-cultural identity. This collection includes active contemporary artists such as Sadie Benning, Jem Cohen, Harun Farocki, Walid Raad, Paul Chan, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Miranda July, and George Kuchar.

"On Art and Artists" is a collection of taped interviews with visual artists, photographers and critics. The interviews focus on the development of the artists' body of work.

Surveying the First Decade

"Surveying the First Decade: Video Art and Alternative Media in the U.S." is a seventeen-hour compilation of experimental and independent video created from 1968-1980, the first decade of video art production. Originally released on VHS in 1995, the collection will be re-released on DVD on September 1st 2008. The anthology includes 68 titles by more than 60 artists and is curated into eight programs ranging from conceptual, performance-based, feminist, and image-processed works, to documentary and grassroots activism.

Chris Hill, former video curator at Hallwells Contemporary Art Center in Buffalo, New York, curated the project. The anthology has become a recognized resource for media studies curricula and offers an authoritative introduction to the history of video art. Surveying the First Decade is notable for its inclusion of grassroots activist and community-based documentary work alongside examples video experimentation by established artists. This pairing offers an overview of the diversity of video practices that originated during the early days of video.

Notes

References

*Halter, Ed (2007). "Before You Tube," "Village Voice", http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0704,halter,75625,20.html.
*Tamblyn, Christine (1991). "Image Processing in Chicago Video Art," "Leonardo," Vol. 24, No. 3, pp.303-310
* cite book
last = Horsfield
first = Kate
authorlink =
coauthors =Lucas Hilderbrand (eds.)
year = 2006
title = Feedback: The Video Data Bank Catalog of Video Art and Artist Interviews
publisher = Temple University Press
location = Philadelphia, PA
id = ISBN 1-59213-182-4
* cite book
last = Juhasz
first = Alexandra
authorlink =
coauthors =
year = 2001
title = Women of Vision: Histories in Feminist Film and Video
publisher = University of Minnesota Press
location =
id = ISBN 081663372X

External links

* [http://www.vdb.org Video Data Bank ]