WE'RE KEEPIN' THE DOG

Caught on tape: Richard Nixon's televised Watergate ordeal transfixed the public. It was the first piece of video art. (Jonathan Jones, July 28, 2003, The Guardian)

Video, in America, has always had an epic national resonance, and a poetic melancholy, that touches pungently on the life of the republic. TV is America, or it became America. But when? Was it during the 1960 presidential election, when John F Kennedy and Richard Milhouse Nixon debated with each other on television?

Or was it in 1974, when Nixon, the defeated 1960 candidate who went on to become Republican president in the late 1960s, was forced to resign after revelations about the illegal lengths his people were prepared to go to during his 1972 re-election campaign? Defending himself on TV with a sweating, monstrous, isolated face, Nixon, who had always been TV's candidate, revealed not just that this was a video age but that video was not the innocent thing it had seemed in the early days of network TV. It was not Bonanza and Bewitched. It was distant colour images of a helicopter taking off from the roof of the embassy in Saigon. It was, like the audio tapes Nixon made, an index of distance from the democratic: it was the death of the agora.

The essentials of video are the essentials of a decayed public life: the artefacts of conspiracy. The aesthetic of early video - black and white, violent and confessional, yet not confessional at all - is an aesthetic of paranoia.

It is, then, no coincidence that the most compelling and distinctive examples of early American video date from the Watergate era. And the
videotapes, transferred to disk and preserved as a cult rarity, do seem outrageously disconnected from what we now know as video art. Video installation is now such a universally accepted form, so integral to the culture of museums, that it can seem banal - is banal. There are so many cinema-scale projections and so few ideas. It is salutary to return to the monochrome intensity of 1974, to realise that video can be about something: can speak resonantly of history, politics and the self.

This is a fine example of what happens when you start with a thesis then ignore any facts that might disrupt it. Mr. Nixon's most compelling video moment and the first truly significant political use of television was his Checkers speech, but that came twenty years too early for Mr. Jones's theory to apply. Likewise, if you're going to focus on the paranoiac and confessional angles then don't you have to deal with the HUAC and McCarthy--as well as the organized crime--hearings? Posted by Orrin Judd at August 4, 2003 9:41 AM