Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

This book is an insightful evaluation of video art since its early beginnings, examining its theoretical, aesthetic and social implications.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Foreword
• Introduction: Complexities of an Art Form
• Histories Video: Shedding the Utopian Moment
• A Brief History of American Documentary Video
• Deacute;-collage/Collage: Notes Toward a Reexamination of the Origins of Video Art
• Video Art: What's TV Got To Do With It?
• Huffman And if the Right Hand did not know What the Left Hand is doing
• Paradox in the Evolution of an Art Form: Great Expectations and the Making of a History
• Furniture/Sculpture/Architecture Television
• Furniture and Sculpture: The Room with the American View
• Vito Acconci Performance
• Video and Trouble in the Home
• Video Installation Art: The Body the Image
• and the Space-in-Between
• Margaret Morse Video in Relation to Architecture
• The Rio Experience: Video's New Architecture Meets Corporate Sponsorship
• Dara Birnbaum The Art of The Possible
• Francesc Torres Mobility
• As American as . . .
• Chip Lord Aligning The Museum Reaction Piece
• Audience/Reception: Access/Control
• The Feminism Factor: Video and its Relation to Feminism
• Martha Gever The Medium Is the Mess . . . age
• This Is Not a Paradox
• The Wild Things on the Banks of the Free Flow
• The Fantasy Beyond Control
• Lynn Hershman Reach Out and Touch Someone: The Romance of Interactivity
• Politics and Poetics: Latinos and Media Art
• Coco Fusco Behind the Image
• Muntadas Interventions of the Present: Three Interactive Videodiscs, 1981-90
• Peter d'Agostino Syntax and Genre The Cultural Logic of Video
• The Smell of Turpentine
• The Importance of Being Ernie: Taking a Close Look (and Listen)
• Joan Jonas Audience Culture and the Video Screen
• Norman M. Klein Significant Others: Social Documentary as Personal Portraiture in Women's Video of the 1985
• Christine Tamblyn Telling Stories Video Writing
• Raymond Bellour Appropriation of Contemporary Reality: An Anecdote
• Tony Labat Directions/Questions: Approaching a Future Mythology
• Light and Death
• The New Epistemic Space
• Three Tapes by Steina
• Steina Video Black--The Mortality of the Image
• Bill Viola Phototropic
• Tony Oursler
• Notes Contributors
• Selected Bibliography
• Videography and Video Index
• Picture Credits Index

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

From the first portapak productions, video art has been a purposeful outsider on the margins of official aesthetic acceptability. This collection of 41 essays by American video artists, scholars, and critics illuminates the complex, heterogeneous nature of video art and highlights its ties to the visual arts and contemporary culture. The essays explore the impact of video technology in mass culture, narrative storytelling, and museum installations and as a means of promulgating alternative social and philosophical visions. This well-conceived book offers consistently good essays. In a field that lacks much critical discourse, it helps to provide a critical basis and context for understanding video's role as art and in society. Substantive and important for special and research collections.-- Rus sell T. Clement, Brigham Young Univ. Lib., Provo, Ut. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

CHOICE Review

Finally: a subtitle that rings true. This sumptuous Aperture publication is wide ranging, scholarly, lively, and a truly essential guide to video art. Its 40 contributions give an exhaustive coverage. One section explores the medium's origins and the difficulties in historicizing. The second section relates the television and the video monitor to their physical contexts, whether domestic, architectural, or institutional. The ^D["Audience/Reception^D]" section explores current issues in feminism, representation, ethnicity, and interactivity. The structure and rhetoric of video are then examined in the fourth section. The ^D["Telling Stories^D]" section presents works by video artists of a metaphysical bent. The book concludes with an exemplary (albeit ^D["selected^D]") bibliography, a videography, and video index. Of the 40 contributions, 12 are artists' pages. Contributors include Acconci, Bellour, Graham, Hanhardt, Lord, Muntadas, Rosler, Vasulka, Viola--the usual suspects and then some. This volume should stand as the model text for years to come.

Booklist Review

An energetic collection of new essays by 41 artists, critics, curators, and art historians. Video art has been a wild child on the art scene, unburdened by a tradition of critical analysis, but now it's time for some serious evaluation. This volume, edited by Hall, a video artist, and critic Fifer, traces the radical beginnings of video art and its continuing innovations and attempts to sort out its complex juxtaposition of narrative and object: video art as performance and/or sculpture. By its very nature--using the format of mass media--video art is destined to function as social commentary on TV's domineering presence in our home and psyches, but it also challenges the more static experience of viewing a painting or traditional sculpture. While the artists' essays provide insight into the creative process, scholars offer diverse interpretations of video art's role in our culture. Recommended for in-depth contemporary art collections. ~--Donna Seaman