Korot

Beryl Korot: Text/Weave/Line—Video, 1977-2010

June 27, 2010, to January 2, 2011

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum

In a 1993 interview Beryl Korot said: “There are no precedents in video as there are for a composer. It’s basically a new medium with a developing vocabulary. But in the early 70s when I made my first multiple channel installation, Dachau, 1974, I was quite concerned about precedents, and I looked both to the film medium and to the ancient technology of the loom to determine how to work in multiples.”

Korot has been involved in this new medium—video—since its infancy. She was co-founder and co-editor of Radical Software (1970), the first publication to document artists' work and ideas concerning video, and in l976 she co-edited the book Video Art. In 1977, she displayed her complex multi-channel installation Text and Commentary, including weavings, video monitors, and pictographic notations, at the Leo Castelli Gallery at 420 West Broadway in New York City.

The Castelli Gallery in the 1970s was a place of seminal importance, at the center of the development of contemporary visual culture. Installation art, text-based work, video, Minimal and Pop art—all were promoted with grace and force by a dealer who owned the most successful of the handful of galleries in New York nur-turing new art. In 2010 it may be hard to remember how small the New York art world was in 1977, and how inter-related the paths of various artists were. Rooted in a SoHo dominated by factories and sweatshops, small hardware stores and wholesale operations, a productive and competitive environment was flowering in hundreds of artists’ studios and a few dozen galleries.

It is also easy to look at that period and ignore the importance it had for the creation of video art. Many artists now perhaps better known for other media—including William Wegman and Bruce Nauman—were active in video. None were involved in a more prescient exploration of the essential qualities of video as we now know it than Beryl Korot. In her early multiple channel works she concerned herself with creating narrative structures based on insights gained from loom programming. In

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Beryl Korot: Text/Weave/Line—Video, 1977-2010

her more recent work, her concern with the poetics of vision and voice, patterning, and the passage of time in the natural world are the qualities that leap out at the viewer.

In 1980, Korot temporarily abandoned video for almost a decade and embraced painting—at first on handwoven canvas—just as video was being recognized as an art form. She resumed creating video in 1989, with work first presented in 1993 and 2002 in the video/music pieces The Cave and Three Tales made in collaboration with her husband, the composer Steve Reich. This placed her videos primarily out-side the gallery or museum context, into the realm of performance and theater.

Korot’s thoughts on her transition from video to painting are fascinating, and pro-vide insight into the richness of her work as a video artist. In 1980 she invented a language based on the grid structure of woven cloth, and began to translate texts into this abstract language that could be deciphered with a code—a kind of lan-guage as still life. Babel, the seven-minute scroll-based video from 2006–7 which is shown in The Aldrich’s exhibition, refers back to this period. In 1987 she wrote:

In the 1970s when people watched my video installations and saw the influence of the weaving loom on the structure and organization of these multiple-channel works, they often asked if I had been a weaver first who came later to work in video. In fact, the re-verse is true. And my journey from video continued until in 1980 I began to devote myself exclusively to painting. At the end of a lecture in the “Video Viewpoints” series at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1977, when asked what my next work would be, I answered that the ideas of my video work would find their way into a series of paintings on handwoven canvases with a dense information base…

In the 1970s I worked primarily making multichannel video constructions. Before working in video I served as co-editor-in-chief of Radical Software, the first magazine to explore

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the notion of alternative communications systems, primarily video. After beginning video work in a multiple format, I became interested in the handloom as the first computer on earth, as the original grid and as a key to visual structuring. Thus, within a relatively short time, I had intensive experience with one of the most ancient of communication technologies, the loom; one of the most modern, video; and the most prevalent, literature in the form of books, jour-nals and now computers. In all three media, weaving, video and print, the information (in the form of patterns, images or words) is encoded and decoded line by line. In video, the electronic camera reads an image at 30 fields per second, line by line. We read printed matter line by line. The pattern on a loom is built up line by line. Time is an important component of this linear structuring in terms of how quickly and effectively information is received and stored. Instant storage and retrieval systems characterize modern technology, while tactility and human memory remain earmarks of more an-cient tools.

What interested me in applying structural insights gained by study-ing loom programming to the programming of multiple channels of video was the continuity of human thought which spanned millen-nia. To realize that the structure of woven cloth provided a firm basis for the ordering of video information and time in the creation

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of nonverbal narrative works satisfied my need to make technological works conform to precedent at a time when the limitlessness and newness of this medium were being extolled. In an age of such tremendous multiplicity of viewpoints, traditions and beliefs as our own, it was a physical way for me as an artist, in an effort to heal my own inner striving for peace, to stretch my arms across millennia to join the ancient and the new in one long embrace.

Text and Commentary is a work of several components and a pivotal work in my transi-tion from video artist to painter. The work includes five detailed weavings programmed with gradual changes in pattern structure from weaving 1 through weaving 5. Opposite these are five video monitors built into a free-standing wall. The installation also includes a weaver’s notation for an enlarged section of each of the five weavings, as well as pic-tographic notations of the 35-minute video portion of the work. All of these provide varying perspectives of virtually the same information but in a variety of scales, media and contexts and translated into different systems of composition. …

When I finished making Text and Commentary, a number of problems presented them-selves. Mainly, the precision of the editing technique I had developed and the entirely manual construction of images in this work underscored for me the need to have a closer relationship to the image-making process than video allowed.

Just as the loom as the original grid led me to perceive the line as a basis for the visual structuring of information, it also led me to think more specifically about the most flexi-ble and abstract of lines: written language as an analog to human speech. The linear visual structure produced by loom and video technologies is a by-product of human thought. As a visual artist, when thinking about speech and its visual form as written language, I turned to the flexibility of the paint medium in order to continue my work. In painting, as in writing, thoughts are transmitted from brain to eye and hand and im-printed on canvas via the simplest of tools.

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This insistent exploration of the programmatic structure of data and imagery is at the heart of Korot’s work and its relevance to our current, visually digital world. Korot has, of course, returned to working with video—the technology has caught up with her. The computer and digital—as opposed to 1970s analog—media allow her the precision and control to edit and weave her imagery, the text, and sound to her liking.

In a note to the author about her new work, FLORENCE, Korot writes:

In 2007 when I began FLORENCE I was playing at the computer and made a weaving out of bits of video footage of snow storms and waterfalls, some ele-ments of which were used in Vermont Landscape. Having finished a long col-laborative period in 2002 I wanted to get back to the studio of the painting years and the years that preceded those to the multiple channel Text and Commentary made entirely in my studio, by hand, for the camera. I wanted to keep the re-corded material local, around the house or in walking distance thereof.

As I viewed the weaving I’d made on the computer the name Florence Nightingale came to mind, and I realized that though her name had become a cliché, I had no idea who she really was.

And so I sifted through hundreds of pages of her brilliant writings, which in-cluded an intense rejection of her upper class English background as she sought to find a life of meaning and purpose apart from what was designated by birth. At 30 she set off with a ragtag group of women to save men outside of Istanbul during the brutal Crimean War, and transformed what had been complete ne-glect on the battlefield into a system of caring for the wounded.

In the same note Korot states: “I thought when I was 12 I'd be a poet. These two works (FLORENCE and ETTY) are a kind of poetry from other peo-ple's words ... also a kind of soliloquy.”

This is complex, ruminative, and beautiful work—drawing on Korot’s rich knowledge of literature and history, infused with a lifetime’s commitment to art, music and time-based performance, and rooted in the ancient origins of digital media.

A young medium has a wise and accomplished practitioner; Beryl Korot takes full advantage of its unique qualities to create her rich and sustained body of work. Harry PhilbrickMay 2010

1 Steve Reich and Beryl Korot, catalogue for The Cave (Hendon Music, Inc., Boosey & Hawkes, 1993), interview by Jonathon Cott, p. 10.

2 See Paul Ryan, “A Genealogy of Video,” Leonardo 21, No. 1, 1988, pp. 39–44.

3 Beryl Korot, “Language as Still Life; From Video to Painting,” Leonardo, Journal of the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology, volume 21, number 4, 1988, pp. 367–70.

4 Note from Beryl Korot to Harry Philbrick, May 19, 2010.

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