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Video art dominates the international art world to such an extent that its heady days on the radical fringes are sometimes overlooked often unknown. Video Art, a Guided Tour is an essential and highly entertaining guide to video art and its history. Elwes, herself a practicing artist and pioneer of early video, traces the story from the weighty Portapak equipment of the '60s and '70s to today's digital technology, from early experiments in 'real time' to the 'new narrative' movement of the '80s. She also examines video's love-hate relationship with television. Artists discussed include, amongst others, Nam June Paik, Nan Hoover, The Duvet Brothers, Dara Birnbaum, Bill Viola, Pipilloti Rist, David Hall, Stuart Marshall, Stan Douglas, Smith & Stewart, Steve McQueen and Sam Taylor-Wood. Elwes brings to life the excitement and political fervour of video art's early days and follows its journey to its current status as the default medium for contemporary art.
Catherine Elwes
Catherine Elwes retired as Professor of Moving Image Art at Chelsea College of Arts in 2017. She is a writer but is also known as a video artist and curator, and was active in the feminist art movement in the late 1970s. She co-curated the exhibitions Women’s Images of Men and About Time at the ICA in 1980 and was the director of the biennial UK/Canadian Film & Video Exchange (1998–2006) and co-curator of Figuring Landscapes (2008–10), an international screening exhibition on themes of landscape. Elwes has written extensively about feminist art, performance, installation, landscape and the moving image and is author of Video Loupe (KT Press, 2000), Video Art: A Guided Tour (I.B. Tauris, 2005), Installation and the Moving Image (Wallflower and Columbia University Press, 2015) and Landscape and the Moving Image (Intellect Books, 2022). Elwes is founding editor of the Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ) and has contributed to numerous anthologies, journals, exhibition catalogues and periodicals.
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