This is the most complete and up-to-date overview available of an art form born less than forty years ago.
Video art has moved from brief showings on tiny screens to dominance in international exhibitions and artistic events. Video installations now occupy factory-sized buildings and projections take over the walls of an entire city block. It embraces all the significant art ideas and forms - from Abstract, Conceptual, Minimal, Performance and Pop art, to photography and film.
Abundantly illustrated with frames and sequences, Video Art offers a history of the medium seen through the perspectives of its early practitioners - such as Bruce Nauman and Vito Acconci; the conceptual, political, personal and lyrical installations of the 1980s and 1990s - by such artists as Gary Hill, Bill Viola, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Mary Lucier and Michal Rovner, through to the present digital revolution.
In this postmedium age, artists from Pierre Huyghe, Douglas Gordon, Rodney Graham and Doug Aitken to Eija-Liisa Ahtila and Lynn Hershman are combining and recombining video with a vast array of other materials - digital video, film, DVD, computer art, CD-roms, graphics, animation and virtual reality - to form new artistic expressions.
Video has engaged many important artists of our time. Its full significance and appeal is at last made clear in this book, essential reading for anyone with an interest in the contemporary.