Art That Has to Sleep in the Garage

 

Art That Has to Sleep in the Garage

 

 

 

By EDWARD LEWINE

Published: June 26, 2005

 

San Francisco

 

ONE day last month, Pam Kramlich tried to serve lunch to two guests, but the artwork kept interrupting. A gentle rain tapped the windows of her stone house atop one of the city's best hills. The antique table was set with salads prepared by the housekeeper, and the video art simply wouldn't shut up.

 

On one screen, the artists Gilbert and George, filmed in crude 1972 video, sipped cocktails while classical music played and a voice intoned over and over, "Gordon's makes us drunk." To the right was a 1969 piece by Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, in which Ms. Holt schlepped the camera through a field of reeds, the soundtrack booming with her stomping and puffing, while Mr. Smithson gave her barely audible directions.

 

 

 

 

Video art by Doug Aitken in Norman and Norah Stone's garage.

 

 

Mrs. Kramlich, a slender 62-year-old with a serene smile, and her gruff venture-capitalist husband, Dick, 71, own what may be the single largest private collection of art that uses electronic sound or moving images. This is known as video art, or media art, or time-based art, and the Kramlichs share their labyrinthine California Tudor home with it. Screens flash from a snarl of tubing atop the dark-stained oak staircase. Slides scroll above the fluffy duvet on the guest bed. A boy's face flickers on a movie screen in the otherwise muted calm of the cream-colored master bedroom.

 

When all the art is activated, the house hums, thrums, squeaks and squawks, gibbers, moans and shouts. In fact, the effect is so overwhelming that the Kramlichs are more or less forced to leave most of their expensive, impeccably chosen collection turned off most of the time. But when the pieces are on, as they were during lunch, Mrs. Kramlich says she savors the cacophony. "I enjoy having these works on," she said. "This is fun. It's playtime."

 

 

 

 

Video art by Matthew Barney in Dick and Pam Kramlich's living room.

 

 

As eccentric as the Kramlichs' domestic situation may seem today, 10 years ago it would have been a downright oddity. Back then, video art was an outlier, a market that collectors barely touched. But now, video art is widely bought and exhibited by collectors and museums alike, and there are those who say flat screens may soon be as common on household walls as picture frames.

 

"Video is where still photography was in the 1970's," said Bruce Jenkins, a dean at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. "There used to be a hesitance to purchasing photos. Now photography is the rage."

 

 

 

 

Norman and Norah Stone with Matthew Barney's video art from their collection.

 

 

Yet, as the first generation of video collectors is discovering, video remains a confounding, ornery medium - especially when it's placed between the silver-framed vacation snapshots and the door that leads to the laundry room. Most artworks sit, mute and distinguished, on a mantel or behind a couch. Video pieces demand attention, and they never blend into the background the way even the most monumental Rothko or vibrantly colored Stella can.

 

"They remind me of my Jack Russell terriers," said Norman Stone, another avid collector. "You can't ignore them."

 

THE first odd thing about collecting video art is this: the medium came into being partly because artists wanted to make work that couldn't be collected. It was born in 1965 when Sony introduced the first portable video camera, attracting artists like Nam June Paik, Bruce Nauman, Joan Jonas and Vito Acconci. "The dream we had was art that couldn't be sold, but broadcast on television," the video artist Bill Viola said in a recent phone interview.

 

 

 

 

A piece by Stan Douglas.

 

 

The pair, who married in 1981 after just seven weeks of courtship, began collecting art when they discovered they had nothing in common. In consultation with curators from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and their adviser, Thea Westreich, they chose to amass video art, because it fit in with Mr. Kramlich's interest in technology, the museum needed patrons in this area, and there was little competition from other collectors.

 

 

At first Mrs. Kramlich assumed that video art would be easy to deal with. "You just pop the tape into the recorder and play it," she said.

 

 

Soon she discovered that it wasn't quite that simple. Buy a painting, and you get the painting sent to you in a crate. When the Kramlichs buy a video installation, say one of Bill Viola's - they own several - they are typically buying one of an edition of anywhere from 3 to 10. They'll receive a master copy of the piece, in digital Beta or the highest-fidelity format available; a DVD home-viewing copy; the equipment needed to show the piece; and an archival box that includes setup instructions, blueprints and a signed certificate of authenticity.

 

 

 

 

 

A piece by Bruce Nauman.

 

 

By the 1980's, however, dealers and artists were turning video into a commodity. Now prices range from a few thousand dollars to six figures. Though collectors aren't talking money, the Kramlichs' curator allows that the couple have spent "millions" amassing some 250 pieces.

 

It's only the box and its contents that they will save. The rest of the piece is essentially disposable, because it will probably grow obsolete over time and have to be replaced. "The work of art is the information," said Mr. Viola, 54. "That is what you own." For this reason, he said, he would gladly substitute lost or broken DVD's and advise on replacing equipment.

 

Although most collectors understand this on some level, they can't quite resist treating the discs, tapes and screens as precious art objects. They create additional home-viewing copies, storing their artists' copies for safekeeping. This puts them in the odd position of never actually viewing the art they own, except in reproduction. But it's hard even to speak of the concept of an "original" when it comes to video art. Unlike other forms of art sometimes sold in multiples - like etchings, ceramics or photographs - video works have none of the handmade aspects that differentiate between originals and copies. Legally, most video art is sold with an agreement limiting the collector to copying for personal use. Practically, there's nothing to prevent a collector from sending out copies as Christmas gifts.

 

 

 

 

 

A piece by Diana Thater.

 

 

 

But even if she did, the purloined copies might soon be useless. Part of art's appeal is the way it can combine a feeling of permanence with immediacy. The gaze in a 400-year-old Rembrandt portrait and the supple line of an ancient Greek statue astound with their freshness. But video will undoubtedly look quite different a few hundred years from now. In fact, the earliest pieces have been copied onto new systems many times. Take "Swamp," the Smithson-Holt piece. It began as a film and went to Beta, then VHS, now DVD. Often, during such changes, some of the information of the original film is lost, and the look of the piece is altered. Though "Swamp" was shot on film, today it has the flatter, less textured look of video.

 

However, the complications inherent in video art are part of its allure to artists and collectors alike. Some of these same complications, of course, are found in other kinds of contemporary art. But video is singular in that it is, in a funny way, alive. It may be ephemeral when compared to a marble statue, but because it consists of information that can be recopied, the video may last longer than stone.

 

 

 

 

 

 piece by Bill Viola.

 

 

 

"This technology reproduces itself the way people do," Mr. Viola said, "by passing along information from generation to generation rather than by preserving a single object. That is part and parcel of why I work in this medium."

 

If the videos themselves won't fade away, then the equipment on which they are viewed probably will. Recently, Robert H. Shimshak heard that the type of battery used to power the screen in his video installation by the Canadian artist Ann Hamilton was going to be discontinued by the manufacturer. So he rushed to replace the batteries. But in the process, technicians scratched the screen, which had already been discontinued. "They offered to replace it with a newer version," said Dr. Shimshak, a radiologist in Berkeley, Calif. Of course, he didn't want to alter the piece, and eventually the technicians found a way to repair the screen.

 

Indeed, technicians are familiar presences for anyone who owns video art. Each time a new piece is installed chez Kramlich, electricians are brought in to snake audio, video and power lines to the location and punch new sockets into the walls. Some collectors have annexed entire areas of their home: consider the case of Norman and Norah Stone, San Francisco collectors who fell in love with "Electric Earth," a video piece by the artist Doug Aitken in which a man walks through a drab Los Angeles cityscape.

 

 

 

 

Pam Kramer with a piece by Bill Viola, owned by her and her husband, Dick.

 

 

 

The original required five screens and 1,200 feet of exhibition space. So Mr. Stone, a psychologist and the president of a family foundation, worked with Mr. Aitken to transform the family garage into a carpeted installation of a single-screen version of the piece. When the Stones want to watch it, they banish their two Porsches and their BMW wagon to the street.

 

This raises the most vexing question video collectors face: when to activate the art. If it's on, it dominates the room; if it's off, well, what's the point?

"The piece we have on more than any other is the Stan Douglas in the card room," said Ms. Stone, referring to "Journey Into Fear" (2001), a movie with an intentionally out-of-sync soundtrack. "It goes on for eight hours, and I find it incredibly irritating, but my husband likes it."

 

 

 

 

 

A work by Dana Birnbaum, also from the Kramlichs' collection.

 

Ethan Kaplan for The New York Times

 

 

 

 

Most of the time, the pieces are turned off, which means that the expensive, exquisitely decorated homes where they sit are filled with blank screens. Those collectors who do keep the art on tend to choose gentle material or exile the works to obscure corners. Dr. Shimshak prefers to have his video pieces on, so it helps that his taste runs to what he calls more "contemplative" works, like his Ann Hamilton, which is a tiny screen embedded in the wall, showing water pouring into a mouth. He keeps it in the back of an out-of-the-way hall. Gary Wolkowitz, an apparel mogul in Manhattan, said he had become interested in video lately through his son Bryce, who deals in media art, and because he views video as the important medium of this century. He has five pieces, and leaves the three less obtrusive ones - a Jim Campbell, an Alan Rath and a John F. Simon Jr. - running when he's at home. The Bill Viola in his bedroom, however, involves what Mr. Wolkowitz, 57, describes as a woman going through "an emotional moment." He activates it only when he's in the mood. "This artwork demands decision-making," he said.

 

And one of those decisions can be to keep the art out of the home. Two of the most important collectors keep their pieces in private museums, away from the intimacy and calm of their houses. Martin Margulies, a Miami developer, and Ydessa Hendeles, a real estate heiress in Toronto, both say they collect video because it moves them, but have resisted living with the pieces. This year, however, Ms. Hendeles is installing a media room in her house.

 

"I wanted to enjoy the art," she said, "but not in a place that I pass through."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/26/arts/design/26lewi.html?pagewanted=1&th&emc=th

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The 6 Cello Suites

 

- Johan Sebastian Bach -

Cello - Maurice Gendron