Video art emerged as an art form about forty years ago, when handheld cameras and portable videotape recorders brought ease, mobility, and, most importantly, affordability to the art of the moving image. Throughout its short history, video art has challenged many of the conventions of the art world, ranging from questions of reproduction to issues surrounding acquisition. While the early days of video featured a low-tech, DIY quality, recent works display high-end Hollywood production values. In spite of its original potential to question the rarefied status of fine art, video art of recent years has repositioned itself within the white cube of the gallery.

The Johnson’s video collection includes works by some of the major figures in the experimental video movement of the 1970s. Artists came from many different media to experiment with video. Their target was most often network television, which by 1957 had reached about 41 million American homes. The collection includes early pioneers such as Stephen Beck, who in 1969 developed one of the first video synthesizers which electronically fused moving color imagery with recorded visual material; and Peter Campus, who is represented with two pieces, Three Transitions (1973) and R-G-B (1974). One of the classic works in the medium, Three Transitions consists of three short exercises in which Campus uses basic techniques of video technology and his own image to create evocative images of the self. Some of the other early video artists represented in the collection include Tom Dewitt, Frank Gillette, James Seawright, Steina, Woody Vasulka, and Shigeko Kubota, as well as Nam June Paik, who is represented with two seminal pieces, Electronic Opera #1 (1969) and Global Groove (1973). Most of these works only exist in their original ¾ inch videotape format.

The collection also includes a complete set of film and video documentations by Gordon Matta-Clark. Dating from 1971 to 1977, the eighteen films and videos—all transferred to DVD— document many of the artist’s well-known performances and architectural interventions. Since Matta-Clark is an alumnus of Cornell’s School of Architecture, Art, and Planning, the collection came to the Johnson in 2007 through a generous gift by Matta-Clark’s widow, Jane Crawford.

From the early 1970s to the present day there has been a strong link between video and the conceptual body. It is central to the work of numerous artists represented in the collection, including Vito Acconci, Type A, Lucy Gunning, Tony Oursler, Amy Jenkins, Pipilotti Rist, Janine Antoni, Janet Biggs, Andrea Bowers, and Patty Chang, among others.

Since the 1990s video projections and multichannel installations have been ubiquitous in museums and galleries, with an ever-increasing accessibility for artists to affordable production and presentation equipment. Janet Biggs’s Water Training, Amy Jenkins’s Shelter for Daydreaming, and Aernout Mik’s Reversal Room are good examples of this type of video art. Also during this period, more artists working with video have challenged the narrative strategies and editing techniques of mainstream Hollywood cinema. The Johnson’s collection includes several such pieces: While Salla Tykkä’s Thriller investigates the construction of femininity in the Hollywood horror movie genre, Jesper Just’s Bliss and Heaven promotes a less stable vision of masculinity than mainstream Hollywood created through unconventional editing techniques.

These are just a few examples of how works in the Johnson’s collection could be classified within the broader history of the medium. Other groupings could include video sculpture (Bowers, Jenkins, Oursler), video and new narrative strategies (Mik, Just, Tykkä, Biggs, Slater Bradley), or the engagement by women artists with the medium (Antoni, Chang, Gunning).