Camera Ready

There was a time, just a generation or so ago, when photography and video were creative mediums that existed in a kind of parallel artistic universe. Over here was real art, code name for painting and sculpture, which is where the cultural action could be found, and over there were photography and video, subsets of art that were very nice and all but that occupied separate, smaller, more particularized niches.

Specialty acts, if you will. Certainly they claimed their devoted fans, but neither could expect to headline.

Since these were quintessentially modern mediums, it was routine to acknowledge the visual and conceptual adventurousness of much of the work that had been done. And most observers, save for a few antediluvian cranks, were happy to extol the virtues of this photographer and that video artist. Still, there was no getting around it: A traditional hierarchy was firmly in place in which painting and sculpture ranked higher and photography and video ranked lower.

Those days aren’t entirely over, but they’re definitely on the way out. Sometime during the 1980s a quiet but dramatic change took place. These days nobody (with the possible exception of Morley Safer) thinks of still or video camera work as “Not Ready for Prime Time” art. Two big exhibitions, both serendipitously opening today in Los Angeles, demonstrate the parity finally achieved by photography and video with more traditional mediums.

The shows survey the remarkable careers of two widely recognized artists--Bill Viola and Cindy Sherman--whose persuasive work is pivotal to this late-20th century shift in consciousness. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is presenting more than a dozen large video works made since 1976 by Viola, the internationally acclaimed artist who is based in Long Beach, including projection pieces and sculptural environments that incorporate video. Downtown, meanwhile, the Museum of Contemporary Art is showing some 150 black-and-white and color photographs, mostly self-portraits and most of them large in scale, by New York-based Sherman, one of the most avidly discussed American artists of her generation.

Viola and Sherman didn’t manage the change in cultural perception of video and photography on their own, of course. But their art is a touchstone for it.

Ironically, photography’s historic second-class status gave Sherman’s work a particular resonance. Her self-portraits, in which she has adopted hundreds of different guises, play with the social and cultural construction of identity. In our patriarchal society, opportunities for women to be successful as painters and sculptors have been severely limited, so seeing her interrogation of feminine identity using the marginalized form of photographs gave body and presence to a real but shadowy sense of social stratification.

A provocative 1989 exhibition at MOCA called “A Forest of Signs” showed how many women like Sherman, entering the art world in the feminist-enlightened 1970s, ignored the exclusionary terrain of painting and sculpture in favor of camera work. For Sherman the result was a seamless fit between subject and object, one that effectively endowed her photographs with a stature hitherto reserved for painting.

Viola began working with video in the early 1970s, when, with certain exceptions, the medium was being defined in one of two ways. There was commercial television, the corporate behemoth, and then there was independent production by artists--call it counterculture television--made possible by the new technology of portable cameras and inexpensive recorders.

Viola took a somewhat different path. He began to explore the ways in which video could be used for spiritual and metaphysical inquiries. For Modern art those had mostly been the province of painting, especially abstract painting.

Sherman and Viola both began to work in the 1970s, but her photographs and his video really began to make their most persuasive claims for cultural centrality in the 1980s. What was it about the decade that made the shift possible? Like any primary cultural change the answer involves lots of small, incremental developments. One big event, though, which we’ll get to in a moment, stands out as decisive.

On the smaller side, Viola and Sherman are simply of a certain age. Born in 1951 and 1954, respectively, they’re baby boomers, meaning they’re also products of the postwar boom in images. As card-carrying members of the first generation in history to grow up bathed in the queer blue light of TV, they speak with easy fluency a common language of camera pictures.

As artists, they also came to maturity during a period of rapid, international expansion of museum programs that focus on contemporary art. The professionalization of the art world, which is a relatively recent phenomenon, created a public platform for more varieties of art than existed before.

Their art also coincides with a virtual explosion in new technology. Photography has been around since 1839, about a century before video was invented. Yet, for both mediums, the transformation of camera technology has been so dramatic in the last few decades and has accelerated so quickly that, today, highly sophisticated equipment for still and video photography is ubiquitous.

The casual use of cameras by untrained amateurs has always fertilized the field for unusually distinctive work by artists. At first, cameras were big, clumsy, cumbersome affairs, which restricted their use and range of users. When George Eastman invented his hand-held Kodak in 1888, followed in 1891 by the introduction of transparent rolls of film on a clear plastic base of nitrocellulose and--perhaps most important of all--offered photofinishing services for customers unlikely to set up a darkroom in the kitchen at home, he didn’t just fulfill his advertising slogan, “You Push the Button, We Do the Rest.” He also built the foundations for a new visual vernacular.

As happened a century ago, we are today in the midst of a period when access to a sophisticated array of new equipment and commercial services is within relatively easy range of middle-class consumers, where once it had been the exclusive province of industry and the professional specialist. For artists, options have expanded exponentially.

Twenty-five years ago I asked Nam June Paik, one of the originators of television as a new tool for artists, just what it was that made something art. “Dust,” he replied. Technologically speaking, in other words, a new medium makes older mediums look more established, automatically giving them a boost in their aura as art.

Which brings us to the big event that has accelerated the movement of photography and video into the mainstream: Our lens-based culture, which has developed and grown in power during the course of some 400 years, is now being superseded (or at the very least joined) by a brand new digital culture. Camera pictures and digital pictures differ in important ways. For one, images made with lenses--whether a microscope, telescope or Kodak or Sony camera--retain at least some connection to nature; digital imagery, on the other hand, made from electronic blips, is sheer artifice.

That’s not to say that one or the other is better or worse. It’s just to note that the supersedence of lens culture by a new and burgeoning digital culture has bumped camera work deeper into the realm of the traditional and mainstream. Finally, photography and video have got dust.

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* “Bill Viola,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, noon to 8 p.m.; Fridays, noon to 9 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Ends Jan. 11. (213) 857-6000.

* “Cindy Sherman,” Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave. Tuesdays to Sundays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursdays, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Ends Feb. 1. (213) 626-6222.