Art review: For inaugural exhibit, Waterville gallery puts focus on video art

Jorge S. Arango, The Portland Press Herald, January 24, 2023

The inaugural show at Waterville’s Joan Digman Schmaltz Gallery of Art – in the newly opened Paul J. Schupf Art Center – presents three videos (two from Colby’s Lunder Institute collection) and a “site-responsive” sculpture (also Lunder’s) in an exhibit entitled “Light on Main Street” (through Jan. 23).

The videos are wonderful and, thematically speaking, fairly light fare. Unexpectedly, however, they initiated a contemplation for me about what constitutes video art. I don’t claim to have any answers, especially in a time when digital animation is daily transforming the medium and NFTs are further complicating a clear understanding of the genre’s value in the art market. But it’s an interesting subject to examine while viewing these works by New York-based Erin Johnson, Los Angeles-based Jennifer Steinkamp and San Francisco-based Paul Kos.

The difficulty divining a definition of video art – if one is needed at all, of course – is how wide open the field has become. More than most media, its voyeuristic predisposition (an artist recording phenomena, whether natural or constructed, with a camera) gives it infinite range: from the purely documentarian to the spiritually esoteric.

What makes it art? Does streaming it via various channels bestow a sculptural presence we more readily recognize as art (as Gary Hill or Nam June Paik – the so-called “father” of video art – did)? When it records acts of human endurance (Chris Burden’s “Shoot”), or when it forces us to confront suppressed fears (Bruce Nauman’s “Clown Torture”)? Is it about tackling existential questions or the nature of consciousness (plug in most any Bill Viola work here, or “The Clock,” Christian Marclay’s meditation on time)?

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