Yesterday, besides Mike Kelley, I saw videos from the late 60s and 70s by a number of artists who have gone on to achieve international reputations � Dan Graham, Bill Viola, Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra. The ICA are currently mounting an exhibition which brings together these works in London for the first time � Video Acts � entry �1.50. This is another piece of luck given my current interest in the point in the 60s where art and not-art became mixed up together.

Nauman made a really big impression. Going back to my reference works I can begin to see why. Apparently he said at the time �If Minimalism was so great, what could I do? What was missing was the source � I had to go back to the source.� At least one of the videos reminded me of a photo that I had seen of a violinist playing an early Philip Glass piece where the long manuscript is joined together to make a continuous sheet of paper � mounted on the wall round the room so that the performance assumed a simple sculptural aspect. It turns out that Nauman was influenced by the sense of time that emerged from some minimalist musical works and sought to carry that across into his vids.

He could play the violin well and one of his musical pieces was very much my favourite. He tunes the violin to the note D E A D � that is from the first D up a second then down a fifth and down a fifth. He plays across the four strings to make a chord � the kind of simple but unusual chord that is characteristic of the genre. He just repeats that chord regularly � maybe 80 bpm - for about an hour. But either by accident or design, the successive chords are not quite identical � different intervals within the chord get different emphasis on different strokes. The video shows his body horizontally on the screen as he plays � filmed from behind. I became very very engaged with this � particularly his insight in creating a very pared down form that was replete with meaning � on the margin of repetition and difference. Just now I am asking myself why he managed to achieved these goals (which have been bouncing around in my mind) in a video rather than just in a composition?

Here�s a para from a review of the ICA Video Acts exhibition:

�In another piece, he stands with his back to the camera, playing a violin tuned to the notes D E A D, in one static image embodying the whole of the Romantic movement, from Caspar David Friedrich to Chopin and Paganini. Nauman's achievement was to deepen and extend the subject matter of early video art, without giving up the absolute simplicity that was so characteristic of it.�

The reviewer is very taken with the exhibition � and makes me realise how lucky I was to bump into it. Peversely these videos are hard to access � I see it costs $100 just to hire the DEAD piece � and this exhibition is a unique assembly as far as the history of art in the UK is concerned.

The review is at

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2003/08/06/baica06.xml

Note the time required to get into this stuff.

Nauman seems to have realised something about the possibilities of recording performance. The reference book explains that he was influenced by Meredith Monk � who started as a choreographer but also became composer/performer sometimes brought under the Minimalist heading. Monk was interested in exploring the art/non-art boundary in terms of ordinary music versus dance. Nauman was also into Wittgenstein and Beckett. A pretty good mix then.

There is also a Nauman piece which involves a stationary camera, in a studio with a square marked out on the floor. The piece involves Nauman moving round the square in different ways. This looks like a response to the question that he posed about what he might do in response to Minimalism.

Many of the works in the ICA exhibition used the video camera in a very simple way � as a stationary recording viewpoint of �whats going on�. An exception was Bill Viola�s piece, The Reflecting Pool,which is in colour where although the camera is stationery, one can see �video effects�, reversals, dematerialisations etc � a magic atmosphere prevails here.

(Sign of the Times: searching for reviews of Video Acts brought me to the website of Iain and Jane Pollard � UK videoartists who have given a talk on their work at the ICA to accompany the Video Acts exhibition. Their latest film seems to be about violent punk performance on the West Coast. I scanned the bog they have just started to discover them speaking very well of John Cale: �We love John Cale. That's about as simple as it can be put really. Ask either of us to name our favourite album, and you'll get the same answer every time - 'Fragments Of A Rainy Season'. No competition, hands down, case closed. � I bought that album an hour before stumbling by chance into the ICA to see what was going on.)