Martha Wilson's Video Premiere

Martha S Wilson Gertrude Berg's Trashy Pick-Up Art

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Welcome to ARTINFO’s latest feature. Starting today ARTINFO will be posting a regular program of short videos that reflect the range of the medium’s use in the contemporary arts, from documentation of exhibitions and their installations, to interviews with artists and gallerists and curators, to – perhaps most important of all – actual examples of video- and Web-based art.

And that is precisely where we start.

Today’s piece, Premiere (1972) by Martha Wilson, is a relic from video art’s pre-digital beginnings. A widely respected member of New York’s radical art scene for the past four decades, Wilson, founder of the performance space and "virtual venue" Franklin Furnace, has probably done more to maintain the vitality of the city’s performance and online art community than any other single person.

In the early ’70s, when she was teaching at Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, Wilson concerned herself, like many artists, with the dry philosophy of the burgeoning conceptual art movement. The influence is evident in Premiere, her very first video piece, but it's balanced by Wilson’s particular concern with identity and self-presentation, a thread that has remained constant in her work, and which is probably more relevant today than it was in 1972. As primitive as Premiere might look to our 21st-century eyes, it still reminds us that the entire domain of video art has its beginnings in the simple radicality of pieces like this. We present Premiere here as part of a program of other early Wilson video performances: Routine Performance, Art Sucks, and Appearance as Value (all 1972) and Method Art, Psychology of Camera Presence, Deformity, Cauterization, and Deformation (all 1974).

An exhibition of Martha Wilson’s photo/text works from the same period as Premiere is on view at Mitchell Algus Gallery until April 26.