However when I went to New York in 1989 to commence a 12 month residency at PS1 one of the first things I was surprised to encounter was a restaging of Beryl Korot's "Dachau" installation from 1974 along with Nam June Paik's "Allen Ginsberg" tape of 1975 at the Jewish Museum.

These were pieces I had only read about and never expected to see since there was no notion in Australia at that time that Video Art could have anything like a retrievable "history". There has been rather an inexorable erasure of things past. Witness the almost complete abandonment of video as a practice or as a curatorial activity in favour of CD-Roms and other forms of interactive media over the last several years in Australia whilst in Europe and in the US video has remained as an established institutionalised art form alongside newer media.

So it's not so bad, after all, to be invited onto a panel such as this - though I reiterate I don't speak at all for the 70s (my first video works were produced in 1980, though I was doing painting and printmaking and filmmaking prior to that).

I came to video by abandoning a potential career in film. I had been trained as a film editor at the ABC in Sydney from 1975-1978. It might seem anachronistic that television could be a training ground for film, but in the mid 70s in Australia it was. All - or nearly all - ABC programs at that time were shot and edited on 16mm colour reversal film. Not that video cameras and editing equipment didn't exist (the portapak, we are often tediously reminded, was first introduced by Sony in 1965 and video was well established as a means of production in television in the US & UK well before this era).

The hold up on its use in Australia was due to an industrial dispute in which film editors were demanding to be retrained technically to edit video. The ABC had decided this re-education was irrelevant and that the film editors would be made redundant. ABC management believed that video was so technical on the one hand and so simple (and perhaps "modern" on the other) that it was felt that the most appropriate people to do video editing were technicians rather than film editors. That's how I remember it anyway. Gone would be the arcane art of the trim bin and pic sync and, more importantly, forgotten would be the post-medieval process of apprenticeship by which the "craft" of editing had been traditionally learned.

Of course it's all gone now ,though it's interesting to note that the metaphor of the trim bin and pic sync, the film strip and even the sprocket hole, survived into the simulative structure of many computer editing and compositing systems (such as Quantel Harry, and Flame). These metaphors jumped a generation directly from film to digital imaging, bypassing video.

This was at least partly because video's entirely inefficient processes of editing by only inserting "over" pre-existing images rather than by displacement and the automatic shifting down of the string of images was indeed so cumbersome (even after the ability to generate "offline" Edit Decision Lists was refined) to film editors that it wasn't till the metaphor of film editing could be sustained in setups such as the early Avid that film editors and the film production world in general felt comfortable enough to really abandon film per se in the off-line editing process.

Learning film editing in a TV station wasn't at all a bad training ground. I worked mainly in News and current affairs programs such as TDT (This Day Tonight - in its dying days) and Weekend Magazine as an assistant editor and then as a sound editor. Whereas today news programs can be delivered fully assembled on air directly from an editing suite in those days everything had to be cement spliced in a physical contraption that looked like it belonged in a metal workshop. Use of the hot splicer involved not only your hands to shave away the emulsion at the side of the cut film, but also your feet to pressure the film together so the cement would hold. It was a visceral process which was followed by a high speed sprint down maze-like corridors to a dubbing suite where sound could be mixed on a completely separate sound reel in synchronisation with the film. All this happened often while the rest of the program had already gone to air. The final leg was the sprint to telecine to deliver, like a football pass (it was after all a very "blokey" environment), the two reels of image and sound. This taught the discipline of speed but the news department also taught me that words and music could be, and were, routinely used to anchor or reinforce the audience's perception of the limits within which any image was to be interpreted in the electronic domain. When I left the ABC to go to art school the first video pieces I made were about the implications of the processes of inscription and gloss that the voice over entailed.

My experience of film production, limited as it was, was that of classic Marxist alienation. There was no sense of totality to the process even as a participant in it and I could see it would be at least a decade before I would be the one who would be in a position to make the totality work for him. On the other hand there was an experimental filmmaker Philip MacGuire also working in the News department and his monthly screenings of all kinds of (mostly abstract) American independent film work struck a desire in me to try to find my own way outside the net of the ABC. In 1978 I went to art school where I studied sculpture and printmaking. Three of the major figures of the 80s became my mentors there: Mike Parr and Imants Tillers and Adrian Hall.

There was video equipment (a reel to reel black and white portapak) but no one knew how it worked and no one was brazen enough to want to teach it. It wasn't till a friend was running the inadequacies of video down one day (something I've heard many times since) that I began to think of its strengths in relation to the medium with which I was spending most of my time - printmaking.

The metaphors I carried to video were thus initially from media like screenprinting (colorization was like an animated version of posterisation) and etching (the ability to begin an image anywhere - just by drawing intuitively - this was like using the camera intuitively, in an unstructured but heuristic, way) rather than film.

Later the availability of the Fairlight Computer Video Instrument (CVI) - a machine which I used extensively from 1984 till 1993 - extended and amplified these collocations. Film was beginning to seem inadequate to me because of its anti-intuitive nature (with its scripts and tightly controlled shooting schedules, its extreme reliance on language to communicate intent to a crew during production and its interminable waiting periods during post-production: -even the simplest dissolve had to be sent away to the laboratory to be processed before it could be experienced. (Here is another instance where a film metaphor, in this case an unfortunate one, went directly from film to digital imaging - rendering time being the equivalent of lab processing - skipping the video generation altogether.) Video made it possible to work without scripts; without words even, and in real time. It was either pre-literate or post-verbal. It was closer to painting in its creative process than it was to film. I liked that.

I don't remember when I first discovered there was such a thing as video "art". But I think I probably thought that it was perfectly natural that there should be video art. Or that video could be art. In that I was way out of step with the thinking of most of the people I came into contact with in the video production scene and the Australian art world early 80s.

A series of thirteen "Video Access Centres" had been established by the Whitlam government around the country. These had been modelled on the highly successful Canadian "Challenge for Change" project in which video was used, for example, in communities as a tool for the resolution of intractable disputes - in cases where communication had broken down between aggrieved parties to the extent that they would no longer talk to each other, video was seen as a means of allowing each party to present their point of view with the video makers operating as go-betweens. In this scheme of things video was seen as a social utility with a clear and narrowly compelling function. To think about its possibilities as "art" was seen as a pretentious perversion.

At the same time video wasn't at all readily accepted in the art world. It was almost universally condemned as a failed project both in the art press and in tabloid journalism as extremely compromised as a mass medium with being misused for private intentions.

Susanna Short, the Sydney Morning Herald's art critic wrote in 1982: "it is one of the ironies of video that what is essentially a private medium is engaged in by artists for the purposes of mass communication, then presented to a select audience in a formal, public space... Alternative television, as artists' video has been called, remains accessible only to the converted. Artists have failed to break the constraints of expectation associated with institutionalised TV and have few video outlets as a result". With the advent of interactive work in the early 90s this style of rhetoric was simply dusted off. Writes John McDonald, the current art critic of the Herald, in 1996 in a review of "Burning the Interface: International Artists' CD-ROM": "Perhaps the biggest impediment to the final, unholy triumph of electronic media over traditional craft-based art forms is the boredom factor. In moments of lucidity, even the most dedicated techno-freak must admit that computer art is probably a lot more interesting for the creator than for the consumer. This is partly because of the way we are all pre-programmed to expect instant gratification from anything resembling a TV screen".

It wasn't until Bernice Murphy allowed video into the Art Gallery of NSW when she curated the first Australian Perspecta in 1981 (standing monitors playing video art on plinths side by side with sculptures and paintings) that the Australian art world gave video any consideration. Still it carried no cache. It was almost as redundant then as it seems now (aside from quite mysterious spouts of voguishness as in the last Sydney Biennale). This didn't reflect what was happening overseas, particularly in New York, where "the tribe who worshipped electricity", as Woody Vasulka has called the participants in the first generation of American video artists, had already made inroads into television as an experimental medium and had found, despite video's origins in the anti-commodity process art movement, staunch supporters with serious money in the NY gallery scene (the Castelli-Sonnabend Gallery and the Howard Wise Gallery which later evolved into Electronic Arts Intermix - the major distributor for video art worldwide in the 70s and 80s).

Few galleries here took any notice and few ever have. There were not so many artists in Australia knocking at their doors in any case. Most vocal and articulate were Randelli who seemed to be set on the idea of "proving" that video could be art by "translating" famous works of art into video using a strict set of codified rules which were intended to accentuate the innate character of video over that of film.

One exception to the resistance of Australian galleries to the entreaties of video artists was Roslyn Oxley Gallery, which has consistently supported video in a small side gallery over many years now. Many video artists in Sydney have at one time or another shown work there.

The extreme indifference of Australian television to Video Art was evident well into the late eighties. As late as 1987 I remember that prior to being interviewed about work being screened in the Australian Video Festival on an Australia-wide morning news program the presenter made a point of saying to me: "I'm not the slightest bit interested in anything that you do" and then on air asked about an SBS production of a Dreamtime story "why is it all out of focus?". About my own work he said on air "God you'd have to have good eyes to watch this!". The show's producer was completely unapologetic and confessed he was perplexed about what I'd shown; though his perplexity didn't lead him to any sense of curiosity - the result for him was disinterest. Outside the narrow range of SBS's audience (particularly via the Eat Carpet program) and the occasional screening on ABC programs such as The 7:30 Report these kinds of attitudes seemed to prevail.

Nearly all of my earliest exposure to video art was through books. Installation work incorporating video fared somewhat better under these circumstances than videotape work did in its distorted "transmission" via printed black and white photographs. Nam June Paik's humour and irreverence in his performance works like "TV Bra" and "TV Penis" and in his installations like "Fish TV", "TV Chair" and "Rembrant Automatic" were never difficult to understand in print.

His videotape works as represented in books showed images of recognisable public figures such as Richard Nixon and Allen Ginsberg distorted by magnets or coloured electronically. But it wasn't till years later that I actually saw much of Paik's work intact (apart from as excerpts). Other "images" which appealed or impressed were Richard Serra's sledge hammer-like slogans aimed right at the heart of television, Les Levine's science fiction-like surveillance confabulations, Bruce Nauman's performances of repetitive actions structured around the length of reel-to-reel tapes, and Vito Acconci's threatening performances and acts of personal risk.

The first videotape I remember seeing from the US which had any deep impact on me was Peter Campus' seminal chromakey work "Three Transitions": it seemed the perfect synthesis of image and idea, self and projection; expressing both the shallowness and the depth of the medium.

The first international video artist of any stature who actually came to Sydney was Douglas Davis. Davis and his partner Jane Bell gave a workshop in which I participated in 1981. John Hughes, who was later to co-form the Even Orchestra, was another participant in that workshop. Davis was at the time the art editor of Newsweek magazine as well as being a well known video artist. His ideas were banal but essential. He was dealing with the physicality of the glass screen of the television set, exploring the metaphor of the invisible "barrier" between the viewer and the on-screen artist. He would entice the viewer towards the screen, entreating them to place their hands on his own in order to feel the "coolness" of the screen.

Looking now at my earliest works the influence of Davis and these other artists is palpable. My three screen installation work "Elementary Alphabetical" borrowed overtly from Davis (though I seem to recall this piece came directly out of the workshop to which Davis had brought a large pane of glass specifically for this purpose).

In the tape I inserted myself on either side of an opaque monitor screen: the figure on the interior is attempting to teach the Greek alphabet to the figure (whose hands are all that appear) on the "audience's" side of the screen. It is a fallible transmission full of errors which appear to be as much about failure of memory as about the inexactitude of interpretation. The central monitor showed Callas family photographs being placed as in a game of snap on an upturned monitor bearing my face.

In "I Would Have Run But I Had A Heavy Cold" I enter the water beside a pontoon on the Hawkesbury River and as speedboats zoom by with skiers in trail, I crawl out of the water at the end of the pontoon like a monster from the black lagoon - and come towards the camera repetitively until I am exhausted.

In "Massage" (made with Dianne Lloyd) an actor (Geoff Miller) is being massaged with chromakey coloured greasepaint. The images which appear within the chromakey areas are generic "media" images. The influences of McLuhan and Campus are obvious.

The tape which I still find the most original from that era amongst the many that I made, and which has the most connections on many levels with my later work, was a two monitor piece called "Our Potential Allies". It was based on my direct personal experiences of having worked in television news rather than on my reinterpretations of distant (though demonstrably direct) ideas. It played with the duplicity of the voice-over in the understanding of televised images.

On one screen I am dressed as a pseudo primitive who, when he is not looking directly ahead quizzically into the camera, is looking to his side as though to the second monitor or else down to his lap which, in a series of cutaways reveals a sequence of "real" objects: a bent fork, a mummified frog and a picture of Buzz Aldrin on the moon. The second monitor contains a rapidly edited and umakeyed sequence of generic media images (as in "Massage") which are intercut with found footage of New Guinea drummers whose drumming goes on repetitively over the imagery throughout the piece. The monitor showing the pseudo me sounds out a list of instructions issued by the office of General MacArthur to American soldiers fighting in New Guinea during World War II which I had discovered in the back of a book in a Mount Hagen bookshop on a trip I made to New Guinea in 1980. It contained statements like "Always treat the natives as your equals even if you do not think of them as your equals". The piece is peppered with a personal visual code which plays with the idea of the serendipity of meaning in the random associations made possible by the TV tuner (pre-remote control).

In 1982 I embarked on a journey to Japan which eventually changed many of the things I had constructed about the way I thought about myself and about my work. I wanted to enter Japan by a roundabout way - a kind of back route, as though I was sneaking up on it by surprise. I travelled via Manila, Hong Kong and Macau and then on to Taiwan and Naha in Okinawa. From Okinawa I travelled by boat to the Japanese island of Kyushu and then by train as far as Hiroshima. I arrived in Tokyo by boat. This route entailed many memories of the War. I had in mind that I would be making a companion piece to "Our Potential Allies" and I wanted to collect material in the form of experiences (I didn't travel with a video camera, which in those days would have still been completely impracticable for a solo traveller because of the size and weight factors). What I found along the way though was that my experience of and exposure to the extraordinary uses to which video and television were being put in these few Asian cultures were way out of the gamut of anything one was likely to experience in Australia at that time. At the same time these encounters produced a kind of ironic resonance with what I'd read (and the little I'd seen) of video installation. After the initial thrill of seeing the first television in shop windows when TV was first introduced to Australia in 1954, the electronic image retreated into the dark interior of Australian domesticity for many years.

At my first stop in Manila I encountered a huge television set in a windy park by the bay. It was three or four metres high and had a plastic screen which billowed in the wind. It was extraordinary to look at. In retrospect it was probably the most meaningful television experience of my life.

It was, I discovered, used as a rear screen film projector in the evenings. The inside housed no electronics; only a 16mm film projector. The image had been rehoused to make it desirable, up-to-date, acceptable. It was a giant statement about how the image is not really embedded in the medium and how the medium can ultimately be seen as an object, a consumer item and that the purpose of the image in this system was not to produce meaning but to simply illustrate what the object does.

In Macau's casino I discovered a novel use of surveillance cameras. Each of a set of four lifts had a camera in the centre of its ceiling - pointing down on the heads and shoulders of its occupants. Its purpose was supposedly to inform the people waiting which lift was the most crowded so they could move to wait by the door of an emptier one. But the effect was both novel and humorous - all the more so for me because this was the first "surveillance installation" I had actually seen.

In Japan I discovered firstly that the TV set was functioning in much the same way as in Australia. Most chuka ryori ten (Chinese cooking shops), the monetary limits of my gourmet experiences in those days, had the incessant TV I was familiar with from Australian pubs. Then I started to notice that the television was beginning to make appearances in, to me, unfamiliar public places like banks and classrooms and that its function within private spaces was also mutable.

It was, I recall, quite obvious that the Japanese were surprisingly comfortable about integrating the electronic image (or was it the electronic image product or electronic image object?) with their idea of their own traditions.

I remember being startled by the sight of a pay TV (ie. a TV set with a money slot which controlled a timer in 10 minute increments) installed next to a scroll painting and lacquerware item in the tokonoma (display alcove) in a countryside ryokan (inn). The video object was beginning to be integrated into both interior and exterior architectural space in both the public and private domains. Moreover it was becoming for the Japanese a culturally-specific object. In 1985, for example, Matsushita began advertising TV sets which were designed to be watched from a kneeling position in a tatami mat room.

The Sony consumer headquarters in Ginza, built in the early 80s, sported an entire wall of monitors that was seven or eight stories high. These carried no images but could be programmed to be black or white, forming crude animations with seasonal themes (like snow flakes falling on a Christmas tree in winter).

Around '86 the Wave building (a multi story music department store) in Roppongi opened with an elegant facade which was lined with tiny black and white monitors which flashed animated geometric graphics which resolved as the name of the store.

Around this time also the first large outdoor colour screens began to appear as though in imitation of the screens which are seen in the opening sequences of "Blade Runner" (1982). By 1986 video screens were ubiquitous in Tokyo. Banks of monitors began appearing even in back lanes and the final absurd epiphany, for me at least, was that TV sets were installed into the utility poles which lined the length of the main thoroughfare leading from Shibuya station up to the Tokyu department store.

Within this context video art operated in a kind of kamikaze mode which fulfilled the ultimate role I'd already seen years before in the giant TV set in Manilla: illustrating the hardware.

By the same token, and probably for the same reasons, the hardware itself was entirely disposable and infinitely renewable. In the mid 80s it was possible to walk around any Tokyo suburb and pickup fully-functional TV sets which had been discarded as trash. (Of course foreigners were the only ones who actually did this. Canadian video artist Byron Black had a room full of functioning TVs he'd acquired in this way.)

But in the midst of this Video Art, whatever it was, had arrived. I had noticed from my arrival in Japan that the answer to "what do you do?" did not arouse the confusion or hostility it was liable to in Australia but a nod of understanding (as if to say "Yes that should be possible") even from people who had never heard of Video Art. The opportunities for video artists to work within this environment were plentiful. Japan had, after all, a vested interest in seeing video as a "cultural asset".

By the mid eighties Video Art exhibitions from the States had started appearing fairly regularly in Tokyo department stores. Barbara London for example, the Curator of Video at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, brought a show of American work to Isetan Department store in Yurakucho in 1985.

The increasing profusion of video screens in the streets in areas such as Shibuya led to extraordinary opportunities for video artists to produce non-commercial work in a thoroughly commercial environment. When Seibu's specialist Seed store opened in 1986 I was part of the production crew of the first performance in Seed Hall, working in conjunction with Koharu Kisaragi's Island theatre group, who sang live to images I'd edited.

Throughout 1986 I was invited as an artist in residence to make material for Marui department store in Shibuya. They had the largest outdoor screen at the time and employed a team of artists and musicians to make non-commercial material for the screen.

There was also ample opportunity to work with other musicians including live performances with trumpeter Jun Miyake at Ink Stick nightclub and video clip work with Yukihiro Takahashi of YMO and Sandii and the Sunsetz amongst others. It is worth pointing out that nearly all of the activities in which I engaged in Japan would have been anathema in the Australian art world at that time (when even using music in videos was considered to be a form of "selling out", let alone actually working within a redolently "commercial" environment). When I returned to Australia from 1987 my work found appeal more for the governmental and bureaucratic sectors than for the commercial environment. (I did commissions for the Bicentennial Travelling Exhibition, the Powerhouse Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and Luna Park.)

It's worth noting that in 1982 when I first arrived in Japan video art was still a pretty obscure activity. It centred around one gallery: Video Gallery Scan run by the irrepressible Fujiko Nakaya. Many western artists had begun arriving in Japan around the early 80s. Bill Viola had been there on a fellowship the year before I arrived.

Michael Goldberg, a well-known Canadian video artist who had been involved with the formation of the Video Inn in Vancouver had arrived in the early 70s figuring that if all this equipment is coming from Japan something interesting must be happening on the art front. He decided to go and check it out and found that no one had even heard of Video Art. He made contact with Professor Katsuhiro Yamaguchi and with fog sculptor Nakaya and from there the germ of Scan was born. It was sustained for over a decade, running weekly screenings (my first solo exhibition in Japan was there) and then organising a number of major festivals, competitions and other events. It became the location at which you could get in touch with the entire video art community both locally and internationally. By 1983 Tokyo was beginning to seem such a magnet for video artists as Rome was for painters during the Renaissance.

Gary Hill worked on "Uru Aru" there, Ken Feingold, Paul Wong, John Sanborn, Shelly Silver, David Blair and Dan Reeves (amongst many others) all made pieces or held exhibitions there. Paik was also a fairly frequent visitor and Stelarc was another resident for 17 years living in Yokohama and exhibiting regularly in the Kanda galleries.

It would be misleading not to suggest that the world of Scan and the world of department stores, music videos and commercials stayed well apart. However they became increasingly difficult to separate. Toshio Iwai for example, one of Japan's leading media artists, has often done work such as games development and TV production (like "Ugo Ugo Lhuga") and he frequently exhibited this alongside work which more readily fits the gallery domain.

Ultimately for me the shift into that domain ironically allowed me to realise (even if it was a "bubble"-induced fantasy) the idea of communal interaction persued in other ways by the Video Access movement in Australia.

Peter Callas
1998

© and the author.
Courtesy of CCP and 200
Gertrude Street