M.Z. The first question I have is about your specialty, when does video art arise and in what context?

K.B. It’s a good question because the answer really depends on one’s perspective. It depends on the region or country we’re talking about. Video equipment actually came up in the United States in the mid-1960s. Within the art scene it fell in the right context i.e. that of the 1960s when there was a strong tendency in contemporary art to question representative art forms such as painting or sculpture. It was the time of the performative, of processual and ephemeral art forms, and video art arises at that very time. Many people currently have little understanding of the fact that the upcoming of video meant a great revolution in the art field and for the moving image because SONY’s first portable camera, the first that existed in history, allowed the artist to control image and sound at the same time. Compared to film, the revolutionary aspect was that 1. you could adapt a monitor to the camera and immediately see what you were recording, which was not the case with film. Film required development before you could see what you shot. 2. Film required a team of people working together: e.g. the operator and the sound person. But with the SONY Portapak one person could control the recording of the image and the sound at the same time. Alltogether this was a great revolution in terms of the autonomy and independence of the artist! I would like to come back to what I said at the beginning, when talking about a topographical perspective regarding the history of video art. We tend to forget that at the beginning video equipment was available only in certain countries. So for example video equipment came to Germany or Austria right after the United States, it came to England some years later, and of course it reached certain parts of Asia, South America, or Eastern Europe, decades after it was available in the USA. Recently I was talking with Sanja Ivekovic, who is a celebrated artist from Croatia. Two years ago, we produced a new work with her, and while we were talking about our video art production I asked her about the availability of video eqipment in former Yugoslavia at the time when she produced her first video works in the mid 1970s. Ivekovic and her fellow video pioneers could produce their early works only, because there was a gallerist in Venice who had a set of video equipment that he gave to Yugoslav artists for a while so that they could produce video art works. That means that in former Yugoslavia an individual initiative of a gallery owner could make it possible for the early video art to exist .. So we can see that the history of video art is rooted in the history of technology.

M.Z. I appreciate your answer about all this context because the reflections I try to make with the anniversary of the one hundred years of Fountain, have to do with this artist who was trying to change the possibilities of art using technique as part about it, what do you think in this respect?

K.B. Of course the Fountain was another great revolution in the arts, if not the biggest.. The fact that something pre-fabricated, something that is not made by the hands of the genius / the creator / the artist, but something trivial was adopted and taken into the context of the exhibition or the Museum, this was the great revolution because it questions many things: It questions the aspect of handycrafts, it questions the authorship, because it favors the fact that art equals the idea and not the handycraft. Art equals handycraft is an understanding of the nineteenth century, but even today there are people that think that a good painting needs to have a high degree of iconicity. This is still seen in the German language: The noun “Kunst” (= art) comes from the verb “können” (= “to be able to”, “to have a skill”), and this is a very strong idea…. So the revolution of the Fountain is that here the idea overcomes the handycraft.

M.Z. In regards of authorship, do you think that in the practices of video art authorship was also involved?

K.B. Yes, it is totally related to the above said from the very beginning of the existence of video art. From the early phase of video art until today, many artists make use of “found footage” or “found imagery”, i.e. images that were taken from sources such as television, advertisement and film. The very pioneers of video art, Wolf Vostell and Nam June Paik, both used television images and manipulated them in order to criticize television, to critisize the manipulative potential of the mass media, etc. I think that in this sense also video art is not necessarily rooted in “original” or “unique” images created or constructed by an artist. Video art also can take images out of one context and and puts them into another context. In some sense, this is the same what Duchamp did with the readymades.

M.Z. We live in a world of many wars, going back to the World Wars, which were fundamental in the transformation of Western thought, what do you think were the transformations they produced in the field of art?

K.B. I could mention two aspects. One is related to the First World War, an aspect that the artist Kader Attia worked on in his great piece “The Repair from Occident to Extra-Occidental Cultures,”: In the First World War, the medical development improved so that a human being that suffered from bullets could be saved by surgery. That was very new, compared to previous wars, it also changed the perception of the human being and the body. Despite the injuries that war victims suffered from they still survived. This gives a new vision of the human being, a fragmented one. The other aspect is the connection between the war machine, the arsenals and cinema. I suppose you remember Paul Virilio’s famous book “War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception”, written in 1989. He gives a very direct comparison between how weapons function and how the camera works.
I would like to mention a complete change in the understanding of art in West Germany after World War II: Any realistic or even figurative art with a certain political attitude behind was under the suspicion of agitation or manipulation. So, even though before the war in Germany there was a strong tradition of critical figurative art with artist like George Grosz e.g., this tradition was not revived after World War II, this school was disappearing. It was considered something dangerous because of the experience with Nazi art.. In the GDR (German Democratic Republic) it was different because of the doctrine of the Sociaist realism that favoured the idea of art educating the people by depicting reality “in its revolutionary development”….

M.Z. Speaking of these wars and the changes they produce, do you consider that the readymade formulated a revolution in art? Do you think that the current pieces of art, which address the complex context of the world we are living in these days, also frame a revolution?

K.B. I think that Duchamp changed the relationship between the artist, the art work and the viewer, because when a work of art is rather a mere idea, you expect a different perception , you expect the viewer to decode the idea more than to involve in the the aesthetic process .
Obviously there is a specific moment (which I find difficult to determine with precision timewise) in which art and the broader public, in a certain way, separated in some sense. Maybe this is something that depends on the Fountain and the concept of the readymade by of Marcel Duchamp… I have the feeling that from the early 20th century contemporary art is more demanding intellectually than in previous centuries, and that is perhaps why probably the broader public feels more seperated from many forms of contemporary art. We are living in a world in which contemporary art is quite elitist. And because of that, I have the impression that this type of revolution in the art field that Marcel Duchamp caused is almost impossible today, because the contemporary art field is ruled by a bunch of specialists. When someone would come up with a revolutionary idea or let’s say, a revolutionary gesture, it is only circulating in this elitist circle of specialists and that is why I think that revolutions in contemporary art are difficult to see. However, I think that art or artists have an impact on society.. Today, a piece of art almost never has the possibility to change the world per se. But maybe it changes a certain aspect: When you think e.g. about the performance of Alexandra Pirici and Manuel Pelmuş, when they turned the monnumental into the immaterial it is something that is somewhat revolutionary, a small revolution in within the process of deconstructing the monument.

M.Z. Do you think we can still use the concept of readymade these days, or do you think we are talking about something different?

K.B. I think the intellectual concept of the readymade as such is not exhausted. Think about appropriation art, the found footage, any form of quotations in art, all this roots in the idea of the readymade.