Vidéo Vintage 1963-1983 at Centre Pompidou Revisits Early Video Art

The exhibition "Vidéo Vintage 1963-1983" at Centre Pompidou in Paris (February 8 – May 7, 2012) presented over seventy canonical videos from the Nouveaux Médias collection of the Musée National d'Art Moderne, spanning two decades from the emergence to the recognition of video art. The show was organized into three sections: self-filming, television, and conceptual approaches. The first two sections featured small orange-and-brown lounges with formica, velvet sofas, and houseplants, where visitors encountered works such as Paul McCarthy's "Spitting on the Camera Lens" (1974), Valie Export's "Body Tape" (1970), and Bruce Nauman's "Bouncing in the Corner 1 and 2 (Upside Down)" (1968-1969). The third section parodied period museum displays with monitors on white pedestals. Key works included Dara Birnbaum's "Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman" (1978-1979), Ant Farm's "Media Burn" (1975), Vito Acconci's "Centers" (1971), and Sanja Iveković's "Meeting Point" (1978). The exhibition also featured three flat-screen videos by Sanja Iveković, Robert Filliou, and Les Levine as a preamble, signaling the obsolescence of the cathode-ray tube and the vintage status of video art, now inseparable from movements like Fluxus and conceptual art.