Most Video Art is boring. Some say Video Art is an oxymoron. A lot of times it's like going to church. You sit in a room and have to have to watch television. Usually, it is someones idea of the world put on video. While some of it can be quite beautiful, most of the time it is too long winded. While watching commercial television, you can always get up in the middle of the program and not offend anyone. Then there are the forced breaks you get, the commercials. Many times that's the best part of whatever you are watching. There is real art in that, getting your point across in 30 seconds. Video artists could learn from that.

What I have been doing, along with my ex-wife Debla, for the last 10 years is try to make Video Art a little less boring. What we tried to do is to take video and put it in form that is both esthetic and interesting, using the video as one element of the piece, not necessarily the focus of the work. Other elements could be anything. Stone, computers, motors, wood, feathers, steel or fiberglass. Pretty much anything I might have laying about the studio. Many of the pieces have some movement to them. Either by batteries or with wires going to them. It always is a group effort. I usually work with Debla (although we haven't worked on a piece since we split up) and Greg Reeves who is a tech/mech genius.

The most important part, I think, is to create work and let it go. Let it make it's own impression on people. That is the most fun part of doing a piece, seeing peoples' reaction to it. No matter how many times you tell people about what you are trying to say, they always come up with their own impression of the work. The best example of this is when we used a particularly violent segment of video in a piece. The reason we used it was to show how people become desensitized to violence on television, but, when you see something on television that you know is real, it no longer becomes television and become the real thing again. Violent. The reviewer for the Seattle Weekly wrote, "The horrorifing literalness defied art." I guess they missed the point.

Hopefully, in the next few months, I will be able to put the reviews and photos of the various shows/pieces on the homepage. It may take some time, however.

Thanks,

Kurt