This is the most complete and up-to-date survey available
of an art form born just over forty years ago and now seen everywhere.

Video art has moved from brief showings on tiny screens in alternative art spaces to dominance in international exhibitions and artistic events, in which vast video installations sometimes occupy factory-sized buildings or the walls of an entire city block. It embraces all the significant art ideas and forms of recent times – from Abstract, Conceptual, Minimal, Performance and Pop art, to photography and film.

In this postmedium age, artists are combining and recombining video with a vast array of other materials – digital video, film, DVD, computer art, CD-ROM, graphics and animation – to form new artistic expressions.

Video Art offers a history of the medium seen from the perspectives of its early practitioners – such as Bruce Nauman and Vito Acconci, through the vast array of conceptual, political, personal and lyrical installations of the 1980s and 1990s by such artists as Gary Hill, Bill Viola, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Mary Lucier and Michal Rovner, to the present digital revolution.

Michael Rush examines some of the most pioneering works and influences to have emerged internationally, as well as the recent use of video not only in multi-screen installations mixing sound and visuals, but also immersive environments such as Virtual Reality, aesthetic surveillance, and alternative sculpture that combines solid forms with moving image.

Michael Rush writes regularly on video, film and other media for international newspapers and journals. He is the author of Thames & Hudson’s New Media in Art, and is also the Director of the Rose Museum, Brandeis University, Massachusetts.