Video Art in Slovenia
.jpg)
Video Art in Slovenia
The beginnings
Video was pioneered within conceptual art practice. Nuša and Srečo Dragan, the first video artists in Slovenia, initially operated as a part of OHO, a group of Slovene conceptual artists. For them, video constituted an element of artistic action and at the same time was a documentation tool. It was mainly understood as a means of immediate interactive communication with the audience.
It was not until the end of the 1970s that Miha Vipotnik explored the structure and aesthetic effects of the electronic image. With professional TV equipment and a synthesiser based at the Televizija Slovenija, he created a different kind of video art which focused on the manipulation and transformation of image and editing.
Video as an alternative medium
The development of video art in Slovenia during the 1980s arose from two specific local subcultures: the Students' Cultural and Art Centre (later to become ŠKUC Association) and the Students' Cultural Forum Society (SKD Forum, later to become Forum Ljubljana). Both independent centres established video sections in 1982. Most of the video works made by video artists and groups active throughout the 1980s were ŠKUC-Forum independent video productions.
Punk culture and its artistic offshoots had a big impact in the shift of art mediums. At this time numerous new social movements, such as the gay and lesbian movements, emerged from Ljubljana's underground. In this context, video established itself quickly as an appropriate medium of expression. Its simple handling and extremely fast production and reproduction made video one of the most popular and radical forms of media for the 80s generation.
The abundant video production and practice of the 1980s within the 'Ljubljana subculture' was not easily placed in a high art context. In 1984 Brane Kovič wrote about the changed role of video and its new tendencies. Events within the society, state rituals, violence, sexuality, myths and taboos of the socialist system had become important references for the creators of art and art-documentary videos. They preferred to describe themselves within the context of the alternative (punk and rock) culture, using Disko FV and the ŠKUC Gallery as their main venues, rather than within the context of (modernist) art, even though several of them trained at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design. Such was the case with Dušan Mandić, at the time a member of the Meje kontrole No 4 (video) art group. In 1983 and 1984 he was the only one to write about the ŠKUC-Forum Video Production. Besides identifying the distinctive features of this, including mass production, he also defined the distinction between the 'formalistic approach to the medium' of video as seen in the 1970s and the 'socially active audio-visual research' of the 1980s.
International programming and establishment of the medium
Miha Vipotnik was one of the founders of the International Biennial VIDEO CD, hekd for the first time at the Cankarjev dom in 1983, which established video in the institutional sense. In the next three biennials he directed, it brought international video art to Slovenia, enabled communication with guest artists and curators, and gradually affirmed Slovene video production in the international arena. In the late 1980s, Vipotnik also prepared several presentations of Yugoslav video in co-operation with American curator Kathy Rae Huffman. These were presented in Canada and the USA, accompanied by introductory notes and critical texts. The biennial continued through until the end of the decade.
Video production in the 1990s
Since the end of the 1980s and especially in the 1990s, Radio-Television Slovenia, as part of its culture and art programme, has been intensively producing artistic video projects. Criticism, social engagement and variations in political and social themes coupled with experimentation in languages, images and technology are the major features of most Slovene video productions.
Video films were not merely a means of expression but also a method of documenting political events. Documentary video projects - created by amateurs with VHS equipment and by independent film and video groups with professional video equipment - captured different periods of political and social struggle in Slovenia: for example the 'trial of the four' in 1988, where four journalists were tried for allegedly stealing and publishing Federal Army documents; the 10-day war in Slovenia in 1991 against the Federal Yugoslav Army; and at the end of 1991, protests against attempts to abolish abortion rights. The 1990s, with the democratisation of Slovene political spheres, witnessed new forms of investigative journalism which utilised documentary video materials.
Video was now more visible in the mainstream cultural sphere and could be found in individual presentations, exhibitions and projections at the Museum of Modern Art, ŠKUC and Fine Artists Society galleries, MKC Maribor Youth Culture Centre and RTV Slovenia, as well as in the programming of commercial TV station Kanal A in its early stage. It could also be seen at the Festival of Slovene Video in Idrija (1992, 1998) and at the Video/Film Dance Festival in Ljubljana (1991–1996).
Avoiding classification
In the late 1980s and 1990s, video became increasingly tied to individual authors. It established itself as an independent medium and as a constituting element of expression in multimedia projects and installations.
Video productions are not as easily classified as video art, video theatre, video dance, video performance, or video installation. Most projects could belong to one or to all these fields at the same time. Often a music video, because of its specifically-defined theme, could hardly be considered to belong to this category (eg Peter Vezjak with Laibach or Borghesia). Video art often dealt with political or social themes (Marina Gržinić and Aina Šmid, Zemira Alajbegović with Neven Korda etc) and was frequently interdisciplinary, connecting with theatre, film, performance and music. Videos are rendered as complex stories, approaching film and theatre, and only in rare cases as a digital experiment. At the same time, video has become an indispensable element of intermedia and visual art practices.
Archiving and research
First screenings or premieres of videos are often held at the Mladinsko Theatre or at the Slovenian Cinematheque. Texts on video are written according to the context in which a video first appears, by visual arts or film critics or in the context of culture in general. Slovenia has several travelling video programmes, some of them derive from Videodokument, the first systematic research of video art in Slovenia, conducted by SCCA-Ljubljana between 1994 and 1999. Since 2005 it has been enhanced by the DIVA Station, an ongoing physical and web archive of video art. In the today's new media sphere the scope has expanded from video art to media art and (short) film. In 2014 the Museum of Modern Art established the Web Museum, designed as a repository for digital audiovisual contemporary art and time-based art, which also provides online access to AV materials.