Video sculptures, a type of video installation

Video installation

Video installation is a contemporary art form that combines video technology with installation art, making use of all aspects of the surrounding environment to affect the audience. Tracing its origins to the birth of video art in the 1970s, it has increased in popularity as digital video production...

, involve one or more video screens that spectators move among or stand in front of. Video sculptures formed of more than one screen may broadcast a single program or may simultaneously broadcast different interconnected sequences on several channels. The screens of which the sculpture is comprised can be arranged in many different ways. For example, they can be suspended from a ceiling, aligned and stacked to make a video wall

Video wall

A video wall consists of multiple computer monitors, video projectors, or television sets tiled together contiguously or overlapped in order to form one large screen...

 or even randomly stacked on top of each other. In some cases only a television

Television

Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...

 cabinet is displayed or a cabinet is emptied of its contents and displayed with something else inside. Video sculpture is a medium that offers performing artists a chance to have a more permanent artistic forum.

History

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, artists Wolf Vostell

Wolf Vostell

Wolf Vostell was a German painter, sculptor, noise music maker and Happening artist of the second half of the 20th century. Wolf Vostell is considered one of the pioneers of video art, environment-sculptures, Happenings and the Fluxus Movement...

 and Edward Kienholz

Edward Kienholz

Edward Kienholz was an American installation artist whose work was highly critical of aspects of modern life. From 1972 onwards, he assembled much of his artwork in close collaboration with his artistic partner and wife, Nancy Reddin Kienholz...

 began experimenting with TVs by using them in their happenings and assemblages respectively. In March 1963, Nam June Paik

Nam June Paik

Nam June Paik was a Korean American artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the first video artist....

's debuted his video sculpture entitled Music/Electronic Television at the Parnass Gallery in Wupertal, which used 13 doctored televisions. In May of the same year, Vostell's TV-dé-coll/age at the Smolin Gallery in New York utilized six televisions, each with an anomaly. Shigeko Kubota

Shigeko Kubota

is a visual and performance artist born in Niigata Prefecture, Japan, in 1937. She studied sculpture at the Tokyo University of Education, and completed her studies at New York University and at the New School for Social Research in the early 1960s. She became vice chairman of the Fluxus...

 was also an innovator in the use of video in sculptural form. Her Duchampiana: Nude Descending a Staircase was the first video sculpture acquired by the Museum of Modern Art

Museum of Modern Art

The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world...

. This work is a reference to Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp

Marcel Duchamp was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art...

's Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2

Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2

-External links:* at the Philadelphia Museum of Art* from Life magazine...

(1912) Video sculpturist are becoming influential among early 21st century artists. One of Paik's video sculptures in which the six windows of a 1936 Chrysler Airstream

Chrysler Airstream

The Chrysler Airstream was an automobile produced by the Chrysler division of the Chrysler Corporation in 1935-1936. The Airstream was a conventional looking automobile that was trimmed to evoke a feeling of streamlined design...

 were replaced with video monitors sold for $75,000 in 2002.

Charlotte Moorman

Charlotte Moorman

Madeline Charlotte Moorman Garside was an American cellist and performance artist.She was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. She studied cello from age ten and won a scholarship to Centenary College where she took her B.A. in music in 1955. She received her M.A...

 was a notable subject of video sculptures as a renowned topless cellist.