March 15, 2008 – June 8, 2008 at the Getty Center

California Video, a featured Getty Center Exhibition, chronicles four decades of diverse artistic experimentation in California. Video has become one of the most common mediums used by contemporary artists throughout the world, but it’s deepest developmental roots lie in Greater Los Angeles, San Diego, and the San Francisco Bay Area. The extraordinary variety of video art presents a unique problem of classification and comparison; differing artistic intentions and goals have drawn a wide array of audiences and elicited vastly dissimilar experiences.

Low-cost, light-weight, easy-to-operate video gear has become as inexpensive as a cell phone. In fact, images recorded on camcorders and phones have entered the broadcast realm as actualities and culture-changing influences. During the late `60s and `70s portable video gear was expensive, cumbersome, limited by emergent technologies, disparaged by “professional” television engineers and executives, and seemed destined for a doubtful, “fringe-art” future. Visual artists led the way in video experiments and, as the form evolved, it became evident that is was a viable medium and revolutionary tool that could alter the way art was made and distributed.

Early Video Art efforts differ greatly, but share an important trait; the desire to produce work that is distinctly unlike commercial television or film. Audiences were exposed to electronic canvases and sculptures, abstract expressions, video used as an adjunct to live performance and as a potent form of political art. As Video Art evolved throughout the late `70s and `80s, it became an accepted medium for gallery display, prompting a rapid development of technical advances such as color video, precise editing equipment, basic special effects, and sophisticated sound reproduction.

These advances, along with the remarkable new possibilities offered by digital and High Definition video, have led artists to explore ever-evolving forms of performance, narrative, political activism, and effects-driven presentation. Previously these works were hampered by the limitations of previous technologies such as: slide projector arrays and film projectors that require a darkened-room and a soundtrack to mask the mechanical operating noises. Video projectors now empower artists to create innovative forms of installation where video art can occupy space with sculptural and architectural components and blur the margin between perceptions and reality.

The artists featured in this exhibition, including Video Free America’s Skip Sweeney, provide provocative samples of California video art and its rich history of experimentation. Video Free America, founded in 1970, continues to lead this innovation and experimentation, and Skip has mastered marrying video to corporate needs, marketing goals and educational curricula.

California Video is a joint effort of the Getty Research Institute and the J. Paul Getty Museum.

View California Video at the Getty Museum Site.

Mr. Sweeney seems to have spent the greater part of his life recording the equivalent of home movies starring his parents and assorted siblings. One result is ”My Father Sold Studebakers,” covering the life and death of his car-salesman dad. It will be repeated on public television this June as a Father’s Day special. In 1972, a year after his father died, Mr. Sweeney’s rather proper mother, Bernardine, startled her family by suddenly eloping with Wilbur Stump, a piano-bar performer who had been through, among other things, seven divorces and four hospitalizations for alcoholism.

Completed last year, the film begins as a straightforward interview with Mrs. Stump. Wilbur Stump, 15 years her senior, died in 1982. They had had 10 happy years of marriage. Now, Mrs. Stump recalls how she met ”this old geezer” performing at the local bar near the family’s summer-vacation home. Mr. Stump was quite bald and missing two front teeth, she says, but was wearing a kind of dapper outfit. ”Can you play ‘You’re Blase’?” she asked. ”Lady, you’ve got class,” responded Mr. Stump. She later found out that it was one of his standard lines with customers. ”It was unthinkable that I’d fall in love with him,” she says, ”but I did.”

As Mrs. Stump tells her story, several of her children – including Skip Sweeney, who remains off camera -ask her questions and add their own details. There were problems. Mrs. Stump is a practicing Roman Catholic and her marriage to a divorced man was not taken lightly. But, after more than two years of petitioning Rome, she managed to get Mr. Stump’s former marriages officially annulled. More complicated, the couple had to contend with what they perceived as the disapproving attitudes of some of her children. Even now, she is compelled to observe that ”Wilbur was a lot smarter than you guys thought.”

What finally emerges is not just the unusual story of Bernardine and Wilbur Stump but the portrait of an entire family, crammed with tensions and laughs, estrangements and reconciliations. As one daughter laughingly observes, ”The guilt trips never end.” But neither does the love that clearly binds together all of these very different individuals. Commenting on the success of Mrs. Stump’s marriage, a friend explains that ”your mother let Wilbur Stump be Wilbur Stump.” Meanwhile, on a record album, Mr. Stump can be heard singing: ”And I’ll follow where she takes me/Though it leads to God-knows-where/As long as she loves me/What the hell do I care.” Mr. Sweeney has skillfully captured the special humor and poignancy of our ordinary lives.

By JOHN J. O’CONNOR
The New York Times
Sunday Arts Section
Published: May 9, 1986