The Getty Gets Serious About Video
By Megan • Dec 10th, 2007 • Category: News for Creatives (archives) Carol Kino reports:
“EARLY this year the artist Martin von Haselberg, better known as one-half of the Kipper Kids performance duo, made a pilgrimage to the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles to view a video he hadn’t seen since he created it in 1976. The institute had just rediscovered it in the Long Beach Museum of Art video archives, a trove of early work that the institute acquired in December 2005. In many ways the tape is typical of the years when video was an exciting new art form, ripe for cheap experimentation, as well as a novel way to document another relatively new medium, performance art. The tape’s first half shows Mr. von Haselberg playing around with technology as he mugs behind a magnifying lens that grotesquely enlarges and distorts his features.
Today, however, the Getty is treating that archive, larks and all, with the seriousness that befits a significant slice of art history. Though the research institute has been slowly building its video holdings since it opened in 1982, the Long Beach acquisition suddenly transformed its collection into one of the world’s largest.
And since then, as a tiny team of institute staff members carefully catalog and conserve these holdings, they have in several cases rediscovered and reunited artists with long-lost work.”
Megan is a creative producer at Wise Elephant.
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