Video: The Aesthetics of

Narcissism
“ It was a commonplace of criticism in the 1960s that a strict
application of symmetry allowed a painter “to point to the center of
the canvas’ and, thus in doing, to invoke the internal structure of the
picture-object. Thus “pointing to the center” was made to serve as one
of the many blocks in that intricately constructed arch by which the
criticism of the last decade sought to connect art to ethics through the
“aesthetics of acknowledgement” But what does it mean to point to
the center
of a TV screen?

So opens Rosalind Krauss’s seminal text. Seminal as term has perhaps become almost
anodyne, such is its grave misuse and overuse, nevertheless in this essay Krauss seeds
and births the most significant thoughts on the nature of video.

This essay remains eternally prescient, even its footnotes and asides bear bitter fruit. Re-
reading in haste I was struck by Krauss’s awareness of the disservice done to art by the
“mass media” and artists’ involvement within it – an issue, nay fact, so crucial,
unfathomable and impossible today.

“I do wish to make one connection here. And that is between the

institution of a self formed by video feedback and the real situation
that exists in the art world from which the makers of video to come. In
the last fifteen years that the world has been deeply and disastrously
affected by it’s relation to mass media. That an artist’s work be
published, reproduced and disseminated through the media has
become, for the generation that has matured in the course of the last
decade, virtually the only means of verifying its existence as art. The
demand for instant replay in the media – in fact the creation of the
work that literally does not exist outside of that replay, as in true
conceptual art and its nether side, body art – finds its obvious
correlative in an aesthetic mode by which the self is created through
the electronic device of feedback.”

Thirty years later, caught in a complex mediatized, electronic web, we remain woefully
lacking in our understanding of our own pathologies, systems of projection and modes of
identification defined by the technologies to which we are bound. Depending on how you
feel – the ‘disaster’ is the defining current or aqua vita in which we now flow.

Krauss recognises the medium of video as primarily psychological and in referencing

artists’ use of their own bodies within their work, equates video as a bracketing of the
body between camera and monitor. She speaks of a ‘sustained tautology’ from a plane of
vision to the eyes of a projected double on the screen/monitor/mirror.

She draws our attention to the meanings of the word medium as a human receiver and
sender of messages while recognising as crucial, video’s capacity to record and transmit
at the same time and goes on to cite key works which confront the properties and essence
of the medium in a critical way – exploring self-encapsulation and a ‘collapsed present’.
She makes us understand that the relation to the mirror image concerns the vanquishing
of separateness, attempts to erase the difference between subject and object, while
acknowledging the separation on which this desire is founded.

She says this and much, much more and her saying continues to seed across time.

READ IT.

THEN READ IT AGAIN.

Despite what I have said regarding texts not read –I am forevermore grateful for having
encountered The Aesthetics of Narcissism.

In my secret world, which I occupy from time to time as a Great Tyrant of Manners,
Ethics and Aesthetics – all literate art students will be required to read this essay. For
those who are illiterate or blind I will read it out-loud myself.

Those who do not succumb will be sentenced to hard labour in the mirror demolition
depot; a highly unpleasant form of work – since one must do this manually and the daily
quota is high. One must shatter one’s self-image a thousand times per day.