The opportunity to edit an issue of the College Art Association's Art Journal provides yet another chance for the academic art history community to rediscover the roles of video in today's culture. As we prepare this issue, we are looking forward to a veritable catalogue of major video representation 20 within the art world: Bill Viola's representation of the United States in the 1995 Venice Biennale; the Henry Art Museum's touring Gary Hill exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum; Bruce Nauman's Walker Art Center-organized traveling retrospective and Barbara London's international survey of video installation art, both at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; Bruce and Norman Yonemoto's exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; a Joan Jonas retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; new media galleries and flexible exhibition spaces at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; video installations by Mary Lucier and Shigeko Kubota in the Whitney Museum of American Art's permanent collection (with a survey of Kubota's new video sculptures also scheduled); Nam June Paik's touring exhibition The Information Superhighway; and finally, the preparation of a largescale historical video exhibition by the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, England.
At this same time, such artists as Jonas were manipulating the video camera within their performances and extending the space of their actions through the closed-circuit camera and videotape. Jonas's Vertical Roll (fig. 6) reimagines the performance space as it plays with the viewer's perception of the performance, rearticulating the dancer's body and movements on video. campus, in an extraordinary period of production, created the work Three Transitions (1973), a videotape that extended the convention of self-portraiture and the illusions of representational image making through the unique properties of the medium. His video installations, including mem (fig. 7), which employed a closed-circuit video camera and projector to manipulate the viewer within the exhibition space, were to have a profound influence on a new generation of artists. Jonas and campus display the complex movement between various discourses including performance, installation, and other forms of art production that characterized this period.
