Planes of Memory, currently at Long Beach Museum of Art, re-creates several video installation pieces from that media's formative period: Bruce Nauman's Live Taped Video Corridor (1969), Beryl Korot's Dachau (1975) and peter campus's mem (1975). All three of these pieces convey a sense of the intricacies and challenges inherent in attempting to apply, manipulate and integrate video technology in a sculptural and institutional situation. The works share a commitment to applying a raw and malleable technology to issues of space and representation while fitting this new form into and opposing it to the art world's pigeonholes labeled minimalism, structural film and conceptual art. These pieces are cast in the pseudo-utopian mode of video art that was meant to turn technology back on itself, to introduce the self-reflexive cathode-ray tube, to subvert television's grip on the image and somehow to integrate these concerns into widely divergent applications.
