The Radical Accessibility of Video Art (for Hearing People) Emily Watlington

Future Anterior, Volume 16, Number 1, Summer 2019, pp. 111-121 (Article)

Published by University of Minnesota Press

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https://muse.jhu.edu/article/762526

Figure 1. Close- up of a mouth. White text overlaying the image reads: “Congratulations! You have just become a participant in the world’s first interactive video art disc game.” Copyright Lynn Hershman- Leeson. Courtesy of the artist and Bridget Donahue, New York. Lynn Hershman- Leeson, Lorna (still), 1979– 84.

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Future AnteriorVolume XVI, Number 1Summer 2019

The implementation of video as an artistic medium is often described as motivated by radical ambitions toward art’s accessibility. Artists, whether seeking to democratically dis-seminate their political stances, subvert messages proffered by mass media, or reach audiences beyond the museum- going class, have long employed the medium of video for the very purpose of its ability to reach broad audiences. Yet the term “access,” regularly used to describe video art’s ambitions since the 1960s, has increasingly become a word that refers to the removal of disabling barriers; when we ask today whether or not something is “accessible,” this is usually what we mean. By and large, historic works of video art are not accessible in this sense: they often lack closed captions, rendering their audio content legible to deaf/Deaf people.1 When displaying historic works of video art in museums today, it would largely be considered taboo for curators to add captions retroactively. The work’s original aesthetic experience is thought unalterable and, by extension, more important than its accessibility. This essay examines this aversion to captions as an alteration, con-siders the rights and responsibilities of video artists and cura-tors, and ultimately, asks that we rethink our aesthetic (and thereby ethical) paradigm, which privileges faithfulness to an “original” over accessibility. Ultimately, I insist that captioning embodies the spirit of access that motivated so many artists to use video in the first place, and that museums should preserve this spirit over an original aesthetic experience when display-ing video art in museums today.

“New media require new ethics,” Peter Decherny has rightly argued.2 And of course, new media, unlike nonreproduc-ible works of video art, has also demanded new approaches to and conceptions of preservation.3 Though having inherited traditions of preservation from nonreproducible media, in or-der to remain displayable on ever- changing equipment, media art and artifacts have had to be constantly updated to new formats.4 What museum and video distribution agencies seek to preserve and display is usually not the original material ob-ject but a close facsimile of the original audiovisual experience in a new format. When historic works of video art are shown today, they are almost never shown in their original format. Lynn Hershman- Leeson’s Lorna (1979– 84), largely considered the first interactive Laserdisk artwork, was acquired by the

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Whitney Museum of American Art in 2018 as a DVD (Figure 1). When the Columbus Museum of Art displayed Mary Lucier’s video sculpture Equinox (1979/2016) in 2016, the piece was updated to digital media players that now show footage that was once connected via a convoluted system of self- rewinding, synchronized U- Matic tapes (Figures 2 and 3).5 This means that adding captions to a work in no way entails a permanent altera-tion to any “original”— for if an original as such even exists and can be identified, it is seldom, if ever, the version that is shown in museums— and demonstrates that displaying old works in new formats is commonly accepted.

It is, then, the institutionalization of video art within the art museum that informs its preservation as an art, rather than media, object. In museums, video art is nearly never displayed with captions added by the exhibiting institution. Moreover, the video’s status as a work of art is sometimes assigned retro-actively by curators and concretized once held in a museum’s collection. Take, for example, Laurie Anderson’s Personal Service Announcements (1990; Figure 4), which first screened on VH1 in the early part of 1990 and is now held in the collec-tion of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.6 On display in the museum’s public space on the first floor in 2018, it was presented without captions. This is not how public service an-nouncements are presented when broadcast on cable televi-sion or screened online. On YouTube, where Anderson’s series circulates freely, automated closed- captions are always avail-able per a feature provide by YouTube. The work would also be

Figure 2. Seven boxy video monitors mounted high on a metal rack and angled slightly downward. Installation view, Mary Lucier, Equinox, 1979/2016, CUNY, 1979. Copyright: Mary Lucier.

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captioned if shown on television today. Since 1990— the year the series was made, and the year the Americans with Disabili-ties Act was signed— closed captions have been mandatory for educational and governmental announcements (including official PSAs; though Anderson’s service announcement is “personal” and not “public”).7 Since 1993 in the United States, televisions with screens thirteen inches or larger have been required to include built- in closed- caption decoders. But within a museum collection and treated as an art object rather than a piece of media (when in fact it is both), efforts to preserve the video often simultaneously work to render it more obscure and inaccessible by deeming it too precious to be captioned.

It is not news that treating a video as a museum object rather than allowing it to circulate freely online hinders its accessibility, though museum stewardship often ensures a work’s preservation often by perpetually updating it. In the case of Personal Service Announcements, the videos circulate both freely online and within the museum (the videos were donated by Warner Brothers, not purchased by a private art col-lector). Yet for many video works that are treated exclusively as art objects within an art economy, their recognition as art ob-jects comes at the cost of the freedom to circulate. Anderson’s Personal Service Announcements was made at a moment when media entities were funding artist projects with some regular-ity: in the 1980s and 1990s, channels such as VH1 and MTV regularly employed artists and commissioned artworks (see, for example, MTV’s Art Break segments from 1985). Other art-ists worked with local television stations, as in Tony Conrad’s

Figure 3. Seven monitors on pedestals, each showing a sunrise and reflecting onto the floor. Installation view, Mary Lucier, Equinox, 1979/2016, MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2018. Photograph by Peter Harris. Copyright: Mary Lucier.

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Homework Helpline (1994– 95).8 This was after artists such as Chris Burden purchased commercial television slots (see his Through the Night Softly, 1973, in which he army- crawled over a field of broken glass). Commercial slots later became more tightly regulated and less affordable to artists, who thus relied on support either from the art market or mass media. This tension between the art and media markets and practices is detailed in Erika Balsom’s book After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation, where she writes, “the circulatory reproducibility of the moving image has figured as dangerous inauthenticity, a utopian possibility— and both at once.”9 But to whom is it dangerous? Largely, to those who profit off of art’s uniqueness. This valuing of art’s uniqueness has directly informed theories of and approaches to the pres-ervation of video art, and benefits not the public, and often not even the artists, but those who stand to profit. The same is true of aversion toward closed captions, both of which wish to treat videos as unique objects against their reproducible nature for the sake of upholding power.

Acknowledging that video art has distribution, funding, and preservation needs that the art market and museums were not created to satisfy, a number of distribution agencies were founded in the 1970s, namely, Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) and Video Data Bank (VDB). These organizations collect, pre-serve, and distribute works of video art (as well as electronic art, experimental films, and similar works). Former EAI Execu-tive Director Lori Zippay notes that the organization’s founding “was based on an almost utopian notion of reproducibility, access, and an idea that video was a democratic medium,” though best practices for closed captions within distribution agencies are still under development.10 These agencies often rent or license works in their collection to be displayed in museums, and at public screenings as well; artists receive a royalty. Even UbuWeb— the freely accessible platform for video art and experimental films— which wholeheartedly embodies

Figure 4. The artist stands in a kitchen wearing a trench coat and looking at the camera. Laurie Anderson, Personal Service Announcement: National Anthem, 1990. Single- channel video, color, sound; 1 min. 50 seconds. Copyright Laurie Anderson.

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the spirit of radically accessibility and updates its works to be playable online for free— does not provide closed captions when they are not already embedded in the file by the artist. While YouTube uses software to automatically generate closed- captions— which are highly prone to error— UbuWeb hosts their files on Vimeo, which requires users to upload their own captions. Though nobly run largely by volunteer labor and shar-ing donated or pirated files, captioning labor was not figured as a crucial ingredient of providing access to video art online. This issue spreads beyond the museum, though online aversion to captions is usually an issue of labor and resources rather than a desire to preserve an original.

One might claim that a historical lack of consciousness for the needs of the deaf/Deaf reflects the historical moment in which a video was produced and therefore should be preserved. However, preservation and display are not one in the same, especially for reproducible works where multiple editions can exist. Displaying videos without closed captions doesn’t only preserve this lack of accommodation but it also perpetuates it. Moreover, many artists did not anticipate their work being preserved as art objects at all, making a museum’s claim to preserving its originality especially questionable. In any case, were the videos now in museum collections pre-served as media artifacts rather than museum objects, this debate would not be had. The museum exhibition space thus becomes a crucial theater for new captioning practices, where established institutional modes of preservation and public par-ticipation are negotiated. The museum is not simply a reposi-tory of untouched, singular, original works of video preserved in a stable state. Museums must always balance their commit-ment to preserving their collections as well as to their publics. Videos, unlike paintings, need not look the same both in the vault and in the gallery.

Anderson’s announcement includes statements on current events in the mode of direct address: for Personal Service An-nouncement: National Anthem, recorded at the time of a move-ment to change the American national anthem to “America, the Beautiful” instead of “The Star Spangled Banner,” she succinctly guides her audience through an analysis of the latter song, pointing out that its lyrics are couched in difficult lan-guage but effectively go, “Say, isn’t that a flag? . . . Hey, do you smell something burning?”11 She then comments on another set of lyrics that many know by heart but few have stopped to decode: the lyrics to “Yankee Doodle” (Why does he call the feather in his hat “macaroni,” and what does that mean?). Her concluding statement is that “if you can understand the words to [“Yankee Doodle”], you can understand anything that’s hap-pening in the art world today.”12 The intended meaning of her

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statement aside, important for this essay, Anderson under-scores how songs and public/governmental entities usually feel more accessible than the art museum does. This is con-firmed by studies showing that, even when art museums offer free admission, they do not suddenly attract greater numbers of low- income visitors; it is more than ticket prices that render museums uninviting.13 Even if only because they are required to, American governmental entities at least provide closed captioning, not only rendering their media legible to deaf/Deaf people, but symbolically showing that their messages are for all, rather than maintaining an elite, separate, and literally inaccessible sphere. Of course, it would be very frightening if governmental messages (the only ones required to be cap-tioned in the US 1990, when the video was made) were the only accessible narratives.

I mention Anderson’s case not to critique her project or its display in particular, but because it fruitfully sits at the intersection of art and media and comments directly on the ac-cessibility of both in manners that succinctly capture concerns at the heart of many video artists’ practices. In the same way, I mention the lack of captioning practices in both art museums and distribution agencies to reveal that the neglect to include the deaf/Deaf when conceiving of ambitions toward video art’s accessibility is commonplace and widespread. A broader cultural value shift is needed.

Of course, this issue could in the future be avoided if artists henceforth captioned their videos; artists bear responsibility as well, at least those who are still alive. Artists are increasingly subtitling their videos, though not necessarily for the purpose of including deaf/Deaf audiences but as English increasingly becomes the homogenizing language of film and video, even when created by and for non- native English speakers. Leaving aside the separate issues that accompany the homogenizing effects of English, captured by Mladen Stilinović’s An Artist Who Cannot Speak English is No Artist (1992), subtitles in the context of an increasingly global art world work to mediate a range of languages and accents, another means by which they accom-modate diverse persons. In fact, this is no different than what closed captions do for deaf/Deaf audiences: many Deaf activ-ists frame themselves not as a disabled, but as a cultural group with their own language that can be translated (this is why many prefer to capitalize the D in Deaf). However, subtitles, as op-posed to closed captions, usually only translate language and not other sounds, like slamming doors. Already- subtitled works could easily incorporate sound descriptions if artists considered the deaf/Deaf as part of their audience.

The more closed captions are used, the more their ab-sence will appear as an inconsiderate omission, rather than

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their presence an aesthetic affront: the way to enact a shift in sensibility is by demonstration. Recent projects by a number of artists have critically and creatively tooled closed captions to make precisely this point. A 2018 project by artist Constantina Zavitsanos and literarature scholar Amalle Dublon (Figure 5) critically reflects on the absence of captions in video art, and reminds us who this tendency privileges. Their short video titled April 4, 1980 (2018), on view at Artists Space in 2018, privileges deaf/Deaf viewers by adjusting the speed of the audio to privilege reading speed, rather than adjusting the speed to match the on- screen speakers (there is no image to which the audio needs to be synchronized). The resulting audio track sounds very different from a typical narration, and, for once, hearing viewers are thus put into a rare experience of watching a piece not made to privilege them. Of course, deaf/Deaf audiences cannot hear this critique and awkwardness, just as hearing folks often don’t have to notice the awkward pacing or errors made by automated closed captioning (what artist Joseph Grigley refers to as “craptions,” pointing out the humor often made by these errors).

Similarly, Carolyn Lazard’s A Recipe for Disaster (2018) samples footage from Julia Child’s cooking show (Figure 6). Child’s program is a didactic one: accordingly, she describes almost everything she does, rendering her actions relatively ac-cessible to those who cannot see them. A narrator in Lazard’s appropriation calls Child’s show “The most accessible con-tent.” Child’s was also the first television show to boast open captions— captions that cannot be turned on and off— though

Figure 5. Black rectangle; a white caption reads: If it was ontologically possible to switch breakfast and lunch. Constantina Zavitanos and Amalle Dublon. April 4, 1980 (2018). HD video: open captions, closed image, sound. 3 min 32 seconds. Copyright Constantina Zavitanos and Amalle Dublon.

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after a number of viewers complained to WGBH, this practice was discontinued. Lazard adds captions, and another narrator describes the few actions that Child doesn’t describe herself. Then, the first narrator articulates how the forms employed (visual descriptions and closed captions) propose a future for video: “What you hear, is what you get. And what you get, is what you hear. A redundancy for some. A clarity for others.” The dialogue is laid over Child’s own narration, at times render-ing Child’s voice illegible. Likewise, the transcription of the dialogue is superimposed on the image, obscuring Child’s actions. A narrator, whose spiel loops throughout the thirty- minute episode, continues by describing the format as:

A way of making and consuming that refuses translation, that we do not understand, that we cannot imagine, be-cause we have not created the conditions for its produc-tion. The possibility of an integrated audience. Listen, I’m trying to say something. Look, I’m trying to do something. We are making an omelet. 3 Ingredients. Eggs. Salt. Butter. 3 Materials. Image. Sound. Text. No more interventions as the condition of access. A work made from the conditions of debility or difference, not translated for debility or dif-ference. Something made from scratch. Eggs. Salt. Butter. And a little water. Don’t forget. Not an accommodation, where we have to be grateful for getting to join the party. Well your party sucks. And I don’t like omelets much. A separation. An infrastructure of segregation. 14

The text insists on both captions and visual descriptions when producing audiovisual media, expanding upon Child’s example. It ends polemically, “No legibility for some. Illegibility for all,” and performs this critique by rendering some of the video’s content either more legible (visual descriptions, narra-tion) or illegible (overlaying both the sound and image with the narrator’s text). The work creatively fills in the gaps for what is a relatively accessible work, serving not only as a critique but also a positive example for future media by “retrofitting” an old work. Still, the work argues that retrofits are not enough, and that access should be part of the work from the start, a maneu-ver Dublon describes as insisting that “access is the material and form of the artwork.”15

In his influential book Disability Aesthetics, Tobin Siebers defines his title term as aesthetics that “embraces beauty that seems by traditional standards to be broken, and yet is not less beautiful, but more so, as a result.”16 Indeed, the audio in April 4, 1980, might seem at first literally broken, the Child video illegible in a familiar sense for sighted and hear-ing people. Accordingly, both works challenge us to question

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how what we came to see as “legible” came to be and who it privileges. They ask their audience to think about who captions are for and what they do, and attend to features such as closed captions and visual descriptions that sighted and hearing audi-ences have had the privilege of not being forced to notice.

It becomes, then, extremely difficult to continue justifying the omission of captions on the ground that they are aesthetic affronts when placed over historic works of video art. Indeed, ethical sensibilities have long been conceived of as inextri-cable with aesthetic ones, at least since Immanuel Kant’s con-ception of taste was articulated in Critique of Judgment, which Ludwig Wittgenstein pithily summarized when he wrote that “ethics and aesthetics are one.”17 Susan Sontag explained the connection succinctly, too, when she wrote that “no generic antagonism exists between the form of consciousness, aimed at action, which is morality, and the nourishment of conscious-ness, which is aesthetic experience.”18 Elsewhere in the same essay, “On Style,” she offers a pertinent definition of morality as that which is

a code of acts, and of judgments and sentiments by which we reinforce our habits of acting in a certain way, which prescribe a standard for behaving or trying to behave toward other human beings generally (that is, to all who are acknowledged to be human) as if we were inspired by love. Needless to say, love is something we feel in truth for just a few individual human beings, among those who are known to us in reality and in our imagination.19

Note her key phrase, “that is, to all who are acknowledged to be human.” It seems doubtful that curators and conservators of video art would explicitly refuse to acknowledge the deaf/

Figure 6. White text overlays an image of Julia Child cooking. It reads: “What you hear is what you get. And what you get, is what you hear. A redundancy for some, a clarity for others. A media of medias. A new materialism. A way of making and consuming that refuses translation. That we do not understand, that we cannot imagine, because we have not created the conditions for its production. The possibility of an integrated audience. Listen, I’m trying to say something. Look, I’m trying to do something.” White caption reads, “Another way, which is a good way, is what I call a scrambled omelet.” Carolyn Lazard, Recipe for Disaster (still, 2018). Copyright Carolyn Lazard. Courtesy of the artist and Essex Street, New York.

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Deaf to be human when asked, but when spirits of radical access are claimed, yet closed captions are not provided, a message is sent about who counts as “everyone” when art is meant for all.20 Failure to include closed captions on historic works of video art not only reinforces ableist exclusion within the art museum but also fails to preserve a fundamental aspect of video art: radical access.

BiographyEmily Watlington is a critic and curator of contemporary art. She is assistant editor at Art in America, and a Fulbright scholar with a master’s degree in the history, theory, and criticism of architecture and art from MIT. Previously, she was the cura-torial research assistant at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, where she contributed to exhibition catalogs, including Before Projection: Video Sculpture 1974– 1995. With Gabriel Cira, she co- taught “Architectural Access: Code and Care” at MIT. She also guest- edited a special issue of Art Papers on disability and the politics of visibility.

Notes1 They also often lack visual descriptors for the blind and low vision, an important issue not specific to the medium of video and thus beyond the scope of this article.2 Peter Decherney, Hollywood’s Copyright Wars: From Edison to the Internet (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 11.3 See, for example, Alain Depocas, Jon Ippolito, and Caitlin Jones, Permanence Through Change: The Variable Media Approach (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2003).4 See Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2016).5 Lorna was originally made with a subtitle option; Equinox doesn’t have dialogue but responsible museum labels will describe the sounds. This updating of Equinox onto new- media players altered the entire structure and appearance of the piece, hence its two dates.6 Anderson’s practice is very much concerned with blurring fine art and mass media. Because she was alive when the museum acquired her work, and when the series was on view at the museum in 2018, the museum and artist could have had a conversation about captions, though often hesitation to caption the work is a hesitation to alter the artist’s original intention and/or desires, which curators can only speculate on after the artist dies..7 See Television Decoder Circuity Act, 47 USC §§ 303(u) and 330(b), available at http://www.gpoaccess.gov/. Many justly feel this law should be updated since the increased prevalence of digital screens now render the 13- inch minimum irrelevant. It is not clear if captions were available for Anderson’s piece when it originally screened on VH1, though my aim is not to critique the series, or the year 1990, in particular. Rather, I am concerned with how video works are presented in museums today.8 An excerpt of his work was also displayed without captions for Conrad’s recent retrospective at Albright Knox without captions, though it would have had a cap-tioned option when shown on television.9 Erika Balsom, After Unique- ness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 9.10 Lori Zippay, “Round Table: Distribution After Digitization,” Moving Image Review and Art Journal 3, no. 1 (2014): 77.11 Laurie Anderson, Personal Service Announcement: The National Anthem, 1990, video, 00:45, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cE6Pg2q3lI.12 Laurie Anderson, Personal Service Announcement: The National Anthem, 1990, video, 1:30, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cE6Pg2q3lI.13 See, for instance, Volker Kirchberg, “Entrance Fees as a Subjective Barrier to Visit-ing Museums,” Journal of Cultural Economics 22, no. 1 (1998): 1– 13.14 Carolyn Lazard, A Recipe for Disaster, 2018, video, 3:04, https://vimeo.com /267429320.15 Amalle Dublon in “Dependency and Improvisation: A Conversation with Park McArthur,” Art Papers (Winter 2019), https://www.artpapers.org/dependency -and-improvisation/.16 Tobin Siebers, Disability Aesthetics, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 3.17 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico- philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), 147.

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18 Susan Sontag, “On Style,” in Susan Sontag: Lessons of the 1960s and 70s, ed. David Rieff (New York: The Library of America, 2013; originally published 1966), 30.19 Sontag, “On Style,” 30.20 Aimi Hamraie made a similar argument about the Universal Design movement in Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability (Minneapolis: Uni-versity of Minnesota Press, 2017), which deeply informed my thinking in this article.