Australian video art since the 1980s

Essay in Video Logic, Sydney, NSW : Museum of Contemporary Art, 2008. In 1999, the influential American art theorist Rosalind Krauss argued that video proclaimed the end of medium specificity, an argument that boldly expresses video's importance to contemporary art. The story of video since the 1980s in Australian art is really the story of the embrace of multiple media by visual artists in the wake of the shake up of modernist paradigms by postmodern ideas and strategies, where eventually video came to replace photography as the medium of convergence. Video's 'post-medium' embrace brought together television and cinema, sculpture and painting, performance and music, all traditions that have been increasingly inflected by the language of the computer. Practitioners who would not necessarily describe themselves as 'video artists' began to use the medium as part of their regular toolbox, and the discourse in which video art flowed broadened dramatically as the technology became cheaper and easier to use. This period also saw the institutional consolidation of video art, with the establishment of various artist-based organisations promoting video practice, a dedicated festival and specialised journals and editions. Galleries and museums which were slow to curate and collect in the 1970s, by the 1990s came to place video at the centre of major exhibitions, although more recently artists using video have increasingly circumvented the gallery by accessing audiences directly on the Internet.