Hayan Kim

This dissertation explores early video art’s visualization of subjectivity as a transformative process, echoing the rise of political consciousness and ecological awareness of the self vis-à-vis social and media systems in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. Artists challenged the belief that subjects exist as unchanging beings, and began to conceptualize subjectivity as an ever-mutating assemblage of heterogeneous traits. This project argues that three American artists—Nam June Paik, Dan Graham, and Dara Birnbaum—and two collectives, TVTV and Videofreex, used the then-novel medium of video to exhibit this newly conceived notion of subjectivity, while resisting the increasingly powerful culture industry, especially the homogenizing and infantilizing effects of network television. My dissertation analyzes not only their videos’ visual language, but also various actions involved in the production and reception processes, as gestures of resistance against passive viewership.

The first chapter examines Nam June Paik’s video works, within which an individual functions as an active processor of information through his or her own action of creating and transforming electronic images on a TV monitor. Chapter two looks at the body in Dan Graham’s video performance as a central agent in breaking the uncritical identification of self with stereotypes and commodities on corporate television. In the third chapter, I argue that Videofreex and TVTV’s use of shaky handheld cameras produced a visual language addressing subjectivity as social and political, rather than individual and solipsistic. The fourth chapter investigates Dara Birnbaum’s appropriation of network television images. I connect her work to remix and mash-up videos on the Internet, and examine individuals’ deliberate reconfigurations of existing audiovisual information in a media spectacle.

These four chapters together argue that the artists’ and collectives’ works engaged the individual’s action as a varying factor in the circulation of visual information, thus diversifying the ecosystems of media and society. Furthermore, this dissertation situates their artistic practices within the sociocultural history of America in the 1960s and 1970s, when the big three networks’ (ABC, CBS, and NBC) oligopoly drew criticism both from the industry and the public, who clamored for more diverse and democratic television programming.