For a peek at San Francisco’s avant-garde past, you have to cross the bay and head to the Berkeley Museum of Art for a new exhibit called Videospace: The National Center for Experiments in Television (NCET). The show, which runs through Nov. 15, is a paean to the old city by the Bay, whose experiments with drugs, art and music were a critical part of the counter-cultural revolution of the ’60s and ’70s.
NCET, which operated in the pre-PC era from 1967 to 1975, was a haven for artists exploring ways to make art on television. The center was located in the heart of San Francisco’s South of Market district-now dot-com office land. And much of what it produced in those eight years still looks wildly abstract: dancing lights and shapes on phosphorescent screens, a psychedelic hodgepodge of light, sound and color. While video art was later commercialized into products like MTV, the center itself was a sanctuary of the theoretical and experimental. “We weren’t thinking economically,” says artist Stephen Beck. “We were doing it with a certain altruism that was a part of the 60s spirit.”
Beck, 51, is one of the featured artists at the museum’s retrospective. He arrived at the center in 1971 as a college teenager, a diehard fan of television and a student of electrical engineering. Beck understood that if video art was to occupy its own aesthetic niche, it would need its own instrument. So he built the Video Synthesizer, an electronic organ that funnels an electric current into a dancing symphony of color and shapes on a TV screen. The machine, Beck points out, was born in the pre-digital era, when it would take an IBM mainframe computer an hour to project a straight line onto a monochrome screen. The synthesizer had nearly 50 dials, 20 switches, and 25,000 wired connections, which Beck hand-soldered himself.
Beck’s Video Synthesizer is on display at the museum, as are several of his works and the Videola, the 1973 invention of artist Don Hollock. The Videola, which grabs your attention as you enter the exhibit, is a television screen surrounded by an eight-foot long horizontal cone of mirrors. The image from the television screen in the center of the cone bounces off the Mylar mirrors, turning the apparatus into a three-dimension visual kaleidoscope.
Against the backdrop of the Internet revolution and the advent of digital art, these seem like obscure artifacts today. But Beck and the video art itself enjoyed a few moments in the spotlight in the early ’70s. Beck performed the Video Synthesizer live on public television in San Francisco and before audiences in Dallas and Washington, D.C. One critic, he now proudly recalls, dubbed him that “crazy California artist with electric crayons.” After NCET closed, the victim of budget cuts in the National Endowment for the Arts, Beck kept performing and eventually put out a series of home videos, while also finding success in Silicon Valley in the ’80s as a video game and toy designer.
Today, Beck reports, old analog art forms are making something of a comeback. Video art is regularly on display in dance clubs and at raves. Beck also reports increased interest from private collectors, particularly technology obsessed venture-capitalists and dot-com types. Pieces, he says, have sold for as much as $500,00. His speaking schedule reflects the increased interest in the art form: In addition to the show at Berkeley, Beck will speak at the Modern Museum of Art in New York City on Oct. 27th and at Stanford art museum in November. Interest in analog art is surging, says Berkeley Museum of Art curator Steve Seid, because digital art “lacks a historical context. It’s impossible to determine where digital art comes from.” The dancing images and colors of video art on display in Berkeley, on the other hand, clearly illuminate a bygone era.
