Visual Culture

Many people seeking social justice share the perception that the dominant media—from the Hollywood studio system to the formation of television and later cable networks—exercised a tremendous, often racist, sexist, and anti-democratic power, leading to the emergence of a variety of visual forms of resistance. These included the Third Cinema movement of the late 1960s and following, which encouraged Third World revolutionary filmmakers and fellow travelers to work "with the camera in one hand and a rock in the other," in order to enable the decolonization of spectators. Additionally, a tremendous number of experimental film and alternative video production projects took root. In the realm of film, endeavors from the French New Wave to experimental sixteen-millimeter filmmaking (especially the work of the American filmmaker Stan Brakhage) tried to investigate the materiality of the medium and its conventions for creating the most persuasive of illusions. Filmmakers such as Yvonne Rainer and Marlene Gorris, among many others, also worked on creating a feminist film corpus. Additionally, with the rise of the video portapak and the general dissemination of inexpensive video technology in the early 1970s, a whole generation of alternative video and video art began to make inroads not only in the field of what could be represented on television, but at least as importantly into the ways in which images were perceived, processed, and understood. The artists Nam June Paik, Lynda Benglis, and Linda Montano in the 1970s and 1980s and Bill Viola in the 1990s and 2000s, among many others, created video artworks, while organizations such as New York's Downtown Community Television Center, with Jon Alpert and Keiko Tsuno, covered topics like access to healthcare and minority experiences in a documentary style. These U.S. efforts at alternative video and video art had their counterparts in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere.