文/林志明（國立台北師範學院藝術與藝術教育研究所助理教授）
1.
一般認為1965年新力公司出產的Portapak
手提攝/錄影機是使得錄像藝術之所以可能的技術性開端[1]。這種輕盈的錄放器材所具有的操作簡易性（不需要大量的人員）和彈性（可以在不需要大量人員和器材在室內及戶外進行拍攝），使得藝術家可以不借助電視公司的器材便得以製作及放映影像。
這個方便性是錄像藝術早期的一個結構性因素，同時和技術發展（新工具）以及影像的媒體傳輸（broadcast）有關。這個新媒體也就是當時在美國已成為主要媒體的電視。電視媒體環境所的形成文化氛圍，一直被認為是錄像藝術興起的主要背景。其中的一個特點在於，電視訊息的接收，往往是在一種漫不經心的狀態之下（distraction）：人們不需要持續地注視著電視螢光幕，可能是在走動之中，一邊在打電話或做著其它事情。另一方面，由於電視的資本集中樣態，大量商業化的取向，使得其中的符碼被視為陳調（stereotype）的形成。而由電視所塑造的大眾文化，也被視為反智和同一化的大本營。這種無形的、難以抵禦的社會形塑和社會控制，更是經由傳輸管道的家庭化甚至個人化，深入了社會原本屬於私密空間的角落。相對於這個情境，早期錄像實踐的發展由兩個路途來加以回應：一是著重電視訊息本身，以錄像提供的低成本和彈性對它的符碼進行解構或批判的錄像游擊戰[2]。另一方面則是由白南準等藝術家發動的，針對其媒體特性所進行的多方向的錄像藝術運動。前者的空間多處於電視原有空間或它的週邊衍生（比如後來的有線電視網絡或在次管道間流通的錄影帶），後者則進入了以畫廊、美術館、藝術中心為主的藝術世界。
幻燈片
a.
Nam June Paik, Magnet TV, 1965
b. Wolf Vostell, TV-Décollage : environment, 1963.
1.1960年代
Magnavox Television 的廣告.
2. TVTV, Four More Years, 1972.
2.
在傳播導向(communication
oreinted)錄像團體和生存於藝術世界中的個人藝術之間，Bill Viola初期的發展是佔據著一個中間性的位置。
Viola 在1984年為Long
Beach Museum of Art, Video: A Retrospective 所寫的回顧性文章中說道：
I
came across about whether it was Piak or Vostell who first used a TV set in
their work seemed just plain ridiculous. It totally ignored the reality of the
situation －
that Paik’s contribution to video art is vastly more important, substantial,
and far reaching than Vostell’s. I was reading that mind by nature will do
precisely that －
distill and synthesize concepts, trends, and content while glossing over
actual figures and sequences.
－
“History, 10 Years, and the Dreamtime”, 1984,
Writings
1973-1994,
1995, MIT, p. 128.
Right
from the start there were at least two different clearly isolated streams: the
video groups, just mentioned (Guerilla Television, Raindance, Videofreex,
Global Village) and the individual artists (Bruce Nauman, Les Levine, Keith
Sonnier, William Wegman, Richerd Serra, Vito Acconci, John Baldessari, Paul
Kos, Joan Jonas, Peter Campus). p. 128
The
Video groups emerged in the communal context of late-sixties politics and were
communications oriented (including technological development), while the other
“group” of individuals were emerging from the established art world. These
“art world artists” were not included in the first two lanmark exhibitions
in the field, Howard Wise’s “TV as a Creative Medium” in New York 1969,
and Russel Connor’s “Vision and Television” at Brandeis University in
1970…. They were also slow to be accepted by the newly forming public
television artists’ facilities, which preferred working with the documentary
and technological videomakers and conventional forms like dance and drama,
easier to assimilate into the context of mass-media broadcast.
These factors cuased an early separation, which has persisted, and put
the technologists, the so-called “video synthesizer artists”, initially on
the side of the communications media activist and video groups, altogether not
an accurate or comfortable position. pp. 128-129.
在這個二元的歷史結構裏(它後來被打破了),
早期Viola
的位置和the
technologists相似(uncomfortable)：
他曾經在1960到1975擔任TV
Squad 的領導人，在1970年加入大學內的cable
TV團體，1973年認識David
Tudor後他一起進行Rainforest電子音響計劃。但他的第一次展出是在1973年和白南準、Peter
Campus、Bruce
Nauman一起。接著又成為Everson
Museum of Art的Technical
Advisor for video，並且擔任Peter
Campus、Frank
Gillette、白南準及其他藝術家的展出助手。1976-81進駐WNET/Thirteen
TV LAB，1981年進駐新力公司的Atsugi
Research Center。
因此Viola實際上是橫跨媒體、藝術和技術，這三個Video
Art基本元素的人物。
這也是為何他後來雖然被Art
world接受乃至於成為其中的英雄(1996年威尼斯雙年展美國館)，但對art
of the art world 保持著警戒和懷疑：
Art
educators and museum and gallery personnel are confronting with a public that
has been programmed into expecting that appreciating art, like everything
else, must rely on the uncovering of a single answer or meaning, in this case
which the artist has cleverly concealed within the work. In other words, that
art is something which one “gets.” They wait to be told. This thing found,
then frees the person to get on with the other works until they are all
finished in this manner and one may then leave the museum or gallery to
continue with the afternoon’s entertainment. Art becomes a “return” on
their ”investment” of time.
The majority of people today feel isolated and detached from art, and
the well-meaning orientations and explanations that fill them with facts about
the meanings in the work and intentions of the artists, in my opinion, only
serve to separate them further from inner life of the art before them.
－
“Interpreting a Broken Wineglass”, 1988, Writings, pp. 169-172。
First
prensented as part of a panel discussion entitled
“Contemporary
Art: Intent and Interpretation”
at
the National Art Education Association conference
in
Los Angeles on April 9, 1988.
The
topic for discussion was “Can contemporary art be explained and interpreated,
and what is the role of the artist’s intension in such efforts?”
幻燈片
1.
Nam June Paik, TV Buddha, 1974.
2.
Nam June Paik, Real Plant/Live Plant, 1978-1982.
3.
Nam June Paik, Real Fish/Live Fish, 1982.
4.
Dan Graham, Opposing Mirrors and Video Monitors on Time Delay, 1974.
5.
Vito Acconci, Air Time, 1973.
6.
Dan Graham, Body Press, 1970-1972.
7.
Dan Graham, Body Press, 1970-1972.
3.
和常見的評論所呈現不同的，Bill
Viola對於媒體社會具有尖銳的批評意識
一般的評論過於著重主題式的解讀，引導至神秘主義及生與死等重大人性主題。仔細閱讀Bill
Viola的言論和寫作，則可發現他對整體的媒體環境具有尖銳的批判意識。這同時也直接地表現在兩部作品之中：
VHS
Information
1973
Reverse
Television 1983-84
The
recurrence of primary images (water in particular, but also fire, solitude,
life and death) and that of ambient and troubling sounds (screams, stifled
conversations, wind, engines) signals, in the immediacy of the video process,
the rise of ionized tensions and the explosion of emotional turbulences that
draw the viewer deep into themselves, at the close of the night.
－Josée Bélisle, “Bill Viola: Incandescent Awareness”,
in
Bill Viola, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 1993,
p. 69.
If
anything, Viola is a postmodern humanist: a humanist transformed by a lifelong
devotion to Eastern spiritual thought… His art does not rely on traditional
religious faith, yet paradoxically it is fueled by an absolute belief in the
transformative power of art and in a common human spiritual nature.
－
David A. Ross, “A Feeling for the Things Themselves”,
Forward
for the Bill Viola, catalogue of exhibition,
Whitney
Museum of American Art, 1997, p. 28.
As
we move faster and faster into the age of electronic communication, the
technology seems to be evolving increasingly realistic methods of rendering
the real world. The often-cited act of taking the image, or representation, of
the thing to be the thing itself seems to have become a particularly
contemporary phenomenon. We rely more and more on electronic data as a
surrogate for direct social interaction…. The genuine “hyper-realist”
artists of today are not the painters of the school of the same name, but
commercial film and television producers; for it is they who deal with
something that has become almost more real than real: a person’s image.
－
“The Porcupine and the Car”, 1981, Writings, p. 64.
After I went through an early infatuation period with the technology, I
obliterated it －
literally and metaphorically －
in 1973 in a piece I called Information. I’ve chosen to work with
images of the real world, camera images, recorded outside on the streets or in
the mountains, images that obviously are representations, and those issues now
are very current. I think we were aware of them back in the early 1970s. They
have now been articulated quite eloquently by people such as Baudrillrad. They
are representations, and that leads to a whole other set of issues.
Nonetheless, they have been taken for the truth, as Baudrillard mentions, they
have become what they represent. One becomes what they behold. For that reason
there is kind of cultural currency with these images, as they are part and
parcel of mass media. There was always the physical possibility for people to
understand my work outside the confines of the specialized issues of the art
world.
－
“Interview with Michael Nash”, 1990, Writings, p. 177.
Information
1973. 29:35 min.
We
live suspended, like fish in water, within a media system that processes all
culture as entertainment and an educational system that processes knowledge as
product, both reflecting their position within an entrenched capitalist system
that has pervaded even private inner lives of their citizens.
－
“Interpreting a Broken Wineglass”, 1988, Writings, p. 170.
I do not accept the catgory of “television art”. Television is a
means of transmitting ideas in the form of moving images and sound. To say
that it has a special case called “television art” is to accept the
political consequences of commercial television’s present hegemony
(particularly in America) over the full spectrum of imagery representing the
infinitely varied, rich, often chaotic, comflicting and contrasting forms of
consciousness that make up the full range of human experience on this planet.
The American media writer Gene Youngblood has called television “perceptual
imperialism”, underscoring the fact that the medium is not only a political
tool but a physiological one as well, and its effect in conforming each
individual’s psycho-physical make-up cannot be underestimated.
Art that conforms to established rules, specifically those rules that
have been instituted outside the practice of art, becomes a form of
propaganda. Even if its “message” is subversive, its form will always be
conformist, underlying form being the true residing place of power in any
system of communication.
－
“Statement 1992”, Writings, p. 211.
Everyone
had read MaCluhan in those days.
－
“History, 10 Years, and the Dreamtime”, 1984, Writings, p. 124.
Reverse
Television
1983-84
這一個系列是用來解構電視的觀看構成。維歐拉進入了44位波士頓居民的家中，把攝影機架在電視上，拍攝了他們作為電視觀者的影像。這些無言地觀看著攝影機鏡頭的人物肖像，原本計劃在節目間歇的時候（也就是原本由廣告佔據的down
time），每隔一小時播出一分鐘，連播兩週。但電視台不但不願播出這麼多的時間（後來是以每天播五次、每次十五秒的方式進行），也要求藝術家在開頭時放置片名。對於維歐拉來說，這正好和他的原意相反，但後來也只好做了一些妥協（在片尾加上作者名字及日期），以求播出[3]。
4.
貫串其藝術思想中的兩條線索
貫串Bill
Viola 藝術思想兩條線索的是錄像作為工具和錄像作為媒體。這同時也是新媒體藝術的雙重線索。
以上我們建立了Viola
作品和思想中有關媒體社會的批評意識。也許有人會說，OK.
這的確成立，但這是不是他作品中最核心的部份呢？或者說，建立了這一點，能將我們引向何方？
我想下一步的工作將是在一個更廣大的檢視中來觀察藝術家和媒體社會或更廣大意義的媒體文明的關係。
這裏我提出了一個貫串其思想和作品的雙重線索，但其實在也是許多新媒體藝術家共有的探討範疇。Video
as tool (e.g. of recording) 或是Video
as (specific) medium.
當然在Viola
這樣的大師身上，這兩條線索是交互在作用著。但我們可以看出不同時期有所著重。
5.
錄像作為工具
將錄像作為自我發現的工具，尤其是Bill
Viola 早期作品的特徵。
透過他，錄像成為探究意識、記憶、內在時間、感官等的工具。
例如：Ancient
of Days,
1979-81, 12:21 min.
Viola很早就體會到技術的過度著重，可能會成為技術的消費。重點還是要用這個技術來作什麼。對他來說，錄像是一種自我發現的工具。
製造者貪婪地推動著流行、消費主義、市場競爭，以推出穩定的新款式、新設計的流體，以及普遍內建老舊程序，顛覆了我們的認知慾望。因為某些原因，許多錄像藝術家陷入了這種高級流行宣傳和先進科技神秘主義的陷阱之中：「如果我擁有這種新型的攝影機、最新的VTR，那我便可以真的作出好的錄像藝術來了。」[4]
而關於錄像技術發展的思考，則顯示出錄像的核心並不是錄影(recording)。
One of most fascinating aspects of video’s technical evolution, and
the one makes it most different from film, is that the video image existed
before many years before a way was developed to record it. In other words, it
is live, simultaneous with experience. Taping or recording is not a integral
part of the system. Film is not film unless it is filming (recording). Video,
however, is “videoing” all the time, continually in motion, putting out 30
frames, or images, a second.…
In
film, Arns said, the basic illusion is of mouveemnt, produced by the
succession of still images flashing on the screen. In video, stillness is the
basic illusion: a still image does not exist because the video signal is in
constant motion scanning across the screen.
The subsequent evolution of video from early years has been aimed at
increasing control over this continually moving system; in other words,
improving control over time.
－
“The Porcupine and the Car”, 1981, Writings, pp. 62-63.
由這些思考裏，Viola發展出一套個人的語彙：
Death
is the non-movement
Stillness
is life
Stillness
is death
Stillness
is the root of all life
Death is the root of all life.
－
“Note, 1980”, Writings, p. 77.
經由這一種靜止的，充滿了強度的影像，Viola提出了把錄像視為心靈探究的主張：
No
beginning/No end/No direction/No duration
Video as mind
－
“Note, 1980”, Writings, p. 78.
The
sense of seeing －
or seeing the sense of an object －
is what I have been after. I have sensed in Chott and some of Reflecting
Pool that intense unrelenting camera vision can be compared to
concentrated vision which heralds a shift in consciousness… The object
doesn’t change, you do. This what is behind the Bouddhism brought from India
to China to Japan －
this is exactly what is the suiboku-ga painters were doing. They
painted rocks, grasses, a heron －
yet these things shone with a light that penetrated far deeper than their
pictorial form or even their concepts conveyed by the viewer’s words.
This
is pure seeing.
－
“Note, 1980”, Writings, p. 79.
Ancient
of Days,
1979-81, 12:21 min..
播放，解說，Notes
copy (pp. 74-76)
6.
錄像作為媒體
其後(1980年代前後)，對於錄像的媒體特質思考更為深入，發展出field
perception, acoustic space, synaesthesia等主題。這些麥克魯漢式的主題，使得錄像藝術與媒體社會的關係進入一個深廣的境地。在作品的形式上，也展開了更多元的面貌，尤其是錄像裝置。
如果說Bill
Viola 作品和思想的中的第一條線索是由身體走向意識，由觀看走向心靈；那麼其中另外一條線索，則更加回到感官的探索，但這次是以聽覺為先導。
他對錄像本質的探討有另一個方向的發展：
The video image is a standing wave pattern of electrical energy, a
vibrating system composed of specific frequencies, as one would expect to find
in any resonating object… the video image is a living dynamic energy field,
a vibration appearing solid only because it exceeds our ability to discern
such fine slices of time.
All video has its roots in the live. The vibrational acoustic character
od video as a virtual image is the essence of its “liveness”.
Technologically, video has evolved out sound (the electromagnetic) and its
close association with cinema is misleading since film and its grandparent,
the photographic process, are members of a completely different branch of
genealogical tree (the mechanical/chemical). The video camera, as an
electronic transducer of physical energy unto electrical impulse, bears a
closer original relation to the microphone than to the film camera.
－
“The Sound of One Line Scanning”, 1986, Writings, pp. 158-159.
雖然我們常用視覺的隱喻來談心靈，但Viola認為心靈之空間也必然存有音響。因為所有的聲音都尋求在空間震動之中來自我表達(p.
154)，那麼心靈空間必定也有它的音響性格，正如音響空間是空間性格的另一種感受。
The science of acoustics is the study of sound in space. It assumes
strong architectural associations because, although it can be described as
simply the study of the behavior of sound waves, sound manifests itself at its
most complex and interesting when bouncing off solid forms, mst noticeably in
those of man-made interior spaces.
－
“The Sound of One Line Scanning”, 1986, Writings, pp. 155-56.
那麼，和心靈空間最接近的音響空間是什呢？Viola由西方音樂和印度音樂的根本差異談起：
Western
music builds things up, piling notes on top of notes, forms on top of forms,
in the way one would construct a building, until at last the piece is
complete. It is additive: its base is silence, all musical sounds proceed from
this point. Indian music, on the other hand, begins from from sound. It is
subtractive. All the notes and possible notes to be played are present before
the main musicians even start playing, stated by the presence and function of
the tambura. A tambura is a drone instrument, usually of four or five strings,
that due to the particular construction of its bridges, amplifies the overtone
or harmonic series of the individual notes in each tuned string.
…
The idea of a sound field that is always present shifts the emphasis away from
the objects of perception to the field on which the perception is occurring; a
nonspecific viewpoint.
As a drone, video’s significant aspect is that electronic images exist everywhere at once, the receiver is free to pull the signal out of the line at any given point along its path or at any location out in the broadcast field…. The “space” of broadcast recalls the acoustic space of the Gothic Cathedral, where all sounds, no matter how near, far, or loud, appear to be originating at the same distant place. They seem detached from the immediate scene, floating somewhere where the point of view has become the entire space. In technology, the current shift from analog,s sequential waves to digital’s recombinant codes further accelerates the diffusion of the point of view. Like the transformation of mater, there is a movement from the tangibility of the solid and liquid states into gaseous. There is less coherence, previously solid barriers become porous, and the perspective is that of the whole space, the point of view of the air.
…
Space without container is the mental world of thoughts and images.
－ Id., pp. 161-62.
另一個相關的特質則是聯覺（synaesthesia:
the corssover between and interchageability of the senses）。
Synaethesia is the natural inclination of the structure of contemporary
media. The material that produces music from a stereo sound system, transmits
the voice over the telephone and materializes the image on a television set
is, at the base level, the same.
… Although it is temting to ponder a possible synaesthetic “putting back together” of science’s discrete perceptual and cognitive compatments, inspired by these electronic free and fluid interchages of our ways of seeing, what seems to be emerging at the moment is amnesia and anaesthesia of vast, cluttered, and confused landscape of image fragments, a semiotician’s field-day of delights.
－
Id.,
pp. 164-66.
由這些錄像媒體特質的發現和思維，我們可以觀察到：
1.
Viola的作品形式逐漸由Videotape
向錄像-聲音裝置滑移，以更能強調以上三個特點。
2.
這些特質也正好是MacLuhan討論電氣媒體時所使用的概念。由此一連繫，我們更能將Viola的作品和思維推向一個媒體文明的沉思（參考本人有關MacLuhan的論文），雖然在引文最後他對於當代媒體文化情境，顯露出更多的悲觀氣息。
He
weeps for you,
1976, Video/Sound Installation. CD-Rom
The
Stopping Mind,
1991, Video/Sound Installation. (Copy p. 215)
7.
由藝術作為自我的發現到藝術作為贈與
1991年The
Passing 一作紀錄了藝術家生命中同時發生的兩個事件：母親的死亡及兒子的出生。Bill
Viola的藝術理念也逐漸由藝術作為自我的發現走向藝術作為贈與，同時也為錄像與媒體的關係作出了更深一層的詮釋。
Until
artists who work with video become, through self discipline, devoted practice,
and selfless knowledge, deeply aware and compassionate human beings, there
will no “television art”. The rules for the artists ultimately do not come
from art history, or from current trends, ideas, and fashions, or even from
the materials themselves. There merely resources to draw on. The real rules
come from the Self. The only method is Self-knowledge, and its only parameters
are that of the Gift, of receiving and in turn passing it on. These rules are
the same and only rules for the creation of a true “television art”.
不再受限於藝術世界內的藝術，以及藝術家本人作為medium的形像.
這使得Viola的藝術邁向他下一步的特色，擁有於今日藝術如此稀少的巨大染力。
VHS
[1]
Margot Lovejoy, Postmodern Currents: Art and Artists in the Age of
Electronic Media, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, Prentice-Hall, 1997
(second edition), p. 97. 一般認為錄像藝術最早的兩件作品則可上溯至1963年。白南準1963年在德國Wuppertal的Galerie
Parnass展出了他的電視機裝置。同年Wolf
Vostell 在紐約展出他的「電子撕開」（décollage électronique）影像。參閱Jean-Paul
Fargier, « La lune n’est pas le soleil », in Où
va la vidéo ?, no. spé., Les Cahiers du Cinéma,
Paris, 1986, p. 11. (有一個說法認為Vostell於1958年開始製作和電視有關的藝術品，但這是一個不確定的說法。參見
Edith Decker-Philipps, Paik Video, NewYork,
Barrytown, Ltd, 1998, pp. 42-49 (原著為德文，出版於1988年)。
[2] 「在開始的時候，錄像實踐有兩種型態：一個是和另類新聞報導相關的活躍份子主導之紀錄片，另一個才是正確意義下的藝術錄像。」Michael Rush, New Media in Late 20th-Century Art, London, Thames and Hudson, 1999, p. 80. 作者還更細緻地區分了Art videon及artful video (p. 83)。有關反對文化電視台組織如「紙老虎」、TVTV等，請參閱p. 81及前引Margot Lovejoy著作pp. 116-120。比較早期的參考資料比如 Peter d’Agostino, Transmission: Theory and Practice for a New Television Aesthetics, New York, Tanam Press, 1985.
[3]
“L’espace à pleine dent”, entretien avec Bill Viola par
Raymond Bellour, in Où va la vidéo ?, op. cit.,
p. 68.
[4] Bill Viola, “The Porcupine and the Car” (1981), in Bill Viloa, Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House, Writings 1973-1994, op. cit., p. 71.