Since the late 1960s, California artists have been at the forefront of an international movement that has made video a central new medium in contemporary art. This illustrated volume--the first comprehensive survey of California video art--focuses on fifty-eight dynamic, provocative artists and collaboratives who have embraced video technology and expanded its possibilities. Whether designing complex sculptures and installations, devising lush projections, experimenting with electronic psychedelia, generating guerrilla video, or producing vanguard works that engage with feminism and other social issues, artists from Northern and Southern California have used video to express revolutionary ideas. Through dozens of interviews with pioneers and luminaries such as John Baldessari, Chris Burden, Mike Kelley, Martha Rosler, Diana Thater, Bill Viola, and William Wegman, California Video sheds new light on well-known artists and brings long-overdue recognition to others. The volume's commissioned essays, rare reprints, unpublished video transcripts, and hundreds of photographs reveal a distinctly West Coast aesthetic within the broader history of video art.
