Beyond the Frame: When Video Art Rewrites the Language of Cinema
From video art’s emergence in the late 1960s, it has sparred in a productive tension with cinema, simultaneously appropriating and dismantling film’s conventions. Early pioneers such as Nam June Paik, who transformed television into sculptural architecture, Bruce Nauman, whose closed-circuit videos foregrounded surveillance, and Joan Jonas, who fused performance with myth, all redefined the screen as a physical and experiential space rather than a transparent narrative window. This expanded cinematic grammar saw further development by artists such as Douglas Gordon, whose temporal manipulations of Hollywood films fractured narrative time; Sam Taylor-Wood, who merged painterly stillness with cinematic duration; and Stan Douglas, whose meticulously constructed filmic installations interrogated history, memory, and the mechanics of storytelling.