Awards
Art Journal Award
One of four essays in Art Journal’s Fall 2006 issue exploring “Forty Years of Video Art,” Sean Cubitt’s “Grayscale Video and the Shift to Color” is a fascinating discussion of the work and milieu of the 1970s British video artist David Hall. Cubitt’s reading is rich in its historical specificity and expansive in its insights. “Video was a medium without an essence,” he writes. “It was as if the machinery of video seemed too simple, too direct, to be capable of lying, or only capable of lying badly, like a child trying to act a part, and like the child, monochrome was very self-conscious.” Cubitt’s deep knowledge of his subject draws us into an understanding of the medium and its moment, too often relegated to a kind of “white noise” that lurks behind the volubility of the conceptualist and performance practices associated with the period.
Cubitt’s essay breathes new life into the evolving historical picture of that moment. It considers striking new material and raises compelling formal and theoretical questions in lively, approachable writing. The vitality of the piece reflects the author’s location at the intersection of media studies, new-media criticism, and contemporary art history. Indeed, his text encourages us to think that some of the disciplinary divides of recent years can be spanned by an intelligent and interactive interdisciplinary approach.
Jury: Darby English, University of Chicago, chair; Nicholas Mirzoeff, New York University; Joanna Roche, California State University, Fullerton
