Tale of the tape

In a modest exhibition that closed Saturday at Cal State L.A.’s Luckman Gallery, artist Euan Macdonald showed a whimsical work that coincidentally evokes a dilemma faced by another, far more extravagant exhibition just opening across town. His 2001 “File Cabinet,” a single-channel video projected on the wall, is something like a preface to the J. Paul Getty Museum’s ambitious 40-year survey, “California Video.”

Macdonald trained his stationary camera on an ordinary two-drawer file cabinet shown head-on against a blank wall, its form and composition reminiscent of Minimalist art. The cabinet’s top drawer is open. Suddenly, as if pushed by an unseen breeze or pulled by a cosmic hand, a few sheets of paper fly up out of the drawer, fluttering in space and drifting down to the floor.

Soon, the initial burst is followed by a steady stream. Reams of paper fly into the air, leaving the orderly precinct of the file cabinet behind. Delighting us with their haphazard aerial ballet of escape from methodical office-routine, the sheets mound up at random in a disorganized blanket of paperwork on the floor. “File Cabinet” describes a familiar universe of institutionalized bureaucracy abruptly invaded by inexplicable mystery, idiosyncrasy and play. An unruly ghost lurks in the modern machine. Making chaos out of order, Macdonald’s anarchic video cheerfully reverses older ideas about art’s purposes.

The L.A. artist is one among 58 past and present Californians whose work is included in the Getty’s big survey. (A different Macdonald video is on view.) Assembled are more than 50 single-channel videos and 15 installation works made in the four decades since Sony introduced the first portable video recording device in 1967. The unruly show is like Macdonald’s file cabinet.

Introduction of the Sony Portapak was an epochal event in image-making history, and it’s smartly signaled at the show’s entry. A black-and-white John Baldessari video plays continuously on a vintage portable Sony TV. Baldessari shows his hand repeatedly writing “I will not make any more boring art” in pencil on lined paper, like a naughty boy kept after class.

The vintage Sony, placed atop a museum pedestal rather than a living room hutch, also illustrates an intersection between art and art museum that has long been integral to video. It’s an art-form born of one institutional nexus -- commercial television -- with almost immediate ties to two others, namely art museums and schools. There, equipment was available and experimentation nurtured.

Think of a museum as a kind of filing cabinet for art, a place that puts an unmanageable variety of cultural production into some temporary semblance of order. The tensions between art and museum, plus their considerable interdependence, are suggested by Macdonald’s video. Not surprisingly they are also encountered at the Getty -- perhaps art’s ultimate filing cabinet.

The show was inspired by the Getty Research Institute’s 2006 acquisition of the Long Beach Museum of Art’s fabled video archive.

The Portapak had given to individuals a powerful electronic image-making capacity formerly held only by corporations. Artists were instantly captivated.

Women, whose work makes up more than a third of the show, were especially inventive. They recognized the possibilities in a new medium -- emerging at the same moment as feminism -- free of the art world’s conventional baggage of social exclusion.

Yet, the revolution touched off by portable technology faced an obstacle. Point-and-shoot camera work was nice, but visual elaboration and complex editing were mostly beyond an individual artist’s reach. That required major equipment. The Long Beach Museum stepped into the breach.

With a $50,000 Rockefeller Foundation grant (nearly $200,000 in today’s currency), the museum built a video facility for artists in 1976. About half the Getty show derives from that archive, including important, rarely seen examples by David Askevold, Terry Fox, Tony Labat, Patty Podesta and many more.

The remaining videos were made by Bay Area, San Diego and L.A. artists working independently, often in academic settings. The skylight in one gallery ceiling is the site of a terrific commissioned work by Jennifer Steinkamp, whose projected clouds of sliding, shifting color are part inner eyeball, part metaphoric birth canal and part hell’s mouth.

It is a lot to take in -- an unavoidably unwieldy array of single monitor works and installations in styles that careen among narrative, pure abstraction, comedy, surrealist fantasy and much more, and in formats that derive from painting, sculpture, performance and installation art, as well as commercial TV. In tandem with an excellent catalog, Getty curator Glenn Phillips has done a remarkable job of giving rudimentary shape to a resistant West Coast history.

Phillips has wisely emphasized video’s early years -- more than half the works date from 1968 to 1979 -- with quite recent video making up the second-largest chunk. A lot has changed between then and now. One dramatic difference is technological, and it isn’t just the obsolescence of the Long Beach Museum’s editing studio in today’s Photoshop universe of personal computing.

Video distribution now takes advantage of the Internet. If the Portapak switched video production from corporate to individual, resulting in personal media as an option for countless artists, the Internet has done something similar for video distribution.

YouTube is home to vernacular video, which inevitably will inflect younger video artists’ future work. Phillips indicates the magnitude of the change with a study room at the center of the show. After galleries chockablock with single channel monitors, each playing one work by one artist, and before galleries overstuffed with wall-size projections and sculptural installations ubiquitous in museums today, it’s like being at home or an Internet cafe.

A banquette lines the walls. Touch-screen computer panels enable visitors to search the show’s video database by artist, time period and theme and to watch what they choose according to personal taste. Using the Getty’s website, the same set-up is available at home. Personal media is evolving from creator/distributor to user. The rather unwieldy exhibition begins to take on an aura of interactive manageability.

It’s also helped by another salient fact. The show correctly deduces a unique propensity for the value of entertainment in early West Coast video, distinguishing it from drier or more sober video elsewhere and very common in art today.

William Wegman and Susan Mogul essentially do comedy routines. Martha Rosler satirizes TV news. Arthur Ginsberg anticipates reality TV.

Skip Arnold goes in for extreme sports. The Kipper Kids do slapstick. Eleanor Antin envisions herself on stage as a poised yet physically atypical ballerina. Ilene Segalove turns the sentiment into a vanity license plate for her car -- TV IS OK -- and records that.

A categorical aesthetic prejudice against entertainment in New York critical circles collided with West Coast video art. Easterners often regard local art as righteously avant-garde, while discounting California (especially Los Angeles) art as kitsch. Made in the vicinity of Hollywood, entertaining video art actually set a radically new standard. The Getty show happily gets it.

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christopher.knight @latimes.com

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‘California Video’

Where: Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles

When: 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Tuesdays-Thursdays and Sundays, 10 a.m.- 9 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays

Ends: June 8

Price: Free

Contact: (310) 440-7300