Early Video Art Experiments in Spain: Precariousness, Experimentation, Activism

In the 1960s, Spain was still under the Francoist dictatorship and Spanish artists struggled to connect with the main trends in the international art world. The country had no solid cultural infrastructure and there was still a veil of censorship. It was not until the mid-1970s that critical views started to emerge both in official art and in the policies of the time. These were the circumstances in which some of the most world-renowned Spanish artists worked, although the majority had been trained and had developed their work abroad. Consequently, the bulk of this “Spanish art” was produced outside Spain and generated, from exile, a poetics of resistance that highlighted issues that were only just coming to light in the country. These included the dematerialization of the art object, the use of digital technology, collective work, and local advocacy. Video art was one of the new artistic disciplines that emerged at this time. Although some artists adopted a more formalist experimental approach (in line with certain Greenbergian postulates that had a great impact on Spanish art), most were aware that video could be used as a tool to subvert the mass media. There were artists linked to Fluxus such as Nam June Paik, Shigeko Kubota and Wolf Vostell in the 1960s and some notable experiments in film in the 1950s, yet electromagnetic tape only began to be used for artistic purposes in Spain from the 1970s onwards. Difficulties in accessing equipment, and indeed a lack thereof, hindered any widespread experimentation, but that does not mean that the situation of video in Spain was any less interesting. In this paper we review the genealogy of video art in Spain to explore its origins, not so easily recognizable, due to a lack of evidence and record and the precarious situation of the country at that time.