BIOGRAPHY
Charles Dee Mitchell is a freelance art writer based in Dallas, Texas. He contributes to the Dallas Morning News and Art in America. He has curated exhibitions for both commercial and not-for-profit spaces, and his catalog essays have accompanied exhibitions at The Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Dallas Museum of Art; and, the Columbus Art Museum, Columbus, Ohio.

About twenty-five years ago I was at a party in Houston.  It was well into the evening when I remember turning around and catching Bart Weiss, now Artistic Director of the Video Association of Dallas, pointing a video camera at me.

I still don’t like people pointing video cameras at me, but at the time I was taking a principled stand against video in general.

Throughout the 1980’s, if I got any gallery invitation that promised “Video by the Artist at 8:00,” I was out of there by 7:45.  For one thing, I knew the equipment probably wouldn’t start working until after 9:00; and, once it did, we would watch some one we knew from the local scene either slowly filling glasses with water or talking directly to the camera about the house he or she lived in as a child, the swing set in the backyard, their dog, and they way the air smelled when the city sprayed for mosquitoes.  This would all take about thirty minutes. I wanted nothing to do with it.

But look at me now, co-curator of The Program, the arty part of the 2008 Dallas Video Festival.  Never say never.

Video caught my attention the first time I saw William Wegman at the Fort Worth museum of Modern Art.  I’m a sucker for a little touch of showbiz with my art, and I was hooked.

Here is my totally undocumented historical analysis of how video art has developed.

Like performance art, which it often documented, video art initially owed much to sculpture and painting.  Some excellent work was done within those parameters, but there came a point at which performance artists decided that what they were doing had more to do with theater than sculpture.  They began seriously to consider the difficult art of “timing,” and good acting sounded like a better idea than bad acting.

About this same time, video artists started looking more at film and narrative.  But just as performance art never became just theater, video art found approaches to narrative, subject matter, and presentation that kept it a unique form rather than a subset of film.

Some of the artists in The Program could be, and maybe soon will be, feature film makers.  There are also some who use video and computers to create purely visual experiences.  Many of these artists are regulars on the international art circuit and are making their area premieres with The Program.  Others are young artists none of us curating The Program had heard of before they submitted their DVD’s.  But what they have all learned how to put on a show.  (Which, by the way, is not an easy thing to do.)

And now we hope you enjoy the show.  Expect some of it to make you laugh loud and some of it make you uncomfortable.  Some of it could piss you off, and some could even make you think.  Whatever the case, please come back for more.