Getty and video

From the New York Times

"EARLY this year the artist Martin von Haselberg, better known as one-half of the Kipper Kids performance duo, made a pilgrimage to the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles to view a video he hadn’t seen since he created it in 1976. The institute had just rediscovered it in the Long Beach Museum of Art video archives, a trove of early work that the institute acquired in December 2005.

In many ways the tape is typical of the years when video was an exciting new art form, ripe for cheap experimentation, as well as a novel way to document another relatively new medium, performance art. The tape’s first half shows Mr. von Haselberg playing around with technology as he mugs behind a magnifying lens that grotesquely enlarges and distorts his features.
In the second half Mr. von Haselberg and the other Kipper Kid, Brian Routh, send up macho camaraderie by grunting and singing in cockney-accented gibberish while roughing each other up, urinating in tandem and stripping to the buff.

It also seems typical that until last summer Mr. von Haselberg (who later became a commodities broker and married Bette Midler) had forgotten the tape’s existence. Back then, as he noted, most artists weren’t too careful about keeping track of their video output."

"In March a fraction of the institute’s vast video holdings will go on view in three major shows: “Making It Together,” about early feminist art collaborations, opening on March 2 at the Bronx Museum of Art; the retrospective “Allan Kaprow: Art as Life,” opening on March 23 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; and the Getty’s own “California Video,” a joint project of the research institute and the J. Paul Getty Museum, opening on March 15, that will offer video made in California between 1968 and 2008."