Ed Halter
In a retrospective at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, over five decades of the pioneering video artist’s work.
Steina: Playback, installation view. Courtesy Buffalo AKG Art Museum. Photo: Brenda Bieger.
Steina: Playback, curated by Natalie Bell and Helga Christoffersen, Buffalo AKG Art Museum, 1284 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, New York,
through June 30, 2025
• • •
Stroll by Steina’s eight-minute Flux (1977) looping on its cathode-ray monitor, and you could mistakenly think that the tube is on the fritz: what at first resembles stochastic patterns of swirling television static quickly reveals itself to be black-and-white analog video of rapid, turbulent waters, the sound of continuously crashing waves intermingling with undertones of magnetic-tape hiss. The footage rapidly intercuts between two opposing angles—an amphetamined Eisensteinian montage juiced up on electronics. This rhythmic repetition of interruption in the waters’ currents realizes, over time, its own kind of musical flow. Stay long enough by the monitor, and the image switches from photographic to nonrepresentational. Now shadowy patterns ripple monochrome shapes across the screen, crude geometric ghosts summoned from video’s essence, pure signal expressed without content.
Steina, Flux, 1977 (still). Single-channel, black-and-white video with sound, 8 minutes 11 seconds. Courtesy the artist and BERG Contemporary.
Flux is on view at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum as part of Steina: Playback, a retrospective of the Icelandic video-art pioneer’s output from 1969 to the end of the twentieth century, some of it produced during the years she taught at nearby SUNY Buffalo. The exhibition made its first appearance at MIT List Visual Arts Center last year, which served as an apt context for a technology-forward figure. Collected together with other examples from the first decade of her video practice in one room at AKG, Flux runs on one of nine monitors set on a ring-shaped wooden table, each facing outward and accompanied by a low circular stool and a pair of headphones, inviting personal interaction. Most of the pieces here, like Flux, center on the manipulation of video signal to create weird animated distortions and abstractions, often by using rewired tools to generate audio from image, or vice versa. Fantastically engaging, in the paradoxical way that music made from noise can be, Steina’s tapes also function as sensorial inquiries into the essential nature of the video signal, and, by extension, communication as such.
Perched before the five-minute Telč (1974), made with Woody Vasulka (Steina’s partner until his death in 2019) on a visit to his Czech homeland, I stared closely at an ever-morphing landscape of wiggly raster lines extruded from their road-trip footage, retroactively reminiscent of the radio-pulsar cover art for Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures, released some five years later. Regressing momentarily to the bad habits of my ’70s childhood, I leaned forward toward the slightly curving glass, removed my progressive lenses for the full effect of advancing nearsightedness, and gazed closely into the screen until I could perceive the color monitor’s triadic RGB phosphor dots, individually winking off and on to create the spectral motion.
Steina and Woody Vasulka, Noisefields, 1974 (still). Single-channel, color video with sound, 12 minutes 5 seconds. Courtesy the artist and BERG Contemporary.
Most of Steina’s pieces on view from the first half of the ’70s—and roughly a quarter of all works included—are coauthored with Woody. Originally trained as a classical musician, Steina met him in Prague while she was studying at a conservatory and he at film school; together, they left for the United States in 1965, landing in Manhattan around the same time that Nam June Paik picked up his first Sony Portapak. In 1969, the couple visited Howard Wise’s landmark video-art exhibition TV as a Creative Medium, and, in Steina’s words, “it quite blew my mind.” Soon, Woody stopped making movies, Steina ditched the violin, and together they turned to video as their instrument of choice. The married couple was known on the scene at the time simply as the Vasulkas, like some vaudeville family act, part of a loose network of US-based artists and technologists obsessed with do-it-yourself TV tinkering.
Steina and Woody Vasulka, Matrix I, 1970–72. Courtesy MIT List Visual Arts Center. Photo: Dario Lasagni.
The Vasulkas borrowed and modified novel electronic-imaging tools designed by others of their ilk and given names straight out of a P. K. Dick story: Harald Bode’s Frequency Shifter, Eric Siegel’s Dual Colorizer, George Brown’s Horizontal Drift Variable Clock, the Rutt/Etra Scan Processor. Steina and Woody sustained a showcase for this thriving but niche community by founding the Electronic Kitchen (today known as the Kitchen) in 1971, which they conceived of not as a theater or gallery but “a live audience test laboratory.” Playback includes a spectacular example of the Vasulkas’ collaborative era, Matrix I (1970–72), configured on a bank of nine monitors upon which layers of zebra-patterns gyre and gimble in a storm of psychedelic feedback. The installation approximates the couple’s Matrix performances, improvised events that fed whatever recent tape the Vasulkas were then working on across an entire video wall.
Steina: Playback, installation view. Courtesy Buffalo AKG Art Museum. Photo: Brenda Bieger.
Mounting a monographic retrospective for an artist such as Steina, whose early career has so long been identified as part of a duo, is a delicate curatorial operation: How to acknowledge what is particular to one artist as well as what is particular to their collaboration alone? Moreover, when it comes to heterosexual art-couples, there is an added urgency to refusing the long pattern of disadvantage shown to female creative partners. In the case of Playback at AKG, one approach is the sequestering of the Vasulkas’ joint efforts in a single room and granting the real estate of the exhibition’s four other chambers to Steina’s predominantly solo work of the later 1970s and after.
Steina: Playback, installation view. Courtesy Buffalo AKG Art Museum. Photo: Brenda Bieger.
The majority of space is thus given to large-scale pieces, like the verdant multiscreen projections Lava and Moss and Mynd (both 2000) and the disorientingly massive water-walls of Borealis (1993), landscape-study video-wall sculpture The West (1983), and Playback’s showstopper, Allvision (1976), Steina’s “live electro/opto/mechanical environment,” consisting of two operational video cameras mounted on the far ends of a crossbar, slowly circulating around a large mirrored ball. The cameras send live feeds of the sphere’s round reflective surface to nearby monitors, displaying distorted images of the gallery back inside itself. At AKG, Allvision is positioned like a clock at the center of the exhibition, in a room that serves as a meeting place between four others. Its rotations accentuate the rounded forms that reappear throughout her work, most dramatically the fish-eyed lensing of the single-channel self-portrait Summer Salt (1982).
Steina: Playback, installation view. Courtesy Buffalo AKG Art Museum. Photo: Brenda Bieger. Pictured: Allvision, 1976.
What Playback successfully argues is a deep continuity, in terms of concept and process, for an artist whose materials have necessarily changed in dramatic ways over the decades. The show becomes, in part, an object lesson in how video itself has evolved from analog tape to data file, like a spirit migrating many bodies, by using a wide variety of formats: monitors, flat-screens, and high-definition projections of all shapes and sizes. This variety accentuates Steina’s long-standing desire to think of video not as any specific set of technologies, but as an embodiment of change itself, a fundamental property of our moving through time.
Ed Halter is a founder and director of Light Industry, a venue for cinema in all its forms in Brooklyn, New York, and Critic in Residence at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.