Vitamin V: Video and the Moving Image in Contemporary Art
“This book is a work of art, a tour de force of text and graphics that belongs in the personal library of everyone who values the moving image.”
Known for publishing books on art, design, photography, and popular culture, Phaidon Press has reached a new height of accomplishment with its acclaimed “Vitamin” series. Their new offering, Vitamin V: Video and the Moving Image in Contemporary Art, extends their vision into yet another venue of today’s creative works of imagination.
Developing a series with such titles as Vitamin P3: New Perspectives on Painting (2019), Vitamin D3: Today’s Best in Contemporary Drawing (2022), and Vitamin Txt: Words in Contemporary Art (2024), Phaidon has chosen a novel and ambitious approach. Assembling an impressive group of nominators from the world of art and an equally impressive panel of writers, the editors curate profiles of notable, and perhaps underexposed, contributors in their field of creativity.
Vitamin V, then, comprises a survey of living artists who “share a common motivation to use contemporary technologies in unexpected and often revolutionary ways.” Centering on the use of moving images, the field includes live action, animation, video game technologies, and computer-generated imagery.
As Erika Balsom explains in the Introduction, when film was in its infancy in the early 20th century, critics questioned its artistic merit as a machine-driven medium. However, “the impulse to reinvent cinema outside its mainstream instantiations reemerged in the postwar United States” in the 1950s. Advancing on work by Europeans such as Dali, Cocteau, and Buñuel, “the New American Cinema adopted an artisanal model of production and asserted its independence from the commercial cinema and the art world alike.”
The inheritors of this movement into artistic freedom? More than one hundred living creators from around the world who are featured in this remarkable survey. While it’s a challenge to select only a few examples that will provide readers with a strong sense of what Phaidon has accomplished in this volume, New York Journal of Books never shirks its responsibilities in these matters. So, let’s take a look!
One profile that stands out among filmmakers is Angelica Mesiti, who was born in Australia and now lives and works in Paris, France. Her film Assembly (2019) is a creative consideration of David Malouf’s poem “To Be Translated into Another Tongue,” which was set to music by Max Lyandvert. Projected across three screens, the music eventually gives way to choreographed movements common in political demonstrations:
“Moving fluidly through metaphor, Mesiti ties the legal armature of the state to the motion, permissions, and freedoms of the body, using Malouf’s poem as a vector to travel from language through to the nonverbal.”
Remaining with Mesiti’s profile for a moment, it’s important to note that Vitamin V is printed on heavy-stock paper that will accommodate crisp, colorful graphics. In this case, the editors have included stills from Assembly and other films such as Future Perfect Continuous (2022), Mother Tongue (2017), and Over the Air and Underground (2020). While Mesiti explores the impact of various media, Phaidon ensures that readers are fully apprised of her own visual perceptiveness and creativity.
Another profile drawing our attention is that of Ian Cheng, a New York-based artist who creates “live simulations” such as BOB (Bag of Beliefs) (2018–19) and his Emissary trilogy (2015–17), the latter described by Cheng as an extended “video game playing itself.”
Of interest is his use of artificial intelligence (AI) not only in production but also with certain characters representing the AI point of view. In Life After BOB: The Chalice Study (2021–22), Dr. Wong, a neural engineer, outfits his daughter Chalice with an AI device that “determines one’s life path—at birth. . . . Throughout the film Dr. Wong grapples with his dual relationship to Chalice—as both his daughter and subject of study.”
The eye-catching stills selected from his animations by the editors ensure readers will not turn the page until they’ve read Cheng’s profile and considered his artistic treatment of this very timely theme.
Finally, one more example with a high “wow” factor is the entry for Laure Prouvost, born in Lille, France, and living in Brussels, Belgium. Working across multiple media including film, installation, performance, and visual art, Prouvost explores themes of “miscommunication and linguistic displacement . . . [presenting] unexpected associations between text and image, creating surreal realms that elude absolute comprehension.”
Her films, such as Four For see Beauties (2022) and They Parlaient Idéale (2019), feature “layered images, ASMR-like sounds and narration, repetition, self-referencing, subtitles, and wordplay.” (ASMR being “autonomous sensory meridian response,” aka that tingling feeling that courses down your spine when you experience something pleasurable.”)
The graphic images included with her profile, stills from the two above-mentioned films, are quite stunning, not to mention ASMR-provoking.
Which leads one to a summary of Vitamin V as a whole. This book is a work of art in itself, a tour de force of text and graphics that belongs in the personal library of everyone who values the moving image as an expression of artistic creativity, as well as anyone who treasures books as a medium of aesthetic endeavor.
Book designer Julia Hasting in her own right has created one of the most visually striking, aesthetically pleasing, and well-organized titles ever to cross this desk, and the Phaidon production team as a whole must be congratulated for their exemplary work.