Content Description
Dan Graham's video installation Present Continuous Past(s) (1974) can be seen in this regard as an illustrative metaphor for the field of suspense within which video art positions itself between presence and historicity. Graham's emphasis of the spectator's role points at the central function of witnessing, which bestows the work its topical presence. Mediated by the mirror effect of the time-delayed feedback of the video circuit, historicity is characterized as a fundamental moment of experience within the reception of the artwork, taking shape in the act of continuous experimental reconstruction. For the discourse on the expanded conditions of the reception of video art, Graham's installation can be read as a programmatic impulse, inasmuch as it translates traditional forms of art display that have been characterized by their demand for autonomy into a communicative system of a permanent "re-framing" and "re-viewing", dialectically connecting the art work’s history and presence.