Edited by Jeroen Boomgaard and Bart Rutten, with essays by Rob Perrée, Jorinde Seijdel, Sebastián López, Anne van Driel, Heiner Holtappels, Hinke Kappert, Marga van Mechelen and Ruth Bellinkx.
This month's pick from our library reaches back to the formative years of video art in the Netherlands. The book traces how the medium took shape between 1970 and 1985 – not as a single story, but through a range of writers and perspectives, refusing a tidy chronology.
Much of that early circuit ran through the workshop facilities of institutions like Het Lijnbaancentrum, the Jan van Eyck Akademie, De Appel and Monte Video – the last of which LI-MA descends from, via the Netherlands Media Art Institute. The book documents the infrastructure that made Dutch video art possible, which makes it a natural companion to Pioneers of Media Art: The First Years of MonteVideo, on view at Nxt Museum. Where the exhibition returns to Monte Video's earliest years, The Magnetic Era sets that history in its wider national context.
The Netherlands played a pioneering role in video art's European trajectory, and much of that circuit took shape through the workshop facilities of institutions such as Het Lijnbaancentrum, the Jan van Eyck Akademie, Monte Video and De Appel. The book follows the medium from its early-1970s beginnings – as artists tested its creative and documentary possibilities while continually defending its validity – through to the cheaper, simpler editing techniques that eased video's assimilation into the wider art world in the 1990s.
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