Video Art. The Viewer’s Montage

This study examines the history of video art as a distinct form of screen art that consistently breaks the rules and traditions established in cinema and television. Alexandra Persheeva demonstrates how montage makes it possible to confront not only images but also entire discursive fields, how meanings arise at the junction of frames, and how worlds are constructed when screens are combined. Each chapter of the book is dedicated to one type of montage. A continuous narrative throughout the text traces the history of the emergence and functioning of montage in screen culture, as well as the transformations of familiar ways of "montage thinking" under the influence of artists' experiments. The author pays special attention to the role of gallery spaces, which, unlike cinemas, open up aesthetic possibilities for spatial montage, as well as the role of the viewer, who becomes a co-author of the artist in the realm of video art. The work mentions and analyzes more than 250 experimental films and videos that may be of interest to both specialists and a wide audience of contemporary art enthusiasts.