Purifying Video’s Visual Pollution: Videographics by Livinus and Jeep van de Bundt

Abstract

The article is based on archival research into material contained by the Van de Bundts' partial artist archive housed at LI-MA, Amsterdam. Despite the status of Livinus and Jeep van de Bundt as the pioneers of Dutch abstract video art, there has been done no research on the substantial part of their oeuvre consisting of prints of video art ('videographics'). By examining videographics from the archive, this article aims to discover how these prints succeed in the artists' goal of purifying the polluted visual culture they thought so prominent in video and television specifically. Proposing a method of analysing an artistic medium through the qualities it shares with other media, allows for a non-differentiating approach to considering the videographic as a medium that exists solely through the artistic qualities of other media. The introduction of Laura Marks' theory of haptic visuality, illustrates how the videographics allow a dual aesthetic reading (visual and tactile). This dual aesthetic experience, in turn, inspires the subject to consider their mode of viewing, weaponizing said subject in the fight against visual pollution.