This book - accompanied by a DVD containing excerpts of all featured works and additional materials - tracks 40 years of German video art, from 1963 to the present. It offers a comprehensive overview of historical and current tendencies in video art, via 59 individual artworks. The included texts reflect on current strategies involving moving images and issues of presentation, conservation and restoration.

This ambitious reference work charts the major works and art movements, the most important theoretical developments, and the historical, socio-political, and aesthetic issues since 1945, primarily in the Euro-American context. Bringing together the leading critics and historians from art to comment on the historical and theoretical issues, the book offers new approaches towards the analysis of visual arts in general.

The book tracks the movement of the film avant-garde between, on the one hand, the cinema, and, on the other hand, modern art. It also reconstitutes the film avant-garde as an independent form of art practice with its own internal logic and aesthetic discourse. This is the first major history of avant-garde film and video to be published, ranging from Cézanne, dada, and Brakhage, to the new wave of British video artists in the 90s.

A critical introduction to video art in Europe and North America covering the period from the early 1960s -- when video art first appeared as a distinctive medium -- into the 1990s, when video through digital technology with independent film-making and photography. Richly illustrated, Video Art is essential reading for anyone interested in art history and contemporary art practice.

Le Grice begins with Cezanne to show how his preoccupation with pictorial space is a key to any understanding of the notion of abstraction. He goes on to discuss the Futurists' cinema, the early abstract film experiments by Eggeling, Duchamp and others in Germany and France of the '20s, the West Coast filmmakers of the '40s, and a stimulating view of the experimental film movement after WW II, including the works of Brakhage, Snow, Gidal and Sharits.