Image and thought in contemporary portuguese video art

Abstract

The Portuguese video art has excelled during the past three decades in the international art scene due to creators like Filipa César, Pedro Gomes, Vasco Araújo, João Onofre, Francisco Queiroz and Nuno Cera, amongst others. Although it is difficult to determine common traits that allow to talk about a “Portuguese School,” on the contrary it can be noted that these artists share a preoccupation concerning the issue of time and the problem of “representation,” present in much of their works. All attempts of theorizing video art, from the earliest (Deleuze, Bellour) to the latest (Parfait, Spielmann), have attempted to meditate on these issues. However, these philosophers and art theorists have realized the complexity owed to the particularity of a medium that presents unprecedented characteristics in the Art History, such as the use of the electronic image. This could be the reason why theory of video art has reached a relatively poorly development. However, the case of those Portuguese artists shows that the creation has been far ahead of theorizing. In this sense, many of their works offer a meditation on time of great interest that cannot be ignored by Aesthetics. This paper discusses some of these creations in order to explain on which consists this particular inquiry about the temporal question, unparalleled in the international video art.