Beryl Korot — Dachau 1974 — video as weaving

1974

Artists: Beryl Korot · Year: 1974 · Medium: Four-channel video installation — synchronized video on four monitors arranged in grid · Substrate: Four 3/4-inch U-matic video recordings played synchronously on four monitors; custom hand-wired synchronization electronics; footage of the Dachau concentration camp · Place: New York, USA · Institution: Independent; later acquired by Jewish Museum and other institutions Beryl Korot's Dachau 1974 is a four-channel video installation in which synchronized video plays across four monitors arranged in a 2×2 grid. The content is footage Korot shot at the Dachau concentration-camp memorial site in Germany; the four channels advance in patterns derived from weaving, a craft Korot had trained in before turning to video. Weaving's warp-and-weft structure — two interlocked sequential systems producing a finished pattern — becomes the formal structure of the video installation. This is a conceptually sophisticated piece. Korot's argument — that video is a weaving medium, that its temporal structure is a textile structure — predates almost every subsequent multi-channel video installation's comparable framing. Her subject choice, the Holocaust memorial site, gives the formal argument moral weight that most formal-video work does not carry. The piece asks how a medium derived from textiles can bear witness to a genocide that the memorial-site imagery has already made unbearable to look at directly. Korot co-edited, with Ira Schneider, Radical Software magazine from 1970 onward — the foundational journal of early video art — and was centrally involved in the infrastructure that let video art become a recognized practice. Her subsequent work has continued the video-as-weaving investigation through the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. She is married to the composer Steve Reich; their The Cave (1993) is a major video-music collaboration. She is still working. Lore Beryl Korot trained as a textile-weaver before turning to multi-channel video in the early 1970s — the structural parallel between woven cloth (multiple parallel threads carried in time) and multi-channel video (multiple parallel image streams) was the conceptual basis of her practice. Dachau 1974 was filmed at the former concentration camp during a personal visit; Korot edited the four-channel work over several years at her Manhattan loft. Her husband Steve Reich (the composer, elsewhere in this archive) collaborated on subsequent works including the major The Cave (1993) and Three Tales (2002). Korot continues to produce work and lives in New York. The Dachau 1974 four-channel video is held by the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Israel Museum. Sources • Korot, Beryl; Schneider, Ira (eds.) — Radical Software (1970–74; complete run) • Jewish Museum — Dachau 1974 collection records • Stanford University — Beryl Korot papers