At the Chelsea Hotel, the filmmaker’s Tee Pee Video Space Troupe turned cameras and monitors into instruments people had to learn to play together.

By Margin Tone

Shirley Clarke had made films including The Connection and Portrait of Jason when she began filling her Chelsea Hotel home with video equipment. By the early 1970s, the filmmaker and former dancer was teaching visitors to make live images together. Her workshops could last until breakfast. A good deal of the night went into learning how to pay attention to someone else while keeping track of what you were doing yourself.

Andrew Gurian, who joined her Tee Pee Video Space Troupe in 1972, recalled one workshop from 1972 or 1973. About fifteen people gathered inside the pyramid-shaped structure on the hotel’s roof. Clarke introduced them to one another and outlined the next eight or nine hours: games, portrait-making, recording and, at dawn, four tapes playing at once. Facing the group stood a figure assembled from four black-and-white monitors. Like Clarke, it wore a hat.

She called it a Totem. A large monitor turned on its side supplied the torso; two smaller sets became arms, and a little round-cased monitor served as the head. Cameras could fill those screens with parts of one person, or assemble a body from several people. Recorded limbs could join live ones. It was a cheerfully awkward introduction to a room where a person’s image could turn up somewhere their body wasn’t.

Once the visitors split between two rooms, each with its own Totem, the game demanded coordination. One participant contributed a head and right arm, another a torso and left arm. Both rooms saw the same composite person. The participants tried to make it dance or clap. Even bringing two hands together meant watching a partner’s movement on a screen and adjusting to it.

Her home had been prepared for these exchanges. Clarke wired spaces inside the tower and out on the roof so that pictures and sound could travel between them. A patchboard let the troupe send an image from one place to the others. Gurian remembered the equipment being left on, carrying pictures of furniture, people, windows and Clarke’s poodles through the household. Wendy Clarke, her daughter and a fellow troupe member, remembered experimenting from sundown to sunrise with people who had arrived from painting, photography, dance and film.

There was plenty for experienced artists to learn. Wendy developed a painting exercise in which a camera looked at the paper from a steep angle. The painter watched the monitor, trying to make the portrait look right there. The drawing on paper might become strangely elongated as the artist compensated for the camera’s view. The painter could know exactly how to draw a face and still have to work out how to make this one appear.

In a 1973 interview published in the video journal Radical Software, Clarke compared the attention this required to playing jazz. The musician hears an individual part while listening to the other players. A video maker likewise had to see an image on one monitor while noticing what everyone else was doing. Passing a camera or moving a picture between screens required practice. Her years in dance gave her an ordinary, demanding model for it: people trained their bodies to do things they couldn’t do before.

Getting visitors to play was its own difficulty. Her interviewers, fellow video makers from Antioch’s Videoball, worried that their own video environments, however generously supplied with props, had made people feel pressured to perform. Clarke thought guidance was necessary. People accustomed to watching needed some idea of what was expected of them. “We must give them hints,” she said. Once an activity got going, she hoped, they would take off on their own.

Gurian remembered that some people resisted the costumes, masks and toy instruments. The equipment itself had been decorated, with knobs disguised and cameras sporting cutouts. Tools were painted pink, partly to identify them on tour. Yet the machinery could still interrupt everything. Clarke complained about collecting expensive equipment and then being unable to trust it to last through a show. She said the most useful advice had come from other video artists.

Around two in the morning, Gurian’s account returns to the practical business of making tapes. The workshop divided into four groups, each led by a troupe member. They worked separately, sometimes elsewhere in the city, producing half-hour recordings that included material from the earlier games. As he gained experience, Gurian steered his groups towards long-held, simple images. He knew these could sit alongside the denser, more complicated pictures Clarke’s groups tended to produce.

Just before dawn, everyone came back. The four tapes played simultaneously across eight or nine monitors while the participants ate breakfast. They recognised the opening games, then encountered what the other groups had made during their hours apart. The pictures could be murky or out of focus; Gurian’s account makes no attempt to tidy them up. What interested him was how one group’s work changed beside another’s. The people eating breakfast had helped make those pictures. They could remember the decisions and accidents behind their own tape while discovering what the others had been doing.