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Barbara London on New Territory

Barbara London founded the Museum of Modern Art's (MoMA) video-media exhibition and collection programs in the mid-70s and has played a pivotal role in new media art's shape since then. The curator and author of Video Art/The First Fifty Years (Phaidon: 2020) spoke with Peter Bauman (Monk Antony). They discuss the early days of video, the challenges of institutionalizing the medium, and why video found institutional acceptance faster than early computer art.

‍Peter Bauman: You began your career at MoMA in 1973 and founded their video-media exhibition and collection programs in 1974 with video art still in its infancy. What gave you the confidence and clarity to believe that this hyper-contemporary work would remain relevant—not only for years and decades, but we can now safely say, for good?‍

‍Barbara London: I began my career at MoMA at a young age. I joke that I was a baby curator. Initially, I worked in the print department, where I founded the Artist Book Collection—artist books were inexpensive, around $2.50, for say the artist books of Ed Ruscha, Sol LeWitt, Nancy Holt and others. I organized a show, Bookworks, in 1977.
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I felt that the motive of those artists to get their work in the hands of people for a very low price was directly connected to the utopianism of the early video makers, who were working initially with a portable camera.

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‍I was really fortunate. MoMA was very small at that point with a staff of only 300 people, including guards. I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed—eager to pursue not only artist books but also work with video. And I was given the green light because it became clear to the museum elders, who were my mentors. They saw me as an energetic person digging into this new field.‍

‍I really wanted to leave the Print Department responsibilities and was encouraged to write a grant application to the Rockefeller Foundation, which came through. It meant that I was relieved of my Print Department responsibilities. I went out on a limb. I didn't know if MoMA would pay my salary after the grant ran out, but they did. So that's the start.‍

‍I started to curate an ongoing exhibition program in a small gallery. Then it became clear that I was finding the gems in this new field. This led to the idea of “What do we do to pursue acquisition?” I found some support among the MoMA trustees, including Mrs. John D. Rockefeller III and others.‍

‍It was a slow, steady process. You could say it was indeed institutionalizing it. But it was really a learning experience for me. I would go on studio visits and have conversations with artists. I was hungry for information. I wanted to know what artists were doing with the tools, what their ideas were. So not only were the older curators in the building my mentors, but I considered artists my mentors as well. They're the ones getting their hands dirty.
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‍Peter Bauman: You mentioned how you were able to find these early gems. Can you talk more about how you were able to get access to artists, like Nam June Paik, in the early days?‍

‍Barbara London: I was very curious. Also, there was very little written at that point.
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The only way to get information was to get out in the field. 

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‍I would do things like go to Max's Kansas City to hear music; I would see artists there. I would go see shows at the early iteration of The Kitchen. I would talk with Woody and Steina Vasulka. I would talk with Joan Jonas. I would go to the Anthology Film Archives. I learned through these conversations. If artists were teaching, I would ask, “Who are your best students and who should I meet?” It was a small field so people were connected and open.‍

‍But it wasn't one big ball of wax. There were cliques and sometimes those groups did not overlap. So if someone says, “The downtown scene was one thing.” No, it wasn't. There were pockets of people. Within and outside of those pockets, the artists helped each other. Maybe Joan Jonas shared her camera with a couple of other artists because they didn't have one. It was like that.‍

‍Peter Bauman: Your experience really highlights the centrality of curiosity. When you were talking about institutionalizing the form, you mentioned needing to reach out for internal support to legitimize what you were doing, perhaps from trustees like Mrs. John D. Rockefeller III. But did you also get any pushback for the medium being so new?‍

‍Was there a sense that video work didn't belong in MoMA next to a Picasso?‍

‍Barbara London: As long as I didn't move my head up too high, as long as I paid attention—I learned very early that the museum has a structure and there's protocol. As long as you followed the protocol, it was fine. I think the director and other people—for example, Bill Rubin, who was the important Picasso scholar and Head of the Painting and Sculpture Department—would say,
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“Thank goodness Barbara London is doing it so my curators can focus on painting and sculpture.” 

It was not only the beginning of video as art but artists were also doing performance. There were painters and other artists who were involved with material practice and were also doing music. They were forming bands.
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It was very interdisciplinary, as it continues to be. So as long as one is aware of that and is aware that definitions keep changing. 

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‍We had a moment, like this is a particular moment. There are other moments. I was fortunate that, for example, around 1977, I got a travel grant to go to Japan. There I was—a very junior curator at MoMA—landing in a culture that I didn't know that much about, although I had studied art from the Near East.‍

‍But because of what I had learned at MoMA, the protocol, I went in with respect, and I think everybody appreciated that. It ended up in a show called Video from Tokyo to Fukui and Kyoto. On my website, you can download the catalog.‍

‍Peter Bauman: In addition to how connected you were to the New York scene, you seemed to know what was going on everywhere. I’m wondering about another pocket forming around this time but in Chicago, with its burgeoning computer video art scene in particular at the University of Illinois at Chicago. That's where Tom DeFanti and Dan Sandin founded the Electronic Visualization Lab [EVL] in 1973. They developed the Sandin Image Processor—which artists like Cory Arcangel still use to this day—and GRASS, one of the earliest computer animation programs. You knew about the work and even included it in MoMA’s seminal Video Art: A History in 1983.‍

‍How did you get to know that Chicago experimental video scene as well?‍

‍Barbara London: I was aware because the video scene was very small. Word went out that at MoMA, there's this curatorial person. Artists would reach out to me or they would come through New York and stop by. She sadly passed away but there was a wonderful artist teaching at the Art Institute of Chicago, Barbara Latham. Barbara invited me to Chicago. I went there and met them, hung out with them, had dinner together and talked about what they were doing.‍

‍Then there was the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers and they would have meetings. MoMA would give me a modest travel grant to attend those meetings, whether they were in LA, at the American Film Institute, or somewhere else.‍

‍Everybody was networking. Everybody was sharing. I joke that I saved every shred of paper an artist ever gave me. There was very little written so I needed to have information for my research. If they gave me a press release, I saved it. If there was an article, I cut it out of a magazine and saved it, whatever.‍

‍Peter Bauman: How did artists working with computer video, like Lillian Schwartz, come across your radar? I'm wondering if you have any insight as to why single-channel videotape seemed to gain institutional acceptance more easily than this early computer video art. You were drawn to both. You even showed Lillian's work at the end of 1975 in a show called Computer Video.‍

‍Barbara London: It's complicated. As you know, it's a combination of factors. You've got the independent voice, so it's easier for the MoMA administration to understand Joan Jonas’s Vertical Roll, the poetry within that black and white work that plays with flaws of the early television.‍

‍When you go into computer graphics, then you've got the world of advertising. What is the logo of a TV station? It's done with computer graphics. So there’s the design aspect. Art writers would look at the work that had a design quality and think, “Well, what makes it unique?”
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Maybe they weren't equipped to analyze but they were easy to dismiss. 

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‍At MoMA, there were curatorial departments. For many years, the Department of Architecture and Design collected posters. Why did they collect posters, which are a form of advertising? Well, there's good design and so-so design. We would heatedly discuss what independent work was about.‍

‍But Lillian Schwartz never was angry. I visited Lillian out at Bell Labs early on—I think in the '70s—and Lillian was interested in scientific ideas. She was investigating the perspective within Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. Lillian was fascinating and so was Doris Chase.‍

‍Peter Bauman: Even in 1968 Lillian was one of the E.A.T. competition winners in MoMA's The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age. That time at the end of the ‘60s seemed to be when interest in computer and digital art peaked. When you arrived by the early-mid '70s, it appeared that institutional interest had largely disappeared—like you said for a variety of reasons. It was mostly dismissed and took several more decades to be reassessed.‍

‍Barbara London: Not dismissed but it was shelved. Decades later, Paola Antonelli came on board in the Architecture and Design Department. Paola spearheaded a lot. I remember in the '70s, I went out for something at the AFI and the Whitney brothers wanted me to see their work. I was very torn because I had a modest travel budget and limited time and didn’t drive over to see them. Of course, I'm very sad now that I didn't meet with them. They're pioneers and they did amazing things. Doing a studio visit would have been great, but alas, I didn't.‍

‍Peter Bauman: It’s an impossible task. People collecting and studying all the contemporary work today—with hindsight from 40, 50 years—will surely overlook and miss things. Someone who worked with and was greatly inspired by the Whitney brothers was Larry Cuba. I bring him up because he was particularly interested in sound, like you. As the ‘80s wore on, what did you think about the work of experimental digital filmmakers like Cuba?‍

‍Barbara London: For sure, I met Larry Cuba. I forget if I did a studio visit. Certainly when I went to Chicago, he and I had different conversations. Where I worked, there was the Film Department. I was doing my thing. There's something called “experimental film." It's just a category that the greater world doesn't know what to do with. So you use that term experimental. I think it would have been frustrating for many people, whether it's Larry or others.‍

‍What I learned early on from Nam June Paik, Bill Viola and others is that video is half sound, whether it's a single-channel video or an installation. Nam June had a foot in both; he played the piano as a child. Bill Viola played drums as a teenager. It all played into how they worked. When they told me that video is half sound, I thought, “Yeah, I better pay attention.”
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‍Peter Bauman: It seems like today, including sound with moving visuals can feel old-fashioned. But in a lot of ways that sound work of Paik, Viola, Cuba—even going back earlier to Oskar Fischinger—and the Whitney brothers is still so impressive. It seems like something that’s been a bit lost today.‍

‍Having said that, your podcast, Barbara London Calling, does an outstanding job of highlighting artists who do emphasize sound and visuals in a multidisciplinary way, like Ryoji Ikeda.‍

‍Barbara London: A recent episode is with the artist Stan Douglas. Everybody knows him as working with installation and looking at history—sometimes he works with large-scale photographs or with video installation. But it was interesting; he revealed to me that he was a DJ when he was young. I was asking him about his installation that was in Venice a couple of years ago. For the work, he used ISDN lines and he had two music groups, riffing back and forth. Why ISDN lines? Well, because it has really good sound—among other reasons. Sound is very important for him but people don't think of Stan necessarily as paying attention to that—he certainly does. It's what we get out in a conversation or the research. I'm sure it's what the other curators you're talking with talk with you about. Because it's not all one thing or another. It's many things.

There’s the artist Ryoji Ikeda, whom I met when he was about 21. When I interviewed him for the podcast, he said, “Barbara, I've told you things I've never told anyone.” It’s because I'm deeply aware of his practice. I'm very happy about that.‍

‍Peter Bauman: Incredible. You mentioned how with experimental film, the greater world didn’t really know what to do with it. Now in 2025, we have emerging technologies in art, like blockchain and AI. They're also largely met with skepticism from the outside world—similar to computer art in the '70s. Do you see a connection and how do you view contemporary artists like Auriea Harvey, Kim Asendorf, Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, who engage with these emerging tools today?‍

‍Barbara London: It's funny. When I started out in the mid-late '70s, using that term experimental, it was a big grab bag. When people didn't know how to discuss something, they'd ask, “Is it experimental?” Then you would just put it in that category. Now, one can use that term, like with Kim Asendorf, but is it about abstraction?‍

‍An artist you didn't mention is Luke Murphy, someone who also works a lot with abstraction and formulas. What's fascinating to me about Auriea is that she trained in sculpture. She's a very good draftswoman; she draws all the time. When she's in a new city, she goes to museums and looks at classical art—doesn't look first at the digital art, even though she knows a lot and was an early internet artist.
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Auriea is driven by many topics, many interests. That's when it makes the work so rich. It's not one thing; it's many things.

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‍Peter Bauman: Certainly. She’s had a decades-long practice as one of the original net artists. Why do you think that net art was accepted more quickly, whereas most of these other emerging technologies in art we’ve mentioned face more skepticism? It seems to be the exception to the rule.‍

‍Barbara London: I don't think you really can say net art was accepted quickly.
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You could say the artists themselves—like in the early days of video—helped define what it is. They knew they were the lone rangers out on the horizon. They helped to create the words for the work.‍

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‍Then ultimately, you had Rhizome corral it and had it considered a category, which can then expand or shrink. All these things happened and we can't say it's going to be like this forever. Artists are always engaged with emerging tools because it's fascinating. It's a new territory. That's what drew me to video—a new territory.
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When I was in graduate school, my peers, the Renaissance scholars, were counting the number of angels on the head of a pin but that did not interest me. What interested me was what’s happening now.

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‍Peter Bauman: I’m fascinated by how museums balance what is happening now with their long-term time horizons and perspectives. What do you see as some of the most significant moments in bringing video art to prominence within the museum context? What were its breakthrough moments?‍

‍Barbara London: In 1975, MoMA made the first acquisitions of single-channel video. There were only five, including Nam June's Global Groove, Joan's Vertical Roll, a work by William Wegman and a few others. Several trustees came forward, such as Mrs. John D. Rockefeller III, and contributed funding for the acquisitions.
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That was a major step. That was a real first.

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‍Another major step was a show I did in 1985, Music Video: The Industry and Its Fringes. In that show, in a way, I was doing what I've always done. I was looking at what makes a good music video and I selected forty works. I went to the record industry and I said, “It’s wild that you throw out and don’t archive what you do. I want to show this work but I want an Archival Master.”‍

‍I asked an engineer at J. Walter Thompson, the advertising firm, to help me make one-inch archival masters of the works I selected. This included music videos by Captain Beefheart, David Bowie and other artists in that grouping.
 

Some people at MoMA said, “What are you doing that for?” I said, “We have posters in the collection and that's a form of design. This happens to be a moving image form.

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‍Then in 1995, I curated the first video installation show in the US: Video Spaces: Eight Installations. That was a very important moment. I also did the show Sound Art, which sometimes people remember, in 1979. Because sound art is oral, not visual and MoMA primarily had been a visual institution, the powers that be refused my doing a big sound show. So I did a small one.‍

Then my last show at MoMA in 2013 was called Soundings: A Contemporary Score. That was a large sound art show. I worked two years on that exhibition.
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‍Peter Bauman: These are milestones in new media art history. Around the time of your 1985 Music Video show, were you aware of Rebecca Allen and her computer music videos she was making with Kraftwerk?‍

‍Barbara London: It was on my radar but I missed it for this exhibition, Music Video, the Industry and Its Fringes. I was interested specifically in the collaboration between a musician, like Captain Beefheart or Bowie, and an artist—how they approached the visualization of their music. I learned something in talking with Bowie's people: he never collaborated. He hired people. In other cases, it was a collaboration. Well, maybe looking back you might say those were collaborations but Bowie would never, ever use that term.‍

‍The real question was, what made a good music video? This was just a couple of years after MTV launched. I wanted to get what I considered some of the best into the MoMA collection, knowing that record companies do not take care of their masters. This is work that's there for posterity. Later I would get requests from curators in Europe asking, “Could we borrow this work?” I'd have to say no because I negotiated the rights to only show the work at MoMA.‍

‍Peter Bauman: These next few questions focus more on your curatorial perspective—more about giving advice. We want to learn from such a unique and celebrated career as yours.‍

‍In your observation, what is missing in the curatorial landscape of time-based media shows today?‍

‍Barbara London: It's very difficult because you have the art, the institution and the curator who's there in between. Now, curators must work very hard to raise money or get an institution to agree to hold an exhibition. When I emerged, it was always wonderful because these “alternative spaces” existed in New York and in other cities—spaces usually with very low rent and overhead.
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Back then, curators and artists were free to experiment and they could fail. And I think that's the problem today.

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‍If someone has created either a work or show that’s misunderstood or not put on very well, people can point and say, “You failed.” But we learn from failure and that's something that's positive but we look at failure as very negative.
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That's one thing: you have to always try. Just keep on trying. Maybe your wings are clipped as you're trying—but keep going. 

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‍I taught at Yale for about seven years to graduate art students and they would ask me for advice. I would say, “You have to work together. You have to consider yourselves as a community.” Any person who's coming through to do a crit, you jolly well better get their email because this is your future. I encouraged them to look at community, where others had like-minded interests—even if you're not identical—if you're going in the same direction, that matters.‍

‍Peter Bauman: That’s great advice. Community seems to be playing an expanding role these days. You've organized so many shows throughout your career and at a major institution like MoMA. What are some of the most important considerations at the installation level—when you're thinking about installing a show in a physical space—for time-based media shows?‍

‍Barbara London: Mediums, like video and sound, are very, very difficult to put in a gallery space. You have to understand your space. What are the acoustics? What about scale? What about your budget? Do you have the budget to build a wall? Do you have a budget to put soundproofing in the wall? Do you have a budget to have carpet if the sound bounces all over the place? You have to do tests beforehand. What equipment do you have access to? Do you have a sound engineer handy to help you work through some of these issues, or an architect who understands contemporary practice and space?‍

‍Some artists are more aware than others because they have experience. They can maybe be pushy.
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What I always would say doing a show is, “Let's sit down, put all the cards on the table. What's your goal? What's the wiggle room?” What do you expect from me? What do I expect of you?

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‍Peter Bauman: Tapping into the expertise of others and honest dialogue with the artists seem to be key. How do you begin the process for a thematic or group exhibition? Do you start with an idea, funding, artists?‍

‍Barbara London: It begins with an idea and then you do the research. Maybe you know the practice of certain artists well. But if you work with the same artist all the time, people are going to say, “You're a one-trick pony.”
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You have to keep getting out there to look at work and this is important. I used to always say to the field that at MoMA, “My door is open.” That was the only way early on I could get information, by talking with people. 

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‍If an artist came in from Paris, Germany or farther, I would sit down with them. Maybe I would never work with them but they were a fount of information about their own practice or about their city and I appreciated it. Keep your ears and eyes open!‍

‍Peter Bauman: Today, when you keep your ears and eyes open, you’re inundated with a seemingly overwhelming amount of information. How were you—and are you—able to sift through what's important in the moment, especially thinking about work to acquire?‍

‍Barbara London: That's difficult to answer. The exhibiting of work and the collecting of work are two very different things. When it's exhibiting, if it involves technology and it involves space, then you have to get the best you can do in terms of the space, installation and tools.‍

‍When it comes to collecting, initially, we were learning on the fly. At MoMA, in the beginning, there was not a media art conservator. Now, there are several people on staff.‍

‍Now, before an acquisition is ever brought before the acquisition committee, the curator sits down with the artist to say, “Okay, what are the aesthetics? What makes this work?” You go through all of that multiple times.‍

‍Then you go before the acquisition committee; then the money is allocated. Then you go back to the artist and you say, “I have to do this artist's interview with you.” And it's all about the tools and the aesthetics.
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We're not going to pay you until you come and sit down with me.

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‍If they're deceased, then, of course, you have to do that as best you can with their partner, manager or dealer. When I was working initially, the dealers knew much less than I did because it was all new. Then, I was telling them what they needed to do. It’s different now.‍

‍Peter Bauman: A focus of ours this year at Le Random is preserving digital culture. How do you navigate between allowing work to evolve over time versus maintaining its original aesthetic?‍

‍Barbara London: That goes back to what I just said, where you have to sit down with the artist. That's the deal. You have to discuss the bottom line: what's important for this work? Is it an analog projector? Those tubes might not be made anymore so what are you going to do or what should we do when that happens? Do you have someone blow the TV tubes for you? Then that's a cost.‍

‍I would also think about lending the work and what we would do if there was damage. Normally institutions like MoMA and Chicago Art Institute or Boston Museum of Fine Art have a very gracious, congenial lending policy. You want to borrow my Picasso? In time, we may want to borrow your Matisse. But if we have to charge more for a loan fee for a video work, that goes against what they all promote.‍

‍So it's complicated. People are a little skittish about media art because, as you already have indicated, there are so many unknowns. How are we going to face the future? Carefully, I say.
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Barbara London is a curator and writer who founded the video-media exhibition and collection programs at The Museum of Modern Art, where she worked between 1973 and 2013. Her current projects include the book Video/Art: The First Fifty Years (Phaidon: 2020) and the podcast series “Barbara London Calling."
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‍Peter Bauman (Monk Antony) is Le Random's Editor-in-Chief.