Marlon Riggs: The Subjective Position of Documentary Video

It is probably true that, in the United States at least, the museum is the cultural institution that has been most directly challenged by the video art of the last thirty years. From the early installations of Nam June Paik and Peter Campus, which disrupted conventional ideas of what media were suitable for gallery display, to the narrative pieces of such artists as Cecilia Condit, which have raised the slightly different question of what representational modes might be featured in exhibition, serious videowork has consistently interrogated the criteria by which the museum defines "art," if only so that it could, paradoxically, itself accede to that privileged status.