Dorsky’s upcoming Videofreex exhibition preserves memories of electronics revolution

Participatory trailblazers

Fired by the notion that television could be an active tool of democratic discourse for the masses rather than something that people needed to be passively spoon-fed by corporate giants, the Videofreex were pioneers blazing a path that led to the participatory media like YouTube that we take for granted today. “We knew this exhibit could not just be a historical presentation; we had to show how the activities of the Videofreex in the Sixties and Seventies still are with us,” says Belasco. “Today’s social media were predicted by what the Videofreex were up to 45 years ago. Even then, they envisioned regular people sharing information through networks.”

The collective lasted seven years after the move upstate. Toward the end of that time, a New Paltz resident named Marji Yablon, who was producing a series of programs about criminal-justice issues called On the Outside Looking In, needed an editing facility and was referred to Maple Tree Farm. “That’s where I met Chuck,” she recalls, referring to the brilliantly inventive Videofreex engineer Chuck Kennedy, whom she eventually married. “He gave me good pointers on special effects, and not long afterwards he invited me to a party at the farm. There were people there from all over the world. I started visiting Chuck on weekends, and I got to see Lanesville TV on Saturday nights.”

Yablon began traveling with the Videofreex on some of the educational jaunts throughout the Northeast funded under the group’s not-for-profit entity, Media Bus. A summer workshop at Goddard College on how to set up a community TV station, and a trip to New Hampshire to document protests against the construction of the Seabrook nuclear plant. “They were still getting out there,” she recalls. “They were traveling around bringing video to the people if the people couldn’t get to the video.”

Guerrilla reunion

But by 1978 the group was breaking up: Parry Teasdale and Carol Vontobel had started a family and left the commune for life near Phoenicia. Other Videofreex drifted off into individual art projects. Bart Friedman and Nancy Cain reestablished Media Bus as a production facility in Woodstock. Kennedy relocated to Yablon’s house in New Paltz; they got married and in 1980. Their daughter Rhea has apparently inherited some of her late father’s flair for information technology: Today she is the webmaster for the Videofreex website and served as a consultant to the Dorsky show’s curator, Andrew Ingall.

“I don’t have my father’s acumen with fixing or remixing equipment, but I contribute the skills I do have to assist the Videofreex when I can,” she writes in an e-mail to New Paltz Times. “Even though the Videofreex disbanded before I was born, it was always part of my life. My parents kept a copy of The Spaghetti City Video Manual, which the group published in the Seventies, on the bookshelf. Videofreex members were friends of the family.

“My father was always an early adopter of technology, which I think was partly due to his innate interest in technical tinkering (he always had a workbench full of soldering irons and pieces of AV equipment and wires) and partly an interest set in motion by the Videofreex. He introduced me to e-mail in the Nineties and was one of the first people I knew with a digital camera.”

The New Paltz native says that she incorporates video production into the courses that she teaches at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC. “Though the students are using iPhones about a hundredth the weight and size of a Portapak, there’s that same spirit of democratized video.”

Rhea Kennedy “officially became part of the Videofreex Partnership soon after my father died” in 2004, of heart failure. “The Videofreex members – and now those chronicling their work in exhibits and an upcoming documentary film – have been so welcoming to me. It’s an honor to work with them to preserve the group’s pioneering, creative and mischievous legacy.”

On view through July 12, the exhibition surveys the history and mythology of the Videofreex with 22 newly restored videotapes, over 90 photographs and slides and nearly 80 other objects including drawings, prints, ephemera, publications and historic audiovisual equipment. Related events will include a screening of videos featured in the exhibition and excerpts from the new documentary Here Come the Videofreex at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, February 12 at the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, followed by a discussion with filmmaker Jon Nealon, curator Ingall and Videofreex Cain and Blumberg. And at 2 p.m. on Sunday, March 8, a panel discussion including Blumberg and Teasdale titled “Videofreex: A Foundation for Participatory Art and Social Engagement” will be held in the Student Union Building at SUNY-New Paltz.

Many veterans of the early days of “guerrilla television” are expected to converge at the exhibition’s opening party, which the Dorsky Museum will host from 5 to 7 p.m. on February 7. The event will also celebrate the openings of two other exhibits running concurrently – “Grace Hartigan: Myths and Malls” and “The Maverick Festival at 100,” both curated by Belasco – as well as the already-open “Geometries of Difference,” guest-curated by Murtaza Vali.
Regular hours at the Dorsky Museum are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday. The museum is closed on Mondays, Tuesdays, holidays and during college intersessions. Admission is free. For information, visit www.newpaltz.edu/museum or call 257-3844.