E-flux video rental :
Anton Vidokle & Julieta Aranda

photo: Blaise Adilon		photo: Blaise Adilon

« E-flux Video Rental », 2007
Vidéo club, archives de films, 700 vidéos disponibles

E-FLUX VIDEO RENTAL
Fondation Bullukian

E-flux Video Rental (EVR) is an installation by Anton Vidolke & Julieta Aranda comprising a free library of over 600 works of video art selected by some of the
international art world’s leading curators and critics. First installed on New York’s Ludlow Street in 2004, EVR has had incarnations lasting a few months at a time at independent and alternative spaces in Amsterdam, Berlin, Frankfurt, Seoul, Miami, Harvard and Paris. The Lyon Biennial will be the project’s final stop. Every time EVR is installed in a new city, local arts professionals are invited to serve as curators, selecting artists whose work is added to the collection. In addition, a program of screenings of works from the EVR collection is part of the project, with participation from interns from the departments of Visual and Environmental Studies, History of Art and Architecture, as well as Mass Art and the Museum School in Boston. EVR is an intervention in the circulation and distribution of artists’ video. In the 1960s and 28 70s, artists were drawn to working in this medium in part because it was cheap to use and easily reproduced and distributed. But video art has become increasingly assimilated to the preciousobject economy of the art world. Even those video works that do circulate must be borrowed from special distributors, usually for fees of $75 or more. EVR changes all that—at least for a few months. The artists designed the space to function like a free video store or library for video art. Tapes can be selected by visitors and watched in the space, or, once a viewer fills out a membership form and contract, they can be checked out and taken home.The
installation includes more than 600 videotapes on specially-constructed shelves, two VCR/monitor stations, and a membership desk and collection management system. A changing selection of works showcasing the depth and breadth of the collection will be showing on at least one of the monitors during all times the exhibition is open to the public.