Beryl Korot (born September 17, 1945) is an American visual artist. Her practice includes video installation, weaving, paper tapestries, digital embroidery, and drawings.
Korot is a pioneer of video art, and of multiple channel work in particular. By applying specific structures inherent to textile loom programming to the programming of multiple video channels, she brought the ancient and modern worlds of technology into conversation. This extended to a body of work on handwoven canvas in an original language based on the grid structure of woven cloth, and to a series of paintings on canvas based on this language. More recently she has created drawings which combine ink, pencil, and digitized threads, as well as large scale “tapestries” where threads are printed on paper and woven.
Biography
Beryl Korot has pioneered the field of video art since the early 1970s, multiple channel work in particular. She was co-editor of Radical Software (1970), the first publication to discuss the possibilities of the new video medium, and Video Art (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1976) with Ira Schneider. By applying specific structures inherent to loom programming to the programming of multiple channels of video, she brought the ancient and modern worlds of technology into conversation. This extended to a body of work on handwoven canvas in an original language based on the grid structure of woven cloth and to a series of paintings on canvas based on this language. More recently, she has created drawings which combine ink, pencil, and digitized threads, as well as large scale tapestries where threads are printed on paper, cut, and woven.
Dachau 1974 and Text and Commentary
Her first multiple channel works (Dachau 1974 and Text and Commentary) were seen at such diverse venues as The Kitchen (1975), Leo Castelli Gallery (1977), Documenta 6 (1977), and the Whitney Museum (1980 and 2002), Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (2010), Tate Modern (2013), Museum of Modern Art (2017–18), ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (2018), amongst others. Dachau 1974 is a four-channel video work, consisting of footage taken in 1974 at the former concentration camp in Dachau, Germany. The recordings focus on the symmetry of the architecture and the present ambiance of the space. Taking inspiration from the technology of the loom, Korot combined her many separate elements (in this case video footage) to develop a work in which paired channels (1 and 3; 2 and 4) conceived as threads bind the non-verbal narrative work as it proceeds in time.
Text and Commentary consists of five video channels on five monitors that Korot recorded from a variety of perspectives as she wove. The five videos depicting the artist working at a loom appear directly across from the resulting tapestries, which are suspended from the ceiling. The viewer experiences the work while seated on a bench between the woven text of the textiles and the video commentary. The installation includes Korot's drawings and pictographic scores, which are the basis for both the textile production and video editing. The work explores the non-decorative meaning and numerical basis of abstract patterns, with Korot understanding the loom and its use of punch cards, to be an early form of communication technology. Traditionally, both weaving and computing have been understood as women's professions, but Korot examines both from a feminist perspective, moving beyond associations with both domesticity and femininity to place textile art within a canon of fine art. The installation was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art.
Dachau 1974 is in the Kramlich Collection as well as the collection of the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation. Her painted text-based handwoven canvases in an original language were exhibited in 1986 at the John Weber Gallery and in the Carnegie Museum of Art's 1991 exhibition Points of Departure: Origins in Video, in 2018 at bitforms gallery, and in 2023 in at LACMA's exhibition Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952-82, amongst others.
Video Collaborations with Steve Reich
Two video/music collaborations with Steve Reich (The Cave, 1993, and Three Tales, 2002) brought video installation art into a theatrical context and have been performed worldwide since 1993 to the present (2023). Apart from performances, the works have been installed at venues such as the Whitney Museum, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, and ZKM.
Korot and Reich both participated in a collaborative interview with writer Jonathan Cott. The article was titled "Modern Folk Tales and Ancient Stories: a Conversation with Beryl Korot and Steve Reich".