Admission Free
This group of artists' videotapes was collected for the de Saisset Gallery of the University of Santa Clara by George Bolling, former curator of video, and Lydia Modi Vitale, former director of de Saisset, in whose honor the collection has been named. It represents not only the first museum video collection in California, but also work not found in any other collection in the world. Included are dialog/performances by Joseph Beuys, early tapes by Lynda Benglis, William Wegman, Terry Fox, Paul Kos, Video Hiroba, Douglas Davis, and others. This collection is on extended loan to the University Art Museum from the de Saisset Gallery, and in the coming years, we will be exhibiting, and cataloging and studying the tapes.

Joseph Beuys, who has been called the most influential artist in the world, and whose “last” exhibition of visible work is currently being shown at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, has evolved into an artist committed to political action. He will run as an ecology candidate in the German federal election next year. These 1974 tapes record Beuys engaging the often unruly public in a dialogue - and thereby creating what he terms an invisible sculpture of thought forms - in an overcrowded auditorium in New York City's New School. Beuys explains his idea of art as an expanded creative activity which will reorganize society from the base up. Culture must be a place where every human meaning can be freely expressed, on which some members of the audience obstreperously take him up.