In 1975, New Yorker art critic Calvin Tomkins joked that the majority of the video art produced in the early 1970s could be attributed to a generation of artists who had grown up watching too much television. ‘Most of the people who are trying to turn the cathode-ray tube into an art medium belong to the under-30, or TV generation,’ he wrote. And since most of these under-30s had averaged around 15,000 hours – that’s 625 consecutive days – of TV-watching, the next logical step would be to appropriate the medium for their own use. ‘Television has been their landscape, in a way, and it would appear inevitable that they should want to make use of it.’

And make use of it they did, so much so that, after Sony released the relatively affordable Portapak video camera in 1965 – which allowed artists to edit in-camera for the first time, thereby avoiding expensive post-production – artists such as Nam June Paik grumbled that commercial television networks and unions were intentionally keeping production costs high in order to exclude them. ‘Circa 1971: Early Video & Film from the EAI Archive’ at Dia:Beacon presents a moving snapshot of this period. Curated by Electronic Arts Intermix’s executive director, Lori Zippay, the exhibition marks the 40th anniversary of the film and video archive EAI.

There are 23 works in the show in total – not nearly enough to cover every one of the genre’s many early incarnations, but enough to pick out the dominant concerns of the period and to survey the artists whose contributions to video art and film would provide an inflection point in the larger trajectory of the medium. The logic behind many of the inclusions is clear. A study of early ’70s video art would be incomplete without Paik’s TV Cello (1971), Joan Jonas’s Vertical Roll (1972) or John Baldessari’s I Am Making Art (1971), the first three works one encounters when entering the basement labyrinth where the show is installed. But many of the other works in ‘Circa 1971’ are unusual, either because their maker has fallen into obscurity in the intervening decades, or because they present an unfamiliar side of an artist we’ve come to associate with other types of media.

In the former case, we have Anthony Ramos, a virtually unknown African-American artist whose life story reads like fiction: a stint as Allan Kaprow’s assistant at CalArts, after which he made the politically charged Balloon Nose Blow-Up and Plastic Bag Tie-Up (both 1972), in which he alternately inflates a balloon through his nostrils and escapes a sealed plastic bag by writhing around on the floor. Ramos had spent 18 months in prison for dodging the draft, acted as a video consultant to the United Nations, created video work in Beijing just prior to the Tiananmen Square massacre, filmed the end of Portugal’s colonial rule in Cape Verde … the list goes on. He relocated to France in the late 1990s and hasn’t been heard from in the art world since; prior to ‘Circa 1971’, his work hadn’t been shown for some 35 years.

Examples of the unfamiliar side of well-known artists include Robert Smithson’s intimate 16mm film Swamp (1971), in which he guides Nancy Holt through the New Jersey wetlands, her field of perception limited to what she could see through the camera lens and Smithson’s gentle instructions as he walked behind her. Or the strange little video by Gordon Matta-Clark in which the artist sweeps his camera over the rooftops of New York’s Chinatown, occasionally lingering on a lit window and spying on its inhabitants, teasing out themes of perception, vicinity and space – themes we expect from his work, but articulated through spatial interventions rather than moving images.

For some of the artists in ‘Circa 71’, video was less an instrument for experimenting with perception and subjectivity than a tool for recording the prevailing attitudes and influences of the period. Ant Farm’s Dirty Dishes (1971) is a document of the collective’s life (including a topless talk show and various other drug-fuelled skits), and was certainly never intended for a gallery wall. Others took a more overtly political approach, such as David Cort’s Mayday Realtime (1971), a jolting document of an anti-Vietnam War sentiment and an early example of citizen reportage.

As a locus for so many of these works, TV itself did not escape critique. For artists who took aim at the transience and/or anaesthetizing effects of television, the go-to method was to film in real time or in some way emphasize duration and slowness (often at the price of tedium, intentionally or otherwise). In Vito Acconci’s Centers (1971), to pick the most literal example, the artist points at his own image in the camera’s monitor for 22:28 minutes, holding perfectly still as though sitting for a portrait, and the viewer gets to watch the subtle strain creep across his face as he tries to hold the pose in real time. Or Valie Export’s Facing a Family (1971), originally filmed for Austrian television, wherein a camera is trained on a family as they watch TV, dead-eyed and robotic and seemingly oblivious to their roles in a uroboric system of watching and being watched.

‘The often raw and open-ended works in “Circa 1971” speak from an analog world that has largely disappeared,’ wrote Zippay in an essay accompanying the exhibition. ‘Revisited at a time when video is ubiquitous in the market-driven art world and when electronic information proliferates in the culture at large, these moving-image works are resonant artifacts from a pre-social networking, pre-digital era.’ Indeed, to view many of these works now is to be drawn into a pre-Internet world that can seem almost naïve in its objectives. But many of their concerns – duration, surveillance and subjective perception – are today even more prescient than they were in 1971.