Courtesy of the Getty Museum "The Eternal Flame," a 1975 video art installation by Ant Farm and T.R. Uthco, has been re-created at the Getty Museum. You can sit down on the couches and watch an unsettling re-enactment of President Kennedy's assassination play on the faux living room's vintage television set.

Courtesy of the Getty Museum Jennifer Steinkamp's "Oculus Sinister" features a pattern of colorful lights projected inside the oculus of the Getty Museum's exhibition hall. The clouded array of brilliant hues and fluffy textures is ethereal.

Long before the arrival of MTV, and long, long before the recent dawn of YouTube, pioneering video artists were busy working in a medium that most critics didn't take seriously.

Much of the early work from this relatively new genre has been lost — it's easier, after all, to erase a tape than to destroy a painting or break a statue — but Los Angeles' Getty Museum has still managed to assemble an impressive collection of video art in its new California Video retrospective.

The exhibit, which will run through June 8, showcases not only single-monitor works but larger installations created by 58 of California's most renowned video artists.

The show relies heavily on the Long Beach Museum of Art collection, which the Getty recently acquired. Although the origins of video art stretch back about half a century, the Getty begins the story 40 years ago, just as the field was beginning to bloom.

The early offerings, in many ways, seem more dated than the centuries-old paintings in the adjacent galleries because video technology has changed much more in a few years than oil paints and canvas.

John Baldessari's "I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art," created in 1971, is screened on a small, vintage television. The video depicts Baldessari writing the piece's title over and over on a piece of paper — a not-so-subtle comment on how the video medium belongs in a different realm from the static written word.

Headphones are offered because several of the monitors are equipped with listening stations, although the Baldessari TV monitor is not one of them. In fact, security guards will stare at you angrily if you try to jam your headphone into the little hole on the TV set. Yes, I know this from experience.

Among the oldest works, the most intriguing is perhaps "Video Surveillance Piece (Public Room, Private Room)," created by Bruce Nauman in 1969 and 1970. It's an installation consisting of two rooms, a monitor and a security camera that appears to be filming the room where visitors are standing, when, in fact, it's shooting the other room.

Viewers expect to see themselves in the monitor, but instead they see the image of a smaller monitor inside the one in the room, and in that small TV screen, they see themselves. It's an easy camera technique, but Nauman's installation elicits inquisitive stares and laughs as he toys with viewers' expectations of what they will see.

Several of the videos contain adult subject matter, nudity and graphic violence. They are separated into one gallery and can be avoided if desired, although many are thought-provoking.

Perhaps the most famous work is a full re-creation of "The Eternal Frame," made by Ant Farm and T.R. Uthco in 1975. A renegade video shoot that oozes discomfort so well that it seems modern, "The Eternal Frame" has the artists re-enacting the assassination of President Kennedy — on location.

Bystanders, unaware what was taking place, saw performers dressed in costumes matching these historical figures driving by the book depository, then miming being shot. The video is exhibited on a television situated in a living room decorated with photos and other Kennedy memorabilia.

Among the large-scale video installations is a new site-specific work by Jennifer Steinkamp called "Oculus Sinister." It features a pattern of colorful lights projected inside the oculus of the Getty Museum's exhibition hall. Steinkamp's clouded array of brilliant hues and fluffy textures is ethereal.

Near the show's end, Paul Kos' "Chartres Bleu" stands majestically as a bridge between the fluid world of videos and the seeming permanence of classic art. Kos' 27-channel video sculpture re-creates a stained-glass window from the Chartres Cathedral in France.

There is a stillness in Kos' installation, yet its video elements make it seem alive.

The glut of video art on the World Wide Web today will likely keep the genre from ever attaining a loftier status. But California Video proves that there is a place for these works in fine art museums.

— E-mail freelance columnist Jeff Favre at jjfavre@yahoo.com.