Forgotten stills, pioneering video art

FLOH | Frith Street Gallery, London

FLOH | Frith Street Gallery, London

Tacita Dean has been collecting old photographs found in fleamarkets in Europe and America. Together with her collaborator, Martyn Ridgewell, she presents some of them in a book, and a selection is also on display in the gallery. Although the exhibition consists only of found images, the way they have been sized and juxtaposed means that there is plenty going on.

Strikingly there is not a single printed word in the linen-bound hardback (or on the walls). Although Dean knows when and where she bought the images, and technical qualities of the original photographs allow them to be dated to within a few decades, she doesn't know, for example, the landscape against which a family of four (two on horseback and one holding a cow) stares inscrutably out at you. In short, she doesn't bog down your responses by providing spurious information.

You can see that these people were important enough in someone's eye for their image to have been captured. Then it became unimportant to anyone and ended up in a fleamarket. Then the artist came along and made the image visible again. But it's surely the case that the images will eventually end up forgotten again. FLOH has the same melancholic air as the 16mm films that dominate Dean's major exhibition currently at Tate Britain. You know everything and nothing about the people in these photographs: the universe seems to shine out of each human face.

Until 30 March; 020 7494 1550

I am making Art | Anthony Wilkinson Gallery, London

In the last year or so, video installations have really come of age: high-tech, large-scale, often a customised room for each one. This show is of work from about 1970, when American artists had just discovered the video camera, and the six identical monitors distributed between four spaces show Vito Acconci, Joan Jonas, Paul McCarthy, John Baldessari and Bruce Nauman turning their new toy on themselves. It may be a low-tech, grainy black-and-white spectacle, but it's a compelling one.

Firstly, the artists treat the camera and themselves incredibly seriously, aware from the start that it wasn't a toy at all. Baldessari is ostensibly mocking performance art as he stands making studied movements for the camera, intoning the phrase "I am making art" every time he does so, but really you get the impression he's showing off. The other monitor in that room shows Nauman repeating a simple movement ad nauseum, and Baldessari would seem to be intoning for them both. Indeed, he's intoning for all the artists in the show - certainly for Acconci, whose Centers has the artist looking and pointing straight at the centre of the camera - another durational piece - with the intensity of Jack Nicholson in The Shining. In Full Circle Acconci walks around the implied viewer while a voiceover underlines the impression that you're in the presence of a character from a Beckett play. In both cases, you feel the camera has been used as a mirror - the viewer is by no means the first thing on the artist's mind.

Although the work is dated, the spare curation certainly isn't, and the pacing of the individual autobiographical pieces encourages the visitor to walk between the rooms and monitors. Maybe you have to visit the McCarthy monitor most often, because his series of short videos involves less repetition than elsewhere in the show. In any case, you can hardly avoid building up a picture of this early stage in the development of video art and video artists.

Until 8 April; 020 8980 2662