Decter-Catalogue Text For Tele (Visions) Exhibition-2001

Tele[visions] Exhibition Kunsthalle Wien Museumsquartier hall 1, October 18th, 2001 - January 06th, 2002 Vienna, Austria
TELE[VISIONS]
By Joshua Decter, 2001-2002.
{Catalogue text for Tele[visions] exhibition, curated by Joshua Decter, Kunsthalle Vienna, October 18, 2001 January 6, 2002.}
Life with Television Television is inside us: constant, endless television. At times, it seems as if television is always on, always ready to be watched, virtually everywhere. It is, in a sense, like the air that we breathe. We love TV, hate it, endeavor to ignore it, but it is simply a fact of life for most people. But is television a life-necessity? This is a question that has been debated endlessly for more than half a century, and still there is no unanimity. I am enamored of television; it is a guilt-free pleasure. Occasionally, the activities of writing and television watching merge for me-- an oddly invigorating sensation wherein focused thought is punctuated by momentary distractions.
Television a medium, so called because it is neither rare nor well done. -- Ernie Kovacs* {*Ernie Kovacs (1919-1962) is considered one of the most important innovators of American television comedy during the 1950s.}
Who, amongst us, has not watched television? And who, amongst us, can make the claim that television has not influenced their life, either profoundly or superficially? Inside of television, I succumb to absorption, distraction and critical reflection, all at once. I am at home with television. When traveling, it is a necessity for the hotel room, at the very least, to provide CNN International. In these tendencies, I am undoubtedly quite like you, the reader. And, as I channel-surf through programs, I am traveling through ideas, representations, signs, languages, dialects, politics, and so much more. TV is all about access, information, communication, entertainment, distraction, and watching. I, for one, like to watch. Do you?
So give me coffee and TV Peacefully Ive seen so much, Im going blind And Im brain-dead virtually -- Blur, Coffee & TV, lyrics by Damon Albarn, from the album 13, copyright Food/EMI Records.
In Jerzy Kosinskis 1971 novel, Being There, we are offered an almost believable fantasy -- a modern parable -- about a man named Chauncey (Chance) Gardiner. Chance has devoted his entire life working as a gardener for an old rich manand, apparently, has not left this mans house in many years. We quickly discover that Chance is addicted to television: he watches TV constantly, from morning to evening, and the remote control is never far from him. When the old man dies, Chance is forced to leave
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the house, and he must enter the outside world. By all outward indications, Chance is completely lost in that new reality. His only outside reality has been television, and so he brings his remote control with him, one of his only possessions. Chance stumbles naively into various accidental (i.e., chance) situations with powerful people-- encounters that will eventually lead him to the highest levels of the American political system. Kosinski weaves an amazing fable, exploring the mythologies of American media culture, our addiction to television, and the obtuseness of our political system. He goes so far as to suggest, with deadpan irony, that even someone as innocent and TVabsorbed/distracted as Chance can become a trusted advisor to the President of the United States. Kosinski adapted his novel into a screenplay, and the film was released in 1979, starring Peter Sellers in the role of Chance. Here is a brief excerpt from Kosinskis screenplay, in a scene where a television reporter is interviewing Chance:
CHANCE I do not read any newspapers. I watch TV. There is a moment of silence as the reporters digest this. The TV Reporter smiles, questions Chance. TV REPORTER ...Do you mean, Mr. Gardiner, that you find television's coverage of the news superior to that of the newspapers? CHANCE (flatly) I like to watch TV.
Being There can be interpreted as a condemnation of an increasingly post-literate American society that began to emerge during late 1960s and early 70s, a skeptical look at the impact of television on peoples daily lives. Chance just likes to watch, emulating everything he watches: television is the literal and symbolic guide for his life, which is why he always carries around a remote control. Perhaps Kosinski was suggesting that his accidental protagonist, Chance, might be a metaphor for the human being of the future: a being whose identity is virtually indistinguishable from and almost entirely based upon the world that he sees on television. Why a Television exhibition? Why, at this historical juncture, develop a show on the topic of television? In a sense, its akin to organizing an exhibition on any other genre of life: food, sex, entertainment sleep, death, animals, etc. Of course, television touches all of these aspects of life, and more; television, in one way or another, whether we like it or not, touches everything. As we enter the new century, it is a propitious moment to look back at the impact of television, and to reevaluate its relationship to artmaking. Now is not the time to relegate television to the dustbin of history, or to the sidelines of the future. For some, television has become an almost obsolete and exhausted issue, displaced by a fixation upon the Internet and related technologies. But we should recognize that TV would be a part of any technological future, on both theoretical and practical terms. An exhibition about art and television may also suggest ways of thinking about the transformation of television as a
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technology. Tele[visions] is fundamentally an exhibition about how artists look at television. It is not an exhibition about every aspect of television; for example, this show declines to offer a direct exposition of the television industry per se, although that important constituency i.e., those involved with the actual day-to-day production of television might find their activities illuminated here. Nor does this exhibition seek to reference every conceivable world-culture that has a connection to television culture. This is not a post-colonial, global-television project that indulges the fantasy of comprehensive inclusiveness. Tele[visions] has not been conceived as an exercise in cultural studies, nor as a gesture towards some vague, easily-consumable notion of the interdisciplinary, and it also declines to recapitulate the well-trodden argument about the influence of generic entertainment culture on artmaking, since this is beyond the obvious. Tele[visions] does not propose a counter-hegemonic, revisionist history of televisioninfluenced art practices. Yet, if Tele[visions] can begin eroding the authority of the familiar institutionalized history of media and video-based art practices, this would be a good by-product (even though elements of that history are acknowledged and represented here). Fundamentally, Tele[visions] offers a rather straightforward, almost transparent, curatorial approach: the audience is invited to rethink art through the filter of television, and vice-versa. The exhibition seeks to underscore the extent to which artists from diverse social and ideological backgrounds have reflected, both seriously and playfully, upon television. It is a subjective reconsideration of how artists have absorbed, embraced, critically challenged -- and occasionally reinvented -- our experience and understanding of television over the past three decades. Tele[visions] is comprised of a distinctive combination of painting, photography, sculpture, installation, single-channel video, multi-channel video, drawings, prints, books, and other materials. The artworks here reveal the presence of television in a variety of ways, from literal (i.e., iconographic) referencing of the ubiquitous television-as-object, to more indirect allusions regarding the atmospherics of TV-permeated life. Some participants deliver a sophisticated critique of televisions socio-political operations, some prefer to ambivalently celebrate televisions aesthetic effects and affects, while still others allow the resonance of television to hover around the margins of the work. The signs of television resurface everywhere.
"In 'The Museum of Accidents,' I say at the end of the article that television is the actual museum. In the beginning, I say a museum of accidents is needed, and the reader imagines a building with accidents inside. But at the end, I say, no, this museum already exists, it's television. This is more than a metaphor: the cinema was certainly an art, but television can't be, because it is the museum of accidents. In other words, its art is to be the site where all accidents happen. But that's its only art." -- Paul Virilio, from Cyberwar, God and Television: Interview with Paul Virilio, by Louise K. Wilson, October 1994, www.ctheory.com/article/a020.html
The reader or, viewer -- of this Tele[visions] catalogue will observe that my entries on the participating artists and their works take the form of interstitial clusters, dispersed throughout the text. This has been conceived and designed to suggest the texture of the exhibition itself, and to reflect, metaphorically, a kind of tele-visual space inhabited by the artworks. In a sense, the reader/viewer is given the opportunity to switch from one artist grouping to the next, as if switching TV channels on a remote control. Although there is a pre-established sequence here, the reader/viewer has the possibility to imagine
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their own interconnections between the artworks. Just like television, the paradox is real: a continuous oscillation between subjective choice and external control. Television Identities/Television Bodies The Tele[visions] exhibition suggests that the expansive culture of television has generated a reservoir of imaginary narratives that people regularly use to negotiate or "map" aspects of their identities. From this perspective, television is understood to function not only as a primary delivery system for information and entertainment (or, its synthesis, infotainment), but also as a conduit for manifold representational codes. Television is our navigation system through the realities of politics, family life, sex, the justice system, global relations, etc. Paradoxically, television is its own reality, and there are moments when the realities inside of TV and the actualities outside of TV are oddly blurred. It seems that I have watched television on an almost daily basis, for most of my life. At home as a child, TV-watching was regulated by my parents, but never prohibited. Thats where I developed an addiction to it. A typical scenario, especially in the United States.
Make everyone television crazy. -- {please enter the correct quote citation}
Television, as one of the primary delivery systems for information and entertainment since the late 1950s, has become a source of our visual and aural nourishment. Beyond nourishment, it is one of the primary technological extensions of our bodies, and it is also a mirror. These mediated reflections tell us quite a lot about our identities, our cultures and our socio-political environments. Its important to remember that we are, at least in part, responsible for what we see on television. But even though the television airways in the United States are technically public, the commercialization of network television has essentially rendered the airwaves private; networks control programming, and the buying and selling of air time. TV air is not free; access to it is limited. The public is thus transformed into an audience whose participation in TV is limited to their expression of choice i.e., ratings wars.
a broadband, multi-channel universe. -- Mel Karmazin, chief executive officer, CBS
Everyone is a Television Expert With few exceptions, most people are fluent, in one way or another, with the languages of television. Everyone, in a sense, is a television expert, since TV is perhaps the most populist cultural language we have invented. We communicate to each other through television, allowing us to move through certain cultural, social and political boundaries. Television victimizes us, and yet it is our salvation. In a sense, watching television is analogous to eating McDonalds hamburgers: the meat is low quality, the taste is ersatz, but we still crave the junk. Im not, however, suggesting that television is pure junk, but it is the primary tributary of representations that feed our consumer desires. It should not be overlooked that TV, for better or worse, has played a central role in the growth and
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perpetuation of advanced consumer-culture in the United States. It has become our second nature, and we always know how, when, and where to plug-into it.
You never forget how to use TV because you never have to learn how. Like any other relationship, it seems you just sort of get along with this chatty appliance; you do it, it does you. We do TV by letting its juices flow. Not flesh-and-blood juices, of course, but continuously acrid signals, impulses that flow from its artificial circuitry to our own. Like humans, television is sensitive to our touch. We flick a knob on its chassis and it performs for us. -- Barbara Kruger, TV Guides, September 1989, in Remote Control: Power, Cultures, and the World of Appearance, The MIT Press: Cambridge and London, 1993, page 47.
Television is the static of our lives, it is the material and symbolic representation of the distraction that we crave as a respite from labor, from family, from emotions. Television has consumed family, sex, romance, sports, reading, and many other life experiences, effectively infiltrating all of these activities to the point where we have begun to reproduce, in our daily lives, the character of TV relations. We are the infotainers, and television is our stage. Television is the mediator of many of our relations, and therefore television is a relational medium; but TV is also a control mechanism that triggers our drive to consume, both abstractly and materially. TV Access & Control The issue of control has often emerged in discussions about television: i.e., who controls television programming, is television controlled by governmental, State, corporate or other commercial interests, and are we somehow controlled by what we view on the screen? And, conversely, does the public actually participate in controlling what we see on the screen, since viewership & ratings have become central instruments in the development and sustaining of popular television programs? To an extent, TV is reliant upon the tastes of viewers, but it is driven either by the bottom-line fiscal realities of mega-corporate media empires, or by the ideological investments of State-operated networks.
"TV, by virtue of its mere presence, is a social control in itself." -- Jean Baudrillard
For some, commercial television represents a full expression of democracy. Fundamentally, this is a belief in the open marketplace of competitive capitalism, which underlies the logic of commercial television. Some may be understandably skeptical of the notion that TV is actually an open marketplace of competition, since there are only a handful of networks-- although the proliferation of cable and satellite channels has posed a real challenge to traditional network hegemonies. But are the enhanced choices in TV programming an expression of a democratized media? Yes and no, depending upon ones ideological perspective. Yet, in those European countries where there has been only a gradual shift away from a handful of State-operated or privately-held channels, the public seems to be eager for more choices, which accounts for the growing popularity of satellite TV. Some will contend, perhaps legitimately, that corporate television networks do not guarantee a truly democratic media, arguing that democracy has little to do with the
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expression of a consumer economy (via commercial advertising revenues, program ratings, and audience shares). And, there is always an ongoing tension between business interests and the publics interests. However, if a media corporation is publicly traded on the stock exchange, and demonstrates profitability for its shareholders, this tends to mitigate the publics concern about definitions of democracy, control and accessfor better or worse. There are, of course, still some populations in the developing world that have relatively limited access to television, due to economic and/or political circumstances. And, within certain contexts, television can still be used as a powerful instrument of centralized State ideologies, in contradistinction to the ideology of freemarket capitalism. Not everyone in the world has enjoyed the television revolution that we may take for granted. Couch Potato Theory At once worshipped and demonized, a catalyst of absorption and distraction, apathy and engagement, TV is a cultural force that just wont go away. After more than fifty years, television still triggers debate, assuming the perennial role of the scapegoat for the supposed dumbing-down of society, or the erosion of morality. Material yet intangible, dumb and brilliant, TV is actually a complex delivery system of multiplying and frequently contradictory value-systems. TV delivers alternately global and localized discourses that promote the universal rituals of (transnational) consumerism, while also consolidating the indigenous social/political mores of nations. Television has occasioned the symbolic collapse of distinctions between the private space of home and the public social space of an interconnected world that is swiftly becoming a simulation of itself.
after all, everybody knows what it is like to watch television. Certainly; and it is televisions familiarity, its centrality to our culture, that makes it so important, so fascinating, and so difficult to analyze. It is rather like the language we speak: taken for granted, but both complex and vital to an understanding of the way human beings have created their world. It [television] is taken to be wholly commercial, conventional and conservative. But this is only another way of saying that as a medium it is normative, a casual part of everyday experience. In fact, it is the very familiarity of television which enables it, according to our analysis, to act as an agency for defamiliarization. Television is certainly aware of the arbitrariness of many of its own codes, and while not criticizing them, certainly celebrates them. What we, the audience then do with the message is another matter. -- John Fiske and John Hartley, Reading Television, Routledge: London and New York, 1978/1990, excerpts from pages 16-19.
Many years ago, media guru Marshall McLuhan claimed that We Become What We Behold. This became a mantra for many theorists and academicians, as well as for practitioners involved with early video-based technologies. But this notion also generated controversy, particularly amongst those who rejected the techno-organic argument that television is a technological extension of our bodies. We may become what we behold, as television takes hold of our eyes, minds and imaginations, but we are also cognizant that were being absorbed, on corporeal and perceptual levels, into media.
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Who, amongst us, has not been a couch potato at one point in their life? No one is exempt: not even members of the intellectual or cultural classes. If you think about it, the couch potato is able to speculate about his or her condition, and such conjectural activity does little to dissuade him or her from "passively" absorbing television emissions on the living room sofa. For some, even, the passivity of being a couch potato creates the opportunity to enter into a state of disinterested contemplation-- which is the adequate prerequisite to any kind of critical activity. Passive TV absorption is thereby converted into critical TV absorption, which allows most people the opportunity to scrutinize, with expertise, what theyre watching. All TV viewers, in other words, develop a reflexive, critical relationship to television, and become TV critics. So, do we really need academics & specialists explaining television to the rest of us? From a certain populist perspective, many folks are already critical viewers of media culture. They understand that television, for example, began as an experiment with technology, gradually became a mass medium, injected itself into our domestic space, transformed our domestic space, and then extended itself -- historically, ideologically, socially -- through our bodies, to become a tactile, material, thing. Television, Work, Leisure, Convergence Today, ironically, there may still be more debates about the usefulness or uselessness of television then there are about the relevance of the Internet. The former, TV, is still dismissed, by some, as a boob tube or idiot box that merely offers rank commercialism, worthless entertainment, and promotes degraded cultural values. The latter, the Internet, is often considered an indispensable communication, information & educational tool, even though it has become, ironically, increasingly congested with commercial cookies and porno.
"I will characterize the material basis of television as a current of simultaneous event reception." -- Stanley Cavell
It used to be that cinema was the primary instrument of visual/narrative entertainment in popular culture, and then it was displaced by television. Cinema was actually folded into the space of television, with the advent of home video. If television became our principle respite from work, our apparatus for distraction, information and entertainment, the introduction of computers (and the Internet) into domestic space has complicated matterseven as it has revolutionized access. The complications arise from the fact that more and more people are discovering that leisure time and work time have converged. It is now possible to fold virtually all activities, experiences, forms and representations into the space of the computer. And, with the rapid development of mobile communication/phone devices, access to everything including TV transmissions -- will be virtually anywhere, all the time. TV will be almost patched-into our brains, for better or worse. There does seem to be a desire, as expressed in these recent technological innovations and business models, to converge television, the Internet, the web, and mobility-- emblematic of the ethos to create an inter-penetration of work and leisure. This fusion is not necessarily a good thing. Perhaps, though, radical convergence will trigger a negative reaction: i.e., a desire to once again distinguish between the activity/space of work and the activity/space of leisure. In this scenario, people may insist upon having the
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option to separate television out from the convergence bundle in order to preserve the sanctity of their TV-viewing experience, and to retain the joys of couch potato absorption and distraction. The Art Factor There are many who argue, with some legitimacy, that television is no longer an available context for the development of innovative art practices, if it ever was. Of course, corporations do not see a viable business model in relation to contemporary art, and governments with cultural programs have been known to be skeptical. Even public television, in the United States, has largely divested itself of producing experimental TV. So, what are the possibilities of artists working on or, inside of -- television in the future? Today, many people in the cultural community have inaugurated the Internet as the new, open, under-regulated context for artistic experimentation, often comparing it to the over-regulated, hyper-commercialized territory of TV. But is such optimism about the Internet and negativity about TV actually warranted? We should recall that, on both quantitative and qualitative terms, there is undoubtedly more worthless junk congesting the Internet than on all of global television combined. On the other hand, it is still relatively inexpensive for artists to set-up websites (i.e., their own private art showcases), and so there is genuine access for self-representation. But a more important question arises: what are artists doing with that access? Of course, its difficult to imagine that, in the foreseeable future, artists will have the economic or political clout to establish viable TV channels (commercial, experimental, or some hybrid), but with the ongoing evolution of TV-Internet convergence, hopefully new possibilities can be tested by artists, and even cultural institutions. Of course, much depends upon the evolution of economic models, and the ongoing tension, or perhaps irreconcilable differences between, media experimentation and media commerce. Life Without Television? Television is ultimately our choice, and our responsibility: watch it, dont watch it, but it will not disappear from the scene. TV will continue to mutate, to frustrate us, and to seduce us. The televisual will always permeate our lives until it ceases to exist (not likely in our lifetime). It will remain a locus for the invention and projection of our imaginary lives, the filtering of our histories and identities. TV will persist as an engine for consumerism, at once democratic and anti-democratic. TV shall always embody the best and worst of any society, because it is an expression of us. Right now, at this very moment, a baby is being born, a person is dying, and someone is watching TV. Constant, endless television.
******************* Sequence of artists & artworks:
General Idea, the three-person collaboration of AA Bronson, Felix Partz, and Jorge Zontal, was probably the most important artist-group to emerge from the Canadian
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context during the past twenty years. They created an elaborate cosmological system for their practice, involving a continuously evolving interplay of visual, performance, formal and other artistic codes. One of the central subjects in their layered practice was a metaphorical reflection on the interrelationship between popular culture and subculture. Test Pattern: TV Dinner Plates from the 1984 Miss General Idea Pavillion," 1988, is comprised of three large panels of individual porcelain TV-dinner plates, the visual design of each plate featuring the universal chromatic TV test pattern. Test Pattern offers a humorous and emphatic statement about life in the age of mass media: a kind of postmodern archeology reflecting the intersection of television, eating and visuality. Keith Haring cultivated an urban language of quasi-graffiti that often combined an economy of energized graphic expression, a sense of humor and wit that was at once childlike and sophisticated, and produced some moments of poignant reflection on important life-issues such as AIDS, love, racism and sex. Haring was committed to injecting his style into the broader popular culture. In Untitled, 1983, Harings largescale ink drawing depicts prototypical human stick figures building a pyramidal stack of television sets. It suggests a kind of postmodern hieroglyphics depicting a cultures worship, for better or worse, of a primary technological artifact of media culture. Does this work have a pro- or anti-TV message? Difficult to say, ambiguous at best, and perhaps this reflects Harings ambivalence regarding televisiona love-hate relationship that we all might identify with. It seems, at least on the surface of things, that the historical reference point for this Haring drawing is the Ant Farm video of a performance, Media Burn, 1974-75. In this famous Ant Farm event, a vehicle obliterates a wall of stacked television sets. Was this a material/symbolic act of violence - or artistic-political subversion -- in relation to the hegemonic aspects of mainstream TV culture? Yes-- the literal and allegorical demolition of television by art. *** Using a method of photographic de-construction, Sarah Charlesworth reflects upon how an event is re-constructed by the media in Movie-Television-News-History, June 21, 1979, 1979. Charlesworth gathered 27 available American newspapers published on June 21, 1979, all of which included a story on the notorious killing of ABC TV news correspondent Bill Stewart in Nicaragua (during the Sandinista rebellion) by one of Somozas National Guard troops. From each of these 27 newspapers, Charlesworth extracted only the pages depicting the shooting of Stewart (which had originally been shown on television news), other photos of Stewart, and all captions accompanying these photos, as well as the mastheads, dates and page numbers. Charlesworth then rephotographed the newspaper pages, and each is reproduced in its original scale. All other text and photographic elements were excluded. Charlesworth here illuminates how a real event, immediately re-contextualized by media coverage, is always a constructed reality, a subtle manipulation. In Dorit Margreiters publication, Some Establishing Shots, 1999, the artist assembles a sequence of actual establishing shots (urban scenes, architectural structures) from well-known American TV programs, foregrounding the generic and redundant codes of televisions visual language. These appropriated, subtly de-contextualized images effectively reflect how television desires to produce a level of suspended animation, a kind of netherworld in between the reality that we inhabit on a
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daily basis, and the projected layer of a fantasy-world. Daniel Pflumms video, CNN, In Hope for the Best, 1999, manipulates imagery from CNN International television broadcasts, reinforcing the theatricality of the media, examining the aesthetics of broadcast news, and exploring the identity and role of the audienceand, by extension, our relationship to the territory of television. Pflumm has a delicate touch, deferring to interfere, too emphatically, in the intrinsic logic of television programmingthereby allowing television to almost unpack itself, like some carefully adjusted readymade material. Michel Auders video The Games: Olympic Variations, 1984, appropriates mainstream television coverage of the 1984 Olympic Games, and seems to amplify the sexualized character of a global event that already fetishes human physicality. In an innovative way, Auder uses the TV coverage as raw material for symbolic/poetic and visual transformation. He reinvents the apparently benign transmissions of media culture in a manner that is anything but safe, perhaps alluding to the sadomasochistic tendencies that underlie events designed for the competition of nations through the vehicle of bodies. Over the past thirty years, Larry Clark has given us an entirely unique vision of American youth culture in its various manifestations. Clarks photographic and cinematic works are subjective, post-documentary, even participatory renderings of lives on the margins of society. Television has also informed Clarks understanding of youth culture. In his video, Nate, G Street Live, 1992, Clark utilizes excerpts from episodes of wellknown American TV talk shows of the 1980s (such as The Donahue Show, and Oprah) that focused on the issue of abused & molested youth. Clark recognizes the fundamentally disturbing and even shocking nature of this subject matter, which has become rather commonplace for the genre of daytime TV talk shows. Perhaps he is asking us to gauge our own moral relationship to the sensationalizing of these kids traumatic lives: is it exploitation, education, or that hybrid named infotainment. *** One of the images that comprises Nan Goldins Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Shelley on her sofa, NYC, 1979, offers an intimate window into the artists world during that period. Yes, on one level, this is a generic, everyday domestic scene, but we are also asked to project ourselves into this persons private space, to imagine the possible (narrative) dimensions of Shelleys life, and to observe, perhaps, the symbolic companionship of the television. The photograph Woman Watching TV, 1978, by Laurie Simmons, suggests an alternately nostalgic and critical reflection on archetypal American life inflected by the presence of television. Simmons constructs (and the rephotographs) a symbolic domestic space, a doll-house evocative of the 1950s period, in order to explore how stereotypes of women -- in particular, the idea of the housewife -became an intrinsic part of American culture during the latter 20th century. Here, Simmons plays on the notion that when the husband is away, the wife utilizes the television as a surrogate partner, an inanimate companion offering soap opera friendship. With Art Club 2000s photograph Untitled (Star Trek Party 1), 1992-93, we are offered another kind of self-critical, humorous look at a stereotype of American television-culture: the cult worship of the 1960s television series, Star Trek. Of course, beneath every stereotype there is a truth, and so Art Club 2000s picture is not merely commentaryit is also the authentic expression of a particular kind of cultural existence.
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Gathered on a couch as the ultimate hybrid young-adult audience, the Art Club collective gazes at the TV show that has generated millions of avid fans known as Trekies. Perhaps, the Art Club are also watching themselves watching Star Trek, a somewhat reflexive group party ritual. A TV Club. *** In the The Body Song, 1997, Jonathan Horowitz nakedly re-appropriates a Michael Jackson music video from MTV, and replays it backwards: the effect is of the King of Pop wailing a series of irrational, pre-verbal utterances. The tape is deceptively simple, revealing the disturbing unconscious of popular culture, and all that might be repressed beneath the glossy surface of a politically correct Michael Jackson song about environmental & ecological crisis. Horowitzs clever reversal of the tape really gets under your skin, reinforcing the extent to which Jackson has re-engineered himself into a kind of post-human creature who is really no longer part of the natural world. In Global Soap, 1999-2000, Julian Rosefeldt has assembled a comprehensive archive of excerpts from a wide range of global soap operas. The intent of this video projection is to analyze and demonstrate the homogenized narrative and visual structures of soap operas around the world, revealing the basic stereotypical sameness intrinsic to this television format. Reflecting considerable research, Rosefeldt has been able to organize an inventory of archetypal soap opera situations, poses and bodily poses, linking this televisual choreography to concepts that also point to broader cultural and historical tendencies. In a sense, Global Soap is a kind of television archaeology, wherein the artist has unearthed TVs systematized, insular, meta-reality. Dara Birnbaums name is synonymous with innovative, video-based explorations of television culture. Historically, she is appropriately credited as producing groundbreaking works that utilized the raw materials of mainstream American television programming to unpack the aesthetic and political dimensions of those media transmissions. For example, her video Wonder Woman, 1978/1980, explored the cultural symbolism of a female pop-culture superhero, utilizing the archetypal moment of bodily transfiguration (mortal into goddess) as a means of reflecting upon broader issues of gender and identity. In "PM Magazine/Acid Rock," 1982, Birnbaum re-scrambles the codes of mainstream American television, producing an ecstatic interplay of appropriated television transmissions and pop music. Candice Breitzs Four Duets series performs a surgical operation on the linguistic dimension of pop music by de/reconstructing music videos such as Karen Carpenters Close to You, and Whitney Houstons I will always love you. Breitz unpacks the circular tautologies and formulaic condition of these pop love songs. Double Annie (Thorn In My Side), 1985-2000 is comprised of two monitors placed in dialogic (duet) relation: on one, Breitz isolates those moments in the temporal & lyrical progression of the video in which Annie Lennox utters self-referential words such as I, Me and MY. On the opposing monitor, only the You or Your words are retained. Funny, disturbing, rhythmic and virtually nonsensical, Lennox (along with the viewer) is trapped inside an absurdly endless back-and-forth, and the subject of the me and the object of the you becomes frustratingly indistinguishable. In Will you please be quiet (Der TVEffekt), 1998, Ursula Rogg examines the visual and social codes of Reality-TV. Rogg visited the set of the German television show, Bitte melde Dich, and produced a series
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of photographs of the guests, the studio-set, and other attributes of the context. In a sense, these are site-specific portraits. Roggs photos re-stage a second-order reality effect that is already mediated through the putative reality affects of a television show whose content claims to be Reality. Rogg captures the strange artificiality of this mediaconstruction, suggesting an apparent disconnect or confusion -- between the reality of the TV studio and the reality of peoples lives. *** Whether we refer to his prescient commodity-reflexive pieces of the 1980s, or his subversively narcissistic self-portrait allegories of the 1990s, Ashley Bickerton offers a deliciously skeptical mirror of our own habits, rituals, and obsessions. Living in Bali, Bickerton has become the consummate outsider-insider, a cosmopolitan artist living on the so-called periphery, while still participating in the cosmopolitan art game. In The Patron, 1997, Bickerton aims his sights at the art collector class, offering a bitingly sardonic appraisal of a (fictive?) rich-guy, who happens to be lounging like a gluttonous slob on a coucha TV remote control in one hand. The ultimate couch potato, exhausted from too much conspicuous accumulation of cultural artifacts, this creature can only muster up enough energy to switch the television channels. Wouldnt it be nice if your wife, husband or partner would agree to function, on occasion, as your domestic servant? Well, of course this is a fantasy, but in William Wegmans hilarious yet poignant 1972 photograph, T.V., the artist, himself, becomes a human TV-stand for the benefit of a woman seated on a couch. It seems that an image of a game show appears on the TV screen, suggesting a pre- or post-dinner ritual for the couple. Wegman has always been interested in retooling the conventions of entertainment culture, and has used comedy (and, of course, dogs) as an instrument to probe the human condition. In T.V., perhaps we are offered an allegory of inter-personal relationships, of how television has become one of the mediating devices in the construction of the domestic scene. An elegant ode to the domestic ritual of television watching, Paul Grahams series of Television Portraits, 1989-1995, captures the mundane atmosphere of life with television. Grahams individuals appear to be photographed within their actual domestic environments, suggesting an oblique reality-effect. Interestingly enough, however, the actual TVs have been omitted. The subjects are watching TV, yet the object itself is just beyond the observable pictorial scene, and so a lovely sense of ambiguity (and abstraction) emerges: TV as an absent referent. It is as if Graham would prefer us to focus on the subtleties of body positions, physical gestures, and facial expressions, as these are inflected by the ambient presence of the television. But what is beyond the sitters gaze? Perhaps, it is the groundbreaking Jan Dibbets video, TV as a Fireplace, 1969, which makes the basic proposal that television (both the images transmitted, as well as the machine-object itself) has become the cultural substitute for the domestic fireplace. For 24 minutes, we are offered videotape of wood burning in a fireplace, nothing more, and nothing less. Beyond the ironic literalness of this piece, and the temporal/durational character, it is apparent that Dibbets would like us to reflect upon the symbolism: the re-channeling of a traditional iconography of domestic comfort through the filter of television.
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*** In the conceptual photograph Once there was a little boy and everything turned out all right. The End., 1985, Louise Lawler re-frames a private art collection in relation to the mundane appurtenances of domestic space, juxtaposing artworks and everyday objects such as a television, in an effort to amplify the institutional rituals of patronage and collecting. Making poignant and humorous commentary on the life of his single male friends in Cologne, Joseph Zehrer recognizes how easily television can function as a surrogate companion or life-partner for lonely fellows desirous of distraction and entertainment. His installation, Fernsehecken in Junggesellenwohnungen, 1999, is comprised of 22 photographs -- and accompanying sculptural elements -- that document how the television set has become a dominant element within the living environments of these men. This is a playfully sociological piece, offering both literal and symbolic reflection on how people use television as a substitute for other human experiences. Dike Blair is also interested in questions of lifestyle, and how entertainment culture articulates itself through various social environments. In this Untitled gouache from 1998, Blair renders an image, seemingly mundane, of a lounge or bar-type environment, a television sit hovering about the premises. Here, the TV is at once peripheral and central, a device that is simply part of the environment, but can quickly become the locus of a place particularly, if there is an important baseball or soccer game being televised. The banal and the poetic embrace in this depicted scene. *** In the famous and influential Blasted Allegories series from 1978, John Baldessari appropriated a range of imagery derived literally from television transmission. The artist created a new language from these appropriated fragments, seeking to deconstruct television programs in order to suggest the fundamentally non-linear character of televisions representational & narrative conditions. John Miller reflects upon the aesthetic, cultural and ideological conditions of television in the painting, Second Coming, 1999-2000. Here, the artist utilizes an image sampled from a TV game show to focus upon the empty theatricality of TVs artificial social space. Either life is just a game show, or the game show is life; such are the conceptual confusions produced in the space between television and "reality," that strange place called television. In his deadpan re-appropriations of the American game show, Miller accentuates the theatricality of the spectacle: a stage upon which fortunes -- and identities -- are won and lost before an audience of millions. In Thomas Demands Studio, 1997, the artist has constructed an image that resembles the interior of a television studio. It is an empty environment, quite generic, although inflected with enough specific contextual information to indicate that it belongs to the culture of television. It is a media stage, really part of the back-stage of media culture, and we can imagine that a newscast could be enacted at any moment. Perhaps, Demand has re-created a specific television studio that has particular symbolic significance (and a background story), but really this is a kind of archetypal image: it registers a space somewhere between the real and the artificial, a tension that is fundamental to television itself. Whereas Demand has constructed a model of a television studio and subsequently photographed (i.e., re-
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made) it, Peter Dombrowe shoots actual television studios and show sets within the context of Germanys advanced media culture. Bravo TV, 1998, is one of Dombrowes glossy color post-documentary images, wherein the artist seems interested in amplifying the theatrical aesthetics of the television broadcast environment. By producing what might be described as situation-specific images, were invited into the actual world of television production, to observe that contexts elaborate theatricality and visual codes. *** In their ongoing initiative to reinvent built spaces for work and leisure (or, an admixture of the two), Giuseppe Lignano and Ada Tolla, the two architects who comprise LOT/EKarchitecture, often look to the landscape of decaying industrial culture as the basis for their adjusted-readymade hybrid architectural/sculptural works. For TV-TANK (television lounging tube), 1999, they reclaimed a disused oil tank, cut the tank into segments, and then transformed these units into identical, intimate environments for lounging. Each section is equipped with a television set and remote control. Fusing the vernacular codes & physical materials of low-tech and hi-tech, LOT/EKs pragmatically futuristic television lounging tube proposes an alternative environment for the interface between TV transmissions and humans, and definitions of private and public. In Pipilotti Rists "Das Zimmer (The Room) 1994, the iconography of the television as domestic object is amplified, and, to a certain extent, fetishized. Das Zimmer is an installation that enlarges the normal proportions of a living room-like environment, producing a shift in our perceptual bearings. On both formal and conceptual levels, television occupies the center of Rists entertainingly mutated roomit is the mundane yet sacred locus of her/our cognitive universe. Yet here, our familiarization with this type of domestic space -- and how we are meant to function within it -- is oddly de-familiarized. Rist, perhaps, has generated this irreality to remind us of how absurdly ritualized domestic life has become. Tobias Rehberger has created a number of sculptural installations that rethink the design of domestic environments, and reference the ubiquitous presence of television. In Cutting, preparing, without missing anything and being happy about what comes next, 1996, Rehberger produces a kitchen-like situation, pushing everyday aesthetics into a new kind of hybrid of design and artistry-- a confluence of utility and the imaginary. Here, you can watch real television, and fantasize about preparing a meal for your friends or family. In Ronald Jones sculptural installation, "The Bed Jack Ruby slept in the night before he shot Lee Harvey Oswald," 1998, the artist continues his inquiry into how history and memory are cultural constructions. Here, the metaphorical reconstruction of Jack Rubys bedroom which includes a TV transmitting a tape of a televised moonwalk becomes a platform for the re-configuration of historys spatial, temporal and political attributes. *** Mark Bennett is fascinated with the fictive lives and fake domestic environments of famous characters from the history of American television. In his series of etchings entitled 10021, Bennett creates detailed architectural floorplans based upon his recollections of classic American TV sit-coms that he watched growing up, such as I
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Love Lucy and The Odd Couple. Referring to television programs that comprise part of the collective media unconscious of American society, Bennett effectively suggests that what we know to be an artificial world of television narrative might actually be the metaphorical mirror of our real domestic lives. Jim Isermanns paintings, objects and environments have explored the interconnections between design aesthetics and geometric/abstract painting, employing a vibrant decorative impulse as a means of reinventing the codes of late modern American visual culture. "TV Lounge," 1988, is one of his most ambitious projects: a permanent installation at the American Museum of the Moving Image in New York that celebrates, and allegorizes, the historic transformation of the domestic space by television as object, and as ambient cultural force. Isermanns vibrantly visual, cannily symbolic environment transports us into another age when television was still considered to be a frontier of endless possibilities, a utopian addition to everyday life. Maike Abetz and Oliver Drescher use painting as a way to articulate their understanding of peoples lives, their tastes, their preoccupations and what they identify with. Such attributes are present in their Forward - Rewind - Cut, 1998, which also suggests a reflection on conditions of youth culture, and testifies to the influencing factor of television in the construction of domestic space (symbolic and literal). In this painting and others, the television appears as an almost innocuous artifact of daily life, an appurtenance of existence. Since the mid 1950s, Richard Hamilton has offered insightful and witty visions of the world transformed by the artifacts of pop/consumer culture, and the influence of television on the domestic environment. In War Games, 1991-92, Hamilton reflects upon the cultural implications of the Gulf War. In a sense, the artist updates the historical genre of still life painting, suggesting that television is our window/screen into war. This is a clever and thoughtful reflection on the question of representation in relation to traditional painting language, and the pictorial conditions of television aesthetics. The painting re-visualizes a war that, by some accounts, was prefabricated for public consumption as a pure TV event. *** Raymond Pettibons humorous and disturbing drawings are like conscious dreamworks, articulating the artists psychological and philosophical relationship to virtually every aspect of life: violence, sex, literature, sports, love, and, of course, television. Pettibon often dips into the visual & verbal codes of popular culture, yet his drawings have an inscrutable edge. Untitled (Shocked to death/Elegy for McCluhan), 1982, is a humorously perverse elegy to Marshall McCluhan, in which a man appears to be fornicating with a TV set. In another, Untitled (Kill), 1982, the word kill is centered on the TV screensuggesting, perhaps, how subliminal (or not so subliminal) messages are sent and received through mass media. Tracey Emins suite of four prints, "All the Girls," 1997, offers a bitingly straightforward, mundanely poetic, look at a girls life. In one of the scenes, a girl reclines prostrate in front of a TV set. The image is at once pathetic and funny, hopeless and ridiculous, suggesting that television is just something that we use when nothing else is available-- perhaps as a surrogate friend, or lover. In a disturbing yet hilarious cartoon-like drawing by David Shrigley, [need title/year information] a stick-figure character engages in an abject dialogue with a television, as he prepares, as the artist indicates, "to masturbate." What more can one say? Shrigley has
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effectively captured an aspect of our human condition: yes, indeed, sometimes a television is our only source of libidinal engagement. With irreverent humor, Jessica Diamond has been looking at American popular culture with a penetrating and playful eye since the 1980s. Garlic, a wall drawing from 1988, resembles a cartoon rendition of garlic; in each clove, the names of historically significant American TV personalities, such as Phil Donahue and Oprah Winfrey (two pioneers of the American television talk show format), have been imbedded. Why use the garlic image? Well, it might be a visual metaphor for the American mind: perhaps Diamond is suggesting that television culture is, fundamentally, an organic part of American society, embedded in our collective unconscious. In the drawing TELE TV, 2000, Olav Westphalen, offers a half-serious proposal for a weekly variety show that consists of live video footage broadcast from a private satellite back to earth. Each episode would only be ten minutes in length (contrary to the current logic of commercial television), and it would simply be broadcast those parts of the earth trained on by that satellite. As Westphalen has also been a professional writer for commercial television, he knows this industry, and so his proposal is at once dreamy and realisticcertainly within the realm of technological possibility, but also absurd. *** The paintings of Miltos Manetas explore the interconnections and contradictions between traditional codes of picture making, and the postmodern world of video games, television, computers, and the Internet. Manetas provokes us to question our investments in both traditional (i.e., painting) and progressive languages of representation & expression (i.e., modalities of technology), suggesting that life today is a thoroughly complex experience that requires innovative, hybrid, responses. In Claudia and Playstation, 1999, Manetas creates an image of a womans perceptual/cognitive absorption into the immaterial zone of video playstations. Here, its almost as if her body is interconnected with the television screen, a kind of meta-organic interconnectivity of body with technology that perhaps we take for granted today. Prior to his development of the Internet-based The Thing, Wolfgang Staehle was already exploring the possibility of new hybrid forms of inter-media languages, cleverly cross-pollinating the codes of abstract painting with the TV/video apparatus, for example. In Escort, 1989, Staehle envisions a potentially mobile kind of hybrid, wherein painting, TV/video and even the residuals of filmic language are interlaced. In Staehles economic composite, we read painting through portable Sony TV, and vice-versa, and this object can become our portable entertainment/contemplation device. Sean Landers offers a painting that is all about the state of mental distraction triggered by too many hours in front of the TV. I Cant Think, 1995, transforms the dilapidated codes of modernist gestural abstraction into the meandering waves of the cathode ray tubes emissions, suggesting a rather close, intimate relationship between the practice of painting and the practice of TV-watching. Landers painting is not merely a subtle snipe at the polite protocol of neo-modernist painting, it is also a wake-up call to anyone who still believes that art can be done in a vacuum, somehow beyond the clutches of television culture. Tony Oursler probes the interconnections between video, performance, installation, theater and sculpture, exploring narrative structure, identity, and human perception.
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Oursler reveals his TV-fascinations in a series of wonderfully idiosyncratic drawings that reflect upon the early 20th century TV inventor, John Logie Baird, and subsequent developments in television culture & technology. "First TV, 1997, may refer to the first light-reflected image transmitted via Bairds mechanical television: a doll, in silhouette. Oursler renders the image as an ambiguously primitive thing, apparition-like in quality: the tentative birth of new mode of imaging reality. Uncovering the interplay between representation and abstraction that characterizes television, Allan McCollums Perpetual Photos series, 1982/89, takes the screen-image as the starting point for a process of second-order mediation. Photographing images off the TV screen, McCollum made a series of prints, and then re-photographed these initial images to create virtually non-pictorial imagery that almost occludes the original pictorial reference in the TV image. On conceptual and formal terms, television is here re-articulated through photography, suggesting a blurring of historical technologies of representation. On the back of each work, however, McCollum carefully documents the original televisionprogram source, thereby offering us an opportunity to complete the circle of identifications. Gerwald Rockenschaub has often probed the formal, historical and ideological conditions of abstraction, and in this work from 1987, Untitled, the artist utilizes the readymade vernacular of television imagery as the background reference for the creation of almost ghost-like photographic images. Here, the codes of representation and abstraction are conflated, thereby de-familiarizing our almost subliminal connection to televisions transmissions, and transporting the language of media into the ambiguous precincts of abstraction. *** To test if American broadcast television could be the site for a new kind of public art, Mel Chin developed a collaboration with a group of artists, arts educators and others, which became known as the GALA Committee. The target of their infiltration: the famous 1990s American television series, Melrose Place. Their project, In the Name of the Place, began as a secret cooperation with a set designer on the TV show. The GALA Committee made prop-like art works for the set of the show, unknown to the producers (Aaron Spelling, et. al.). These subtly subversive paintings, objects, and other artifacts offered commentary on a range of cultural and political issues. Yet what began as an infiltration unexpectedly morphed into a cooperation with the shows producers. The GALA Committee was provided with scripts of upcoming episodes, so they could respond to particular themes (safe sex, AIDS, race, etc.). These props included, among many others, a painting depicting the bombing of Baghdad, and sheets & pillowcases decorated with used condoms: subliminal elements, inscribed within the texture of everyday television. Collaborators Simon Grennan and Christopher Sperandio facilitate other people's imaginations by converting real-life stories and recollections into narratives that are re-articulated through the visual rhetoric of comic books and cartoons. Grennan and Sperandio have developed a social model of artmaking that depends upon collaboration with individuals from various walks of life. Recently, Grennan and Sperandio have begun producing animated cartoons for television. They developed a pilot for MTV Animation, and also were commissioned by Channel Four Television in London to create a sci-fi short. For Channel Four, Grennan and Sperandio created The
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Liquid Platform, 2000, a fantasy cartoon that was broadcast in Christmas 2000, to an audience of 1.8 million TV viewers. In Christine Hills Pilot, 2000, the artist developed & produced the structure of a new commercial television talk show. Hill conducted real-world research into network television talk shows, becoming expert in all the requisite codes, and utilized a standard television model of collaborative production. She then shot a pilot for possible development by commercial American television. Whether this would ever come to pass seems uncertain, even unlikely. Yet Hill proved that, as a visual artist, she could re-produce all the conditions necessary to make a massmarket TV show. In 1976, Chris Burden produced a work for broadcast on real television, entitled TV ad Chris Burden Promo. Burden combined his own name with the names of four of art historys most famous figures: Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Van Gogh. The TV ad was broadcast in New York on channels 4 and 9 during May, 1976, and also in Los Angeles during September 76 on channels 5, 11, and 17. Essentially, Burden promoted himself as a member of the artistic pantheon, utilizing a text-based mode of advertising. Economically stated, and laced with subtle irony, Burden demonstrated that a contemporary artist could penetrate the space of real television. Coolly transgressive, the work delivered Burdens self-serving version of art history to the largest possible audience. Andy Warhol was one of the only artists, ever, to have a show produced for -- and broadcast on American commercial television: Andy Warhols Fifteen Minutes was broadcast on MTV in the United States from 1985 to 1987. On a certain level, Warhols TV show for MTV was related to his magazine, Interview, which also dwelled on the pop culture scene. But what made Andy Warhols Fifteen Minutes an interesting TV show was the presence of Warhol himself: both his oddly seductive neutrality, and his chameleon-like identity, gave Warhol an unusual televisual presence. It should also be noted that Warhol appeared in a number of TV shows and commercials during this period, including his famous guest-spot on the sit-com, The Love Boat. *** Carrie Mae Weems reflects upon struggles for representation and identity, reinventing social narratives of memory and history within the context of African-American life. In "Jim, If You Choose to Accept, The Mission is to Land on Your Own Two Feet," 1990, Weems deftly combines image and text, inviting us to rethink how African American men understand themselves in relation to a traditionally white-oriented popular culture. A black man is pictured seated at a table, smoking a cigarette, with bottle of liquor, glass, and a tape recorder; he gazes somewhat tenuously at the tape recorder. The text of the works title (a clever re-appropriation of the key phrase of the 1970s American TV series, Mission Impossible) functions as the provocative caption. Perhaps, in a broader sense, Weems is asking how/if black men will take responsibility for their own self-identities and lives. Ilene Segaloves video, "Why I Got Into TV and other Stories," 1983, mixes autobiography with fiction, offering us a series of vignettes exploring how her own identity and life developed in relation to a fixation on television during childhood. In a humorous yet serious vein, Segalove recollects the broadcast of JFKs assassination, her fantasy romance with the TV repairman, among other poignant moments. She reveals how deeply television has penetrated into our imaginations, memories and fantasies, for
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better and worse. In 1994, Sophie Calle produced an exhibition project at the Museum Boymans-Van Beuningen, entitled Absent. Calle distributed personal possessions throughout the museum, supplemented by autobiographical notations. A walkman-guided tour of the show was developed (in collaboration with Laurie Anderson), and a publication was subsequently created in 1996, entitled La Visite Guidee. La Visite Guidee: Telestar is a memento mori of her grandmother. After Calles grandmother died in a hospital, the artist went to her house to find a memento, and discovered a TV guide still on a table, by the television: her grandmothers last issue of Tele Star, which poignantly marked the final week of her life. In the museum display, Calle presented a television, the issue of Tele Star, plastic utensils, and other elements, invoking a highly personal yet also universal scene of melancholy and remembrancefiltered through the ubiquitous presence of television culture. In her TV Magazine Tele vita from 1996, Astrid Hermann created a pseudo-TV Guide publication that focused entirely around her own life, featuring a list of television programs comprised of her daily life-activities. Here, Hermann blurs the (imaginary) line between the reality of life and the reality of television, thereby producing a new kind of irreality. As a writer, artist Barbara Kruger produced some of the most entertaining and trenchant commentaries on television during the 1980s, many of which were published on a regular basis in Artforum magazine. Krugers short yet resonant texts addressed a diverse range of television-related phenomena-- from reviews of specific American TV programs, to broader, more theoretically inclined analyses of broader social tendencies in television culture. These texts have been collected in the book, Remote Control, and they will expand anyones understanding of the mechanisms of TV. *** Mexican artist Miguel Calderons "My Fathers Bodyguard, " 1998, is a fusion of personal history and popular culture. Calderon re-creates the scenario of the famous 1970s American TV series, "Fantasy Island," reflecting upon how pop culture stereotypes influence identity and memory. Perhaps, Calderon identified his own father with the famous Latin actor Ricardo Montalban (who played Mr. Roarke on this TV series). The theme of Fantasy Island was simple: vacationers pay Mr. Roarke loads of money to have their fantasies realized on a private Caribbean island. Invariably, the narrative would involve the unfolding of a seminal life moment, a kind of morality tale with epiphanies and ethical consequences. Calderon both honors and spoofs this TV program, filtering it through an imaginary relationship to family. Maurizio Cattelans wacky assemblage of a television and a donkey, If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one around it, does it make a sound?, 1998, suggests a wry commentary on a world of collapsing cultural differences. Or, maybe, this sculpture is just wonderfully nonsensical, a kind of post-dada expression of unbridled artistic imagination designed to makes us laugh. Yet through the laughter, Cattelan is showing us a new kind of hybrid convergence. It suggests that the world today is a place in which the signs & artifacts of cultural difference -- e.g., the real/imaginary distance between the first world, the second world, and the third world -are mixed together into an unpredictable Esperanto. But what unites everything, inevitably, may be the presence of television, even on the back of a donkey! In Philippe Parrenos video document of his event-performance work, No More Reality II (la
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manifestation), 1991, the artist created a situation in which a group of young children staged a mock-demonstration, carrying No More Reality placards and repeatedly shouting that slogan. The childrens performance, at once weirdly disturbing and hilariously absurd, might be construed as a critical reflection on how the media, via the supposedly neutral apparatus of television documentary, is always a complicit partner in the manipulation of political spectacle-events. Here, in clamoring for No More Reality, Parrenos manipulated children may be asking us to suspend our belief in what we see on the collective screen. Telemistica was conceived and produced by Christian Jankowski as a context-specific television project for the 1999 Venice Biennale. In the period of time leading up to the opening of the Biennale, Jankowski telephoned a number of well-known Italian television psychics, seeking their wisdom about how his project might be received at the opening in Venice. By plugging-into an already existing system of interface between television and the Italian public, Jankowski effectively references an increasingly global tendency to conflate television with mysticism and religion. We observe the humorous results of Jankowskis sessions with these television-age mystics, as the artist seeks to negotiate with deadpan irony the anxieties of being an artist in the Venice Biennale. *** Richard Princes photo-collage, Untitled (Publicity), 1999, brings together signed publicity photographs of stars of bygone American television programs, such as the cast of "Gilligans Island," as well as more recent TV stars, such as Pamela Anderson Lee of "Baywatch" fame. In a sense, Prince offers these souvenirs as evidence of his own and, by extension, Americas preoccupation with the reality of television: that TV, itself, has become the language of social communication. Of course, there is irony, since it remains unclear if Princes true fascinations are revealed here, or, if it is merely his projection of everyone elses desire for so-called low brow culture. Or, just maybe, Prince is the ultimate fan. Martin Kippenberger had a judiciously whimsical approach to artmaking. It seemed as if nearly everything and every person Kippenberger encountered in life found a way into his art. As part of the series, Lieber Maler, male mir," 1981, Kippenberger made a painting (most likely, invited someone to actually paint it) of the German film and television actor Hansjoerg Felmy, who played Kommissar Haferkampf in the German television (ARD) series, Krimireihe Tatort. Here, the telegenic glow, the coolly suave presence of Felmy, seeps through the canvas, transporting us back to what might be the source: a publicity/celebrity photo of the actor, with his signature. Haim Steinbach has been a keen observer of commodity culture, selecting or, shopping for everyday and kitsch items from consumer/pop culture to incorporate, as readymade materials, into hybrid shelf-unit sculptures. Steinbach reinvented the genre of the still life, displaying a system of objects, a cultural archaeology, corresponding to his own taste as a consumer. In Pop Art L-1, 1990, a Bart Simpson toy -- referencing one of the most successful and internationally-recognized American television cartoon programs, The Simpsons -- is combined with a set of mugs shaped like womens breasts. Tasteless and crass, perhaps, but nevertheless an affirmation of Americas no-brow cultural aesthetics. One might also suggest that Steinbach is saluting the sophistication of The Simpsons cartoon series, recognizing the extent to which this TV show invariable pokes fun at
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itself, and at American life. Hans Haacke is an expert in analyzing institutional power, both within the art world, and broader society. Haacke exposes how corporate America utilizes the sponsorship of high art to mask their more fundamental conservative ideological agendas. He identifies profound contradictions and apparent conflicts-ofinterest within the American cultural patronage system, an issue addressed in the sculpture, Creating Consent, 1981. The artist imprints the logo of the Mobil Oil Corporation on an actual oil barrel, and attaches a TV antenna (rabbit ears) to the top of this adjusted readymade. In addition, a quote, from the chairman of Mobil during that period, reads, We Spent 102 Million Last Year in Advertising We Just Want to be Heard. In other words, Mobil wants to exert influence upon Americans, to persuade the public that their corporate policies are benevolent and Mobil hopes to achieve this consent by supporting cultural programming on public television. Alexander Kluges 1988 video, "Antiques of Advertising," probes the interrelationship between desire and commodities through the culture of media/TV culture, ingeniously linking together supposedly neutral imagery of television product advertising with references to the historical ideologies of Fascism and Nazism. *** Commencing in 1986, Van Gogh TV has been a flexible collective of artists, technicians, programmers and others, engaged with the invention of interactive television. VGTVs primary commitment has been to transform the passive viewer into an active participant. They developed a series of mobile-media projects during the late 1980s and 1990s, including the first interactive, digital television event: Piazza Virtuale, a special broadcast for 100 days transmitted from Documenta 9 in 1992. Reinventing television to facilitate new kinds of social engagement, Piazza Virtuale featured a visionary interface between TV, the telephone and the computer. VGTV created an accessible system that allowed television viewers (or, users) from all over the world to participate in real-time broadcastsa prescient strategy anticipating convergence between television and the Internet. One historical precedent for VGTV might be TVTVs 1972 "The Worlds Largest TV Studio, an intervention in and alternative documentation of -- the 1972 Democratic National Convention. A media-collective of the 1970s, TVTV infiltrated this national political event, giving their crew members video Portapaks to conduct unconventional interviews with delegates on the convention floor. TVTV endeavored to utilize the newly emergent technology of portable video to re-empower independent groups and individuals, and to stage a symbolic & pragmatic resistance to the ideological hegemony of Network television. TVTVs interventions prompted critical reflection on democracy and media, but they also served to illustrate the extent to which the airwaves no longer really belonged to the people. "Do-TV" was a one day-long, real-time, Internet-based web conference on television (www.do-tv.com), one of the innovative Do projects initiated by the Amsterdam-based design collaborative, KesselsKramer. The Do-TV event explored the global implications of television, utilizing the interactive potential of the Internet to catalyze these discussions; a book was published to document the daylong event, its design articulating the on-line character of the project. Nam June Paik has had an unwavering faith in experimental televisions ability to redefine our relationship to the world, and a belief in the ability of vanguard artists to
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transform commercial TV. In the 1973 Global Groove, produced with WNET in New York, Paik utilized innovative electronics to manipulate image and sound, creating a dynamic mosaic of quickly edited cuts and juxtapositions that challenged the language of television at that time. In Good Morning Mr. Orwell, (a co-production of WNETs Television Laboratory in New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and WDR in Germany), Paik orchestrated a live television broadcast by satellite hookup that was seen in the United States, France and Germany on January 1, 1984. He considered Good Morning Mr. Orwell a challenge to Orwells fatalistic vision of an authoritarian society that acquired power over the individual through tele-visual surveillance. *** Mans Wranges "The Subliminal Journey of an Opinion from an Average Citizen to Public Opinion" is one element of the artists long-term project, "The Average Citizen." Wrange utilizes Swedens most popular TV program, "Skrgrdsdoktorn" -- a kind of "Chicago Hope" series about a doctor in the archipelago outside Stockholm -- as a framework of analysis. A single persons opinion (on how to change society) is disseminated to the Swedish population that watches this TV show (28.6% of all television viewers). In this way, Wrange finds a method of implanting one opinion into the minds of manifold TV viewers, while also offering a critical reflection on how media strategists and political lobbyists develop & implement ways to influence public opinion via television. David Reeb explores the semiotic/political/representation systems of television, extracting images from the flow of Israeli TV in order to reflect upon the distinctions & connections between the local and the global. Reebs digital print, "Why not buy something (with Ocalan and Springer), 1999, is comprised of a grid of TV images. We see American trash-talk show host Jerry Springer (with Hebrew subtitles), an MTV logo, and courtroom scenes of Abdullah Ocalan (leader of the PKK who was abducted and brought to trial in Turkey that year). Hand-written in yellow over these images is the following: Please Stay On This Channel Why Not Buy Something Buying Something Will Make You Happy. In this allegory of TV viewing, Reeb effectively articulates the intrinsic consumerism that virtually neutralizes difference between cultural signs on TV. Sanja Ivekovic, a Croatian artist based in Zagreb, has made a simple yet eloquent statement on the seemingly endless series of conflicts and wars in the former Yugoslavia. Her video, General Alert, 2000, was made one day while watching television: it features a brief clip from a popular Spanish soap opera re-televised on Croatian television. At a certain point during the soap opera, a general alert text was broadcast and superimposed over the narrative scene, warning the public of an imminent attack on Zagreb. Ivekovic captures the intersection between the fictional world of television and the all-too-real world of war, implying that, on one level, this is just another normal day. Perhaps, this reminder of war irritated some viewers who were distracted from their favorite soap opera. Television has been the locus of Antonio Muntadas practice for more than 25 years. Video is Television?, 1989, is an entertainingly frenetic deconstruction of the relationship between television, cinema and popular music--- exploiting the aesthetics of media overload to create a vivid reconsideration of our visual culture. Arte<->Vida is a 1974 intervention in Barcelonas city space: the placing of a television on the street. The words ARTE and
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VIDA appear on the TV screen, with two arrows pointing at each other. Through this humorous and provocative intervention in urban space (resonantly documented in a poster image), Muntadas perhaps suggests that television has become the filtering system between art and life, a mediator of public and private imagination. *** Michael Smith has been fascinated with the codes of television, the rituals of American entertainment culture, and various mannerisms of comedy. During the 1980s, Smith became well know for reinventing himself as the character Mike-- an oddly blank creature of media culture, who functioned as Smiths alter-ego in a series of performances, videos and installations. During this period, Smith even flirted with mainstream TV, but discovered that television had yet to catch up with his innovative model of media-behavior. More recently, Smith, in collaboration with Joshua White, produced Interstitial, a real-time event and installation originally presented at the New Museum in 1998-99. This project reflected upon the history of public-access television, the codes of the talk show, and offered a kind of allegory of do-it-yourself television production. Hans-Christian Dany and Christoph Schaefer conceived and designed a bar, TELE 5, in Hamburgs St. Pauli. They operated this establishment successfully for two and a half years, until the last day of 2000. The name, TELE 5, actually refers to the first private TV station in Germany. The main light source of this bar was 4 televisions, one in each corner of the room. The video footage playing on these television monitors was related to electronic, minimal music, but also involved real-time analogies and repeated imagery. In a sense, Dany and Schaefer created a real-world social environment infused with media, articulating a positive notion of visual muzak, a phenomena that oscillates between foreground and backgroundmuch like everyday television itself. Pierre Huyghes Mobil TV, 1995, was originally produced and presented at the Lyon Biennale, and indicates a clever strategy of media re-appropriation designed to reveal our almost narcissistic fascination with television culture. For this project, Huyghe set-up the framework of an audition at the Biennale for a Paris-based television dance show, and successfully persuaded people that this was a real audition to appear on TV. The contestants were invited to test their dance skills with techno music, and were recorded by Huyghes camera. In actuality, however, this was a fake dance audition. With his strategy of audience-manipulation, Huyghe effectively demonstrated how television always involves some form of benevolent coercion, revealing the power of the TV camera to seduce us into becoming performers for an imaginary mass audience. *** Paper Tiger Television has a twenty-year history of facilitating media activism in the United States. Their website, http://www.papertiger.org, provides a comprehensive overview of their various projects, and their affiliations with related media-activist organizations such as Deep Dish TV. Paper Tiger Television took advantage of the emergence of public access television in the United States during the 1980s, producing a range of home-made, guerilla-oriented television counter-news shows that critiqued and deconstructed various aspects of the mainstream information and entertainment media.
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The Paper Tiger Guide to TV Repair, 1992, is a humorously subversive publication: not literally a guide for repairing your TV set, but rather a primer for people interested in repairing -- i.e., critically demystifying -- the dominant ideological and economic conditions of television culture. Szuper Gallery, a collaborative team with members from London and Munich, has produced a series of works that address the local and global impact of Bloomberg Television. Utilizing methods of performance, installation, and video, Szuper Gallery has focused its playfully critical attention upon the worldwide corporate and information culture of financial news that Bloomberg Television has fostered and perpetuated during the economic boom of the 1990s. In the video Contemporary Art, for example, the team members can be seen engaging in a performance-like activity in one of the actual Bloomberg corporate offices. This mode of infiltration (with permission granted, however) creates the effect of a subtle interruption, albeit symbolic, in the normative image/operation of the office environment. Engendering a collapse of historical time and media-based temporality, Klaus vom Bruchs 1980 video, Das Duracellband, utilizes an appropriated TV commercial for Duracell batteries as a filter through which to reflect upon the pernicious economics of World War II. In this complex, subjective and poignant work, vom Bruch challenges linear history and memory, drawing an analogy between consumerism and violence. The video suggests that access to our past is always mediated through a texture of fragmented moments that involves a dance between sublimation and disclosure. Christoph Schlingensief is a media-savvy, postmodern radical, who develops strategies to engage the public in specific political and social questions. His quasi-guerilla, quasi-theatrical tactics are provocative, playful and self-consciously subversive, seeking to explode the decorum of the public arena. Schlingensiefs widest audience has probably been reached via his Talk 2000 and U3000 programs the latter broadcast on television for a number of episodes. For this TV program, Schlingensief conducted interviews with people riding on the Berlin U-Bahn, creating a kind of context-specific, neo-Brechtian, political theater. It was a strange, perhaps even contradictory hybrid, mixing pop culture and social activism for TV audiences. *** Zhang Peilis video "Water The Standard Version, Read from the Ci Hai Dictionary" is not constructed as a direct political critique, but rather as a subtly articulated reconsideration of the normative semiotic codes of Chinas state-controlled television. In Peilis video, a well-known Chinese TV newscaster, Xin Zhibin, reads the definition of water from a dictionary for the entire duration of the tape. Peilis piece is an inquiry about language and culture, and it proposes a way of reflecting upon how a society articulates itself ideologically, sometimes subliminally, through the medium of television. Western television is also ideological, not only reflecting the values of capitalism, but also perpetuating it. This is one of the issues addressed by Richard Serra in his critique of television as a mass medium, Television Delivers People, 1973. The video investigates how television has become a primary instrument of consumer culture. Using a minimal text-based approach of sequenced aphorisms and truisms (almost resembling a TV public service announcement), Serra demystifies the complicity between televisions consciousness industry and capitalism. Of course, the notion that television delivers
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people is ironic, suggesting a new kind of media-religion that worships at the alter of commerce. Although Serras video could never hope to short-circuit televisions commercialism, it did reinforce the understanding that American television had become the key instrument for perpetuating and expanding consumer culture. A humorous cut at former American president Ronald Reagan, Vito Acconcis Election Tape 84, 1984, offers a sardonic look at Reagan, who here appears as a mannequin, virtually reembodied by Acconcis voice-over. "If Its Too Bad To Be True, It Could Be DISINFORMATION," 1985, is one of Martha Roslers most important video works. Rosler interrogates the supposed neutrality of information transmitted through television. She proposes a semiotic critique of the NBC Night News program, seeking to unpack the medias claims of veracity and truth. Harun Farockis "Videogramme einer Revolution, 1992, provides an alternative documentary of the revolution in Romania, intermixing appropriated television programming and documentary materials shot during the events of 1989, the year that Ceaucescu was ousted from power, and the national broadcasting station was occupied. Videomaker Doron Solomons utilizes the codes of Israeli television to reflect upon the alternately mundane, poignant, and, occasionally absurd dimensions of cultural politics in that region. As a video editor at Israels National News Company, he has had access to a large archive of television material. A clever appropriator, Solomons crafts rhythmic textures, re-editing television materials to produce mesmerizing structures of repetition. In the video projection, Lullaby, 1998, we are confronted with rapidly alternating images of conflict from the Middle East. His editing is almost violent, somewhat reminiscent of the MTV-style of music videos clips: a subliminal juxtaposition of media fragments. Solomons reveals the disappearing borders between ethics and aestheticsa thin line distinguishing actual warfare from the violence of spectacular media representations. Apsolutno, a collaboration founded in 1993 in Novi Sad/Yugoslavia, uses a range of media (video, site-specific projects, Internet) to investigate the social and political aspects of their cultural situation, linking these inquiries to a broader global perspective, and an internationalist rhetoric of media culture. In Apsolutnos video, Good Evening, 1996, we are offered a rapid-fire, overlapping sequence of TV newscasters from a diverse range of contexts, all signing-off from their broadcast with the universal phrase: good evening. Here, Apsolutno articulates how the increasingly standardized formats of television news broadcasting tend to occlude cultural differenceseven though, of course, distinctions still manage to reveal themselves in the margins, between the lines.
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Decter-Catalogue Text For Tele (Visions) Exhibition-2001

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Decter-Catalogue Text For Tele (Visions) Exhibition-2001

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Tele[visions] Exhibition Kunsthalle Wien Museumsquartier hall 1, October 18th, 2001 - January 06th, 2002 Vienna, Austria

******************* Sequence of artists & artworks:

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