Against Comfort Watching
Art and TV
Two exhibitions about television, in Vienna and Barcelona, demonstrate art’s continuing fascination with this mass medium – and prove how difficult it is to make a good presentation of it. The year 2010 will have witnessed two major museum exhibitions addressing the history of the complex relationship between art and television. The first, Changing Channels: Art and Television 1963–1987, curated by Matthias Michalka, was presented earlier this year at MUMOK in Vienna. An epic historical survey, it explored the multifaceted role of television as an artistic medium, mode of dissemination, source of inspiration, sculptural ready-made, and vehicle for political activism. In November, Are you Ready for TV?, curated by Chus Martinez, opens at MACBA in Barcelona. In comparison with the exhibition in Vienna, this has a more experimental character and primarily explores the properties of television as a pedagogical experiment.Changing Channels incorporated over eighty artists’ and collectives’ works in a configuration designed by Julie Ault and Martin Beck (founders of the activist artists’ collective Group Material), using the striped TV colour-test palette, identical Hantarex monitors and large wall graphics as its unifying principles. The participatory and sculptural possibilities of the medium were represented with works by Dan Graham, Nam June Paik and Wolf Vostell, amongst others, all displaying early utopian hopes. However, what dominated was the artists’ impulse to employ television to address the urgent political and social issues of their times. For example, Martha Rosler’s If It’s Too Bad to Be True, It Could Be DISINFORMATION (1985) fuzzed in and out of footage of the guerrilla war in Nicaragua and a speech given by Ronald Reagan, with ‘disinformation’ referring to the political strategy of spreading false information. Joseph Beuys’s Sonne Statt Reagan (1982) records his appearance on a German entertainment show singing a protest song against Reagan’s NATO armament policies. Since its inception, TV has been a fierce advocate for anachronistic gender roles, and several works dexterously manipulated gender stereotypes with intelligence and wit. Suzanne Lacy’s Learn Where the Meat Comes From (1976) – a parody of Julia Child’s cooking show, where Lacy introduces the audience to the parts of a skinned dead lamb, in parallel to the ‘cuts’ of meat on her body. Yet, what pervaded the show was the fact that artists had embraced television for the freedom it enabled, allowing them to experiment with alternative distribution systems, outside the institutional norm of a gallery. Therefore, could not a version of this exhibition have better been played on a television station – as did Gerry Schum (who developed a series of land art ‘exhibitions’ for broadcast TV in the late 60s), WGBH-TV Boston (which produced the first artist created television programme) and Andy Warhol, who made ‘real’ TV? Or even on the Internet? After many hours of moving from one identical screen to another, my eyes blurred.For MACBA’s curator Chus Martinez, a key factor at stake when developing Are you Ready for TV? was how to activate the white cube, by trying to re-interpret the museum as a forum for public broadcast. Martinez has collaborated with artist Dora Garcia on the conceptual framework for the exhibition, developing ten scenarios, or scripts – such as The Inveterate Joker and What’s my Line? (Who Am I?) – to categorize the ways artists have operated within this field, versus the popular media’s way of exploring art. This will sit aside a third strand investigating the pedagogy of broadcast, where philosophers have become ‘performers’ presenting complex ideas to a mass audience, by using alternative presentation strategies – such as Michel Foucault’s refusal to look at the camera, or Hannah Arendt changing her clothes mid-programme. The conceptual focus devised by Martinez and Garcia provides an intriguing theoretical space to display a variety of other programmes, including the seminal art history TV series Ways of Seeing by John Berger and The Shock of the New by Robert Hughes. The architect Olga Subirós has designed a format that avoids traditional projection or monitors through a series of ten booths in which each ‘scenario’ will be played with an advertised schedule, enabling the viewer to choose how they navigate the material. Alongside this, Martinez is creating an online catalogue that is part text, part downloadable broadcast, with a new film by Albert Serra. Are you Ready for TV? seems an exercise of ‘in-between-ness’; where definitions, mediums and ideologies collide, leading to a friction of ideas that occurs in the space in-between.Yet, to most people, TV is a form of escapism. A screen that enables them to ‘do’ without ‘doing’, to use their mind without thinking, to entertain and relax, or to lift away the crushing ennui. Both these exhibitions exist on a higher cultural plane that will never meet the performed reality of the average TV diet. In the brilliant essay E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction (1993), writer David Foster Wallace begins by equating the passive-compulsive viewers’ relationship with the TV to comfort food. He states, ‘television’s whole raison is reflecting what people want to see. It’s a mirror…. Television, from the surface on down, is about desire…’, before hypothesizing that postmodern writers and artists may have used irony as ‘subversive’ media critique, but that television had beaten them at their own game – as the ironic ‘gap’ between what is seen and said, has been utilized by television since its inception, and rather than a liberating force, it is inherently destructive. This ironic multiplicity of ‘comfort TV’ was beautifully expressed by Warhol: ‘On my way back from the psychiatrist… I bought my first TV set… I left the television on the whole time, particularly when people were talking to me about their problems, and I realized that television diverted my attention just enough so that the problems people were telling me about didn’t affect me anymore. It was like this magical thing.’Kathy Noble is a curator and writer, LondonChanging Channels: Art and Television 1963-19875 March – 6 June 2010MUMOK, Museum Moderner Kunst, ViennaAre you Ready for TV? 5 November 2010 – 25 April 2011MACBA, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona
Kathy Noble