Art vs. TV: A Brief History of Contemporary Artists’ Responses to Television 9781501370571, 9781501370533, 9781501370557

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Introduction
Prolegomena to the Study of the Relationships Between Art and TV
The Body Split to Travel in Space
Art Reflecting Tele-Vision
Artists as Prosumers
Synopsis by Chapter
TV in the Postmedia Scenario
1 Historical and Theoretical Frameworks
1.1 1920s–1950s
The 1920s: The Age of Radio-Television
The 1930s–1940s: Utopia or Dystopia?
The 1950s: Reality and Its Duplicate
The 1950s: Television and Spatialism
1.2 1960s–1970s
The 1960s: Television as an Extension of Man
The 1960s: Situationism and the Society of the Spectacle
The 1960s: Early Application of Semiotics to TV
The 1960s–1970s: The Birth of Video Art
1.3 1970s–1980s
The 1970s: The Flow
The 1980s: Hyperreality
The 1980s: Neo-Television
The 1980s: Pastiche and Schizophrenia
1.4 1990s–2010s
The 1980s–1990s: A Sociological Viewpoint
The 1990s: The Body Split
The 1990s–2000s: Television and Post-Fordism
The 2010s: From Convergence to Circulationism
2 TV as a Mirror: Manipulations and Re-Presentations
2.1 Artists Familiarize with the New Mass Medium
Early Acts of Manumission of the TV Set
The Rise of Artists Television: Germany
The Rise of Artists Television: United States
Nam June Paik’s Video-Synthesizer and TV Programs
2.2 Performance, CCTV, and the Narcissistic Impulse
The First Exhibition of Television Art
Performing CCTV
Video as a Definition of the Self
The Audience Is the Product: Richard Serra
2.3 The TV Set and Its Double
TV as a Living Organism
Interruptions: The TV Set Literalized
Commercials and Zapping
Two Cases of Metatelevision
2.4 Tele-Pictures
The Allegorical Impulse of the Pictures Generation
Feminist Approaches to Media Fantasies
The Video as a Poststructuralist Visual Essay
Function Is to Perform Fiction
3 Breaking News: Television Between Art and Activism
3.1 Guerrilla Television
The Rise of the Guerrilla Television Movement
The Theories Behind Guerrilla Television
Guerrilla Television and the 1960s Counterculture
The Professionalization of Guerrilla Television
3.2 Community Television
Community Television: Videofreex’s Lanesville TV
The Legacy of Guerrilla Television: PTTV
The Personal Is Political: AIDS TV
Grassroots Television
3.3 Mediated War
John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “Bed-In for Peace”
War and Remoteness
From the Gulf War to the War on Terror
The Electronic War
3.4 Break the News
The First Global TV News Event: The JFK Assassination
The News Anchor
The Domestication of Fear: Johan Grimonprez
Live on BBC: The Yes Men
4 Artists as Media Stars
4.1 The Artist as a TV Personality
The Surrealist Persona: Salvador Dalí
Television Happening: John Cage
A Shy Apathetic Star: Andy Warhol
The Artist Diva: Charlotte Moorman and Cindy Sherman
4.2 The Artist as Intruder
Violence and Disclosure: Chris Burden
Space Invaders
Art, TV, and Mysticism: Christian Jankowski
The Bad Girl: Tracey Emin
4.3 Representations of Art and Artists in TV
The Loss of the Aura: TV Shows About Art
Stereotypes Exposed: From General Idea to the Internet
Downtown Television
The East Village Heterotopia: Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party
4.4 Andy Warhol’s TV Programs
The “Superstar” as a Dysfunctional Replica
From Pop to Fashion (1979–80)
Andy Warhol’s T.V. (1980–83)
Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes (1986–87)
5 Disentertainment: Music, Kids, Fun, and Soap Operas
5.1 The Art of the Music Video
Birth and Evolution of the Music Video
Music Videos Directed by Visual Artists
Artistic Parodies and Appropriations of the Music Video
Music Videos by Visual Artists/Musicians
5.2 Kids Shows and the Aesthetic of Failure
The Abused Child: Mike Kelley
Dysfunctional Kids
The Troubled Girl: Alex Bag
Surreal Children’s Shows and Cartoons
5.3 Comic Personae
Absurdist Humor: Ernie Kovacs
Satire and Argentinean Conceptualism
Fun TV: New Wave Vaudeville at Club 57
The Inadequate Spectator: Michael Smith
5.4 The Semiotics of the Soap Opera
Infiltrating the Soap Opera
The Double on the Screen
A Postcolonial View: Bruce and Norman Yonemoto
Identity and the Telenovela: Phil Collins
6 The Age of Prosumers: Reality TV and the Internet
6.1 Processing Reality TV
Early Artistic Responses to Reality TV
Emotions for Sale: Artists’ Reality Shows
Italian Love Meetings: From Pasolini to Vezzoli
Reality TV and the Collective Unconscious: Gillian Wearing
6.2 Performing Selves
Imitation of Life: The Truman Effect
Video Performance as Identity Research Practice
The Schizophrenic Prosumer: Ryan Trecartin
Identity Politics and the Melodrama: Kalup Linzy
6.3 Art After Reality TV
TV and Participatory Art
Talent Shows for Artists
Live from the Art World
Video Art and Edutainment
6.4 Remediation, Rematerialization, Abstraction
Artists’ TV Series, Sharing Economy, and Biopower
TV, Accelerationism, and EDM
The TV Stage Abandoned
Television and Abstraction
Chronology of Exhibitions on Art and Television
Bibliography
Works Cited
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Index

Citation preview

Art vs. TV

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Art vs. TV A Brief History of Contemporary Artists’ Responses to Television Francesco Spampinato

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2022 Copyright © Francesco Spampinato, 2022 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. 339 constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Eleanor Rose Cover image: The Palace at 4 A.M. by Jon Kessler, 2005. Installation view, Sammlung Falckenberg, Hamburg, 2006. Photo Egbert Haneke. Courtesy of the artist. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Spampinato, Francesco, 1978- author. Title: Art vs. TV : a brief history of contemporary artists’ responses to television / Francesco Spampinato. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021023756 (print) | LCCN 2021023757 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501370571 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501370564 (epub) | ISBN 9781501370557 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501370533 Subjects: LCSH: Television and art. Classification: LCC N72.T47 S63 2021 (print) | LCC N72.T47 (ebook) | DDC 791.45–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021023756 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021023757 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-7057-1 ePDF: 978-1-5013-7055-7 eBook: 978-1-5013-7056-4 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

To my father, Santi, for his unconditional support, with love

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CONTENTS

Introduction  1 Prolegomena to the Study of the Relationships Between Art and TV 1 The Body Split to Travel in Space  3 Art Reflecting Tele-Vision  6 Artists as Prosumers  8 Synopsis by Chapter  10 TV in the Postmedia Scenario  12

1 Historical and Theoretical Frameworks  17 1.1 1920s–1950s  17 The 1920s: The Age of Radio-Television  17 The 1930s–1940s: Utopia or Dystopia?  20 The 1950s: Reality and Its Duplicate  22 The 1950s: Television and Spatialism  24 1.2 1960s–1970s  27 The 1960s: Television as an Extension of Man  27 The 1960s: Situationism and the Society of the Spectacle  29 The 1960s: Early Application of Semiotics to TV  31 The 1960s–1970s: The Birth of Video Art  33 1.3 1970s–1980s  35 The 1970s: The Flow  35 The 1980s: Hyperreality  37 The 1980s: Neo-Television  39 The 1980s: Pastiche and Schizophrenia  41 1.4 1990s–2010s  43 The 1980s–1990s: A Sociological Viewpoint  43 The 1990s: The Body Split  45

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CONTENTS

The 1990s–2000s: Television and Post-Fordism  47 The 2010s: From Convergence to Circulationism  49

2 TV as a Mirror: Manipulations and Re-Presentations  53 2.1 Artists Familiarize with the New Mass Medium  53 Early Acts of Manumission of the TV Set  53 The Rise of Artists Television: Germany  56 The Rise of Artists Television: United States  58 Nam June Paik’s Video-Synthesizer and TV Programs  60 2.2 Performance, CCTV, and the Narcissistic Impulse  63 The First Exhibition of Television Art  63 Performing CCTV  66 Video as a Definition of the Self  69 The Audience Is the Product: Richard Serra  71 2.3 The TV Set and Its Double  73 TV as a Living Organism  73 Interruptions: The TV Set Literalized  76 Commercials and Zapping  78 Two Cases of Metatelevision  82 2.4 Tele-Pictures  84 The Allegorical Impulse of the Pictures Generation  84 Feminist Approaches to Media Fantasies  87 The Video as a Poststructuralist Visual Essay  89 Function Is to Perform Fiction  92

3 Breaking News: Television Between Art and Activism  95 3.1 Guerrilla Television  95 The Rise of the Guerrilla Television Movement  95 The Theories Behind Guerrilla Television  97 Guerrilla Television and the 1960s Counterculture  100 The Professionalization of Guerrilla Television  103 3.2 Community Television  105

CONTENTS

Community Television: Videofreex’s Lanesville TV  105 The Legacy of Guerrilla Television: PTTV  107 The Personal Is Political: AIDS TV  109 Grassroots Television  111 3.3 Mediated War  113 John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “Bed-In for Peace” 113 War and Remoteness  115 From the Gulf War to the War on Terror  117 The Electronic War  119 3.4 Break the News  124 The First Global TV News Event: The JFK Assassination  124 The News Anchor  126 The Domestication of Fear: Johan Grimonprez  130 Live on BBC: The Yes Men  132

4 Artists as Media Stars  135 4.1 The Artist as a TV Personality  135 The Surrealist Persona: Salvador Dalí  135 Television Happening: John Cage  138 A Shy Apathetic Star: Andy Warhol  140 The Artist Diva: Charlotte Moorman and Cindy Sherman  142 4.2 The Artist as Intruder  146 Violence and Disclosure: Chris Burden  146 Space Invaders  148 Art, TV, and Mysticism: Christian Jankowski  150 The Bad Girl: Tracey Emin  155 4.3 Representations of Art and Artists in TV  157 The Loss of the Aura: TV Shows About Art  157 Stereotypes Exposed: From General Idea to the Internet  160 Downtown Television  163 The East Village Heterotopia: Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party  166

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CONTENTS

4.4 Andy Warhol’s TV Programs  169 The “Superstar” as a Dysfunctional Replica  169 From Pop to Fashion (1979–80)  171 Andy Warhol’s T.V. (1980–83)  175 Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes (1986–87)  177

5 Disentertainment: Music, Kids, Fun, and Soap Operas  181 5.1 The Art of the Music Video  181 Birth and Evolution of the Music Video  181 Music Videos Directed by Visual Artists  183 Artistic Parodies and Appropriations of the Music Video  185 Music Videos by Visual Artists/Musicians  189 5.2 Kids Shows and the Aesthetic of Failure  191 The Abused Child: Mike Kelley  191 Dysfunctional Kids  195 The Troubled Girl: Alex Bag  198 Surreal Children’s Shows and Cartoons  201 5.3 Comic Personae  204 Absurdist Humor: Ernie Kovacs  204 Satire and Argentinean Conceptualism  206 Fun TV: New Wave Vaudeville at Club 57  209 The Inadequate Spectator: Michael Smith  212 5.4 The Semiotics of the Soap Opera  215 Infiltrating the Soap Opera  215 The Double on the Screen  217 A Postcolonial View: Bruce and Norman Yonemoto  220 Identity and the Telenovela: Phil Collins  223

6 The Age of Prosumers: Reality TV and the Internet  227 6.1 Processing Reality TV  227 Early Artistic Responses to Reality TV  227 Emotions for Sale: Artists’ Reality Shows  229

CONTENTS

Italian Love Meetings: From Pasolini to Vezzoli  233 Reality TV and the Collective Unconscious: Gillian Wearing  236 6.2 Performing Selves  239 Imitation of Life: The Truman Effect  239 Video Performance as Identity Research Practice  242 The Schizophrenic Prosumer: Ryan Trecartin  244 Identity Politics and the Melodrama: Kalup Linzy  249 6.3 Art After Reality TV  254 TV and Participatory Art  254 Talent Shows for Artists  257 Live from the Art World  261 Video Art and Edutainment  264 6.4 Remediation, Rematerialization, Abstraction  267 Artists’ TV Series, Sharing Economy, and Biopower  267 TV, Accelerationism, and EDM  270 The TV Stage Abandoned  273 Television and Abstraction  276 Chronology of Exhibitions on Art and Television  281 Bibliography  285 Works Cited  311 List of Figures  333 Acknowledgments  339 Index  342

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Introduction

Prolegomena to the Study of the Relationships Between Art and TV Downgraded and “expanded” since the mass diffusion of digital technologies and the internet, television in the twenty-first century has lost the predominant position it held, roughly from the 1950s through to the turn of the millennium, as the most authoritative and persuasive mass medium. If television cannot be declared dead yet, then it has certainly mutated in a drastic way, having been forced to abdicate in favor of a new ungraspable media scenario governed by on-demand criteria and usergenerated content, distributed by video-sharing platforms and streaming media services. Most of the content that circulates online today, even that resembling traditional television formats, is, in fact, indicative of an epochal change not just in terms of media production but mostly of their fruition, as media are accessed through portable computers and pocketsize devices by users belonging to increasingly atomized, globalized, and nomadic societies. The power that television acquired and maintained for about half a century originally came from the vertical dynamic it established with viewers, chiefly enacted by the positioning of the actual TV set in the home: the way it reinforced the temporal structuring of daily life with its schedule; and its role as a “talking head,” on a human scale, that did not give viewers a right of reply. Viewers would passively absorb whatever television broadcast, their only form of control being the possibility of changing channels, and ultimately turning the set off. Experiencing television was primarily an act of physical indoctrination: a metaphorical procedure of imprisonment of the viewers’ body that turned the home into another of those power systems that Gilles Deleuze—tracing an evolution from Michel Foucault’s

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idea of disciplinary societies to his own concept of contemporary societies of control—called “environments of enclosure.”1 In his seminal book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of a Prison (1975), Foucault described the society that formed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a disciplinary society: that is, a social order based on a program of disciplining individuals enacted through power systems, such as the family (and by extension the home), the school, the factory, the prison, and so on, that indoctrinate the citizens in physical terms through the mechanization of their activities and surveillance. The primary aim of the disciplinary society was to produce individuals that would obey and adhere to a determined status quo. A pioneering example identified by Foucault of how disciplinary societies refer to “the body as object and target of power […] the body that is manipulated, shaped, trained,”2 were the new protocols, adopted since the seventeenth century, for training soldiers to coordinate with one another with the precision of a mechanical instrument. From there through to his more famous discourse on the architectural model of the “panopticon”—a circular prison where inmates are constantly surveilled by a watchman at the center—Foucault pointed out to what he defined as “docile bodies,”3 or the embodiment of the disciplinary logic. The major shift that Deleuze identified from disciplinary to control societies coincided with the rise of neoliberalism in the global market from around the 1970s. This, in turn, produced a new social order in which people are no longer kept docile through confinement within enclosed spaces, such as homes, factories, and prisons, but on a more subtle level, being controlled as they embrace the new virtual open-ended networks brought forth by the mass diffusion of computers and the internet. It is perhaps no coincidence that Deleuze wrote his essay in 1990, the same year that Tim Berners-Lee set up the World Wide Web. As the numerical language of control—made up of codes—replaced discipline, the body rhetoric mutated. From mechanized bodies controlled through confinement to environments of enclosure, we now have individuals who “have become ‘dividuals,’ and masses, samples, data, markets, or ‘banks.’”4 The citizens of this interconnected, technological, globalized, and surveilled world are deluded of being freer than before, when, in fact, each single action they perform is instantly transformed into a pack of data. Compared to the television age, the new mediascape is certainly based on more horizontal dynamics into which viewers have apparently acquired an

1

 Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October, Vol. 59, Winter (1992): 3.

 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 136. 3  Ibid. 4  Deleuze, 5. 2

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active role. However, as Deleuze had already anticipated in a lecture he delivered at FÉMIS film school in Paris in 1987: “Control is not discipline. You do not confine people with a highway. But by making highways, you multiply the means of control. I am not saying this is the only aim of highways, but people can travel infinitely and ‘freely’ without being confined while being perfectly controlled. That is our future.”5 As the mass medium par excellence of the late twentieth century— although not addressed specifically by either Foucault or Deleuze— television incarnates elements from both disciplinary and control societies. Its transformation from the domestic “fireplace” to a multifunctional apparatus with attached peripherals and internet connectivity is testament indeed to the metamorphosis of the role of the viewers and the definition of their body. The transformation from the docile, torpid body sinking into a sofa to the athletic body of the new, always-on-the-move “prosumer,” is also exemplary of the shift from nuclear to atomized families and, as a consequence, of the lifestyle migration from houses to increasingly smaller apartments. At the same time, television prefigured the electronic highway Deleuze talked about, offering a fictional reality—specular to factual reality—to which the viewer was irresistibly attracted, and into which he or she was deluded to be immersed, only now surfing in cyberspace while the body stayed put.

The Body Split to Travel in Space This book aims to map and condense the history of contemporary visual artists’ responses to television during the half century or so in which television maintained its position as society’s quintessential mass medium. The study will take into account video artworks, installations, performances, interventions, and television programs made by artists as forms of resistance to, and appropriation and parody of, mainstream television. Apart from a few interventions in major TV channels, most of the works discussed herein are intellectual productions destined for the art world, small television networks, or the internet, that oppose, simulate, or make fun of television in the attempt to expose the mechanisms through which the mass medium influences our perception of both reality and ourselves: the way we mold our identity, how we relate to one another, and how we develop certain preferences and make certain choices in life. Aside for a few case studies from Argentina, former-Yugoslavia, and Japan, most of the artists discussed   Gilles Deleuze, “What Is the Creative Act?,” 1987 in Gilles Deleuze: Two Regimes of Madness—Texts and Interviews 1975–1995, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 322.

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are from the United States and Europe. The reason is not only that most researches for this book have been conducted in the United States and Europe but also to highlight the predominant role of television in Western societies from an insider perspective, having lived in Italy most of my life and in the United States for almost a decade. The many works surveyed in this compendium are manifest forms of opposition to television genres, languages, formats, and phenomena. Moved by the utopian desire to develop alternative forms of cultural production that would potentially affect larger and more generic audiences, the artists that realized these works are prompted by an irreverent poststructuralist approach to television, either in literal or in figural terms, in an attempt to reveal its subliminal power or to exorcise our saturated media existence. In both cases, these works and phenomena elicit a tension between art and television, exposing an incongruence; an impossibility not only to converge but at the very least to open up a dialogical exchange. Indeed, even the television programs made by artists end up exposing the coercive nature of the medium itself, and the fictional apparatus on which its very raison d’être is based. In other words, every artistic commentary on television configures itself as an act of challenge to television itself. What emerges, in particular, is that while functioning as a window into another virtual reality that supposedly replicates surrounding reality, television also produces a sensation of physical displacement in the viewer; the perception of being at home one minute and immersed in whatever televisual space is broadcast the next. A parallel can be traced to the neurophysiological syndrome of the so-called phantom limb, which manifests when an amputee feels sensations in a limb that no longer exists. For the TV viewer it is not a question of perceiving physical feelings such as touch, temperature, pressure, vibration, and so on (an effect that can be achieved, instead, during more immersive media experiences such as virtual or augmented reality) but of having the illusion that his or her whole body has actually travelled in space or, vice versa, that the body on screen has travelled through space and entered the living room to talk with the viewer. One of the most acute thinkers to have discussed media in relation to aesthetics, American literary critic and philosopher Samuel Weber condensed his thoughts on television in the essay “Television: Set and Screen” (1996), which revolves around the presupposition that the specificity of television as a medium is that it allows the viewer to “see at distance”—a function epitomized, after all, in the very combination of the terms “tele” and “vision.” However, unlike other devices whose noun incorporates the prefix “tele,” and which allow to overcome distance (such as the telegraph, the telescope, or the telephone), with television it is not distance per se that is overcome but the body itself. If a body is defined by the determinate extent

INTRODUCTION

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of the space it occupies, and the fact that it can occupy one place at a time, according to Weber: Television thus serves as a surrogate for the body in that it allows for a certain sense-perception to take place; but it does this in a way that no body can, for its perception takes place in more than one place at a time. Television takes place in taking the place of the body and at the same time in transforming both place and body.6 Weber identifies three places where television occurs: where the images and sounds are recorded, where they are received, and the place in between, or else the ether through which they are transmitted. All three converge in the TV set. “What it sets before us, in and as the television set,” continues Weber, “is therefore split, or rather, it is a split or a separation that camouflages itself by taking the form of a visible image.”7 By standing between the viewer and the viewed, the television screen is the materialization of this split between these three locations which also constitutes a triple split of the body. Various science fiction movies have also played on the idea of the TV screen as a window or door into another dimension—a liminal boundary through which bodies from both factual and televised reality can pass. This happens to Max Renn, the protagonist in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983), whose surrounding reality is affected by the actions performed in a television program (with the same title as the film) that induces hallucinations to such a degree that as he approaches to kiss a mouth on the screen, his entire body is eaten up and transported to the other side. Following Weber’s reasoning then, one can assume that, much more than being a device, “tele-vision” is, in fact, a scopic system that, while allowing the viewer to see at distance, simultaneously reiterates and negates the very idea of visual perception as being that sense that allows one to detect and interpret visual information so as to build a representation of the surrounding reality. If the only sense that proves reality as being factual is touch, more than the amputee who feels a non-existent phantom limb, the TV viewer perceives a reality that is both visible and audible, yet is not properly there. This ambiguity is proven by the fact that, unlike Max in Videodrome, the viewer who will try to interact physically with the televised reality will be confronted with the screen: no warm lips to await, only a dusty, cold, and hard surface. Therefore, as Weber concludes, what is placed in front of the viewer is, after all, the very power of vision to create a representation of reality.

6  Samuel Weber, Mass-Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 117. 7  Ibid., 120.

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Art Reflecting Tele-Vision Voluntarily confined in the environment of enclosure, chiefly the home, the viewer opens up, through the television set, to a phantom reality. While his or her body relaxes in a comfortable seat, sensory processing is stimulated and altered by increasingly advanced systems of audiovisual reproduction, be it high-definition screens able to display information that the human eye wouldn’t otherwise see or Dolby Surround audio systems giving the enhanced impression of being truly immersed in whatever manufactured reality is being broadcast at the moment. For the viewer is not only disinterested in confronting the idea of “tele-vision” as a scopic regime but is also totally unaware of the implications that television as a system of representation may have on his or her psyche, and how it can influence his or her individual and social life. As for Max, the degree of mimesis of factual and televisual reality is so high that the viewer might even decide to stand up at one point, approach the TV set, and decide to interact with the person on the screen. Now, for many that would certainly be ascribed to a pathological condition, but how many Maxes wouldn’t kiss someone on the screen in the privacy of their own living room where nobody can see them? A recent example of mimesis gone wrong, albeit not in such literal terms, occurs in a scene of a popular Italian TV series based on the story of Rosy Abate—a fictional ex-mafia queen who tries to change her life. A character who plays the role of a criminal hands the protagonist a note with his telephone number in open sight. This doesn’t seem strange, except for the coincidental fact that it happened to be the real phone number of a carpenter from Domodossola, whose Sunday night turned into a nightmare as viewers kept calling and threatening him to leave Rosy alone. To display a real phone number in a television show was certainly an oversight by the production team, but who would ever have thought that viewers would bother to take down the number, call it, and, most of all, think they were talking with the TV character in question as if he were a real person? Well, an artist definitely would—and that is when art joins in the game. Being itself a system of representation, art has proven to be a privileged context in which to measure the psychological impact of television and rethink its social role. Since the dawn of civilization, art has traditionally performed a social function, be it to serve as décor or illustrate hierarchical power structures under the commissions of kingdoms, governments or religious orders. Of course, that did not stop artists from treating art as a free expression of human intellect and spirit, using metaphor and allegory as instruments to develop subliminal commentaries on life, politics, or culture itself. By embracing these rhetorical figures, art became independent from the “functional” constraints of society—be they ethical or political—and

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began to serve “as a mirror held up to nature,” as Arthur Danto wrote in an influential essay, “to catch the conscience of our kings.”8 Allegory, in particular, has proven to be an efficient avenue to expose the misconduct of a given social order. As industrial production and the economic interests it gained became a state’s priority along with traditional geopolitical concerns, art has employed allegory as a proper weapon to expose, criticize, or challenge the anti-democratic and coercive nature of the new disciplinary societies that formed with the advent of the Industrial Revolution. This explains why artists started to imitate the language of mass consumerist culture, overidentifying the work of art with an industrial object, both through acts of literal appropriation—from Marcel Duchamp’s readymade through to collages and simulation—and through the adoption of techniques and tools proper of industrial production, such as the screenprint, video technologies, and, more recently, computer software and web applications. Along with traditional mediums, such as painting, drawing, and sculpture, artists adopted and learned how to use a new array of mediums through which they could elaborate more subtle and efficient commentaries, and sometimes even assaults, on society and its “kings.” Being power systems at the core of disciplinary and later control societies, mass media became a recurring subject—and sometimes also the medium itself—for artists who could now fight their enemies on equal terms, so to speak. This is particularly true of video art, which arose in the 1960s and developed initially in open opposition to television. If early visual technologies, from the camera obscura to photography, allowed to measure and so reorganize reality in the form of an image, their development in film and television allowed to recreate reality. Just as artists began to challenge the film industry as soon as they had access to the technology, so too with the emergence of video technology on the market, or through collaborations with TV networks, television became their prime target. Video art’s confrontational approach to television is well summed up by Philippe Dubois when he argues: It is not a question of simply turning over the television, but of reflecting it, of staging (in image and in device) the image and the device that it is. The video can thus appear not as another form (the form of the other)— the anti-television, but as the very form of a thought of the television. Something like an analytic metalanguage. Video is the formal and intellectual material in which reflection on/from/with television flows, or even better: which generates it, which invents it, which gives it body and  Arthur Danto, “The Artworld,” Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 61, No. 19 (October 15, 1964): 584. 8

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ideas. There is a kind of ‘power of thought’ in and through the image, which seems to me at the heart of the video form. ‘Video’ would be, in this sense, quite literally, a form that thinks, that is to say, a thought of the image. In general, not just of television.9

Artists as Prosumers Dubois’ discourse confirms that video art is the artist’s favorite genre when it comes to reflecting upon television, and the sensation of body split that it produces. When used to address television, however, video is rarely employed by artists as a technology that only reproduces vision; rather, it is often in reference to the body—be it the body of the television viewer, the body represented on screen and its social implications, or the body of the visitor or beholder of the artwork the moment it is displayed or performed in an exhibition space or other venues. Therefore, it is the body, more than video, which is employed as a proper medium, while video subordinates to performance either as a mere tool for documentation or as a referent in relation to or against that which a performance is structured on. This also includes real-life events—that is, public or TV interventions, or proper TV programs directed, hosted, or featuring artists, and thus automatically transformed, or at least seen as works of art in their own right. The artists discussed in this study belong to different generations: those emerged in the 1960s in association with art movements such as Pop Art, Fluxus, and Happening—whose work explored the implications of television becoming a ubiquitous presence in all homes; those emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s in association with video and performance art practices, as well as counterculture and Conceptual Art, who employed video as a mirror—either in psychoanalytical or in social terms; those appearing on the scene in the 1980s, whose work aimed at deconstructing media representation in line with postmodernist theories; those emerged in the 1990s, who reacted to the coeval convergence of art and entertainment, politics and spectacle; those arriving in the 2000s, an era in which, through reality shows and the Internet, anybody could potentially become a media personality; and finally those emerged in the 2010s, whose work reflects on how old media like television has definitively vaporized through the electronic highways of cyberspace (borrowing a retrofuturistic vocabulary from the age when personal computers entered our homes, notably the 1980s).

 Philippe Dubois, La Question Vidéo: Entre Cinéma et Art Contemporain (Crisnée, Belgium: Éditions Yellow Now), 109, my translation.

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The most popular television genres and formats to be targeted through artistic acts of resistance, appropriation, and parody include: news, commercials, sitcoms, soap operas, talk shows, children’s and youth programs, music videos, reality and talent shows, edutainment, and TV series. While endeavoring to chart a diachronic development, the present study has also been structured by areas of interest, into which some of the aforementioned TV formats have been referred to as connecting threads; to group and compare works that would otherwise have been looked at from a distance, since they often pertain to different tendencies or moments of contemporary art practice. Although contemporary art is the main field with which they are associated, some of the works discussed also come from parallel and occasionally tangential spheres, such as cinema, music, design, activism, and television itself. Far from being willing to reinforce obsolete distinctions between disciplines—not to mention establishing hierarchies between high and low culture—the various techniques or tools employed, and the works and phenomena taken into consideration are approached from an expanded, transversal, and transdisciplinary perspective. After all, being homologous to the evolution of television and its role in society, they reflect not only a change in terms of contents and production, but mostly of distribution and fruition. As noted before, a determining element to signal the passage identified by Deleuze, from disciplinary societies to societies of control, is the user’s new approach to media since the advent of digital technologies. Exemplary of this change, the term “prosumer” was coined to denote the shift from consumers into producers; a groundbreaking transformation that began in the 1960s with the diffusion of portable video cameras, and which continued over the decades with the introduction and development of the computer market, advanced digital technologies, and later the internet; the latter allowing anyone without proper expertise to produce media products. The introduction in the 1960s of portable video cameras, such as the Sony Portapak, triggered the rise of bottom-up video productions as well as video art practices, but it also signaled the beginning of the story of the relationships between art and television that is about to be outlined. When it comes to “reflecting” and reflecting upon television, both artists and prosumers embraced video technologies with a similar metalinguistic approach, which resulted in works that ultimately exposed—even though inadvertently for the most part—the very ontology of vision and the mechanisms of image-making and distribution. More than in art historical terms, the examination of these works will be undertaken from an expanded approach to visual culture; one that, as Andrea Pinotti and Antonio Somaini argued in their primer on the topic, assumes that “images and vision are not abstract and supra-historical entities. On the contrary, they are always something concrete and historically conditioned. They are material images and incarnate looks that circulate in a context whose coordinates are defined

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by a whole series of factors at the same time technological and media, social and political.”10 Therefore, along with contemporary art history and visual studies, both standing as the main disciplines of reference, the works to be taken into account will also be of interest to such academic fields as media studies, cultural studies, and critical theory, as they are forms of artistic expression that comment on the tectonic cultural shifts brought on by the social role of images and the mass diffusion of visual technologies. Television may no longer be society’s quintessential mass medium, but it certainly continues to exert a huge amount of power even in today’s cross-media scenario. Its long-lived authority does not depend only upon its omnipresence, now moreover global, but by having worked as the bridge that transported viewers from disciplinary societies to societies of control. Apparently, prosumer technologies and the internet allow viewers to develop more horizontal and transparent relationships with media, but dynamics of control, mechanization, and stereotyping are still at stake. Initially perfected by television, these dynamics have simply transmigrated to the new media as a reminder that, after all, although feeling emancipated from television, many of us grew up as docile viewers in front of it.

Synopsis by Chapter The first chapter sums up the theoretical substrate through which artists and thinkers shaped the discourse on television as an aesthetic and cultural form in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The first part, charting the period between the 1920s and the 1950s, presents the pioneering ideas of László Moholy-Nagy, Dziga Vertov, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Rudolf Arnheim, Sergei Eisenstein, Martin Heidegger, Theodor W. Adorno, and Lucio Fontana. The second focuses on the 1960s and 1970s media theories of Marshall McLuhan, Guy Debord, and Umberto Eco. The third expounds the postmodernist ideas of Raymond Williams, Jean Baudrillard, Eco, and Fredric Jameson. The last one encompasses the main sociological viewpoints of the 1980s and 1990s: Neil Postman, Karl R. Popper, Pierre Bordieu; the illuminating theory of Samuel Weber; the thoughts on TV in relation to immaterial labor by Maurizio Lazzarato and Jonathan Beller; and considerations on the internet breakthrough by Lev Manovich, Henry Jenkins, and Hito Steyerl. The second chapter revolves around the idea of TV as a mirror, beginning with pioneering acts of manipulation of the TV Set by Wolf Vostell and Nam 10  Andrea Pinotti and Antonio Somaini, Cultura Visuale: Immagini, Sguardi, Media, Dispositivi (Turin: Einaudi, 2016), XIV, my translation.

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June Paik. It then moves on to early utopian artists’ TV programs: Black Gate Cologne and Gerry Schum’s Fernsehgalerie in Germany, and KQED, WGBH, WNET, and KGW in United States. The second part looks at the first exhibition of “television art,” TV as a Creative Medium (1969); the TVrelated works by American conceptual artists Dan Graham, Bruce Nauman, and Richard Serra; the psychoanalytical dimension of Andy Warhol’s Outer and Inner Space (1965); and the works discussed by Rosalind Krauss in her seminal essay Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism (1976). The third part presents various speculations on the TV set as a domestic living organism, and artists’ attempts to break the television flow through metalinguistic commercials and programs. The final part explores the allegorical impulse of Pictures Generation women artists Judith Barry, Gretchen Bender, and Dara Birnbaum, as well as of James Coleman and Stan Douglas. TV news is the theme of the third chapter, which opens recounting the genesis of the guerrilla television movement, an offshoot of the 1960s American counterculture—from the early street tapes to either its professionalization (e.g., TVTV) or the development of community television projects (e.g., Videofreex). The legacy of guerrilla television is the topic of the second part, which looks at Paper Tiger Television, AIDS-related TV productions and videos, and the subsequent uses of camcorders in the name of social justice. The third part centers on the forms of representation of war, with a focus on US-driven conflicts (i.e., the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, and the War on Terror), encompassing the work of artists and writers, including J.G. Ballard, Harun Farocki, Sanja Iveković, Jon Kessler, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Susan Sontag, Paul Virilio, and Peter Weibel. The last part centers, instead, on works investigating how news manufactures reality, as in Johan Grimonprez’s sampling of TV reports of airplane hijacks, and the Yes Men’s prank live on the BBC—the most successful ever act of artistic intervention in the TV apparatus. The fourth chapter explores how TV reinforces stereotypes of the artist as an eccentric, outsider, or troubled human being through caricature or degrading representations. The first part examines the cases of Salvador Dalí, John Cage, Andy Warhol, Charlotte Moorman, and Cindy Sherman, all of whom variously employed self-parody to expose television’s stereotyping mechanism. Unlike them, Chris Burden, Mathieu Laurette, Christian Jankowski, and Tracey Emin (discussed in the second part) enacted metalinguistic forms of intrusion, ranging from violent through to disrespectful to zany, which ultimately overturned media entertaining logic—pushing the audience to confront the very meaning of art. The third part focuses on the 1980s TV programs through which New York-based artists emphasized the blurring of art and life, as in Colab’s Potato Wolf and Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party. The last part is devoted entirely to Andy Warhol’s approach to TV, from his early filmic proto-reality shows to his own TV programs of the 1980s—Fashion, Andy Warhol’s T.V., and Andy

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Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes—through which the artist elicited a metalinguistic exploration of celebrity culture. The fifth chapter focuses on entertainment, the TV genre that most often becomes the subject of artists’ acts of resistance, appropriation, and parody. The first part investigates the music video, both as a commercial art form and as a field to which artists have contributed, either through commissions or by embracing this format in their work. The second part examines TV’s negative influence on children and teenagers as it emerges from the work of Mike Kelley and Alex Bag, as well as an array of artists who have depicted dysfunctional youth and associated symbols in their films, videos, and animations. The third part looks at how absurdist humor, pioneered on TV by Ernie Kovacs, informs video performances by the likes of David Lamelas and Michael Smith, as well as some 1980s TV programs by East Village artists like Jaime Davidovich or those associated to Club 57. The final part focuses on forms of appropriation of the soap opera genre by artists including Joan Braderman, Mel Chin, Julian Rosefeldt, and Richard Phillips, through to the postcolonial views of Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, and Phil Collins. Following a diachronic criterion, the sixth and final chapter focuses on artistic responses to TV genres emerged from the 1990s to the late 2010s; a time frame characterized by the emergence of reality TV and the internet. Reality shows are the subject of the works discussed in the first part, by artists like Phil Collins, John Miller, Christoph Schlingensief, Francesco Vezzoli, and Gillian Wearing. After a discussion on the 1998 movie The Truman Show, the second part explores how artists embraced video performance to enact identity search processes, as in the cases of Bjørn Melhus, Shana Moulton, Ryan Trecartin, and Kalup Linzy. The third part looks at the impact of reality TV on the art system, including discussions on TV-related participatory art projects, talent shows for artists, artists’ establishment of TV channels in art venues, and the adoption of edutainment in self-representational videos. The chapter closes with the examination of art projects that reflect on the transformation of TV in today’s interconnected mediascape, with considerations on such issues as sharing economy, biopower, social networking, and “accelerationism,” through the work of such artists as Tauba Auerbach, Keren Cytter, Simon Denny, Michel François, Melanie Gilligan, Ken Okiishi, Cally Spooner, and Hito Steyerl.

TV in the Postmedia Scenario To introduce what he defines as today’s “postmedia condition,” Italian media scholar Ruggero Eugeni recounts the television commercial with which

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Apple launched the Macintosh computer on the market. Scheduled for maximum impact, it was aired in United States on January 22, 1984, during the live Superbowl telecast—the most watched media event in America’s broadcast calendar—to an estimated audience of over 77.6 million viewers. Filmed by acclaimed Blade Runner (1982) director Ridley Scott, the oneminute ad—which depicts a sci-fi dystopia, loosely based on George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)—proved prophetic of what media were deemed to become with the diffusion of personal computers. Set in a grayish industrial complex, it opens with a line of uniformed workers-cum-prisoners with blank expressions, marching in unison through a tunnel punctuated by television screens, transmitting the speech of a Big Brother-like figure. The group converges in what looks like a cinema theater filled with hundreds of other seemingly lobotomized “slaves,” all sitting dazed in front of a giant screen broadcasting the same speech, whose content is epitomized in the homologizing statement: “We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause.”11 In plain contrast with the brainwashing atmosphere, typical of a disciplinary society, a blond woman athlete in colored sportswear runs from a group of guards in riot gear. As she approaches the talking head, she hurls a big hammer against the screen that explodes in a blinding flash, releasing a gust of white smoke, which sweeps across the faces of the gobsmacked “viewers.” At that point, a portentous voice-over, reiterated by a scrolling text, announces: “On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984.”12 Clearly, the commercial ironizes upon Orwell’s dystopian prediction, by promoting the end of the social order imagined in the novel: one in which media were employed by a totalitarian regime as tools of both propaganda and surveillance. As Eugeni notes, the object of the commercial, the computer, is not even shown, but is “represented only metaphorically through the young athlete who breaks into the cinema theater and shatters the screen. One thing, however, is clear: the moment it appears on the court of nineteenth and twentieth century media, the computer decrees their destruction. Not, mind you, an economic destruction but mostly a cultural and political vaporization.”13 Symptomatic of these vaporizations are the last works discussed in this study, in which TV sets and television images are treated almost as relics from a previous civilization—as with the arrival of prosumer technologies and finally the internet, media as we knew them underwent processes of   Apple commercial introducing the Macintosh personal computer, directed by Ridley Scott, 1983. Retrieved from YouTube, accessed April 24, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=0q7iX0QWaTg. 12  Ibid. 13  Ruggero Eugeni, La Condizione Postmediale: Media, Linguaggi e Narrazioni (Brescia: Editrice La Scuola, 2015), 9, my translation. 11

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remediation, rematerialization, and abstraction. Ultimate indicators of this postmedia condition can be found in the recent installations by New Zealander artist Simon Denny and German artist and theorist Hito Steyerl. Denny challenges the illusionistic dynamic of television by displaying rows of freestanding printed canvases reproducing TV sets, thus reducing the televisual illusionism to a bulk of still frames serving as collapsible props. In contrast, Steyerl’s futuristic theaters are faux stages in which mesmerizing videos display sampled media according to a logic that the artist defined as “circulationist”14—or else, an artistic act of acceleration to investigate and eventually expose processes of image-making and circulation in today’s postmedia scenario. In presuming a type of viewer who interacts with the surrounding mediascape only through screens that he or she is deluded to be in control of while in fact ignoring their codes, works like these warn about the dangers of today’s postmedia condition as being symptomatic of what Deleuze called societies of control, or else another Orwellian dystopia. As this might be the subject of a possible follow-up investigation—also in light of the impact of the recent Covid pandemic and its related crisis—this study has focused instead on the phase that ushered in the current postmedia condition: one in which television was society’s most essential mass medium, a phase whose genesis is exemplified in the works highlighted and the types of viewers they implied. Just as the athlete in the Apple commercial challenges the unilateral power system of a media-based Big Brother regime through a physical act of rebellion, many of the artists surveyed, whose work has been discussed, have enacted a performative dimension too—either through performances, events, and installations or in conjunction with the use of video technologies, as in video works and the TV programs they produced, hosted, or appeared in. Organized as confrontational acts that challenged the coercive nature of television, these artistic forms of resistance, appropriation, and parody may not have always achieved the instant success of a hammer shattering a screen, but they have certainly contributed to a slow and efficient process of demystification and deconstruction of television as a scopic regime. If it is true that video, as noted by Dubois, has been employed by artists as a form to rethink vision, and so “reflect” television, then it is also true that performance has been employed as a complementary practice to investigate the effects of media on the psychology of the viewer. By often using their own body as a medium or offering audiences the chance to rethink their role as spectators, artists have explored the uncanny feeling of displacement

 Hito Steyerl, “Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?,” e-flux, No. 49 (November 2013). Accessed April 24, 2021, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/49/60004/too-much-world-is-theinternet-dead/.

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produced by tele-vision. Indeed, what the examined works attempt to overcome is precisely that split between the factual and televised bodies that Weber indicated as the specificity of television, which is also a split between reality and representation. Seen from today’s perspective, that is, from an era in which media are accessed on mobile devices as body appendages by users in their atomized and nomad existences, television is increasingly regarded as an obsolete medium. Likewise, in comparison with the subliminal media dynamics enacted today by governments and corporations—harder than ever to be distinguished by users—the retrofuturistic appeal of television is often the subject of mockery or of nostalgic views of a bygone collective unconscious. That doesn’t mean that the power television held for around half a century should be underestimated. On the contrary, a study such as the one that has been conducted here aims to show precisely that some dynamics perfected by television have, in fact, transmigrated to and have been reinforced by new media. If the artistic commentaries on television have some reactionary power, it is to reveal to viewers that television offers no more than an illusionistic travel in space in exchange for our docile immobility: a physical condition from which derives our implicit consensus to a given status quo.

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1 Historical and Theoretical Frameworks

1.1 1920s–1950s The 1920s: The Age of Radio-Television Most technological inventions destined to change human civilization were initially met with a sense of wonder and optimism by some while provoking fear and opposition in others. When television began to be “imagined” in the late nineteenth century—largely as a consequence of the invention of the telephone developed between the 1850s and 1870s—these mixed reactions emerged from some futuristic illustrations that visualized television decades before the first receiver was actually built. Paradigmatic is Le Journal Téléphonoscopique (1883) by French illustrator and novelist Albert Robida, which shows a shocked family watching a proto-TV news program broadcasting images of a distant war on a screen in their living room1 (Figure 1.1). From Robida’s sci-fi speculations on the Téléphonoscope—as much an early concept of the videophone as television—through to Karl Ferdinand Braun’s 1897 invention of the cathode-ray tube and up to John Logie Baird’s early demonstrations of televised images in motion in the mid-1920s, before

1  The illustration, originally featured in Robida’s book Le Vingtième Siècle (1883), was referred to among other “startling predictions” by American media historian Erik Barnouw in his Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 4. The book, one of the earliest accounts of the history of television in the United States, condensed Barnouw’s writings on television previously published as three individual volumes: A Tower of Babel (1966), The Golden Web (1968), and The Image Empire (1970).

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FIGURE 1.1  Albert Robida, Forecast: Watching a War, illustration, 1882.

the first regular broadcasts started in Germany in 1935 (followed by the UK, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States), television was already one of the most speculated upon and longed for technological innovations in history. And as it has always happened with the arrival of technology, artists and intellectuals were among the first to fantasize about it. The earliest discourses on television that are fundamental from the viewpoint of the history of art and cinema were raised by the historical avant-gardes with two essays, both published in 1925, by Bauhaus professor László Moholy-Nagy and Constructivist filmmaker Dziga Vertov. Neither used the term “television,” though. Rather, they talked about images transmitted through radio waves; the primary reason being that in the 1920s television was seen as an extension of radio, which was already entering the domestic space, and for the first time had begun introducing its growing mass of listeners to the concept of a daily program schedule. Fascinated by the possibility of bringing images simultaneously to thousands of people, the two artists suggested two different approaches. Moholy-Nagy did so in the book Malerie Fotografie Film (Painting Photography Film)—originally published in 1925 as the eighth volume of the Bauhausbücher (Bauhaus Books, 1925–30) series, it is considered a cornerstone of media studies today. The most groundbreaking idea

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expressed therein by the Hungarian painter, photographer, and writer was to use technology, “which has so far been used solely for purposes of reproduction for productive purposes,”2 to create original content made of sensible forms (aural, visual, and audiovisual) able to expand the sensorial capacities of human beings and educate them to interact with an environment totally transformed by technology. He mainly referred to photography and the gramophone but also mentioned film and a new device he called Radiobilderdienst, literally a “radio picture service”; although when the first English version of the book came out in 1969, the term was loosely translated as “television (Telehor).”3 Based on the rejection of the idea of art as autonomous from society, Bauhaus and Constructivism—two avant-garde movements active respectively in Germany and Russia from the late 1910s to the early 1930s—advocated not only the integration of all the arts but also that of the arts and industry. In Russia this integration led the artist, who so far had traditionally practiced painting, sculpture and crafts, to assume the role of visual communicator—so to speak—who variously embraced photography, design, advertising, urban planning, and cinema: any medium, with a penchant for new technologies, that would facilitate spreading the socialist message, while at the same time documenting how society was being positively transformed by it. As a film director in postrevolutionary Russia, Vertov’s task was to make proletarian workers aware of the improvements brought to their living conditions by the new Bolshevik state. Through the idea of the KinoGlaz (Film-Eye)—which considered the camera lens as an extension of the human eye and referred to the epistemic potential of a “non-acted cinema”: a cinema without actors and clearly separated from any literary or theatrical tradition—Vertov promoted a cinema of fact: of “life caught unawares”4 in the streets and the factories of 1920s Russia. In his 1925 text Osnovnoe

2  László Moholy-Nagy, Painting Photography Film, trans. Janet Seligman (London: Lund Humpries, 1969), 30. 3  With the word “Telehor,” Janet Seligman, who translated Malerei Fotografie Film into English in 1969, forced a retroactive association of Moholy-Nagy’s use of the term radiobilderdienst with the name of the only issue of the magazine Telehor, a term of Greek origin meaning television. Published by Czech architect and graphic designer František Kalivodathat in 1936, Telehor was entirely devoted to the work of Moholy-Nagy, who treated it as an artist’s book. However, despite the name, the book didn’t contain specific references to television. “Telehor” was also the name of a television technology developed in Germany since 1919 by Hungarian inventor Dénes Mihály, who established a company called Telehor AG, with which MoholyNagy was familiar. 4  Dziga Vertov, “From the History of the Kinoks,” in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 94.

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Kino-Glaza (The Essence of Kino-Eye), he expanded his idea of “non-acted cinema,” prefiguring that radio-broadcasting images, just recently invented, can bring us still closer in our cherished basic goal—to unite all the workers scattered over the earth through a single consciousness, a single bond, a single collective will in the battle for communism. This objective of ours we call kinoeye. The decoding of life as it is. Using facts to influence the workers’ consciousness.5

The 1930s–1940s: Utopia or Dystopia? Following a chronological path, the next historical reference to television within the avant-gardes dates back to “La Radia: Manifesto Futurista” (The Radia: Futurist Manifesto), co-signed in 1933 by Italian writer, poet, and theorist of Futurism Filippo Tommaso Marinetti together with poet and playwright Pino Masnata. They both speculated on a new imaginary device, listing a series of things that the radia (a further feminization of the word “radio,” which is already a feminine noun in Italian) “should not be,” “abolishes,” and “will be.”6 For example, the radia should not be cinematographic because “the filmmaker is already on his deathbed,” they stated, for a series of reasons, including “the inferiority of reflected light to the self-emitted light of radio-television.”7 The idea of “radio-television” was really popular in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly in Italy, where the Fascists glorified the myth of Guglielmo Marconi, who had invented radio in 1894. However, aside from mentioning “radio-television,” it is the whole idea of the radia that could be interpreted as a premonition of television. In being neither theater nor cinema, neither book nor radio—at least in a traditional sense—and abolishing space, time, and narrative, the radia would offer “the possibility of receiving broadcast stations situated in various time zones,” Marinetti and Masnata wrote, and shall be “the synthesis of infinite simultaneous actions.”8 As such, it incarnated two crucial characteristics of future television: “ubiquity” and “simultaneity.” Two years after “La Radia” was published, the German art theorist and Gestalt psychologist Rudolf Arnheim wrote A Forecast of Television, which  Dziga Vertov, “The Essence of Kino-Eye,” in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 49. 6  Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Pino Masnata, “The Radia: Futurist Manifesto,” in Futurism: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi and Laura Whittman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 293. 7  Ibid. 8  Ibid. 5

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is not only one of the earliest theoretical accounts on television but also the first to warn about its possible dangers. Echoing the author’s concerns for medium-specificity as a conditio sine qua non for art expression, the text begins with a reflection drenched in wonder but also bewilderment: “The new gadget seems magical and mysterious. It arouses curiosity: How does it work? What does it do to us?”9 Arnheim was skeptical about television because unlike silent cinema (based exclusively on motion pictures) and radio (based exclusively on sound), it stimulated different sensory spheres (eyes and ears), whilst at the same time leaving the viewer “isolated… in his retreat.”10 To conclude this brief panorama on the references to television in relation to the historical avant-gardes in the first half of the twentieth century, another influential Russian film director should be mentioned, that is, Sergei M. Eisenstein. Although Eisenstein’s cinema privileged narrative structures, with a penchant for drama and its heavy use of theatrical features, he found himself aligned with Vertov in producing and theorizing on a new role of montage to increase the ideological power of film to aid the cause of the communist party. In his Notes of a Film Director (1946), Eisenstein asserted that television could produce a “synthesis of arts”11—something that “has not yet found its full solution”12 in cinema. He also wrote how the “miracle of television—a living reality staring us in the face”—was “ready to nullify the experience of the silent and sound cinema.”13 At this point it is necessary to mention that although television had been associated to other media in various forms during its infancy, it soon began to distinguish itself from them; the first case in point being the telephone, followed by radio and cinema. Unlike cinema, which was born essentially as photography in motion, television’s specificity lay in its being a simultaneous medium—its capacity to transmit reality in progress. As two distinct cultural forms of representation, Vertov first, and Eisenstein later, fantasized about television as a more direct medium to achieve their revolutionary purposes. As suggested by Antonio Somaini, for Eisenstein, television appeared to be “the ‘extreme embodiment’ of an ‘urge’ toward a ‘real communion’

9  Rudolf Arnheim, “A Forecast for Television,” (1935) in Film as Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 188. The essay was originally published on Intercine, the journal of the Istituto Internazionale di Cinema Educativo (IICE) (International Institute of Educational Cinematography), Rome. Active from 1928 to 1937, the IICE was the first major international forum for the discussion of the educational role of documentary filmmaking, that included among its members such figures as Arnheim and Moholy-Nagy. 10  Ibid. 11  Sergei M. Eisenstein, Notes of a Film Director (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1948), 6. 12  Ibid. 13  Ibid.

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with historical events (real’noe soprichastie c sobytiem): events that the Dionysian mysteries remembered through performed reenactments, that cinema could record and re-present as a form of ‘dynamic mummification,’ and that television could instead transmit in real time, allowing the highest form of direct participation.”14 Following Roland Barthes’ famous theory on photography—wherein he argues that “in the Photograph, what I posit is not only the absence of the object; it is also… the fact that this object has indeed existed and that it has been there where I see it,”15—cinema, as a photography-based medium, presents a reality that was in the past. On the contrary, as a simultaneous medium, television, for Eisenstein at least, could broadcast the present “live” and serve to commemorate the revolution as the founding yet distant event— as the regime had attempted to do with reenactments and celebrations after the storming of the Winter Palace in 1917. Nevertheless, Eisenstein’s utopian beliefs on television would soon be fated to contradiction.

The 1950s: Reality and Its Duplicate In the first half of the twentieth century most of the thinkers and artists who referred to television were in favor of the new medium. The only one that sounded skeptical and even concerned was Arnheim, but he didn’t remain alone for long. In the 1950s, two other seminal German thinkers, Martin Heidegger and Theodor W. Adorno, joined him. In his lecture titled “The Thing,” given at the Bayerischen Akademie der Schönen Künste in Munich in 1950, Heidegger used the analogy of a handmade ceramic jug to build an argument around the limits between reality and the way we perceive it in an era of increasing shrinkage of time and space due to technology. “Man now reaches overnight, by plane, places which formerly took weeks and months of travel,”16 he said. “The peak of this abolition of every possibility of remoteness is reached by television, which will soon pervade and dominate the whole machinery of communication.”17 A consequence of this uniformity of reality, of being “neither far nor near,” provoked a kind of “void” or “vessel,” according to Heidegger, which could be considered a metaphor of the ether itself, because “no representation of what is present,

 Antonio Somaini, “Cinema as ‘Dynamic Mummification,’ History as Montage: Eisenstein’s Media Archaeology,” in Sergei M. Eisenstein: Notes for a General History of Cinema, ed. Naum Kleiman and Antonio Somaini (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016), 101. 15  Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 115. 16   Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” in The Craft Reader, ed. Glenn Adamson (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), 404. 17  Ibid., 405. 14

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in the sense of what stands forth and of what stands over against as an object, ever reaches to the thing qua thing.”18 Slightly younger than Heidegger, Adorno was, alongside Max Horkheimer, a leading member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Other associates included such influential thinkers as Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, all of whom analyzed modern culture advocating social change. Active since the 1920s as a musician and composer first, and lecturer in philosophy and writer later, Adorno left Nazi Germany in 1941, relocating with fellow German émigrés (including Horkheimer, Bertold Brecht, and Arnold Schoenberg) to Los Angeles. There he faced an increasingly consumerist society where entertainment (embodied in Hollywood cinema) and advertising (displayed on billboards and in the press) would soon be integrated and intensify their persuasive power through television. Adorno was not new to television when he moved to southern California. Although a far cry from the commercial nature of American television, Germany was the first country to begin a regular television service in 1935, although most of the 1,000 or so receivers present in the German territory at that time were concentrated in Fernsehstuben (television parlors), where crowds of people could watch live broadcasts of such events as the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics. The main reason the Nazis preferred radio over television was that its diffusion was more capillary.19 Most of Adorno’s writings are from after the Second World War and concern music, literature, and philosophy, but his most influential contribution to critical theory is the definition of “culture industry,” a category against which, like Nazism, he set himself firmly against. Adorno defined “culture industry” with Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment, a book they cowrote and published in 1944, wherein they suggested with a simple yet radically anti-capitalist take that popular culture goods, like movies, radio programs, and magazines, rendered individuals docile and turned them away from the real political and economic issues of society, transforming them into an unthinking mass. Moreover, they were worried that the adoption of an assembly-line approach to the commercial marketing of culture could contaminate high art forms; a concern that echoed American art theorist Clement Greenberg’s 1939 warning to distinguish avant-garde art (by exploring its self-defining medium-specificity) from kitsch.20 As a boosted integration of various preexisting forms of modern culture industry, television became one of the phenomena most discussed by Adorno in the early 1950s, while he was scientific director at the Hacker Foundation  Ibid., 408.  The role of radio and sound in Nazi Germany is addressed thoroughly in Carolyn Birdsall, Nazi Soundscapes: Sound, Technology and Urban Space in Germany, 1933–1945 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012). 20  Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” in Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 3–21. 18 19

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in Santa Monica: notably in the essays “Prologue to Television” (1953), “Television as Ideology” (1953), and “How to Look at Television” (1954). “As a combination of film and radio,” he wrote in the first one, “[television] falls within the comprehensive schema of the culture industry and furthers its tendency to transform and capture the consciousness of the public from all sides.”21 He then continued talking about televised reality as “a copy satisfying every sensory organ, the dreamless dream,”22 a “duplicate,” or else a virtual substitute for what Heidegger defined the “thing qua thing,”23 which is reality itself.

The 1950s: Television and Spatialism Adorno’s idea of the televised image as a “copy” of reality is close to that of the “void” suggested by Heidegger; that is, the space through which the “duplicate” decomposed image of reality is transmitted through electromagnetic waves, or else the ether that the human eye cannot see and that therefore we offhandedly dismiss as immaterial; a void that calls into question the ontology of the word “medium” itself; that is, the material space through which signals, waves, or forces pass. Indeed, our primordial fascination for, and passive submission to, television could be ascribed precisely to the fact that we perceive a reality that is not in front of us: a “magical and mysterious”24 phenomenon, as Arnheim had called it, that leaves us amazed and speechless. Several modern artists dedicated their practice to the investigation of the ether as a medium, an issue discussed in depth by American historian of art Linda Dalrymple Henderson.25 Let us think, for example, about the series of abstract paintings that the Futurist Giacomo Balla began in the 1910s called Compenetrazioni Iridescenti (Iridescent Inter-Penetrations), which seemingly decomposed reality into electromagnetic waves, or about the “rayographs” that Man Ray began in the 1920s, realized by placing daily objects on photosensitized paper and exposing to light. In this lineage one can also fit Lucio Fontana’s Spatial Concepts: a series of monochromatic paintings started in the late 1940s, characterized by holes and later by tagli (slashes).

  Theodor W. Adorno, “Prologue to Television,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 49. 22  Ibid. 23  Heidegger, 408. 24  Arnheim, 188. 25   Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. Reprint, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). This book is recommended as a general primer to the idea of a fourth dimension in art. 21

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Fontana presented them as metaphorical attempts to go beyond the surface, to show the viewer that painting could overcome its representational nature only through a material break of the canvas, a break of that suspension of disbelief that painting had started producing since Leon Battista Alberti systematized, in the book De Pictura (1435), the rules for the depiction of a three-dimensional scene on a two-dimensional support—also known as perspective. To achieve this task Fontana even went beyond the painting practice per se. In 1947, he founded Spatialism, an art movement that produced various manifestos prefiguring new experiential forms of multimedia art—halfway between happenings and installations—conceived as ephemeral manifestations of abstract forms in space through neon lights, projections, and even television. The group mentioned television in the first and second Spatialist manifestos of 1947 and 1948, as a new medium for art expression, while their sixth manifesto, released in 1952, was devoted entirely to television. Signed by Fontana and sixteen other Spatialists (including Alberto Burri and Roberto Crippa), the “Manifesto del Movimento Spaziale per la Televisione” (Manifesto of the Spatial Movement for Television) declaimed: For us, television is a means that we have been waiting for to give completeness to our concepts ... . It is true that art is eternal, but it was always tied down to matter, whereas we want it to be freed from matter. Through space, we want it to be able to last a millennium even for a transmission of only a minute.26 The manifesto was launched on a “live” television program broadcast on May 17, 1952, by the Italian state television Rai (Radiotelevisione Italiana), during which Fontana was supposed to read it out aloud; although this didn’t happen in the end. According to art historian Paolo Campiglio, the program consisted of a projection of light through some of Fontana’s paintings and drawings onto the walls of a Rai studio—“points of light in the dark to draw a kind of galaxy, not unlike the spiral hollowing of the holes of the early Spatial Concepts on paper or canvas of 1949, which indeed were used by the artist for those projections.”27 Campiglio also mentioned that the only available documentation of the event are two photographs published alongside a short review of the event written by architect Luigi Moretti in the architecture magazine Spazio, for which he served as editorial director (Figure 1.2). That first experiment was followed by two more, in October 1952 and then February 1953,   Lucio Fontana, “Television Manifesto of the Spatial Movement,” Medien Kunst Netz, accessed April 24, 2021, http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/source-text/70/. 27  Paolo Campiglio, “Lucio Fontana: Il Manifesto del Movimento Spaziale per la Televisione (1952),” COMBO, No. 0, (Summer 2007): 7, my translation. 26

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FIGURE 1.2  Lucio Fontana, Moving Luminous Images, video stills, 1952. Related to the television experiment, Rai TV, Milan, 1952. Photo: Attilio Bacci. Courtesy of Fondazione Lucio Fontana. © Fondazione Lucio Fontana by SIAE 2020.

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although no documentation of either event is known. Despite passing almost unnoticed in Italy at that time (also considering that Rai, the first television network in Italy, only began a regular service in January 1954), and despite the naïve, technophilic dimension of the manifesto, Fontana’s television event was not only the first television program ever realized by an artist but also functioned as a visual essay illustrating the materialization of a theory.

1.2 1960s–1970s The 1960s: Television as an Extension of Man During the Second World War (1939–45), those countries in possession of television technology halted its advancement to focus on developing weapons, but production resumed at the end of the war and television became relevant again, and an ever-greater priority for those who intended it as an instrument of geopolitical consolidation. The mass diffusion of television in the 1950s and 1960s ushered in a new era of the so-called Information Age, characterized by the shift from traditional industry to an economy based on information. Since computers—a core tenet of the Information Age—would only begin to see a proliferation in the late 1970s, it would be the role of television to start turning information into a commodity. The thinker who provided the most defining theories to understand television in the moment of its mass expansion was the Canadian sociologist and philosopher Marshall McLuhan. Like Adorno, McLuhan approached television as a manifestation of the larger “culture industry.” Although there is no mention of television yet, in his first book The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of the Industrial Man (1951) he stated that movies, radio programs, and magazines invented—through their entertaining content and advertising—forms of representation that had the power to produce stereotypical models with which people identified, thereby giving up their individuality in the name of mass consumerism. McLuhan addressed television more explicitly in his following book, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962), wherein he contextualized the culture industry within a lineage that had begun with Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the movable type in 1450. The main concept that emerged from the book was that of the “global village,” often regarded as a prophecy of the internet. According to McLuhan, print, together with perspective, allowed man, from the Renaissance onward, to measure and then to represent space in cultural terms, favoring the

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predominance of the visual over the aural. As the quintessential medium of the early information age, television activated a process of retribalization of society fostering, through its ability to transcend time and space, the formation of a global and collective identity. References to television are also featured in McLuhan’s following and most popular book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), which reinforced the idea of “technological determinism,” or else that technology affects the social structure and the cultural values of society. The first important consideration expressed therein is that media determine society regardless of its content, or if it has content or not, from which derived his famous maxim: “the medium is the message.” A light bulb affects the way we live as much as television, although a light bulb doesn’t have any content. Rather, what distinguishes media is the degree of participation they require to their users, which depends on the level of definition of the messages they transmit. According to McLuhan, radio, film, and photography are “hot” media because they transmit lots of data and consequently do not demand a high degree of participation. On the other side, comics, magazines, and television are “cool” media because their low-definition content (unlike high-definition television of today) needs to be complemented by the user’s active (although unaware) participation. Moreover, McLuhan stated that media were extensions of man. Borrowing the myth of Narcissus, whose “extension of himself by mirror numbed his perceptions,”28 McLuhan argued that, “By continuously embracing technologies, we relate ourselves to them as servomechanisms,”29 that is devices merely used to correct the performance of a larger mechanism by means of feedback. McLuhan discussed television throughout his lectures, articles, and following books like The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (1967), where the term “massage” implies the “soft” effect that media have on the human sensorium. A collaboration with graphic designer Quentin Fiore, and one of the key works of the late 1960s countercultural movement, the book was conceived as a collage of images appropriated from mass media, interspersed by McLuhan’s always acute thoughts such as: “Television completes the cycle of the human sensorium… Television demands participation and involvement in depth of the whole being. It will not work as a background. It engages you. Perhaps this is why so many people feel that their identity has been threatened.”30

 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGrawHill, 1966), 41. 29  Ibid., 46. 30  Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2001), 125. 28

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The 1960s: Situationism and the Society of the Spectacle While McLuhan seemed at times optimistic for the future of society, the coeval output of the Situationists, notably of their leader Guy Debord, expressed concern through belligerence. Active from 1957 to 1972, the Situationist International (SI) organization challenged television as part of a larger oppositional approach to culture industry informed by Karl Marx’s critique of the capitalist mode of production. What distinguished the SI from CoBrA and Lettrism (the postwar avant-gardes whose schism the movement originated from) was its adoption of artistic forms of visual and literary expression to reinforce radically anti-capitalist ideologies, thus, redefining the social role of art as a weapon of political resistance. Therefore, more than arts and visual culture, the SI’s abecedary of tactics inspired future social movements and subcultures, from the late 1960s student revolts through to punk, to the anti-globalization movement, and today’s internetrelated acts of plagiarism and parody. At the core of the group’s ethos lay the concept of “spectacle,” which Debord defined in his 1967 disruptive treatise, The Society of the Spectacle (La Société du Spectacle), as “capital accumulated to the point that it becomes an image,”31 where the term “image” stands for those forms of representation in which advanced capitalism incarnated: that is, commodities disguised as entertainment and advertising circulating through the means of the culture industry. Determined to dismantle the spectacle, the Situationists developed a series of techniques animated by a sense of play such as the psychogeographic approach to the urban landscape and the détournement (literally deflection), a satirical variation of appropriated media like maps, comics, press clippings, and found footage. Before Situationism was born, in 1950 a small group of Lettrists dressed as Dominican monks entered the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris during Easter mass, reached the altar and declared that God was dead in front of the cameras broadcasting the event live on television. Although Debord, who had already joined Lettrism by then, was not involved, some aspects of this action resonated in his “Report on the Construction of Situations” (1957), the founding manifesto of the SI. Here, he talks about “transforming everyday life”32 through organized collective labor and “the invention of a new species of games,”33 but also proposed to produce “live televisual

 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (London: Rebel Press, 1983), 17.  Guy Debord, “Report on the Construction of Situations and on the Terms of Organization and Action of the International Situationist,” in Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 42. 33  Ibid., 45. 31 32

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projections of some aspects of one situation into another, bringing about modifications and interferences.”34 Television is more explicitly addressed—and contextualized within a larger set of indoctrinating power structures—in another key text of the SI, Raoul Vaneigem’s “Comments Against Urbanism” (1961). “The chief attraction of the spectacle is the planning of happiness,”35 claimed Vaneigem. “The pollster is already conducting his inquiry; precise surveys establish the number of television viewers; it is a question of developing real estate around them, of building for them, without distracting them from the concerns that are being fed to them through their eyes and ears.”36 No wonder that Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle and Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life (also from 1967) inflamed the late 1960s student revolts in France, which arose precisely as a protest against capitalism, consumerism, and authority. Debord echoed Marx’s theory of alienation when mentioning television in the twenty-eighth paragraph of The Society of the Spectacle: “From automobiles to television, the goods that the spectacular system chooses to produce also serve it as weapons for constantly reinforcing the conditions that engender ‘lonely crowds.’”37 And for his eighty-eight-minute film version of The Society of the Spectacle (1973)—the fourth of seven films he directed—made exclusively of found footage, Debord interspersed clips from Soviet and American movies of the 1920s to the 1940s with “lifestyle” television commercials (e.g. a fancy couple watching television in a minimal space-age interior), industrial films, still photographs and broadcasts of historical events (e.g., the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, and Mao Zedong meeting Richard Nixon), while his voice-over reads excerpts from the book as well as texts from the likes of Marx, Machiavelli, and the 1968 Occupation Committee of the Sorbonne (Figure 1.3). Borrowing Marcel Duchamp’s idea of the readymade, and pioneering the cinematic use of collage, Debord appropriated found footage in order to expose the mechanism of media representation and critique the role of industrial production and its alienating effects on modern society. As he stated: “The spectacle has deported real life behind the screen. I have tried to “expropriate the expropriators.”38 Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben put it in other words: By placing repetition at the center of his compositional technique, Debord makes what he shows us possible again, or rather he opens up a zone  Ibid., 48.   Raoul Vaneigem, “Comments against Urbanism,” in Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 120. 36  Ibid. 37  Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 15. 38  Guy Debord, “Note on the Use of Stolen Films,” in Guy Debord: Complete Cinematic Works, ed. Ken Knabb (Oakland: AK Press, 2003), 223. 34 35

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FIGURE 1.3  Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, film still, 1973.

of undecidability between the real and the possible. When he shows an excerpt of a TV news broadcast, the force of the repetition is to cease being an accomplished fact and to become, so to speak, possible again.39

The 1960s: Early Application of Semiotics to TV As previously mentioned, after the hiatus imposed by the Second World War, television had resumed its evolution at full speed—becoming a crucial instrument for the geopolitical consolidation of Western postwar societies— starting with the decision taken at the 1947 International Radio Conference in Atlantic City to officialize the term “television” (from now on also abbreviated as TV) and distribute the electromagnetic frequencies available in the ether. In

 Giorgio Agamben, “Repetition and Stoppage—Debord in the Field of Cinema,” in In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni—The Situationist International (1957–1972), trans. and ed. Stefan Zweifel, Juri Steiner and Heinz Sthlhut (Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2006), 37.

39

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1952, only 4 percent of households in the United States had a receiver, but this number increased to 48 percent in 1956, and 89 percent by 1960.40 By the time McLuhan and Debord had elaborated their thoughts, television had already become a “mass medium,” and the most powerful one at that, although with a few distinctions between the American and European situations. While in the United States the commercial dimension of television predominated from the outset, in many European countries television was controlled by the state and considered to have a cultural and even pedagogical function. In Italy, for example, which had only become a unified country in 1861, and where most citizens still spoke exclusively in regional dialects, television contributed to promoting literacy to large portions of the population. Paradigmatic of this process was the program Non è Mai Troppo Tardi (It Is Never Too Late). Broadcast throughout most of the 1960s, it was supported by the Ministry of Public Instruction and hosted by Alberto Manzi, a real school teacher. Until as late as 1976 the only network in Italy was Rai, which expanded from one to three channels, all in the hands of the state. And it is from this peculiar situation that Umberto Eco emerged. Along McLuhan and Debord, Eco was one of the most original voices to discuss media and television in the moment of its mass diffusion. With the exception of some experimental programs, including the aforementioned one by Lucio Fontana in 1952, Rai commenced a regular television service in January 1954. The same year the network hired a small group of young and promising intellectuals including Eco, Furio Colombo, and Gianni Vattimo, soon to be dubbed the corsari (corsairs), who contributed to various TV programs until the end of the decade. For Eco, who had just graduated in philosophy, the experience at Rai had a deep impact and resonated in many of his future writings, starting with “La Fenomenologia di Mike Bongiorno” (The Phenomenology of Mike Bongiorno) (1961), featured in his 1963 collection Diario Minimo (Misreadings). The essay was not only the first application of semiotics to television; that is, a semiotic analysis of the Italo-American host’s vocabulary and gestures, but it also elucidated one of the main characteristics of television; namely, that it offered the audience a model of mediocrity. “Television does not propose superman as an ideal with which to identify it proposes everyman,”41 Eco claimed, alluding to Mike Bongiorno, who was then the most popular game show host on Italian television. Whilst offering a model of sociological investigation, with this and his following essays on television Eco has also provided a model of cultural and aesthetic analysis, contributing to the development of media studies as a distinctive field.  Data retrieved from Enrico Menduni, Televisioni: Dallo Spettacolo Televisivo alle Piattaforme Multimediali (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2009), 34. 41  Umberto Eco, “The Phenomenology of Mike Bongiorno,” in Misreadings, trans. William Weaver (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1993), 157. 40

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Crucial to understanding Eco’s trailblazing impact on the television discourse in the 1960s, is a chapter from his seminal book The Open Work (1962), entitled “Chance and Plot: Television and Aesthetics.” Here, he examines the live broadcast claiming it was a genre through which television did not offer a “mirror image” of an event but “an interpretation of it,” thanks to the montage of different points of view. While on one side Eco insisted that in offering an interpretation of an event the live broadcast could be considered a proper artistic genre, on the other he acknowledged that the public “not only wants to know what is happening in the world but also expects to hear or see it in the shape of a well-constructed novel, since this is the way it chooses to perceive ‘real life’—stripped of all chance elements and reconstructed as plot.”42 Television was certainly a creative medium but also one that fictionalized reality. Eco elaborated this point further in “Towards a Semiotic Inquiry Into the Television Message” (1965), in which he suggested that television involved its public on a subliminal level through a series of codes (iconic, linguistic, and audio) and subcodes, applied to the television message according to the cultural references that constitute “the receiver’s patrimony of knowledge: his ideological, ethical, religious standpoints, his psychological attitudes, his tastes, his value systems, etc.”43 Among countless other thoughts by Eco on television, worthy of note is the lecture “Towards a Semiological Guerrilla Warfare” (1967)—to be taken into account in the third chapter as a founding text of the guerrilla television movement—and “TV: Transparency Lost” (1983)—to be discussed in the following section of this chapter dedicated to television in the postmodernism era.

The 1960s–1970s: The Birth of Video Art As outlined in the introduction, the purpose of this first chapter is to present the framework of ideas expressed throughout the twentieth and twenty-first century about television, in order to provide a context for the analysis and interpretation of those forms of artistic expression that will be discussed in the following five chapters: artworks and projects that have either used television as a theme or reference, notably video works, installations, and performances; or as a medium, in the form of programs, interventions,

 Umberto Eco, “Chance and Plot: Television and Aesthetics,” in The Open Work, trans. Anna Cangoni (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 118. 43  Umberto Eco, “Towards a Semiotic Inquiry into the Television Message,” in Television: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies Vol. II, ed. Toby Miller (London and New York: Routledge, 1972), 13. 42

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or clips made by artists for experimental or cable TV channels. With the exception of the purely philosophical text by Heidegger, all the other cited works refer to cinema, art, or media. What clearly emerges is a shift from the utopian feelings of its early evolution to increasingly skeptical interpretations of television that started surfacing in the 1960s. In 1925, while television technology was in its infancy and still tied to radio, Moholy-Nagy proposed a productive use of a “radio picture service” he called radiobilderdienst,44 and Vertov imagined that a “method of radiobroadcasting images” would one day unite “all the workers scattered over the earth through a single consciousness.”45 While in 1933 Marinetti and Masnata speculated on a new technology called la radia, which would produce “the synthesis of infinite simultaneous actions,”46 in 1935 Arnheim argued that television was “a mere instrument of transmission, which does not offer new means for the artistic interpretation of reality—as radio and film did.”47 Indeed, Arnheim could be considered the first voice in history to mistrust television, though it would be another two decades before others would begin to align with his critical views. After the Second World War, some artists and thinkers kept approaching television with a positive attitude. In 1946, Eisenstein wrote about television as something that could produce a “synthesis of arts,”48 which is precisely what Fontana tried to achieve in 1952 through his Spatialist television programs. But the more concrete and pervasive television became in society, the more artists and thinkers settled themselves in opposition to it. In the early 1950s Adorno declared that the “dichotomy between autonomous art and mass media”49 could not be taken for granted, and in the 1960s the writings of Debord, Eco, and McLuhan inspired an emerging generation of artists and activists to dismantle the “spectacle.” Seen from this perspective, the documents discussed so far, dating from the 1920s to the 1960s, could be considered founding material for what today we call media studies, and its subcategory of television studies, but also for the emergence of video art. Not to be confused with experimental cinema or art film, video art has distinguished itself for being based, like television, on a specific type of electronic image consisting of a twodimensional composition of pixels, and on its instant playback capability. Since the 1960s, video has been employed in a variety of ways by artists, such as to document scripted performances and improvised actions, to appropriate preexisting moving images, or to create new narratives.  Moholy-Nagy.  Vertov. 46  Marinetti and Masnata. 47  Arnheim, 194. 48  Eisenstein. 49  Theodor W. Adorno, “How to Look at Television,” The Quarterly of Film Radio and Television, Vol. 8, No. 3, (Spring 1954): 214. 44 45

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Although practices emerged in the late 1960s, the first theoretical essays setting the genre’s paradigms emerged in the 1970s. One of the earliest was Gene Youngblood’s seminal book Expanded Cinema (1970), in which the American media theorist presented new tools and genres—special effects, computer art, holography, and so also video art—that were mutating and expanding cinema into new forms of moving images. In the fifth chapter of the book titled “Television as a Creative Medium,” Youngblood claimed: “Like the computer, television is a powerful extension of man’s central nervous system”50 and at the base of “a completely new video environment and image-exchange lifestyle”51 that he called the videosphere. To reinforce this anthropological interpretation, Youngblood discussed some newly introduced devices that would affect both communication and artistic practice, including Community Antenna Television (CATV), Bell Industries Inc.’s Picturephone, videotape recorders (VTR), video synthesizers, and postproduction techniques such as Chroma keying. The mass proliferation of portable cameras in the late 1960s brought an increasing number of artists to embrace them, finally putting into practice fifty years of intellectual speculations on the use of television as an artistic medium. Video art developed as a distinctive art genre, but during the early phases of its evolution, in the 1960s and 1970s, television remained a constant reference. American poet and critic David Antin wrote in 1975 that the “relation between television and video is created by the shared technologies and conditions of viewing,”52 a relation that early video art practitioners investigated through artworks and projects that will be discussed in the second and third chapter: from Wolf Vostell’s and Nam June Paik’s early manipulations of TV sets to the involvement of artists in TV networks like WGBH in Boston; from closed circuits-based installations to the Guerrilla Television movement.

1.3 1970s–1980s The 1970s: The Flow Video art represents a significant aspect of the historical relationship between art and television; a history that has unfolded since the 1960s but that also encompasses performances, participatory projects, and experiments at the boundaries of art and technology—and events that blur the distinction  Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: P. Dutton & Co., 1970), 260.  Ibid., 264. 52  David Antin, “Video: The Distinctive Features of the Medium,” in Video Culture: A Critical Investigation, ed. John G. Hanhardt (Rochester: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1986), 162. 50 51

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between art and life. While this history will be articulated and examined in detail in the following chapters, this chapter will continue to follow a historiographical approach, presenting the founding texts in relation to art produced within that field, which would now become known as “television studies”—a hybrid academic discipline born in the 1970s as a subgenre of the newly established media studies. A cornerstone publication of the early phase of television studies is considered to be Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974) by Raymond Williams. When the book was published, the Welsh academic, novelist, and critic was already considered an influential figure of the New Left (a movement mainly active in the 1960s and 1970s) to which he had contributed by updating ideas originally developed by Frankfurt School thinkers like Adorno, notably through his early books Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961), both of which focused on the concept of “culture” at large. Also a founding figure of “cultural studies,” Williams proposed the idea that culture is distinctive of a given human society and developed by its members as a whole of common meanings and directions. The critical success of Television: Technology and Cultural Form was due to the fact that it not only provided a series of illuminating interpretations of key features of television but that it also posed itself in clear opposition to McLuhan, whose theories Williams accused of formalism. More specifically, Williams rejected the idea of “technological determinism” proposed by McLuhan, which was founded on the presupposition that media shaped society. In contrast, he insisted on “the radically different position in which technology, including communication technology, and specifically television, is at once an intention and an effect of a particular social order.”53 In other words, according to Williams television has not determined society; rather, it was a particular type of society—one born out of the Industrial Revolution— that developed television, within a lineage of telecommunications, as an instrument to reinforce its specific culture. In relation to television studies as a discipline, Williams’ most influential contribution to have emerged from the book is the concept of “flow,” which he presented as “the defining characteristic of broadcasting, simultaneously as a technology and as a cultural form.”54 Before broadcasting, we experienced reality and communication as made of discrete items, while radio and then television accustomed us to the idea of a sequence, or set of sequences of various events, as in the program schedule. Williams mentioned that earlier forms of culture industry emerged in the eighteenth century were already

 Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 131–2. 54  Ibid., 86. 53

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miscellaneous: for instance, dramatic performances that included musical interludes, or even magazines and newspapers made of articles, illustrations, photographs, and advertisements. Yet, he reminded us that “until the coming of broadcasting the normal expectation was still of a discrete event or of a succession of discrete events. People took a book or a pamphlet or a newspaper, went out to a play or a concert or a meeting or a match, with a single predominant expectation and attitude.”55 In the beginning, broadcasting borrowed this habit. However, very soon a “significant shift” occurred, “from the concept of sequence as programming to the concept of sequence as flow.”56 According to Williams, this was mainly attributed to the increasingly pervasive presence of commercials interrupting the broadcasting of “news programs, plays, even films that had been shown in cinemas as specific whole performances.”57 Although presented as “intervals” or “interruptions,” commercials have, in fact, worked as connecting threads, bending the whole content of the broadcast to their own rules. With the advent of the “flow,” the distinction between high and low is lost, as well as that between reality and entertainment, information and advertising, and the idea of history and of the present. As the term postmodernism describes both an era and a movement born out of human sciences and the arts as a departure from modernism, Williams’ conceptualization of the “flow” was the result of a postmodernist approach to culture—one that considered mass media as instruments used by the ruling class to reinforce its power by transforming reality into fiction, or rather into a “spectacle,” as announced by Debord.

The 1980s: Hyperreality The introduction of the videotape in the late 1950s, and its mass diffusion a decade later—which prompted the emergence of video art practices—was born out of the interest of TV networks to create more articulated forms of “flow” through the montage of different prerecorded fragments. A key trope of postmodernism, fragmentation is also at the base of intertextuality, which is a literary device that creates interrelationships between different texts through the use of appropriationist techniques such as citation, plagiarism, pastiche, and parody. If we move from literature to visual culture, since the late 1970s intertextuality was used as an oppositional tactic in visual arts, architecture, fashion, and design, while advertising and television employed it to reinforce society’s dominant structures and codes.

 Ibid., 88.  Ibid., 89. 57  Ibid., 90. 55 56

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What characterized postmodernism the most was the distrust toward the grand narratives of history, ideologies, authority, and the idea that objective reality and an absolute truth exist. Postmodernist thinking suggested that history and knowledge were products of dominant systems: fictional constructions developed by industrialists and lobbies at the head of Western nation-states, as a means to geopolitically control both their citizens and underdeveloped countries. Within this scenario, imbued of a certain paranoid fascination for conspiracies, television was increasingly seen as a persuasive instrument used to produce political consensus, induce consumerism and reinforce the status quo. Among the philosophers who provided the founding theories of postmodernism—often loosely associated with deconstructivism or poststructuralism for their critical approach to the relationships between text and meaning—Jean Baudrillard has been a key figure in the discourses on technology, media, and television therein. At the core of his thinking lies the idea that, following the collapse of the great narratives, the dominant structures of society have employed mass media, particularly television, to replace reality with its simulated version, or what he defined as “hyperreality.” As a fictional image, hyperreality is made of “simulacra”—a Latin word meaning copies (of persons or things) that have lost the originals. The French thinker expressed his earliest ideas on television in Requiem for the Media (1971), a text born out of a response to German author Hans Magnus Enzensberg, who raised the basic question of how to interact with media and liberate them from the capitalist control? Although the Guerrilla Television movement emerged in the late 1960s had already proved by then that forms of interaction, decentralization, and ecology were possible (as will be discussed later), Baudrillard stated that mass media were “antimediatory and intransitive. They fabricate non-communication—this is what characterizes them, if one agrees to define communication as an exchange, as a reciprocal space of a speech and a response, and thus of a responsibility (not a psychological or moral responsibility, but a personal, mutual correlation in exchange).”58 In his previous books, The System of Objects (1968) and The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (1970), Baudrillard had observed—following a Marxist approach via the Frankfurt School and Debord—that the commodities produced by consumerism had become mirrors of the subjects to whom they belonged. A little more than a decade later, he claimed in “The Ecstasy of Communication” (1983) that with media the situation had changed drastically: there was no longer a reflective mirror but “a nonreflecting surface, an immanent surface where operations unfold—the

58  Jean Baudrillard, “Requiem for the Media,” in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin (Saint Louis, MO: Telos Press, 1981), 169.

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smooth operational surface of communication.”59 It is on this smooth and glossy surface—the television screen, and also the early personal computer monitor—that reality was simulated, becoming hyperreal, or else obscene or pornographic: “more-visible-than-the-visible.”60 The same year, Baudrillard wrote again about television in Simulations (1983), his most seminal book. Here he used the example of An American Family, a 1971 TV documentary that is considered to be the first reality show in history—a phenonemon which Baudrillard would go back to in one of his last essays, Telemorphosis (2001)—which will be discussed in the last chapter. With references to Debord’s idea of the “spectacle” and McLuhan’s refrain of “the medium is the message,” Baudrillard claimed that with television, “There is no longer a medium in the literal sense: it is now intangible, diffused, and diffracted in the real… dissolution of TV in life, dissolution of life in TV.”61

The 1980s: Neo-Television Along with Baudrillard’s idea of hyperreality, another groundbreaking concept that acknowledged the transformation of television in the 1980s, and its relevance in characterizing the postmodernist era, was that of “Neo-Television” (or Neo-TV), developed by Umberto Eco in 1983 in contraposition to “Paleo-Television” (or Paleo-TV). According to Eco, NeoTV had “lost transparency,” meaning that it no longer showed reality but created a synthetic one: enacting a self-referential mechanism of legitimation. In Eco’s own words, Neo-TV “talks less and less about the outside world (which Paleo-TV used to do, or pretended to do). It speaks of itself and the contact it is establishing with its audience.”62 The first sign of this change is in the new behavior adopted by hosts, news anchors, and actors of commercials, who all of a sudden seem to be speaking directly to the audience through the way they look and talk to the camera. There are only a few cases in which the person being filmed does not look into the camera, such as the protagonists of an incident being filmed, the participant in a debate, or the actors in a fictionalized program. According to Eco, the reason is that television “represents” them. Unlike them, the person looking and speaking into the camera signals that he or she is personally addressing the viewer to the point that—as the author reiterates—there

  Jean Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Communication” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), 127. 60  Ibid., 131. 61  Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983), 54–5. 62  Umberto Eco, “TV: Transparency Lost” (1983) in Telegen: Art and Television, trans. and ed. Dieter Daniels and Stephan Berg (Munich: Himer Verlag GmbH, 2015), 207. 59

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have been cases of viewers contacting the networks and asking if the person looking and speaking into the camera was really addressing them. According to Eco, this dynamic of communication showed “that what is at issue is no longer the truth of what has been stated, namely its adherence to the facts, but rather the truth of the act of stating.”63 Or, in other words, “it matters less and less whether or not television is telling the truth; what really counts is that it is true that television is really speaking to the audience.”64 Reality per se is left out of this equation. In its place, the audience member finds himself or herself confronted with a hyperreality (to connect to Baudrillard), of which he or she is deluded to be both a protagonist (by the way TV addresses him/her) and a producer (through increasingly accurate audience-rating systems). Neo-TV provided its audience with this illusion, no longer showing just facts but the “apparatus for the production of facts”65—that is, a series of features and instruments used for creating reality; an apparatus that PaleoTV kept hidden. For instance, Eco suggests that by exposing the microphone and the TV camera, it was as if television was saying, “I am here, and this I am here means that in front of you is reality, namely television filming reality.”66 Eco also mentioned various new uses of the telephone in TV, like the one by the news anchor to communicate with the control room, and the live phone calls through which the audience could participate in a live TV program from home. Eco went on to expand the idea he had originally introduced in The Open Work (1962), that live broadcast provided an interpretation of reality but, more deeply than in the 1960s, it was now able to create a mise-enscène—an expression normally used to describe how scenography in theatre and film increases the fictional elements of the story told. Eco claimed that certain events no longer unfolded in a natural way but were constructed for being filmed by TV cameras, whose very presence influenced their course. Cases in point he took into consideration were soccer games, and the royal wedding of Charles and Diana in 1981, for which the whole city of London “had turned into a studio, like a backdrop made for TV.”67 It is only in the last part of the essay that Eco makes evident the fact that Neo-Television was a consequence of the privatization of television in Europe, although he didn’t make explicit references to the peculiar Italian situation characterized by the duopoly between the public television broadcaster Rai and later Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s constitution in

 Ibid., 210.  Ibid., 211. 65  Ibid. 66  Ibid. 67  Ibid., 214. 63 64

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the early 1980s of his powerful three-channel network Fininvest. Toward the end, Eco also addresses the remote control and teletext as key features of Neo-TV. The former allowed the viewer to create a customized type of flow—which he even compared to the rhythm of jazz music—while the latter, an information retrieval service, prefigured new forms of interaction with TV that anticipated the internet.

The 1980s: Pastiche and Schizophrenia Along with the remote control and teletext, the videocassette recorder and the video game console contributed to the definition of a new genre of television in the postmodern era. Both peripherals of the television set—on the one hand they allowed new forms of interaction, and on the other they introduced a new concept of time. As media based on the possibility of endless repetition—enacted through the “rewind” mode in the videocassette recorder and the “press start” option available after any “game over” in video games—they contributed to the creation of a “perpetual present,” which is another major trope of the postmodernist discourse. In this respect, American literary critic and Marxist political theorist Fredric Jameson, another representative voice in the definition of postmodernism, has talked about “the disappearance of a sense of history.” According to Jameson, “our entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions of the kind which all earlier social formations have had in one way or another to preserve.”68 And he continued: “The informational function of the media would thus be to help us forget, to serve as the very agents and mechanisms for our historical amnesia.”69 The quote is from a lecture originally delivered by Jameson in 1982 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and published in the 1998 collection The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, edited by art historian Hal Foster. The collection presented essays by American art historians and theorists, such as Douglas Crimp, Rosalind Krauss, and Craig Owens, along with essays by philosophers like Baudrillard and Jürgen Habermas. All these authors acknowledged a crisis in Western representation; that is, both the narrative identity through which the West has dominated in

68  Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (New York: The New Press, 1998), 143–4. 69  Ibid., 144.

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the geopolitical world scenario and the reduction of modernist culture and its originally disruptive and avant-garde nature to mere academicism. In response to the loss of representation, media looked to more and more advanced forms of simulation, or what Baudrillard called hyperreality, while artists borrowed from media the tendency to combine high and mass culture (e.g., TV series, B-Movies, paraliterature, etc.) in order to express “the inner truth of that newly emergent social order of late capitalism.”70 The two postmodernist tropes around which Jameson constructed his argument are the concepts of “pastiche” and “schizophrenia.” The former—indicative of the loss of the sense of space—is a technique based on the appropriation or imitation of a unique style but that, unlike parody, is not driven by a satirical impulse. The latter—indicative of the loss of the sense of time—is the state of mind of perpetual present that results from a prolonged immersion in a simulated reality. In his essay, Jameson mentions artists, musicians, film directors, and writers as diverse as Andy Warhol, John Cage, the Talking Heads, Jean-Luc Godard, William Burroughs, and George Lucas—the latter of whose movies, American Graffiti (1973) and Star Wars (1977), the author proposed as paradigmatic examples of pastiche. Three of these figures (Cage, Godard, and Warhol) all developed distinctive forms of reflection on television that will be discussed later. Cage and Warhol speculated on the media image of the artist (the former to expose the stereotypes associated with art through his participation in popular TV shows, and the latter through his films and television programs), while in 1976, Godard—at the peak of his career as a film director—created a TV series that critiqued the power of TV from the inside. Jameson’s ideas of pastiche and schizophrenia mostly echoed through the work of those artists emerged in the 1980s and associated with the Pictures Generation. The last section of the second chapter will be devoted to discussing the work of some of the key figures of the group, notably Judith Barry, Gretchen Bender, and Dara Birnbaum, whose practice of appropriation and simulation of television images was at the base of a critique of representation, with a particular focus on the representation of women in a male-dominated society. With similar intents, other artists in the 1980s deconstructed TV genres like infotainment (e.g., Martha Rosler, Gregg Bordowitz) and soap operas (e.g., Mike Kelley, Michael Smith, Ann Magnuson, Joan Braderman, Bruce, and Norman Yonemoto). As one of the most enduring of all the TV genres, the soap opera will also be the subject of artworks in the following decades (e.g., Mel Chin, Phil Collins, Kalup Linzy).

 Ibid., 129.

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1.4 1990s–2010s The 1980s–1990s: A Sociological Viewpoint In the 1980s and 1990s, television was increasingly addressed from a sociological point of view, through essays that accused TV of having a negative influence on society. A cornerstone publication in this sense was Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985), in which the American educator and cultural critic claimed that having replaced the aural with the visual, television was not able to discuss serious issues because “form excludes the content.”71 Focusing on the American scenario, Postman adopted McLuhan’s idea of “technological determinism” to distinguish between an Age of Reason72 in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and an Age of Show Business in the twentieth century, where everything had turned into entertainment. The book was developed from a talk Postman gave at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1984 as part of a panel dedicated to George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)—a dystopian metaphor on Stalinism set in a world of perpetual war, where the totalitarian government of Big Brother controls its citizens through screens in every home. Although Orwell certainly predicted some aspects of the contemporary media sphere, Postman argued that a more authentic picture of a futuristic Western society was imagined in the novel by another English author. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1931), set in London in the year 2540, described a population addicted to amusement. “What Orwell feared were those who would ban books,” wrote Postman. “What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.”73 Indeed, American author Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) extends upon Huxley and Orwell’s dystopian visions, wherein he illustrates a future society where books have been banned altogether, and the populace is addicted to watching wall-size home television screens called “parlor walls.”74

71  Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (London: Penguin Books, 2005), 7. 72  Postman refers to English and American activist Thomas Paine’s book The Age of Reason, published in three parts in 1794, 1795, and 1807, which is considered a key text of the intellectual and philosophical movement adopted from the book’s title and also referred to as the Enlightenment. 73  Postman, xix. 74  Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013).

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FIGURE 1.4  They Live, movie directed by John Carpenter, film still, 1988.

Postman’s approach to television echoed the increasingly popular idea that television, being dependent upon the political establishment and advertisers, conditioned the audience to embrace certain ideologies and consume superfluous products without any critical approach, as if under hypnosis. This idea became a refrain in 1980s popular culture, an interesting example being John Carpenter’s film They Live (1988)—a satirical sci-fi movie set in a world where the ruling class comprises aliens concealing their appearance and coercing people to accept the status quo through the consumption of mass media. Only special glasses enable people to discern the real identity of the “invaders” and to grasp the real meaning of their subliminal messages, such as “CONFORM,” “BUY,” “SLEEP,” “CONSUME,” “WATCH TV,” and particularly, “OBEY” (Figure 1.4). Beyond the highly science-fictionalized worlds of Huxley, Orwell, Bradbury, and Carpenter, the use of television as a political propaganda machine began to become a reality. It happened in Italy with Silvio Berlusconi, who in the 1980s learned to build consensus through his TV network Fininvest, and later applied the same strategies to political marketing. In 1994, Berlusconi (one of the richest men in the country) formed the centerright political party Forza Italia—for whom he consistently increased the vote share under his tenure as prime minister from 1994 and 2011. According to Carlo Freccero, a media scholar and TV author who helped shape Fininvest during the 1980s, Berlusconi’s political populism was built on “the myth of the majority”:75 that is, his ability to collect data about  Carlo Freccero, Televisione (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2013), 69, my translation.

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voters’ preferences by using the same audience-rating system he relied on for making his TV network successful. It is no coincidence that the same year Berlusconi entered into politics, Karl R. Popper’s invectives against television circulated widely in Italy. Already in his nineties, the Austrian-British philosopher was mainly known for his concept of “open society”—developed after Henri Bergson during the Second World War—a society based on transparency and liberal democracy that promoted individualism over collectivism. Within an open society, television was not only inappropriate—by proposing violence, sex, and sensationalism—but also represented a threat to democracy. “A democracy cannot exist if television is not put under control,” argued Popper, “or, more precisely, cannot exist any longer until the power of television will not be fully exposed.”76 Violence, sex, and sensationalism are also key tropes in Pierre Bourdieu’s Sur la Télévision (On Television, 1996). One of the world’s leading sociologists of the late twentieth century, here Bordieu investigated television’s subliminal mechanisms of manipulation, with particular focus on journalism and the techniques of persuasion adopted by TV news. “Television enjoys a de facto monopoly on what goes on in the heads of a significant part of the population and what they think,”77 he claimed. Like Postman and Popper, Bordieu insisted that television was a threat to democracy. He warned on the dangers of the audience-rating system, which he accused of being “the sanction of the market and the economy, that of an external and purely market law.”78

The 1990s: The Body Split The paradoxical nature of the televisual reality, vivid yet creating distance, became more evident in the 1990s. The introduction of color (in the late 1950s in the United States and in the 1970s in Europe) had started a process of improvement of image quality toward more realistic effects and a higher definition. The content of TV programs became increasingly realistic too, with talk and reality shows enacting that “dissolution of TV in life, dissolution of life in TV”79 that Baudrillard had talked about. At the same time, with the advent of digital television and the growing number of satellites around the earth’s orbit, reality became subjected to more articulated processes of rematerialization and long-distance broadcasting.  Karl. R. Popper, “Una Patente Per Fare Televisione,” in Cattiva Maestra Televisione, ed. Giancarlo Bosetti (Milan: Reset, 1994), 25, my translation. 77  Pierre Bordieu, On Television (New York: The New Press, 1998), 18. 78  Ibid., 66. 79  Baudrillard, Simulations, 54–5. 76

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In the 1990s, one of the most original voices in the television discourse was Samuel Weber, an American literary critic and philosopher. A renowned scholar of Frankfurt School thinkers like Adorno and Benjamin, and French post-structuralists like Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, Weber borrowed their concepts and techniques of deconstruction that applied to the interpretation of aesthetics in relation to media. His most intense reflections on this topic have been collected in Mass-Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media (1996), some passages of which are dedicated to the effects of television on reality and the role of media in the Gulf War. According to Weber, with the introduction in 1994 of the Global Positioning System (GPS)—a global satellite technology that provides geolocation, originally conceived for military purposes but soon employed for civilian uses—the impulse toward the conquest of space that had started in the Renaissance period with the invention of perspective could be considered completed. However, the more precise mapping became, the more technologies and media detached society from reality. The result was a feeling of uncertainty that, while materializing in phenomena like religious fundamentalism and the global economic crisis, it was also represented by a crisis of the sense perception. In the fourth chapter, evolved from a lecture delivered in 1992, Weber compares Heidegger’s idea of “shadow” as it emerged from his 1938 lecture, “The Age of the World-Picture”—where Heidegger anticipated some of the thoughts later formulated in his aforementioned text titled “The Thing” (1950)—and Benjamin’s concept of “aura” as discussed in his seminal treatise, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936). According to Weber, Heidegger and Benjamin respectively used the terms “shadow” and “aura” to name that “undepictable de-piction of distancing and separation”80 produced by modern technology. Likewise, as reproductive media, film and television abolish every distance, suspending its audience in an interstitial zone between reality and its reproduction. In the chapter titled “Television: Set and Screen,” Weber identifies the distinctive specificity of television as not simply a technology allowing to “see at distance” but that “transports vision as such and sets it immediately before the viewer.”81 In doing so, television, unlike any other reproductive medium, “serves as a surrogate for the body in that it allows for a certain sense-perception to take place… Television takes place in taking the place of the body and at the same time in transforming both place and body.”82 Indeed, Weber suggested that television happens in at least three places at the same time: the place where images and sounds are recorded; the place in  Samuel Weber, Mass-Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 87. 81  Ibid., 116. 82  Ibid., 117. 80

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which they are received; and the place in between, that is, the “undepictable” interstitial zone through which they are transmitted. The visible image that appears on the television screen is thus the result of a “split” or “separation” between reality and its reproduction. But the “split” is also the body of the viewer: part sits on a sofa in front of the TV screen and part is displaced in the virtual reality being transmitted. In an interview, also published in the book, Weber went even further and defined the bodies represented on the screen as species of ghosts, and the televisual image as an uncanny reality that alienates the TV viewer from the outside world.

The 1990s–2000s: Television and Post-Fordism An accurate panorama of the main discourses on television cannot leave aside a few considerations on the concept of immaterial labor. The term was coined by Italian philosopher and sociologist Maurizio Lazzarato in his 1997 essay “Immaterial Labor,” and defined as “the labor that produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity.”83 Unlike manual labor, immaterial labor is a form of intellectual labor that demands the worker’s creativity (imagination, cooperative, and communication skills) and that also includes activities ranging from product conceptualization through to design and marketing. The resulting commodity does not simply presuppose consumption but a consumption of information: that is, that social relation known as communication. Therefore, labor is not just that which is produced by the worker but also by the consumer. Immaterial labor is at the core of post-Fordism—a term acknowledging the evolution of industrial production from the assembly line system formulated by Henry Ford’s automotive factories in 1913 to small flexible manufacturing units. Post-Fordism has been loosely theorized by a group of Italian post-Marxist theorists associated with the “Operaist” movement Autonomia, emerged since the late 1960s—including such figures as Lazzarato, Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, and Franco “Bifo” Berardi. Among them, Negri, together with Michael Hardt, theorized in the book Empire (2000), on the emergence in an increasingly globalized world of a threelayered pyramidal construct created by the world’s ruling powers: an empire in which labor is no longer just waged, restricted within the factory walls and limited to eight hours a day but “expands to fill the entire time of life.”84

83  Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 132. 84  Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 53.

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Lazzarato wrote for the first time about television in Videofilosofia (1997), referring to it as part of a series of video technologies—video, computer, virtual reality, and so on—that reproduce the function of human perception and intelligence. With references to Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, Benjamin, and Heidegger, Lazzarato argued that the post-Fordist economy uses video technologies to produce a new sense of time in relation to the new forms of immaterial labor. According to Lazzarato, the fact alone that “The social images of which our collective and public memory is constituted are televisual images”85 is meaningful enough to understand how, by regulating time, television sets the paradigms of the relationship between perception of the present and memory. Being based on the production and consumption of information more than products, the post-Fordist economic system of the empire, continued Lazzarato, “is a strategic device apt to subordinate, control, make productive the normal time. The capital doesn’t need to subjugate it to the time of labor, but captivates and exploits it as normal time.”86 The author expanded his thoughts on television in the essays “Struggle, Event, Media” (2003), and “The Machine” (2006). In the latter, he argued that television produces a “machinic” enslavement in which “we are no longer television users, ‘subjects’ who relate to it as an external object. In machinic enslavement, we are connected to the television and we function as components of the televisual device… we literally form one single body with the machine.”87 The idea that TV enslaves its viewers and forces them to produce forms of immaterial labor is at the core of the thoughts around the so-called “attention economy,” such as those condensed by Jonathan Beller in The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle (2006) and by Yves Citton in The Ecology of Attention (2017). Beller, an American film and media theorist, argues that cinema and audiovisual media function as “deterritorialized factories” that transform the act of looking into labor. According to the author, the industrialization of the visual—from nineteenth-century pre-cinema optical devices to cinema, from television to the Internet—has produced a scopic regime that treats human attention as a productive value. This is particularly true for television to the degree that Beller claimed: “In the depths of the mind, at the core of the psyche, at the center of the human experience, is television.”88  Maurizio Lazzarato, Videofilosofia: La Percezione del Tempo nel Postfordismo (Rome: Manifestolibri, 1997), 114, my translation. 86  Ibid., 117. 87  Maurizio Lazzarato, “The Machine,” epilogue Tausend Maschinen: Eine Kleine Philosophie der Maschine als Sozialer Bewegung, by Gerald Raunig (Wien: Turia + Kant, 2008). English translation retrieved from Transversal.at. Accessed April 24, 2021, https://transversal.at/ transversal/1106/lazzarato/en. 88  Jonathan Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle (Lebanon, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2006), 151–2. 85

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The ideas summarized so far in this chapter’s last section are echoed in artworks and art projects from the late 1980s to the 2000s. The sensationalist nature of TV news discussed by Postman, Popper, and Bordieu is exposed, for example, by artists such as Johan Grimonprez and The Yes Men. Weber’s idea that television “serves as a surrogate for the body”89 emerges from those artists who have performed either themselves (e.g., Andy Warhol, Christian Jankowski) or fictional characters (e.g., Mike Kelley, Alex Bag) to explore the split between natural and televisual subjectivities in fictions and reality shows. Finally, Lazzarato’s and Beller’s ideas of watching TV as a form of immaterial labor resonate in those speculations on TV commercials by the likes of Bill Viola, Stan Douglas, and Harun Farocki.

The 2010s: From Convergence to Circulationism Since the late 1980s, massive technological changes impacted upon the evolution of television and threatened its authority. On the one side, devices—ranging from the video cassette recorder, camcorder, the Walkman, and video games through to early personal computers and mobile phones— began transforming users from mere consumers into producers, for which the neologism “prosumers” was coined. On the other side, a new global system of communication was created: the internet. Developed since the 1960s, it was only in 1990 that English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee wrote the World Wide Web, which reached a mass diffusion at the turn of the millennium—at first in the United States and Europe followed by the rest of the world. Being based on the key criteria of being “on-demand,” and allowing user interaction and participation, digital devices and the internet created a shift from old media to what we started calling new media. In The Language of New Media (2001), Lev Manovich claimed, “If the logic of old media corresponded to the logic of industrial mass society, the logic of new media fits the logic of the postindustrial society, which values individuality over conformity.”90 In the book, a landmark in new media studies, the Russian media theorist also argued that, within computer culture, the computer works as “a filter for all culture; a form through which all kinds of cultural and artistic production were mediated.”91 The groundbreaking peculiarity of digital culture consisted of allowing its users to literally create their own media and redefine the rules of

 Weber, 117.  Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 41. 91  Ibid., 64. 89 90

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communication, entertainment, and commerce—thanks to more and more diffused and portable devices, software, and web applications. The early history of the internet in particular (during the late 1990s and early 2000s) was characterized by a sense of optimism for what was thought to represent a new step in human civilization; a democratic instrument that would allow participation and promote transparency, where users would not have to passively absorb culture and entertainment but could create their own. A key trope of digital culture, the empowering ideal of participation soon migrated to politics, art, education, industrial production, management, culture, and entertainment. With regard to entertainment, participation has been set in contraposition to older notions of passive media spectatorship (associated to cinema and television) and at the core of a new cultural phase that Henry Jenkins has defined as “convergence,” in which media (old and new) flow across multiple platforms and their consumers develop forms of collective intelligence that allow for their active participation. In his seminal book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2006), the American media scholar insisted on the “bottom-up” power of fans (which he also called grassroots artists) to impact, thanks to new media, “top-down” corporate old media (e.g., TV reality shows and sci-fi films) by applying “folk culture practices to mass culture content.”92 With the advent of new media, traditional forms of media were put in jeopardy, but they didn’t die out as many had predicted. If anything, the book, music, cinema, television, and other old media migrated to new delivery systems, rematerializing and integrating with each other. But the more regulated and controlled the internet and its users started becoming in the 2010s, the more the web lost its supposed democratic dimension. In her 2013 essay titled “Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?” German artist and writer Hito Steyerl coined the term “circulationism” to describe a new form of artistic resistance where the artist is not necessarily a professional but closer to the fan described by Jenkins. “Circulationism is not about the art of making an image, but of postproducing, launching, and accelerating it,” claimed Steyerl, “It is about the public relations of images across social networks, about advertisement and alienation, and about being as suavely vacuous as possible.”93 Paradigmatic of a new genre of artistic response to the power logics inherent to the internet—a genre loosely referred to with the controversial label “post-Internet” and associated to contemporary philosophical 92  Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 257. 93  Hito Steyerl, “Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?” e-flux, No. 49 (November 2013). Accessed April 24, 2021, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/49/60004/too-much-world-is-theinternet-dead/.

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tendencies, such as “accelerationism” and “speculative realism”—Steyerl’s idea of “circulationism” is enacted in her films, which combine original high-definition videos, computer-generated graphics, and what the artist defines as “poor images,”94 that is, images found online created with phones, webcams, and security cameras. From the work of Steyerl as well as other artists emerged in the 2010s, such as Ryan Trecartin and Simon Denny—whose work will be discussed in the last chapter—what clearly emerges is that although still setting the standards of contemporary global communication, TV has lost its predominant position among mass media. The internet and prosumer technologies didn’t kill TV, but they certainly forced it to mutate and adapt to an ever-changing crossmedia scenario.

 Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image.” e-flux, No. 10 (November 2009). Accessed April 24, 2021, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/.

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2 TV as a Mirror: Manipulations and Re-Presentations

2.1 Artists Familiarize with the New Mass Medium Early Acts of Manumission of the TV Set The entire history of the relationships between art and television could be synthesized as a series of attempts to bridge the gap between reality and its televisual duplicate, most resulting from performative approaches: actions performed to produce the artwork or intended to be part of it, as well as artworks planned to have repercussions in the daily life of the viewer. German media art theorist and curator Dieter Daniels has defined the early 1960s as a “pre-medial” period, when “artists had no way of accessing the powerful new medium of television,”1 but began approaching it through sculptural acts of manipulation of the TV set. One of the earliest of such acts was German artist Wolf Vostell’s cycle Black Room (1958–59), a trilogy of assemblages that incorporate built-in TV sets. The “German View” version, for example, is made of barbed wire, newspaper clippings of the DDR era, bones, a toy, and a switched-on TV set. As with the artists of Nouveau Réalisme (e.g., Mimmo Rotella, Raymond Hains), Vostell adopted the technique of décollage in the mid-1950s; he tore away portions of advertising posters to create random intertextual connections between snippets of the fantasies they promoted. Toward the late 1950s, Vostell transposed the idea of décollage to happenings and

 Dieter Daniels, “Viewing Television (as Art),” in Telegen: Art and Television, ed. Dieter Daniels and Stephan Berg (Munich: Hirmer Verlag GmbH, 2015), 20.

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installations, often incorporating TV sets—a practice that, in the early 1960s, led him to cofound and actively participate in Fluxus. Moved by the desire to reconnect art with daily life, the artists and composers who joined this prolific avant-garde movement redefined the art object as open and indeterminate. They achieved this through the organization of happenings and performances (often music-based), the  release of multiples (often instruction-based), the foundation of imaginary institutions and utopian “lands,” and a playful approach to media. Since his first work TV Dé-coll/age (1959), Vostell manipulated numerous TV sets to transmit distorted images, sometimes providing instructions for viewers to interact with them. Other examples include the film Sun in Your Head (1963), presented in the happening Nein 9 Décollagen (1963), or the installations TV Dé-coll/age (1963) at Smolin Gallery, New York, and Electronic Dé-coll/ age, Happening Room (1968) at the Venice Biennale. A contemporary of Vostell’s who also pioneered the use of television in art was Korean-American artist Nam June Paik. Both “confronted the individual with the detritus of consumer culture in an effort to understand art as a living presence,”2 wrote American art historian and curator John G. Hanhardt. After studying music and art history at the University of Tokyo, Paik moved to West Germany, where, in 1962, he joined Fluxus. His first solo exhibition, Exposition of Music—Electronic Television (1963), took place at Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal—the same that represented Vostell. Greeted by the butchered head of a cow, the viewer walked through musicbased installations and thirteen black-and-white TV sets, all tuned in to Germany’s then only TV station ARD, but broadcasting distortions, wave patterns, and minimal lines (Zen for TV). Paik achieved these hypnotic effects by connecting (to the TV sets) devices like a radio receiver (Sound Wave Input on Two TV Sets), a tape recorder (Kuba TV), and a microphone through which the viewer could modulate a distortion live (Participation TV). In a brochure accompanying the exhibition, he wrote: “My experimental TV is the first ART (?), in which the ‘perfect crime’ is possible… I had put just a diode into opposite direction, and got a ‘waving’ negative Television.”3 By disrupting the broadcast and inviting the spectator to participate in the action, Paik broke the suspension of disbelief enacted by TV and questioned the processes of production, circulation, and consumption of televisual images. Over the years, he made new versions and variations of these artworks, a representative one being Magnet TV (1965), which produces a mesmerizing flow of electrons with the simple application of a magnet (Figure 2.1).  John G. Hanhardt, “The Anti-TV Set,” in From Receiver to Remote Control: The TV Set, ed. Matthew Geller and Reese Williams (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990), 111. 3  Nam June Paik, “Afterlude to the Exposition of Experimental Television,” Brochure, Galerie Parnass, Wuppertal 1963. Reprinted in Fluxus cc Five Three, June 1964, 1. 2

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FIGURE 2.1  Nam June Paik, Magnet TV, installation view, 1965. Photo courtesy of Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. © The Estate of Nam June Paik.

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Characterized, like Vostell’s and Paik’s artworks, by the use of switchedon TV sets, Isidor Isou’s La Télévision Déchiquetée ou L’Anti-Crétinisation (Shattered Television of Anti-Cretinization, 1962) and Karl Gerstner’s series Auto-Vision (1964) also fit into this “pre-medial” phase. Isou’s is a template with die-cut abstract forms that, when applied to a TV set, produces a décollage of the broadcasting screen underneath.4 The Romanian-born French artist, and founder of Lettrism, mixed two constitutive elements of his practice: the critique of media, and “hypergraphics”—a form of ideographic poetry invented by the Lettrists. Similarly, Gerster, a Swiss graphic designer and artist, fragmented the televisual images by applying customized lenses (grid-like or concentric) to the monitor, which is a purely optical procedure, close to the sensibility of Op Art, which accelerated the process of abstraction enacted by TV.

The Rise of Artists Television: Germany When the Ampex Corporation of California marketed the first videotape recorders (or VTRs) in 1956, it triggered a process (albeit somewhat lengthy) of democratizing video, which, as American media scholar Michael Z. Newman suggests, had evolved “from being synonymous with television to denoting an alternative to conventional television transmission and reception using its technology against the purpose of live broadcasting.”5 The turning point can be set in the late 1960s, when cheaper and portable devices for videotaping and recording entered the market—coincidentally, amid a growing desire to redefine the paradigms of politics, family, education, and so also media. As an extension of this larger process of redefinition of life, artists reevaluated the status of the artwork from object to process. This is why the neo-avant-garde movements of the 1960s and 1970s (e.g., Arte Povera, Conceptual Art, Fluxus, Happening, Land Art, Minimalism, New Dance, Radical Architecture), as well as various coeval countercultures (e.g., free speech movement, psychedelic culture, street theatre, underground cinema), were all essentially performative—because they felt the need to bypass the conventional rules of the art world. Through “situations,” artists prompted

 According to Jean-Paul Curtay, ed., Lettrism and Hypergraphics—The Unknown AvantGarde, 1949–1985 (New York: Franklin Furnace, 1985), Isou’s original artwork “was shown in the Paris Museum of Modern Art and then destroyed.” The illustration shows a reconstructed version published in Flash Art, No. 145, March–April 1989. Information retrieved from Medien Kunst Netz, accessed April 24, 2021, http://mkn.zkm.de/themes/overview_of_media_ art/massmedia/13/. 5  Michael Z. Newman, Video Revolutions: On the History of a Medium (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 18. 4

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the viewers to revolt against their passive role of spectators/consumers and become active participants as individuals and citizens. During that period television (a process-based medium) seemed a possible ally—not only to reach this goal but even to affect the masses, rather than the more limited audiences in galleries and museums. Pioneered by Fontana in the early 1950s, the phenomenon of television programs made by artists began to evolve into a recognized art genre in the 1960s, mainly in Germany and the United States. Not counting a happening organized on December 11, 1964, by Joseph Beuys, Bazon Brock, and Vostell in a studio of ZDF television in Düsseldorf (which unfortunately was not recorded), the first of such programs was Otto Piene and Aldo Tambellini’s Black Gate Cologne (1968). Also a happening, this work involved projections, inflatable structures, kinetic assemblages, and audience participation. The result of a full cooperation between the German, Italian artists, and the TV crew, the forty-five-minute event was shot in a studio of Cologne’s WDR television and then cut down to twenty-three minutes after a heavy editing process that juxtaposed studio images, TV footage, and throbbing distortions generated by video synthesizers. Meanwhile in Düsseldorf, the filmmaker Gerry Schum—in collaboration with his wife Ursula Wevers—started the Fernsehgalerie (Television Gallery). The gallery, whose highlight projects were Land Art (1969) and Identifications (1970), lasted only five years until 1973 (when Schum committed suicide at the age of 34). He came up with the idea for the Fernsehgalerie in 1967 when he contributed to a TV documentary about the art market titled Konsumkunst-Kunstkonsum, which enlightened him on the shift taking place in art production from an object-based to a process-based practice. The Fernsehgalerie didn’t have a physical space until 1971—but even then, it existed mainly as a set of relationships between Schum, the artists, various technical figures, and the TV stations that produced and broadcast the films (originally shot on 16 mm and then transferred to video): Sender Freies Berlin (SFB) for Land Art and Südwestfunk Baden-Baden (SWF) for Identifications. “One of our ideas is communication of art instead of possession of art objects,”6 explained Schum to Gene Youngblood—in reply to Youngblood’s request for information to be included in his then upcoming book Expanded Cinema (1970). Schum not only proposed a model of autonomy for art in regards to the market but also legitimated the use of filmic documentation as an integral element of the new artwork-as-process. This logic perfectly suited the ethos of Jan Dibbets, Walter De Maria, Richard Long, and

6  Gerry Schum, “Fernsehgalerie,” in Katalog Fernsehausstellung Land Art: TV Germany, Chanel 1, April 69, ed. Gerry Schum and Ursula-Schum-Wevers (Hannover: Hartwig Popp, 1970), 4–5. English translation retrieved from Medien Kunst Netz, accessed April 24, 2021, http:// medienkunstnetz.de/source-text/89/.

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Robert Smithson, among the artists featured in Land Art (a term coined by Schum), which comprised eight 16 mm films—ranging from two to seven minutes—that documented (without commentary) the making of ephemeral installations and actions in natural landscapes. In 1970, Schum released Identifications, featuring prominent Conceptual artists such as Beuys, Daniel Buren, Gilbert & George, Richard Serra, Lawrence Weiner, and members of the Italian Arte Povera, the likes of Alighiero Boetti, Gino De Dominicis, and Mario Merz. To introduce it, he wrote: “In the TV object the artist can reduce his object to the attitude, to the mere gesture, as a reference to his conception.”7 Some of the films emerged as stand-outs in the artists’ careers, such as Beuys’ Filz-TV, a re-enactment of a 1966 performance of him covering a TV set with felt. According to Wevers, with the exception of Keith Arnatt’s Self-Burial and Dibbets’ TV as a Fireplace (both made in 1969 for Cologne’s WDR), Schum’s films were neither appreciated by the TV stations nor by their audience. “Television as a mass medium took refuge in clichés like ‘my own kids could have done that,’” she wrote in 1979, “and failed totally in its commitment to enter into a qualifying dialogue with art.”8

The Rise of Artists Television: United States In the United States some artists established either one-off or long-term collaborations with TV stations and their crews. Four in particular offered artists this opportunity: KQED (San Francisco), WGBH (Boston), WNET (New York), and KGW (Portland). According to American media art curator and writer Kathy Rae Huffman, “technical developments helped to create an experimental impetus, a curiosity and creative approach to the production of programming among a few public TV broadcasters.”9 Add to this the fact that foundations and organizations like the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), and the Rockefeller Foundation established program funds to support the emergence of video art. In San Francisco, the public TV station KQED became a hub for all those artists based on the West Coast, and willing to experiment with advanced video technologies and a generic audience. In 1968, KQED joined forces with the art dealer James Newman, a case Youngblood compared to

 Gerry Schum, “Introduction to TV Exhibition II: Identifications,” in Gerry Schum, ed. Dorine Mignot and Ursula Wevers (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1970), 74. 8  Ursula Wevers, “Gerry Schum: The Television Gallery. The Idea and How It Failed,” in Museums by Artists, ed. AA Bronson and Peggy Gale (Toronto: Art Metropole, 1979), 286. 9  Kathy Rae Huffman, “Video Art: What’s TV Got to Do with It?” in Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art, ed. Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer (New York: Aperture, 1990), 81. 7

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Schum’s in Expanded Cinema. Under the moniker of the Dilexi Foundation, Newman commissioned artists as diverse as Walter De Maria, Robert Frank, the Living Theatre, Yvonne Rainer, and Frank Zappa to create works for broadcast.10 From 1967 to 1974, the station also ran the National Center for Experiments in Television (NCET): an artists-in-residence program focused on experiments on abstraction in line with the coeval psychedelic culture. Paradigmatic of this initiative was Stephen Beck’s series Illuminated Music (1972–73), made with his Direct Video Synthesizer, which the artist performed live on KQED on May 19, 1972. The main hub for artists’ television on the East Coast was in Boston, where MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) attracted artists interested in technology. Many of them established a productive dialogue with the local public TV station WGBH, where the young and forwardthinking producer Fred Barzyk had already been realizing experimental programs since the mid-1960s, notably Jazz Images (1964–66) and What’s Happening Mr. Silver? (1967). Among the artists who gravitated around WGBH in the late 1960s and early 1970s were the likes of John Cage, Peter Campus, Allan Kaprow, Paik, Piene, Tambellini, Stan VanDerBeek, and William Wegman. In 1969, Barzyk condensed some of the works produced at WGBH in the half-hour program titled The Medium Is the Medium, introduced by a narrator asking, “What happens when artists explore television?” By highlighting that the “content” of the program was television itself, the title reinforced McLuhan’s statement that “the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium.”11 A case in point among WGBH’s productions was VanDerBeek’s Violence Sonata (1969), a ninety-minute-long program that questioned the role of violence in American culture and its media representation. The artist instructed the audience to experience the program on two TV sets positioned side by side. One channel broadcast archival film footage concerning violence, while the other played the same images and invited a live studio audience to answer the question: “Can man communicate?” Viewers at home could also provide their responses through a computerized telephone vote-in system. VanDerBeek’s aim was to stimulate what he called the “social imagistics,”12 or else, “a new media consciousness”—suggesting “that TV is an external noo or form of an inner landscape.”13

 Youngblood, 292–3.  McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 8. 12  Stan VanDerBeek, “Social Imagistics,” in The New Television: A Public/private Art: Essays, Statements, and Videotapes Based on “Open Circuits: An International Conference on the Future of Television” Organized by Fred Barzyk, Douglas Davis, Gerald O’Grady, and Willard Van Dyke for the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, ed. Douglas Davis and Allison Simmons (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1977), 58. 13  Ibid., 62. 10 11

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Taking WGBH as a model, in 1972, New York’s public television station WNET opened a TV Laboratory and established a longstanding relationship with some of the video artists living in the city. Active until 1984, the TV Lab of WNET offered an artists-in-residence program (Paik and Douglas Davis were among those who participated); and between 1975 and 1977, it established and broadcast the Video Tape Review series, in which a host introduced the audience to the artists working in the TV Lab, including the Guerrilla Television collectives Videofreex and TVTV. The list of works produced in the 1970s at the TV Lab includes: Paik’s Global Groove (1973), TVTV’s The Lord of the Universe (1974), Davis’ Video Against Video (1975), Bill Viola’s Junkyard Levitation (1976), Joan Jonas’ I Want to Live in the Country (And Other Romances) (1976), and Gary Hill’s Soundings (1979). Another American TV station scheduling arts programs in the 1970s was Portland’s KGW. An episode of the Sunday afternoon arts program Eight Lively Arts (1976) featured Michael Asher’s Via Los Angeles, Portland Center for the Visual Arts, Portland, Oregon, January 8–February 8, 1976, which was named after the exhibition to which Asher contributed with this project. A key figure of the Conceptual Art movement, Asher was already renowned for creating “situations” that undermined the status of the art object and the role of art institutions, ranging from concealing a blower inside the Whitney Museum (1969) to removing the entrance doors of the Pomona College gallery (1970). In the work with KGW (realized as his contribution to a local group show), Asher provided a “backstage” view of the station’s production activities by broadcasting footage of its control room.14 According to Asher’s bibliographer Kirsi Peltomäki, during the broadcast (which aired on a Sunday at 1 pm), the station received around 140 phone calls from viewers (including one technician) who thought the program was an accident.15

Nam June Paik’s Video-Synthesizer and TV Programs To conclude this brief account of the early history of artists’ television, it is now time to go back to Paik and pick up where we left him. As discussed, Paik (together with Vostell) was a paradigmatic figure during the “premedial” phase of the relationships between artists and TV, that is, when

 Asher provided an account of this project in his notebook on January 11, 1976, printed in Video, Architecture, Television: Writings on Video and Video Works, 1970–1978, ed. Benjamin H.D. Buchloh and Dan Graham (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, 1979), 56. 15  Kirsi Peltomäki, Situation Aesthetics: The Work of Michael Asher (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2010), 45. 14

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artists couldn’t access the mechanism of TV—without the direct physical manipulation of its functioning (or broadcast apparatus). The centrality of Paik in the television art discourse (provided that such a term as “television art” could be considered legitimate) is given by the fact that he can also be considered largely responsible for bringing this relationship into the next phase. This soon transpired when TV stations started inviting artists to contribute to their programming, allowing them to intervene within their functioning as systems of communication (i.e., modes of production and broadcasting). Paik brought forward his interest in the “abstraction” of televisual images through more and more advanced techniques and the invention of new tools, notably a Video-Synthesizer that he developed with electronics engineer Shuya Abe (1969–71) with the support of Boston’s WGBH. The device allowed Paik to edit seven sources simultaneously, manipulating input signals to create new independent abstractions, as well as turning sounds into video imagery. In a text published in an issue of Radical Software magazine in 1970, Paik compared the process of synthesizing images to drug consumption. According to him, both activities empowered the viewer to become a creator. “[D]rug is a short cut effort to recover the sense of participation… and basic cause lies in our passive state of mind, such as TV watching,” Paik claimed. He then wondered: “Can we transplant this strange ‘ontology’ of drug experience to ‘safer’ and more ‘authentic’ art medium, without transplanting the inherent danger of drug overdose???”16 Besides a large body of work, Paik’s legacy includes several texts like this—which, while documenting artworks and projects, also expand their intellectual dimension, suggesting correspondences and illuminating on the artist’s overall idea of media. Another of Paik’s key writings (also published in Radical Software in 1970) is his article titled “Expanded Education for the Paperless Society,”17 which offered a series of practical tips on how TV and video technologies could facilitate students to learn philosophy, music, and art history. What emerges is a utopic idea in which, as German art historian Tom Holert suggested, “Television and video have important roles to play in this new architecture of knowledge. They enable viewers to navigate their way through an expanding and ever-more complex technocultural landscape.”18

16  Nam June Paik, “Video Synthesizer Plus,” Radical Software, Vol. 1, No. 2, Autumn (1970): 25. 17  Nam June Paik, “Expanded Education for the Paperless Society,” Radical Software, Vol. 1, No. 1, Spring (1970): 7–8. 18  Tom Holert, “‘A Live Feedback of You in the Now, Alternating with Broadcast in the Central Monitor’ Video, Television, Self-Awareness, and Education Around 1970,” in Changing Channels: Art and Television 1963–1987, ed. Matthias Michalka (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2010), 39–40.

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Paik’s tributes to McLuhan abound in his production. One of the recurring themes of the Canadian thinker’s oeuvre that Paik speculated on was the concept of the “global village,” notably in the TV project Global Groove (1973). The thirty-minute video (commissioned by New York’s WNET and broadcast on January 30, 1974) was introduced by a voice-over saying: “This is a glimpse of a video landscape of tomorrow when you will be able to switch on any TV station on the earth and TV guides will be as fat as the Manhattan telephone book” (Figure 2.2). Global Groove mixes throbbing, synthesized images of people dancing to different music styles— from rock and roll to Korean folk—interspersed with Paik’s own works; a Japanese commercial for Pepsi; and performances by a host of avantgarde and countercultural icons, including John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Allen Ginsberg, Charlotte Moorman, the Living Theatre, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. A key image of the piece shows the distorted face of the then American president Richard Nixon, which seems to warn the viewer of the ever-present danger that TV could pose if used as a propaganda tool. An ideal follow-up to Global Groove was Good Morning Mr. Orwell (1984), which opposed Orwell’s dystopian vision of media by exemplifying the possibilities of TV as a positive medium. Produced by WNET, the hourlong program aired on New Year’s Eve in 1984 and connected the studio

FIGURE 2.2  Nam June Paik, Global Groove, video stills, 1973. © The Estate of Nam June Paik.

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of the New York TV station with the Centre Pompidou in Paris via a live satellite link. Paik (with a full production team at his disposal) made heavy use of editing techniques and mixed pre-recorded and live performances by artists and musicians at the crossroads of avant-garde and pop, including Laurie Anderson, Joseph Beuys, Peter Gabriel, Philip Glass, the Thompson Twins, along with some of those already featured in Global Groove like Cage, Cunningham, Ginsberg, and Moorman. According to Daniels, the program reached an audience of around 10 million. In aesthetic and structural terms, Good Morning Mr. Orwell echoes Jameson’s postmodernist ideas of pastiche and schizophrenia in that it signals a loss of the cognition of space and time. However, new satellite technologies offered Paik a means to recover a sense of participation and liveness. Indeed, on this point he asserted: the satellite artist must compose his art from the beginning suitable to physical conditions and grammar. The satellite art… must consider how to achieve a two-way connection between opposite sides of the earth; how to give a conversational structure to the art… how to play with improvisation, in determinism, echoes, feedbacks, and empty spaces in the Cagean sense; and how to instantaneously manage the differences in culture, preconceptions, and common sense that exist between various nations.19

2.2 Performance, CCTV, and the Narcissistic Impulse The First Exhibition of Television Art The more thinkers and artists expressed their concerns for media as alienating systems of control, the more Paik’s utopian ethos began to take root. By the time of his death in 2006, he had realized several other TV programs and TV set manipulations. Paik also created new configurations to install and synchronize them in exhibition spaces—which often displayed his penchant for totems, crosses, and robot-like shapes—ranging from a few units to over a thousand, such as in Dadaikseon (The More the Better) (1988). What lies at the core of Paik’s production, even when not openly manifest, is a naïve

 Nam June Paik, “La Vie, Satellites, One Meeting—One Life,” in Video Culture: A Critical Investigation, ed. John G. Hanhardt (Rochester: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1986), 219.

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and technophilic attempt to humanize video technologies and TV; a bid to solve the tension between the body in flesh and the mediated reality. Along with Participation TV (1963)—a microphone connected to a TV set through which the viewer could create abstract images with the voice— Paik’s more successful attempts to humanize video technologies are his collaborative performances with cellist Charlotte Moorman; notably, TV Bra for Living Sculpture (1969), and Concerto for TV Cello and Videotapes (1971). In the former, Moorman wore a bra with two miniature TV sets in the place of the cups while playing a cello, whose sound modulated the images live on the two small monitors. By eroticizing technology, Paik’s aim was to stimulate the viewer’s “phantasy to look for the new, imaginative and humanistic ways of using our technology.”20 Similarly, in the latter, Moorman played a cello made of three stacked TV sets modulating (through the sound) live broadcast images, pre-recorded videotapes, and closed-circuit footage of the performance itself. Participation TV and TV Bra for Living Sculpture both featured in the milestone group exhibition TV as a Creative Medium, organized in 1969 by Howard Wise21 in his eponymous New York gallery. On this occasion, the term “television art” began to circulate, although it has never been accredited by art historians. Besides Paik, the roster included: Serge Boutourline, Frank Gillette, and Ira Schneider (the latter two working in collaboration), Earl Reibach, Paul Ryan, John Seery, Eric Siegel, Thomas Tadlock, Aldo Tambellini, and Joe Weintraub. In the catalog, which features short interventions by the artists, Wise introduced the group as part of a generation “‘brought up’ on TV,” that “read ‘do it yourself’ books on how to make radio and TVs;” a group of artists “working with TV because they were fascinated with the results they were able to achieve, and because they sensed the potential of TV as the medium for their expression.”22 Some of the artists in TV as a Creative Medium explored the “lysergic” potential of television in line with the coeval psychedelic culture: abstract

20  Nam June Paik, “TV Bra for Living Sculpture,” in TV as a Creative Medium, ed. Howard Wise (New York: Howard Wise Gallery, 1969), 3. 21  Howard Wise was a crucial supporter of the nexus between art and technology in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1960, he opened the Howard Wise Gallery at 50 West 57th Street, New York, which presented exhibitions by artists associated with the Kinetic art movement such as Len Lye, Takis, Jean Tinguely, and the Zero group. With the exhibition TV as a Creative Medium (1969), Wise presented the phenomenon of “television art” as a new distinctive art genre and acknowledged the emergence of video art. In order to be able to support this new area of research more efficiently, Wise closed the gallery in 1970 and founded the non-profit organization Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), which is today a leading international resource for video and media art with a program ranging from the preservation and distribution of over 3,500 video works to the organization of exhibitions, educational initiatives and online resources. 22  Howard Wise, TV as a Creative Medium (New York: Howard Wise Gallery, 1969), 2.

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patterns and distortions of the transmitted images, either live or pre-recorded, created through the use of synthesizers. Psychedelevision in Color was generated by Siegel as a result of his speculations on the “ecstatic potential”23 of TV conducted through his Processing Chrominance Synthesizer. Tadlock’s Archetron synthesizer—also employed for The Medium Is the Medium on WGBH—allowed him to create kaleidoscopic patterns out of TV, which he considered “the most advanced light source we have.”24 Weintraub’s AC/TV (Audio-Controlled Television), also a synthesizer, translated “music into a complex kinetic image on the screen of any color TV.”25 The centerpiece of the exhibition was Gillette and Schneider’s Wipe Cycle. The installation consisted of a bank of nine monitors: some tuned into live broadcasts; some transmitted pre-recorded material; and some showed closed-circuit images of the gallery entrance (both live or delayed by eight to sixteen seconds), which allowed viewers to see themselves from the perspective of another mechanical eye. This synchronized cycle pattern created an effect of disorientation in the viewer, complicated by the rotation of the images from monitor to monitor. In the catalog the artists declared: “The intent of this overloading (something like a play within a play within a play) is to escape the automatic ‘information’ experience of commercial television without totally divesting it of its usual content.”26 A pivotal year in the history of the relationships between art and television was 1969. It is the year of Schum’s Land Art, Barzyk’s The Medium Is the Medium, and Wise’s exhibition TV as a Creative Medium; all projects that John S. Margolies—soon to become known as a photographer of vernacular architecture—discussed in a seminal article published in Art in America. In “TV-The Next Medium,” Margolies identified this new phenomenon of “television art” as both emerging from the first generation to have grown up with television, and the result of a larger transformation of art into “a two-step process-formulation or creation of an idea and communication of this idea.”27 According to him, since TV was not traditionally considered art, television artists could have a deeper affect on the lives of their audience; those who could simply experience it without having to classify it as art.

23  Eric Siegel, “Psychedelevision in Color,” in TV as a Creative Medium, ed. Howard Wise (New York: Howard Wise Gallery, 1969), 7. 24  Thomas Tadlock. Interview by Jud Yalkut, “The Archetron of Thomas Tadlock,” The East Village Other, 4:31 (July 2, 1969). 25  Joe Weintraub, “AC/TV (Audio-Controlled Television),” in TV as a Creative Medium, ed. Howard Wise (New York: Howard Wise Gallery, 1969), 8. 26  Frank Gillette and Ira Schneider, “Wipe Cycle,” in TV as a Creative Medium, ed. Howard Wise (New York: Howard Wise Gallery, 1969), 6. 27  John S. Margolies, “TV-The Next Medium,” Art in America, Vol. 57, No. 5, (September/ October 1969): 50.

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Performing CCTV Gillette and Schneider’s Wipe Cycle was the first of a series of artworks that addressed the topic of surveillance and the role of closed-circuit television systems (or CCTV) in reinforcing the status quo. Although not explicitly referring to TV as such, these artworks exposed how the increasing diffusion of video technologies was affecting society. Indeed, it was right at the end of the 1960s that CCTV systems began to be installed on the corners of busy streets, inside banks, airports, train stations, and stores. Officially employed for safety and security purposes—chiefly as a deterrent against crime— CCTV has since been accused of being a key instrument for governments to exert power over citizens in what Michel Foucault has defined as a “disciplinary society.” According to Foucault, CCTV was a contemporary incarnation of the idea of the “panopticon,” Jeremy Bentham’s late eighteenth-century architectural model that allowed a single watchman, concealed inside an “inspection house” at the center of a circular building, to control all the “inmates” without being seen. The model was conceived for a prison but could equally be employed for schools, hospitals, and various other indoctrinating or correctional institutions. “There is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a gaze,” claimed Foucault. “An inspecting gaze, a gaze which each individual under its weight will end by interiorisation to the point that he is his own overseer, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over, and against, himself.”28 In order to challenge the “inspecting gaze” of video technologies and expose the unilateral mechanism of both TV broadcasting and CCTV, Wipe Cycle—and similar subsequent installations—aimed to elicit “feedback” from the viewers. Simply put by American art historian David Joselit, Wipe Cycle “was meant both to represent and to pluralize the monolithic ‘information’ of network TV through a spectator’s unexpected encounter with her or his own act of viewing.”29 Indeed, to allow viewers to spot themselves in a live CCTV-based video installation was a way of breaking that mechanism of self-surveillance enacted by CCTV. Meanwhile, by creating a clash between the lo-fi quality of CCTV images and the superior definition of broadcast TV (either live or pre-recorded), the viewer was reminded of how TV fictionalized reality.

 Michel Foucault, “The Eye of Power,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980), 155. 29  David Joselit, Feedback: Television against Democracy (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2007), 93. 28

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Other American artists who explored the feedback mechanism in the late 1960s and early 1970s include such figures as Les Levine, whose work Iris (1968), for example, was a wall-like structure made of six color TV monitors: three transmitted distorted images whilst the other three played live images filmed by concealed cameras at different angles. For The Medium Is the Medium, Allan Kaprow created a thirty-minute video-happening titled Hello (1969), which used twenty-seven monitors connected to four remote locations. Paik also employed CCTV in TV-Buddha (1974), which testified his devotion to Zen Buddhism (Figure 2.3). He positioned an antique Buddha statue in front of a camera and monitor set: the videotaped image appears live on the monitor as if the Buddha looks itself into a mirror. The installation, which embeds the viewer into the composition (when he or she is within camera shot of the statue), enacts the tension between the transcendentalism of Zen Buddhism—a discipline based on self-control and meditation—and the tendency of video technologies to displace. Another key installation based on the antagonism between viewers and their mediated duplicate is Bruce Nauman’s Live-Taped Video Corridor (1970). The work consists of a narrow corridor with two stacked monitors

FIGURE 2.3  Nam June Paik, TV-Buddha, installation view, 1974. Photo courtesy of Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. © The Estate of Nam June Paik.

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at its far end, one transmitting the live images filmed by a camera positioned above the entrance of the corridor, and the other pre-recorded footage of the empty corridor from the same angle. Walking down the corridor, the viewer sees himself or herself from behind, but the closer he or she gets to the monitors, the more the mediated duplicate shrinks. According to Italian art theorist Marco Senaldi, the “result is the uncanny experience of watching oneself being filmed and ‘not recognizing’ oneself in the video image.”30 In other words, it is as if oneself, who is used to seeing his or her reflection from a single viewpoint on a mirror, sees oneself for the first time from the perspective of another—as if in a dream or in a near-death experience. Dan Graham, another major Conceptual artist like Nauman, approached CCTV as part of his larger research on anthropological issues related to suburban architecture and lifestyle. Graham’s works with CCTV include: TV Camera/Monitor (1970), Project for a Local Cable TV (1970), Present Continuous Past(s) (1974) (Figure 2.4), and Video Projection Outside the Home (1978). In the first work, the artist filmed a group of students whose delayed images were broadcast on a monitor. The second saw two

FIGURE 2.4  Dan Graham, Present Continuous Past(s), installation view, New York, 1974. © Dan Graham; courtesy of Lisson Gallery.

 Marco Senaldi, Arte e Televisione: Da Andy Warhol al Grande Fratello (Milan: Postmediabooks, 2009), 24, my translation. 30

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participants with opposing opinions filming each other. Present Continuous Past(s), an immersive installation, complicated the mechanism of timedelayed feedback with two mirror walls. More openly sociological, Video Projection Outside the Home was a proposal to show a large-scale monitor in front of a typical American suburban house projecting whatever the occupant of the house watches on TV.

Video as a Definition of the Self A key driver of Video Art and all its correlated phenomena—in addition to some of those already taken into consideration—was the launch of the Sony Portapak in 1965. Thanks to its smaller size (albeit still bulky for its time) and reduced price in comparison to the exorbitant costs of previous models, the Portapak was the first portable video camera accessible to consumers. This, and other similar products commercialized by other brands, triggered a process of emancipation of video from TV and democratization of video technologies— offering almost everyone the thrill of simultaneous transmission. It is no wonder that the first artists who employed video did so from a performative perspective; to explore the gap between the filming of the subject (either him or herself) and his or her mediated and objectified duplicate. American Pop artist Andy Warhol—whose longstanding relationship with TV will be discussed in detail later on—prefigured this dynamic as soon as the Portapak became available, though using film rather than video. His Outer and Inner Space (1965), two thirty-three-minute-long 16 mm black-and-white film reels projected side by side, shows Edie Sedgwick—a recurring “superstar” of the artist’s films of the mid-1960s— commenting upon the uncanny feeling of watching the objectified image of herself, as she talks to someone off-screen, broadcast on the TV behind her (Figure 2.5). The TV occupies half of each segment. The mesmerizing result produces a clash between the “outer” space of the two televisual Sedgwicks and the “inner” space of the two “live” Sedgwicks, or else demonstrates literally how the mechanism of objectification enacted by TV works. Here, Warhol transposes to film the idea of the “duplicate” that he was investigating in his painting production. Through the multiplication of media and commercial “icons”—and the use of a mechanical technique, the screenprint—Warhol made a commentary on how the assembly-line principle had migrated from manufacturing into marketing and advertising. With Outer and Inner Space, he shows that, through TV, the process of standardization practiced by power systems such as media and commerce is applied to subjectivities as if they were products. This shift is embodied in the phenomenon of “reflection” enacted: first, the mechanical reflection of the “outer” and “inner” image on the same segment; second, the split of the

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FIGURE 2.5 Andy Warhol, Outer and Inner Space, 1965. 16 mm film, black and white, sound, 66 minutes or 33 minutes in double screen. © The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved.

already split segment into two consecutive segments; and third, Sedgwick’s psychological reflection on herself. Although she doesn’t mention this specific work, the reflective principle of Outer and Inner Space informs all the video works that American art theorist Rosalind Krauss discusses in her seminal essay Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism, published in 1976 in the first issue of her newly cofounded journal October. Borrowing the idea of the mirror as an instrument of selfconstruction from French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, Krauss builds her argument around the idea that the specificity of video as a medium is its simultaneity, which allows artists to use the CCTV apparatus as a mirror. In his earlier studies, around 1936, Lacan identified the “mirror stage” as the moment a child recognizes him or herself for the first time in the mirror and from that moment becomes conscious of both his or her subjectivity, and that the “I” is dependent upon a series of external factors. But according to Lacan, a mirror dynamic takes place also when the psychoanalyst invites the patient to self-describe, a phase Lacan refers to as “the monumental construct of his narcissism.” Unable to make his or her true subjectivity coincide with the “ideal” self he or she describes, the patient experiences a feeling of frustration. In her essay, Krauss presents videos realized in the early 1970s by American artists such as Vito Acconci, Peter Campus, Lynda Benglis, and Richard Serra with Nancy Holt. Like the CCTV video-installations discussed before, none of them deals directly with television. Rather, they perform the split of the self as described by Lacan (subject versus object), and point out that whoever controls video technologies, including TV, has the power to objectify the viewers, both physically and psychologically. In Centers (1971), Acconci films himself as he points his forefinger at the center of the camera, which, when transmitted live, coincides with the center of the monitor—as if he’s searching for a correspondence between the agent of the action and his mediated duplicate. In Three Transitions

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(1973), Campus employs the then innovative video editing technique of Chroma key to interact (he, the subject) with his virtual self (he, the object): cutting a paper wall onto which his image is projected; erasing portions of his face, thereby revealing another face underneath; and burning a sheet that transmits his pre-recorded face. While Acconci challenges space, Benglis’ referent is time. In Now (1973), which uses a similar configuration to Outer and Inner Space, she interacts with her pre-recorded self—interrupting the temporal ambiguity of the action, only to issue the vocal command “Now!” or to wonder, “Is it now?”

The Audience Is the Product: Richard Serra In the artworks discussed by Krauss, the body occupies that void between the camera and the monitor, “which re-projects the performer’s image with the immediacy of a mirror.”31 Another key example of this process is Boomerang (1974), a video realized by Richard Serra in collaboration with Nancy Holt. Holt is filmed sitting as she describes the feeling of listening to her voice through headphones with a one-second delay. She even defines the situation as a “prison,” and says, “I am throwing things out in the world and they are boomeranging back”—the boomerang being synonymous of the reverberation. Holt also says, “I am surrounded by me and my mind surrounds me,” a condition that denotes a multiplication of the self into another, uncontrollable object. Like Acconci, Campus, and Benglis, here Holt searches for a feedback from her objectified self in order to find orientation within a system that disrupts the coordinates of space and time, and that alters the condition of selfhood. On this point, Krauss claims: the nature of video performance is specified as an activity of bracketing out the text and substituting for it in the mirror-reflection. The result of this substitution is the presentation of a self-understood to have no past, and as well no connection with any objects that are external to it. For the double that appears on the monitor cannot be called a true external object. Rather it is a displacement of the self which has the effect of transforming the performer’s subjectivity into another, mirror, object.32 Serra emerged in the 1960s in association with Minimalism, a movement that speculated on the potentialities of sculpture to affect, through seriality

 Rosalind Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” October, Vol. 1, (Spring 1976): 52.  Ibid., 55.

31 32

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and large-scale structures, the space (and therefore the context) in which the artwork is installed, or for which it is specifically conceived. Serra’s sculptural research is based on the exploration of “process,” “repetition,” and “serial progression,” employed as allegorical features of modern industrial production and communication. Whilst being primarily appreciated as a sculptor, he also made several films and videos in the 1960s and 1970s; an apparently “collateral” production, which suggests that his whole research is not merely formalist or materialist but could also be interpreted as a sociopolitical commentary. Before Boomerang, Serra had made Television Delivers People (1973) in collaboration with Carlota Fay Schoolman: a series of messages in white Times New Roman font scroll on an electric blue background, accompanied by a lounge music soundtrack (Figure 2.6). The first message is: “The product of Television, Commercial Television, is the Audience.” Then comes: “Mass media means that a medium can deliver masses of people.” And then: “You are delivered to the advertiser who is the customer. He consumes you.” And also: “You are the end product.” Thus, through a process of brainwashing, the traditional role of the audience as passive “consumer” has shifted; the

FIGURE 2.6  Richard Serra, Television Delivers People, video still, 1973. Courtesy of the artist.

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audience, through the artwork, is now presented as the real end product. And toward the end, Serra declares, in caps: “POPULAR ENTERTAINMENT IS BASICALLY PROPAGANDA FOR THE STATUS QUO.” Another work by Serra that specifically addresses television is the video performance Prisoner’s Dilemma (1974), made of a pre-recorded video and a performance. The forty-minute video mixes elements from commercial television and criminal interrogations, where a prize or punishment is handed out—depending on whether the subject answers A or B to specific and often ambiguous questions. “What I did in Prisoner’s Dilemma was to use a particular game theory as a way to direct a situation which was close enough to commercial TV to be able to expose its format at the same time,”33 Serra confessed to Liza Béar in a 1974 interview for the performance art journal Avalanche. The performance was filmed live at 112 Greene Street, a nonprofit art space in SoHo, New York, transformed for the occasion into a television studio partitioned into two sections by a light cardboard wall. The audience watching the monitors stayed on the one side with the artist and his crew (including the art critic Bruce Boice and the art dealer Leo Castelli, who reenacted the interrogation) on the other. The performance ends with Boice and Castelli—neither of whom informed on the other—being sent to the basement for four hours as a symbolic punishment. The whole project was based on the idea that television—like governmental authorities (e.g., a policeman or district attorney) during an interrogation—has the power to manipulate our choices: to make us take positions that we would not necessarily take outside of that specific situation. In other words, television has the power to produce consensus, and that power is in the hands of the government and a few corporations that endorse the interests of television moguls in exchange for control.

2.3 The TV Set and Its Double TV as a Living Organism In the 1960s, the TV set became an integral presence in most American and European homes. More than a guest though, it was the host: a living organism that established new daily rhythms and redefined spaces. Pop artists began incorporating television in their paintings and sculptures

33  Richard Serra, “Prisoner’s Dilemma.” Interview by Liza Baer, Avalanche, No. 9, (1974), in Richard Serra: Writings and Interviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 20.

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alongside other commodities that created a new lifestyle based on the maximum comfort. An early example was British artist Richard Hamilton’s collage Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? (1956), which introduced “pop” as a term for popular culture as well as an art concept. Similarly, in the early 1960s, American artist Tom Wesselmann integrated TV screens, as photo screenprints, into flat domestic still lifes alongside everyday objects and food. As part of a larger investigation on the postwar “American social landscape and its conditions,”34 American photographer Lee Friedlander commented on TV in his series The Little Screens (1961–70): black-andwhite shots of switched-on TV sets—with a penchant for uncanny facial close-ups—within domestic interiors devoid of human presence. Other artists felt the urge to turn TV sets off: César, a member of the French movement of Nouveau Réalisme, placed one on a pedestal made of debris (Ensemble de Télévision, 1961); German artist Günther Uecker drove nails into one (TV 1963, 1963); Paik and Piene decorated one with pearls (Untitled, 1968); Wolf Kahlen, another German artist, applied a mirror on one screen (Mirror TV, 1969–77) and a rock on another (Young Rock, 1971); and Vostell even made a concrete TV (Concrete TV Paris, 1974–81). The average American family sat in front of the TV screen for five hours a day in the 1960s. As a reaction, some artists pushed the TV set outside. In 1963, Vostell created the happening TV Burying for the YAM Festival, a Fluxus event that took place at Pop artist George Segal’s farm in New Brunswick, New Jersey. TV Burying, a typical “pre-medial” action, was a funeral ritual during which a TV set was covered with food, wrapped in barbed wire and buried into the ground. Three years later the Japanese artist and singer Yoko Ono (another member of Fluxus) tried to achieve a similar goal but with a different procedure: her Sky TV (1966) broadcast live images of the sky above the exhibition space where it was installed. In the years of the economic boom, the status of the TV set as a bourgeois commodity was also addressed by Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg in Leben mit Pop—Eine Demonstration für den Kapitalistischen Realismus (Living with Pop—A Demonstration for Capitalism Realism, 1963), a happening at Bergers furniture store in Düsseldorf. Viewers entered in groups and could freely interact with life-size cardboard figures of John F. Kennedy and the art dealer Alfred Schmela, eat food, and sit with the artists on some sofas while a TV set broadcast the news and other evening programs. Since then, the term “Capitalist Realism” has become synonymous with a peculiar version of German Pop Art (particularly the work of Richter and Sigmar  As quoted in “Acknowledgments,” in 12 Photographers of the American Social Landscape, ed. Thomas H. Garver (Waltham, MA: Poses Institute of Fine Arts, Brandeis University, 1967) in Teledgen: Art and Television, ed. Dieter Daniels and Stephan Berg (Munich: Hirmer Verlag GmbH, 2015), 116.

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FIGURE 2.7  Videodrome, movie directed by David Cronenberg, film still, 1983.

Polke), characterized, like this happening, by ironic critiques of capitalism, media, and the culture industry. Taking a step forward into the 1980s, the idea of TV as a living organism became a leitmotiv of sci-fi horror movies such as Poltergeist (1982), written by Steven Spielberg and directed by Tobe Hooper, and Videodrome (1983), written and directed by David Cronenberg (Figure 2.7). In the latter, Max (James Woods), CEO of a TV station specializing in sensationalistic programming, becomes himself the victim of Videodrome, a new program that produces hallucinations and transposes acts of torture and murder from television into material reality and vice versa. According to American media theorist Steven Shaviro, in Videodrome, “The function of vision is no longer to show but to excite the nerves directly. Sight is not a neutral source of information, but a gaping wound, a violation of the integrity of the body.”35 A paradigmatic scene is when Max approaches the televisual close-up of the seducing mouth of Nikki (Debbie Harry), with whom he has a sexual relationship, at which point the whole TV set begins deforming as if an actual body is trying to come out of it. Alongside his décollaged TV sets— such as TV for Millions (1959–67)—Vostell used to leave instructions for the viewers to interact with them, one being, “kiss a person on the screen.”36 Max does the same but as soon as he approaches the screen his body is  Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Theory Out of Bounds) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 140. 36  Quoted in Astrid Kurz, “Wolf Vostell—TV For Millions, 1959/1967,” in Changing Channels: Art and Television 1963–1987, ed. Matthias Michalka (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2010), 63. 35

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eaten up; the Videodrome overcomes that uncanny split between reality and hyperreality. It is not a coincidence that Professor Brian O’Blivion, the character of a media guru, borrows some of McLuhan’s and Baudrillard’s theories for his delirious prophecies: “After all, there is nothing real outside our perception of reality, is there?”37 he wonders, as if to claim that televisual reality is true as much as physical reality just because we perceive it as such.

Interruptions: The TV Set Literalized In his 1984 essay “Television, Furniture, and Sculpture: The Room with the American View,” Acconci, an American artist and architect, approached television from the same perspective he adopted in Centers (1971), his video discussed by Krauss. The connection is exemplified in his thoughts on the televisual face close-up; a phenomenon that, like his pointing at his own image in Centers, literalizes television (as Friedlander’s The Little Screens series made evident). “The close-up is the same size as the TV screen; the face on-screen, then, is a fact, just as the TV set is a fact in the living room,” he writes. But then he wonders, “if this is a face, where’s the body? The face on-screen is a detached head: a head-without-a-body-without-organs.”38 From the 1960s to the 1980s, collaborations with boundary-pushing TV producers resulted in some artists intervening in the daily program schedule with works that literalized the TV set, thus breaking its incessant flow. An early example was Dutch artist Jan Dibbets’ TV as a Fireplace (1969), produced by Schum and aired on WDR 3—the same German TV station responsible for Piene and Tambellini’s Black Gate Cologne. Broadcast nightly between Christmas and New Year’s Eve as a three-minute slot at the close of the station’s program schedule, the work (showing images of a fireplace) literalized the TV set as if it was itself a fireplace. In doing so, it broke that suspension of disbelief enacted by television through the representation of a hyperreal fireplace that doesn’t actually emit heat. During this period, other artists also explored the literalization of television through the intervention of program schedules; in not treating the screen as a window into another world but by creating images that played with the materiality, shape, and volume of the TV set. In TV Aquarium (TV Death 1) (1970–72), Austrian media artist, curator, and writer Peter Weibel turned a TV set into a meditative metaphor of death: an aquarium is drained of water, rendering the viewer helpless as the fish die on screen. Similarly,

 Videodrome. Film. Directed by David Cronenberg, Canada, 1983.  Vito Acconci, “Television, Furniture, and Sculpture: The Room with the American View,” in Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art, ed. Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer (New York: Aperture, 1990), 125. 37 38

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English artist David Hall’s TV Interruptions (1971)—ten three-minute-long films broadcast by Scottish Television—attempted to overcome that sense of remoteness between televisual and physical reality by showing, among other things, a burning TV set (Interruption Piece) and a running tap that fills the screen with water (Tap Piece). Another case of literalization is Fabio Mauri’s Il Televisore che Piange (The Weeping Television Set, 1972), broadcast by Italian public TV channel Rai 2 as part of the program titled “Happening.” In the opening segment, the show’s host presents documentation of paradigmatic happenings by the likes of Allan Kaprow and Jim Dine, after which Mauri’s name and the title of his work appear on the screen. Subsequently, for about twenty seconds, the screen goes white and a grief-stricken weeping sound can be heard. As the weeping ceases, the camera zooms in on a white canvas—one of Mauri’s Schermi (Screens)—bearing the words “The End.” The camera then zooms out to reveal the artist who claims that the viewer has just experienced a happening, which (like the other happenings) was a symbolic event that “broke a usual situation, that of television transmitting images, transmitting nothing but the television itself.”39 By showing that it cannot measure the live reaction of the audience (the most striking element of a happening), a “television happening” suggests that the tele-vision produces alienation. The desire to overcome this condition of remoteness pushed some artists to interrupt the programming by showing the act of watching TV itself, or else the viewer. In Weibel’s The Endless Sandwich (Tele-Aktion I) (1969–72), which shows the back of a man in front of a TV set, the image multiplies smaller and smaller as if embedded within a self-contained infinity mirror (Figure 2.8). Every time he stands up to repair a fault, a duplicate appears. The work was aired by Austrian public TV station ORF in 1971, which, in the same year, also broadcast Facing a Family by another Austrian artist, Valie Export. This work showed a fiveminute scene of a family in a kitchen in front of their TV set. The idea of metaphorically holding up a mirror in front of the television viewer was explored further by American artist Bill Viola in Reverse Television—Portraits of Viewers, aired by Boston’s WGBH five times a day in late November 1983. The work consisted of forty-four video portraits (each thirty -seconds in length) of individuals in their living rooms staring silently at the camera as if they were in front of a TV set (Figure 2.9). According to Raymond Bellour, what “reverses” television here “is not merely its audience made visible,” but “the silence that permeates the shot itself.”40 The same

 Quote extracted from the transcription of Mauri’s talk, retrieved from Vimeo, accessed April 24, 2021, https://vimeo.com/58984747, my translation. 40  Raymond Bellour, “Video Utopia,” (1986), in Between-the-Images (Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2012), 71. 39

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FIGURE 2.8  Peter Weibel, The Endless Sandwich (Tele-Aktion I), video still, 1969– 72. Courtesy of ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe.

silence pervades British artist Paul Graham’s Television Portraits (1989–95), a series of meditative profile photographs of people whose faces reflect the light of a TV set in front of them, which is out of frame. British scholar of photography David Chandler claims that we are led “to what we cannot see: to what is happening on the television screen… and more importantly to what is going on in the sitters’ heads, what they might be thinking.”41

Commercials and Zapping As a peculiar form of interruption, and a constitutive feature of television itself, commercials represent a fertile area of investigation for artists. In a few cases artists have even realized actual spots. The first was Warhol’s Underground Sundae (1968), which, although advertised a new ice cream,

 David Chandler, “A Thing There Was That Mattered,” in Paul Graham, ed. Paul Graham and Michael Mack (London: MACK, 2009), 45.

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could be considered, like all his other “commercial” works (e.g., magazine illustrations, record covers, etc.), an artwork in its own right. Made for the restaurant chain Schrafft, the sixty-second close-up color video of a cherry-topped chocolate sundae is characterized by the continuous focus calibration and the fading of colored lights in the room. The resulting quasipsychedelic effect produces a sense of alienation that disrupts the mechanism of television, or as Joselit put it, “Warhol dissolved the commodity itself into the pulsating waves of the network.”42 If Warhol was able to achieve a feeling of estrangement while still showing the commodity, the artists whom Austrian shoe brand Humanic commissioned spots from 1969 to 1980 (including Roland Goeschl and Richard Kriesche) were given total freedom, provided that the company logo was shown at the end. With the same obligation, in the mid-1980s MTV created Artbreaks, which will be touched upon again in the fifth chapter. Attracted by the youth appeal of the channel, from 1985 to 1987 artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lynda Benglis, Dara Birnbaum, and Richard Prince created short clips. A new edition of Artbreaks was born in 2012 and featured works by a new generation of artists, including Tala Madani, Mickalene Thomas, and Guido van der Werve. While these artists speculated on the TV commercial from the inside, as accomplices, others employed the simple yet efficient tactic of appropriation in the attempt to dismantle the subliminal effects of advertising to induce viewers to buy certain products and embrace specific lifestyles. An early case of note is then-Yugoslavian now-Croatian artist Sanja Iveković’s Slatko nasilje (Sweet Violence, 1974): a series of spots for Western products, cosmetics, and technological appliances appropriated from TV Zagreb’s economic propaganda program when the communist country knows as Yugoslavia still existed, onto which the artist juxtaposed a series of vertical black bars as if the appealing commodities were being looked at from inside a prison. In this way, Iveković exposes her country’s ambiguous and almost paradoxical belief that a “third way”—between socialism and the free market—was possible. Taking a step forward, another interesting case of appropriation of TV commercials is Harun Farocki’s Ein Tag im Leben der Endverbraucher (A Day in the Life of a Consumer, 1993). The forty-four-minute film plunders clips from dozens of commercials (from various eras) to convey the idea of “zapping”—or intercutting scenes in chronological sequence to suggest the day in the life of a typical consumer, from early morning to late night. The film shows how the market advertises a product for every moment of daily life, or rather, how daily life is structured according to the products being advertised: from face creams in the morning to food for lunch; from alcoholic drinks in the evening to sleeping pills.  Joselit, 13.

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FIGURE 2.9  Bill Viola, Reverse Television—Portraits of Viewers, video stills, 1983. Broadcast television project. Photo: Kira Perov. © Bill Viola Studio.

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Active since the early 1970s, Spanish artist Antoni Muntadas (also known mononymously as Muntadas) has addressed television in several works. Beginning with Acción TV (1972), in which he appears with the letters T and V on his eyelids, he has always presented television as an instrument of manipulation, as in the videos Media Ecology Ads (1982) and Video Is Television? (1989). The former is made up of three clips: Fuse (a fuse burning), Timer (sand running through an hourglass), and Slow Down (water running from a faucet). Focusing, as Norwegian art historian Ina Blom comments, “on objects that not only exist ‘in’ the time of moving image-recording, but that are also essentially of time,”43 the Media Ecology Ads suggest the need—for the sake of good mental health and well-being— to reduce the exposure to and consumption of ads (thus the term “ecology”) as attention-grabbing and time-consuming tools of persuasion. Commercials are foundational elements of the “flow,” the new narrative form peculiar of postmodern television, theorized by Williams in 1974. Reinforced by a more and more frenetic use of the remote control, an activity also known as “zapping,” the flow induced new habits of media consumption, which the French filmmaker and artist Chris Marker addressed in Zapping Zone: Proposal for an Imaginary Television (1990). Realized for the seminal group exhibition Passages de l’Image at the Centre Georges Pompidou, the immersive installation consisted of thirteen TV sets and personal computers transmitting found footage, clips of Marker’s films, and computer-generated imagery. By “enabling to zap in the zone,”44 as Raymond Bellour suggested in the catalog, the installation transposed the visual act of zapping into a physical space, allowing the viewer to experience and dissect it as an external object rather than being immersed into it.

Two Cases of Metatelevision Artists’ attempts to break the flow of normal television programming have not only manifested as abrupt “interruptions.” There are also a few cases in which the cooperation between artists and TV stations was realized as television programs destined to a wide audience, albeit in their unconventional nature. Two paradigmatic cases are Jean-Luc Godard and his wife Anne-Marie Miéville’s Six Fois Deux/Sur et Sous la Communication (Six Times Two/On and Under Communication, 1976), and Daniele Ciprì

43  Ina Blom, “Muntadas’ Mediascapes,” in Muntadas: Entre/Between, ed. Daina Augaitis and Antoni Muntadas (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte, Reina Sofia, 2011), 88. 44  Raymond Bellour, “Zapping Zone,” in Passages de l’Image, ed. Raymond Bellour, Catherine David and Christine Van Assche (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1990), 169.

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and Franco Maresco’s Cinico TV (Cynical TV, 1992). Interestingly enough, neither Godard and Miéville nor Ciprì and Maresco are properly known as visual artists—that is, artists whose primary audience is that of museums, galleries, biennials, and art fairs—but as “avant-garde” filmmakers whose experimental approach has often pushed their films outside the conventional boundaries of their discipline. Broadcast on French TV station FR3 on a Sunday evening during the summer of 1976, Godard and Miéville’s Six Fois Deux/Sur et Sous la Communication consisted of six episodes (ranging from forty to sixty minutes in length) made of two complementary segments: a visual essay on the social, political, and cultural role of media; and an interview on labor and leisure with various individuals, including a dairy farmer, a mathematician, and Godard himself. Like other members of the Nouvelle Vague, the film director and critic is known for employing the film medium to address social and political issues; not as a representational tool though, but through a metalinguistic deconstruction of cinema as a manifestation of modernity itself. Interviewed about Six Fois Deux/Sur et Sus la Communication in the influential film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma (of which Godard was a longtime contributor), Gilles Deleuze claimed that Godard approached television with the same metalinguistic attitude he reserved for cinema. According to Deleuze, with this program it was as if Godard had asked: “Why not pay the people who watch television, instead of making them pay, because they are engaged in real work and are themselves providing a public service?”45 According to Deleuze, Godard and Miéville’s TV program was characterized by an inquiry into the very concept of labor, which modern society has concealed behind leisure activities. “And children are supplied with syntax like workers being given tools,” continued Deleuze, “in order to produce utterances conforming to accepted meanings.”46 Moving forward in time from France to Italy, Ciprì and Maresco’s Cinico TV, although very different in style and language, dealt with similar issues. The program was born in 1990 on TVM, a local TV station in Palermo, Sicily (also the hometown of its two directors). Following a brief stint on Berlusconi’s Italia 1, it finally found its home on Rai 3, which—thanks to the direction of Angelo Guglielmi (1987–94)—was at that time a model for progressive and cultural programming. In total, Cinico TV consisted of fortynine short, black-and-white episodes (each a few minutes in length), shot on a very low budget in the outskirts of Palermo, the city where the criminal organization known as the Mafia emerged from. The format comprised video interviews with grotesque male characters—debouched, criminal, insane,  Gilles Deleuze, “Trois questions sur Six fois deux,” Cahiers, no. 271. (November 1976). English version found in ‘Gilles Deleuze: Negotiations 1972–1990’ (Columbia University Press, 1995), translated by Martin Joughin. 46  Ibid., 41. 45

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boorish—who would reply to the off-screen interlocutor with illogical answers; incomprehensible grumblings or body sounds like farts and burps. One of the accomplishments of Cinico TV was to expose and demystify the social substrate that allowed the Mafia to take root. By coincidence, when the show was at the height of its popularity in 1992, some episodes were filmed around the same locations where the horrific murders of high-profile antiMafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone (May 23) and Paolo Borsellino (July 19) took place. Another key factor was in the program’s scheduling: Cinico TV was aired shortly before 8 pm—typically when Italian viewers would be preparing for dinner; a key factor in reinforcing a harsh commentary on the increasing cynicism of TV. Television critic Aldo Grasso, for example, reviewed the program by saying that TV, as an organism, “often manages to find forms of self-defense, self-regulatory systems, remedies against the poison… Ciprì and Maresco have translated into image the most radical critique of a certain way of making TV.”47 Both Six Fois Deux/Sur et Sous la Communication and Cinico TV are the result of alliances between TV stations and artists willing to dismantle the mechanism of television from the inside. While the television projects of the likes of Schum, Paik, Serra, Mauri, and Viola have all abruptly broken the TV flow, Godard & Miéville and Ciprì & Maresco’s programs have leveraged on the popular appeal of “realism” to produce a subtle commentary on the political economy of personal communication—each referring to a respective national cinematographic tradition. By displaying an array of diligent workers, the former reminisces upon cinéma vérité, while the abject beings portrayed in the latter hark back to Neorealismo. In this sense, both programs echo Lazzarato and Beller’s theories, according to which, television produces forms of immaterial labor and that the media function as “deterritorialized factories,”48 whose products become the viewers’ subjectivities.

2.4 Tele-Pictures The Allegorical Impulse of the Pictures Generation The Pictures Generation is the title of an exhibition organized in 2009 by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, which labeled, retroactively, a seminal group of American artists emerged in the late 1970s—including  Aldo Grasso, “Da Palermo la TV del Cinismo: Cinico TV di Daniele Ciprì and Franco Maresco, Uno dei Rari Momenti di Buona TV Offerti dai Palinsesti,” Corriere della Sera, April 17 (1992), in Cinico TV: Volume Primo 1989–1992, ed. Paola Cristalli and Maurizio Bassi (Bologna: Cineteca di Bologna, 2011), 49–50. 48  Beller. 47

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Jack Goldstein, Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince, and Cindy Sherman— whose work mainly employs the appropriation of mass media imagery. The title derives from the Pictures (1977) exhibition curated by Douglas Crimp at Artists Space—the nonprofit exhibition venue in New York. According to Crimp, a defining characteristic of these artists was that they were “not in search of sources of origins, but structures of signification: underneath each picture there is always another picture.”49 In their hands, fragments of advertising, cinema, and television become allegories—“pictures” that reveal hidden moral or political meanings. A clever yet harsh response to a peculiar phase of late capitalism and media production, the practice of the Pictures artists is quintessentially postmodern insofar as it deconstructs those mechanisms through which media reinforce the “grand narratives” of modernity. Fundamental to understanding this practice is the linguistic distinction (in English) between the term “picture”—that is, a material representation produced by various means (e.g., a painting, a photograph)—and the term “image:” an immaterial representation produced by an optical device (e.g., a mirror). In accordance to the postmodernist discourse, these artists isolate certain “pictures” as symbolic fragments of larger narrative processes in the attempt to reveal how they are, in fact, artificial “constructions” made by political, economic, and media systems to exert their power, producing consensus and reinforcing the status quo. An inspirational figure for the emerging Pictures Generation in the late 1970s was the artist John Baldessari, already renowned by then as a representative member of the Conceptual Art movement, who also taught some of these artists at CalArts in Valencia, California. At that time, Baldessari began transposing his interest for the relationships between text and images (influenced by Claude Levi-Strauss’ structuralist theories) to media. Although most of his works from this phase related to cinema, it comes as no surprise that one of his earliest attempts to trace patterns of thought underlying the language of media was conducted as an investigation of television, through the fragmentation, re-presentation and connection of various pictures. In Blasted Allegories (1978), Baldessari approached TV “as a window into the world,” he claimed: “For many, it is the world and not even a surrogate one.”50 First, he took random photographs of the TV screen applying ROYGBIV color filters. Then, he and his assistants assigned a

 Douglas Crimp, “Pictures,” October, No. 8, (Spring 1979): 87.  John Baldessari, “Blasted Allegories,” (1978) in More Than You Wanted to Know about John Baldessari: Volume 2, ed. Meg Cranston and Hans Ulrich Obrist (Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2013), 58. 49

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word to each duotone picture: “the first that comes to mind is the best, provided that it makes a logical connection,”51 he said. Finally, he arranged them in sequences and grids according to the color spectrum. This way of indexing revealed the co-existence of multiple potential meanings in a single sentence, thus emphasizing “the complex structure of the allegorical form,”52 as Marcia Tucker wrote in the forward of a 1987 anthology of postmodernist artists’ writings, deliberately titled Blasted Allegories in homage to Baldessari. During this period, another paradigmatic artist of the Pictures Generation—although not one of Baldessari’s pupils, and not someone who addressed television directly in her work—Cindy Sherman produced her most famous work to date, the series Untitled Film Stills (1977–80). Here she re-presented stereotypical female characters from 1950s and 1960s Hollywood and European movies; impersonating them within reconstructions of original scenes, in order to point out how subjectivity is built on media representation. What unites the seventy black-and-white photographs of the series—which initiated a feminist pathway within the Pictures Generation—is the fact that most of the characters (played by Sherman herself) do not look at the camera but off-frame—a reminder that women in movies of that era were not presented as subjects but objects, whose objectification Sherman makes explicit by alluding to the unseen presence of an external male gaze. While, in her prolific output, Sherman focuses mainly on cinema and later advertising and fashion (except for a TV project made in collaboration with MICA-TV that will be discussed in Chapter 4) other women artists associated with the Pictures Generation have created videos and installations that directly addressed television. Judith Barry, Gretchen Bender, and Dara Birnbaum have all tried to deconstruct television as a power system that invented modes of subliminal communication and forms of representation that have reinforced women stereotypes in society. As Craig Owens argued in his essay “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism” (1983), “these artists are not primarily interested in what representations says about women; rather, they investigate what representation does to women (e.g., the way it invariably positions them as objects of the male gaze).”53

 Ibid., 59.  Marcia Tucker, “Director’s Forward,” in Blasted Allegories: An Anthology of Writings by Contemporary Artists, ed. Brian Wallis (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art and Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1987), vii. 53  Craig Owens, Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 180. 51 52

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Feminist Approaches to Media Fantasies Barry refers to television in her early twenty-eight-minute video Casual Shopper (1980–81), which presents the act of shopping as a metaphor of seduction by showing the fictional characters of a man and a woman, both embodying stereotypes promoted by TV commercials and soap operas— beautiful, elegant, mysterious—as they pursue one another inside a shopping mall. A throbbing electronic beat sets the rhythm of their quasi-mechanical movements as they stroll in front of store windows, ride up and down on escalators, and cruise through the maze-like displays of blatant products and their collapsible packaging so typical of 1980s American malls. In the 1980 essay “Casual Imagination,” which partly relates to the video, Barry traces a brief history of the “spectacle of looking”—an activity that produces desire. According to Barry, from Renaissance theater scenography through to sixteenth-century mnemonic devices onward, perspective became “a way of methodologizing the imagination”54—a scopic apparatus that would, in the eighteenth century, be employed to build those boulevards, arcades, and department stores through which flâneurs and flâneuses would stroll and buy products. This model became a staple of twentieth-century Western society with the shopping mall becoming a physical extension of the televisual hyperreality, where televisual fantasies materialize. “Television commercials are viewed on TV sets in the home,” continues Barry, “Shopping takes place in a space specifically constructed for that purpose.”55 Barry also addressed television in other videos such as: Kaleidoscope (1978), They Agape (1982), and Space Invaders (1982), all based on “narrative tropes from soap operas and other television conventions in relation to the construction of gender, subjectivity, and the short-film/video form.”56 The quote is taken from the digital-only catalog of the exhibition Are You Ready for TV? organized by the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) in 2010, for which Barry and Ken Saylor recreated an installation they had originally made as exhibition designers in 1990 for the show titled From Receiver to Remote Control: The TV Set at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. Comprising twenty period rooms, the installation mapped “the transformation of the US home from

54  Judith Barry, “Casual Imagination,” in Judith Barry: Public Fantasy, ed. Iwona Blazwick (London: The Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1991), 23. 55  Ibid., 35. 56  Judith Barry, “Media and Me,” in Are You Ready for TV?, ed. Chus Martínez (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2010), 80, MACBA, accessed April 24, 2021, https:// img.macba.cat/public/uploads/20111125/ready4tv_eng.pdf.

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a site of production to a site of consumption and revealing how deeply television has affected every aspect of daily and cultural life.”57 If Barry examined how television fantasies affect physical reality, Bender focused on the recurring strategies adopted by TV, notably repetition. Her video installations, which the artist called “electronic theaters,” critique late capitalist Western culture, which she considered to be “saturated by corporate self-representation.” Characteristic of these immersive installations is the use of multiple TV screens, synchronized in groups or all together; a configuration that can be used politically to collapse the structure that the network seeks. Rather than the one of split screen, the perspective of multiple screensin space would enable the viewer to detect the general mode of operations of the networks. This ‘physical’ collision of screens could multiply the opportunity for a critical examination of this mode, thereby reducing it to its abstract codes.58 The thirty-three monitors assembled in Wild Dead (1984), and twenty-four in Total Recall (1987) (Figure 2.10) constitute postmodern Gesamtkunstwerk—merging the immersive idea of theatre, the phantasmagorical dimension of cinema, the captivating appeal of advertising, and the hypnotizing power of television. They transmit TV clips, mainstream film footage, CGI, and logos of American telecommunications companies, such as AT&T and the TV networks ABC and CBS—overloading the viewer with stroboscopic flows of uncanny icons and information that induces an almost nauseating, discomforting effect. Unlike other artists of the Pictures Generation, who slowed down the media flow to isolate certain pictures, Bender accelerated the flow by pushing every single fragment behind what Baudrillard, in “The Ecstasy of Communication” (1983), described as “a nonreflecting surface, an immanent surface where operations unfold.”59 In his essay titled “Eclipse of the Spectacle” (1984), which opens with two still frames showing an abstracted AT&T logo from another of Bender’s installations, Dumping Core (1984), American art and media theorist Jonathan Crary wrote: “Information, structured by automated data processing, becomes a new kind of raw material—one that is not depleted by use. Patterns of accumulation and consumption now shift onto new surfaces.”60 According to Crary, neo-television no longer deals with a  Ibid., 82.  Gretchen Bender, “Political Entertainment,” in TV Guides: A Collection of Thoughts about Television, ed. Barbara Kruger (New York: Kuklapolitan Press, 1985), 27. 59  Jean Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Communication,” 127. 60  Jonathan Crary, “Eclipse of the Spectacle,” in Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation (Art Criticism and Theory), ed. Brian Wallis (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art and Boston: D.R: Godine, 1984), 286–7. 57 58

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FIGURE 2.10  Gretchen Bender, Total Recall, installation view, 1987. Courtesy of the Gretchen Bender Estate and Metro Pictures, New York.

spectacle à la Debord, but—as articulated by Baudrillard, and visualized in Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983)—with “a threshold at which the social domestication of the body produces unmanageable disruption, as in psychosis or contagion;”61 these being precisely the effects of this new scopic regime whose mechanism Bender reproduces in her work.

The Video as a Poststructuralist Visual Essay The quintessential artist of the Pictures Generation to develop a critique of television is Dara Birnbaum, whose works—which could be defined as poststructuralist visual essays—combine the allegorical impulse of Baldessari and Sherman with the exploration on the formal and linguistic strategies of media as conducted by Barry and Bender. For example, her best-known video, Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978), appropriates the comic book superhero Wonder Woman from a highly popular American TV series of the time, presenting it as an allegory for

 Ibid., 291.

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FIGURE 2.11 Dara Birnbaum, Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, video still, 1978–79. Courtesy of the artist, Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York, and Marian Goodman Gallery. © Dara Birnbaum.

the condition of many women whose empowerment remains confined to media fantasies (Figure 2.11). But it also uses basic editing techniques (e.g., the loop) to expose the overloading effect of media and the power of postproduction to reinforce imagination. Originally, the artist had also planned to appropriate other TV series in this work (i.e., The Incredible Hulk, The Six Million Dollar Man, and The Bionic Woman62), but in the end opted for Wonder Woman alone— probably because, as Owens suggests, she is “the perfect embodiment of the phallic mother,” as well as the “representation of masculine desire.”63 Similarly, American art historian T.J. Demos claims that Wonder Woman

  Dara Birnbaum, “Transformation/Technology: Notes,” in Dara Birnbaum: The Dark Matter of Media Light, ed. Karen Kelly, Barbara Schroder, and Giel Vandecaveye (New York: DelMonico Books, 2010), 97. 63  Owens, 182. 62

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represents “both a powerful subject and a sexualized object.”64 Unlike Sherman’s women (submissive to an external male gaze), Birnbaum’s superhero represents an empowered woman. Indeed, it is no coincidence that Wonder Woman is also a feminist icon. As the title alone suggests, the work (close to six minutes in length) explores the very concept of video “technology”—using video to demystify TV—and the idea of “transformation” embodied by the protagonist. “The intention of my tape, in terms of appropriation of the TV material, would be to expose the structure which allows this consumption to occur,”65 claims Birnbaum: “By removing the images from their placement in the narrative structure, the fluidity and continuity of the process of consumption is disrupted.”66 By looping a scene that is effectively already a loop (i.e. the character spinning in order to transform), Birnbaum accelerates the narrative into a “form of constraint,”67 as Demos put it, which leaves the audience with a special effect whose power to deceive is put under scrutiny. Birnbaum uses television as “found” material in several other works, such as Kiss the Girls: Make Them Cry (1979), made up of footage from the popular TV game show Hollywood Squares. Here, the artist uses the tic-tac-toe grid of the show’s scenography (in which the contestants are inserted) as an allegory of the power of television to reinforce women stereotypes. A blonde, a brunette, and a child—whose physical aspects correspond to the way they introduce themselves—occupy specific spots on the grid, allowing the audience to identify with predetermined models. “Taken out of context, the gestures are so unreal, and yet they are gestures they’ve chosen to act out in order to reach an audience of millions,”68 claimed Birnbaum. The artist also appropriates television in Pop-Pop Video (1980), a work comprising two parts. The first part, Pop-Pop Video: General Hospital/Olympic Women Speed Skating, mixes an intense conversation between a male doctor and a woman patient (taken from the American soap opera General Hospital) with women speed skating (taken from an Olympic sportscast). The second part, Pop-Pop Video: Kojak/Wang, compares the gunfire effects of a shootout from Kojak with the colored

 T.J. Demos, Dara Birnbaum—Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (London: Afterall Books, 2010), 53. 65  Dara Birnbaum. Interview with Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, in Dara Birnbaum—Rough Edits: Popular Image Video Works 1977–1980, ed. Benjamin H.D. Buchloh (Halifax: The Press of Nova Scotia, 1987), 85. 66  Ibid. 67  Demos, 21. 68   Dara Birnbaum. Interview with Barbara Shroder and Karen Kelley, BOMB, No. 104, (Summer 2008), Bomb Magazine, accessed April 24, 2021, https://bombmagazine.org/articles/ dara-birnbaum/. 64

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laser beams of a commercial for the computer company Wang. Birnbaum homogenizes the plundered imagery through the use of unifying threads: a rock/experimental soundtrack in the former, and the colored-bars TV test pattern in the latter. In doing so, the pictures “break the temporal continuity of the television narrative,” claims German art historian Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “and split it into self-reflexive elements that make the minute and seemingly inextricable interaction of behavior and ideology an observable pattern.”69 Although she never examined television directly in her artworks, another Pictures Generation artist who deserves to be mentioned is Barbara Kruger. In the 1980s, Kruger contributed to the postmodernist discourse about television through her column “Remote Control” in the magazine Artforum, and TV Guides, her edited anthology of artists’ writings (Kuklapolitan Press, 1985). Citing one of her artworks from 1982, in the November 1985 issue of Artforum, she wrote: “We know TV meant what it said when it announced, ‘You Are There.’ We know that we have received orders not to move and that we’re learning to walk in place at the speed of light.”70 In the September 1989 issue, she reiterated the idea: “[TV] simulates an ‘open’ relationship, offering us a menu of seemingly multiple choices and encouraging flirtations and fickleness. We see what we think we want to see. We make mute.”71 But in fact we cannot escape from the prison-like hyperreality that TV has built for us.

Function Is to Perform Fiction Thomas Lawson, another artist associated with the Pictures Generation, who, like Kruger, has also been able to translate his critical approach to representation with words, often alludes to television in his writings. In a 1981 article eloquently titled “Switching Channels” (published in Flash Art), Lawson argued: We are constantly bombarded with the display of a norm of contentment. We get it in advertising, in the movies, on TV. We get it at school and at home. Constantly we are shown the life we are supposed to be living and enjoying, and we are made to feel inadequate if we fail to conform….TV is the most important of the tools which propagate the spectacle of the

  Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art,” Artforum, Vol. 21, No. 1, (Summer 1982): 55. 70  Barbara Kruger, Remote Control: Power, Cultures, and the World of Appearances (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1993), 80. 71  Ibid., 47. 69

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dominant order. TV offers choices, but they all turn out to be variations on the same bland picture.72 Prior to the 1990s, representations of the other—that were not depicted as caricatures in TV (i.e. anti-conformists and minorities)—were very rare occurrences. The audience was plunged into a fictional universe where the masses conformed to certain formal standards—in terms of appearance (e.g., height, skin color, shape, somatic features) and how they spoke (e.g., tone of voice and clarity of language). These “pictures” reduced the bodies of actors and TV hosts to those of mannequins whose only function was to perform a fictional reality. In parallel with the Pictures Generation, artists from countries other than the United States also dealt with issues of representation—two examples being the Irishman James Coleman and the Canadian Stan Douglas. Coleman’s references to television form part of his larger investigation into temporality and the relation between the viewer and the work of art. Krauss has pointed to the work of Coleman as symptomatic of a post-medium condition alongside such figures as William Kentridge and Christian Marclay, both of whom have experimented with unusual technical supports—inventing new mediums of expression. In the case of Coleman, this is the lightbox and the slide projection; both turn the exhibition space into a walkthrough, which exposes, while reacting to them, the mechanisms of traditional media like cinema and television. Whilst the reference to TV may not be immediately evident in Coleman’s work, in his essay featured in the catalog to Coleman’s 1999 solo exhibition at Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona, French art critic Jean-Christophe Royoux interpreted Coleman’s work as a paradigmatic exploration of the TV series. One of the artworks discussed by Royoux, Clara and Dario (1975), is a wall-size double projection of the close-up portraits of a man and a woman, Clara and Dario, accompanied by a synchronized audio narration telling the love story of two children, Elsa and Andrea. The confusion generated by the overlaps of the four characters is, according to Royoux, “the demonstration of a troubled, cut off, unworkable, even impossible communication… It is as though James Coleman’s ‘archaeology’ brought together two archaic forms of representation—theater and narration—via the model of television.”73 The same approach is taken for Kojak and Zamora (1977). This video installation juxtaposes “reality” and “fiction” with references to the contemporary live TV broadcast of a murder trial (the first seen on TV), in 72  Thomas Lawson, “Switching Channels,” Flash Art, No. 102, March–April (1981) in Thomas Lawson—Mining for Gold: Selected Writings (1979–1996), ed. Lionel Bovier and Fabrice Stroun (Zurich: JRP Ringier and Paris; Les Presses du Réel, 2004), 49. 73  Jean-Christophe Royoux, “Expanded Spectatorship: Narrative Strategies in the Work of James Coleman,” in James Coleman (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 1999), 46.

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which Ronny Zamora, a Puerto Rican teenager convicted for the murder of a woman, defended himself by declaring he was driven to committing the crime after long exposure to watching Kojak. Douglas’ artworks too expose the stereotypes media are capable of perpetuating by dismantling the mechanism of fictionalization that they trigger. He openly addresses television in two series: Television Spots (1987– 88) and Monodramas (1991). Planned to be inserted in regular advertising segments— unannounced and without a proper introduction—and broadcast by private TV networks in Saskatoon and Ottawa, the twelve fifeen–twentysecond-long Television Spots are all based on the idea of “being watched”: be it a man on a sidewalk, a parking attendant, four friends seen walking from behind on the notes of Stand by Me, or a woman sitting at the far end of a bus laughing out loud. Elements of these micro-narratives are expanded and articulated more thoroughly in the ten thirty–sixty-second-long films of the Monodramas series, notably the dysfunctional use of suspense and the mise-en-scène of situations of misunderstanding. When broadcast nightly in British Columbia in 1992, viewers at home were confronted with broken forms of fiction that “cut holes in the continuum of televisual monologue,”74 wrote Royoux in a 1994 catalog essay. “The rhetoric of suspense… becomes the means of prolonging the interval, or the proximity between the spectator and the work,” he continued. In “I’m Not Gary,” for example, two men walk toward each other on a market street. As they get close one greets the other: “Hi Gary, how you doing?” In response, the other man, seen in a close-up, simply answers: “I’m not Gary.” His function then shifts from performing fiction to performing an interruption of the production of pictures.

 Jean-Christophe Royoux, “The Conflict of Communication,” in Stan Douglas, ed. Christine Van Assche (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1994), 67.

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3 Breaking News: Television Between Art and Activism

3.1 Guerrilla Television The Rise of the Guerrilla Television Movement In the late 1960s, the Sony Portapak and other portable video recorders inspired not only artists interested in conducting aesthetic and cultural speculations but also activists who wanted to decentralize the telecommunications system. Both were part of the first generation “‘brought up’ on TV,”1 as Howard Wise ascribed in the exhibition catalogue of TV as a Creative Medium (1969): those who “read ‘do it yourself’ books on how to make radio and TVs”2 and who demanded participation in the forms of information and entertainment they consumed. To galvanize their activities was also the promise that, thanks to Cable Television or CATV, “every home and office will contain a communications center of a breadth and flexibility to influence every aspect of private and community life,”3 as Ralph Lee Smith wrote in his prophetic article “The Wired Nation.” Some of the artists featured in TV as a Creative Medium, such as Schneider, Gillette, and Ryan, were also the initiators of that movement of dissent against mainstream media known as “guerrilla television” that emerged in the United States around 1968. Inflamed by certain theories of Eco and McLuhan; inspired by the so-called New Journalism of Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, and Hunter S. Thompson; and close to hippie culture, this “alternative” species of television aligned itself to a set of  Wise.  Ibid. 3  Ralph Lee Smith, “The Wired Nation,” The Nation, Vol. 210, No. 19, May 18 (1970) in David Joselit, “Tale of the Tape,” Artforum, Vol. 40, No. 9 (May 2002): 152. 1 2

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countercultural media: radio, magazines, books, and records. Like all these vehicles for alternative forms of cultural production, artistic expression, and communication, guerrilla television was the result of collective ventures born out of a desire to reclaim transparency and civil rights—and foremost, the freedom of speech. Although similar phenomena appeared in various countries, it is in the United States that guerrilla television assumed clear contours as a movement in its own right, at the crossroads of avant-garde art and activism. The protagonists of guerrilla television were all collectives, starting with the New York City-based Raindance Corporation and Videofreex, and the San Francisco-based Ant Farm. Other groups in New York were: Commediation, Televisionary Associates, Information Structures, Global Village, Revolutionary People’s Communication Project, and People’s Video Theater. In California, besides Ant Farm, there was Media Access, and later TVTV; May Day Video Collective formed in Washington, DC, while Broadside TV was located in Tennessee; and University Community Video was founded by a group in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The main activity of the guerrilla television videomakers consisted in producing street tapes; that is, clips filmed in the public sphere—either to document public events or in the form of interviews with generic passersby or members of underrepresented communities who could offer more direct information and a transparent viewpoint than that adopted by mainstream media. Aside from a pioneering tape by Paik (who, in 1965, filmed Pope Paul VI’s visit in New York), the street tapes focused on specific social contexts and communities that were not usually given a voice. Gillette, for example, interviewed youths in the Manhattan neighborhood of the East Village, while Ryan focused on the citizens of the so-called Resurrection City—a six-week encampment formed in Washington, DC, in 1968 by followers of Martin Luther King while campaigning. The same year street tapes were made during the bloody protests that erupted around the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which followed the assassination of King and of the potential future president, Robert F. Kennedy. An early theoretical background that gave substance and motivation to the rise of the movement was a lesson that Eco delivered at the “Vision ’67” symposium in New York entitled “Towards a Semiological Guerrilla Warfare,” which called upon a “cultural guerrilla” to be fought by “the scholars and educators of tomorrow… who would restore a critical dimension to passive reception.”4 Eco aligned this new type of guerrilla to coeval countercultural phenomena of mass dissent that invented new nonindustrial forms of communication. It was not intended as a violent

4  Umberto Eco, “Towards a Semiological Guerrilla Warfare,” 1967 in Travels in Hyperreality (San Diego: Harcourt Inc., 1986), 143–4.

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form of guerrilla warfare, of course, but involved warfare tactics, and, like any form of guerrilla, it aimed at producing a social and cultural revolution. Even more inspirational than Eco for the rise of the guerrilla television movement were McLuhan’s theories. As early as 1964, the Canadian thinker wrote: “The TV Child expects involvement and doesn’t want a specialist job in the future. He does want a role and a deep commitment to his society.”5 But his main contribution is from 1970: “World War I was a railway war of centralism and encirclement. World War II was a radio war of decentralization. World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.”6 McLuhan suggested that power is exerted by whoever controls information; to decentralize the telecommunications system thereby meant to give part of this power to the citizens—a dream that would only become reality with the mass diffusion of the Internet almost three decades later.

The Theories Behind Guerrilla Television An assistant of McLuhan’s at New York’s Fordham University in 1968, Ryan theorized a cybernetic use of the videotape as a prosthesis of the human sensorium to turn the passive consumer into an empowered producer, or what would later become defined as “prosumer.” In TV as a Creative Medium, Ryan presented the CCTV-based installation Everyman’s Moebius Strip (1969), which, like Gillette and Schneider’s Wipe Cycle, played with the delayed images of the gallery’s viewers. But neither he nor Schneider and Gillette were content with that; to activate a real “process” meant overcoming the boundaries of the art world, and it was in order to achieve this aspiration that they joined forces with the young Time magazine contributor Michael Shamberg. Together, they founded the Raindance Corporation collective, whose name was intended as a pun on the Rand Corporation—a governmental think tank that provided analysis for the US military. The Raindance Corporation, which also included Marco Vassi, Louis Jaffe, Beryl Korot, and Phyllis Gershuny, set up in a loft in the Union Square area of Manhattan. The group’s early output appeared under the umbrella of The Center for Decentralized Television, a project funded by the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA). In June 1970, the Raindance Corporation released 2,000 copies of the first of the eleven issues of Radical Software (1970–74)—a large tabloid that became the official forum of the

5 6

 McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 335.  McLuhan, Culture Is Our Business, 66.

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movement to discuss issues related to an alternative use of video technologies and television. Radical Software had the tone of a manifesto and mixed speculative theories, infographics, and profiles of various practitioners: textual and visual elements laid out with a graphic style reminiscent of psychedelic illustration, underground comics, and Quentin Fiore’s verbovisual paperbacks for McLuhan. Radical Software featured articles by some of the most representative figures of the early information age, including Paik, Youngblood, and the visionary architect Buckminster Fuller. But the most interesting contributions are by the group’s members, notably Ryan. His ideas were built around the presupposition that “VT (videotape) is not TV. If anything, it’s TV flipped into itself,”7 and the concept of “infolding information,”8 or else the chance offered by video—as a simultaneous medium—to reflect on the artificiality of the “pictures” created by mainstream media. But it is “Cybernetic Guerrilla Warfare” (featured in the third issue) that made Ryan the movement’s quintessential thinker. Motivated by McLuhan’s prophecy of a Third World War as an “information war,”9 the article promotes the use of portable cameras as weapons of social and cultural transformation. On behalf of the Raindance Corporation, in 1971, Shamberg collected and reformulated all the main ideas discussed in Radical Software into a book, simply titled Guerrilla Television (Figure 3.1). Designed by the transdisciplinary collective Ant Farm (already responsible for some of the funkiest graphics in Radical Software), Guerrilla Television synthesizes the  key concepts behind this fruitful movement, such as the difference between information in the press (“biased toward hierarchy and control because it fosters linearity and detachment”10) and electronic media (“they are everywhere all at once”11) that assign the user an active role. What emerges clearly from the book is the movement’s ultimate goal for a media ecology, which meant not only to depurate the infosphere—that is, to reduce the amount of information—but to decentralize mainstream media. “In Media-America” (another key term), “our information structures are so designed as to minimize feedback,”12 claimed Shamberg in a critique of Electronic Video Recording, or EVR (a film-based format produced by CBS television to read tapes but not for recording), and in praise of the “media bus” (a futuristic vehicle equipped with video production systems 7  Paul Ryan, “Cable Television: The Raw and the Overcooked”, Radical Software, N.1, 1971. 8  Paul Ryan, Birth and Death and Cybernation: Cybernetics of the Sacred, An Interface Book (New York: Gordon & Breach, 1973). 9  McLuhan, Culture Is Our Business, 66. 10   Michael Shamberg and Raindance Corporation, Guerrilla Television (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971), 9. 11  Ibid. 12  Ibid., 12.

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FIGURE 3.1  Michael Shamberg & Raindance Corporation, Guerrilla Television, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, book cover, 1971.

used by the Videofreex and Ant Farm). However, the main concept that emerges from Guerrilla Television is the difference between “product” and “process,” echoing the coeval shift in art practice. According to Shamberg, information must be understood as a process; while a product implies passive consumption, a process presupposes the user’s active contribution, that is, the user’s feedback. A recurring term in the discourses on television and art, the dictionary definition of “feedback” is “the return to the input of a part of the output

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of a machine, system, or process.”13 In short, the feedback is the responsive proof that a machine has worked or that a process has taken place. In regard to the guerrilla television movement, Joselit—who aptly titled his key book on art and television, Feedback: Television against Democracy (2007)— interprets the term “as a means of redressing media inequities.”14 Far from the narcissistic dynamic discussed by Krauss—where the artist doesn’t recognize himself or herself on the screen/mirror—for the guerrilla television videomakers, a feedback occurs when the user recognizes himself or herself, thus acknowledging his or her participative potential. This dynamic could be synthesized in a single message, which is a recurring mantra for this generation of media guerrillas: “you are information.”

Guerrilla Television and the 1960s Counterculture Joselit reexamines Krauss’ idea of narcissism by claiming that artworks like Acconci’s Centers (1971) were not simply acts of self-reflection but interpolated the spectator directly in the work. “In pointing at his reflected image on the playback monitor, Acconci simultaneously points out at the viewer of the tape,” writes Joselit. “His ‘narcissism’ (if that is what it is) is a thoroughly social act that interpellates the spectator as an object and an other.”15 Therefore, as he considered artists like Acconci and activists like the Raindance Corporation to be on the same page, Joselit decided to rehabilitate other countercultural figures of the 1960s in his discourse on art and television, such as the activist and prankster Abbie Hoffman; the performative group the Diggers; the revolutionary Black Panther party; and the beat poet William S. Burroughs. The leader of the Yippies—a radical youth offshoot of the free speech and anti-war movements of the late 1960s—Hoffman even used “Guerrilla Television” as a chapter title in his infamous paperback Steal This Book (1971). He did not talk about street tapes though but provided technical information on how to sabotage antennas: “Given time and experience you might want to go into direct competition with the big boys on their own channel,”16 he assured the reader. But what best synthesizes his critical approach to television are those theatrical public actions in which, as Joselit put it, “he used his own body to provoke media attention.”17 Or, what

 Definition of “feedback” from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, accessed April 24, 2021, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/feedback. 14  Joselit, “Tale of the Tape,” 155. 15  Ibid., 196. 16  Abbie Hoffman, Steal This Book (New York: Grove Press, 1971). Retrieved from Semantikon, accessed April 24, 2021. http://www.semantikon.com/StealThisBookbyAbbieHoffman.pdf. 17  Joselit, Feedback: Television against Democracy, 111. 13

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American historian Daniel Boorstin had described a few years earlier as “pseudo-events”:18 like throwing one-dollar bills up into the air at the New York Stock Exchange (August 1967), or attending a congressional hearing simply wearing an American Flag shirt (October 1968). Thanks to Hoffman, some key exponents of the guerrilla television movement were able to access and document one of the major events of 1960s counterculture, the Woodstock Music Festival—which attracted over 400,000 people in the small town of upstate New York for over four days in late August 1969. Here, David Cort (Hoffman’s friend from college) joined forces with Parry Teasdale and Curtis Ratcliff to found the Videofreex collective (Figure 3.2). The group did not film the music performances on stage though, like Michael Wadleigh and his crew;19 rather, they focused on those thousands of youths who gathered in the small town—interviewing

FIGURE 3.2 Videofreex in their control room in Soho, New York, 1970. Photo courtesy of Videofreex.com.  Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1962), 11 in Joselit, Feedback: Television against Democracy, 109. 19  A case in point is Michael Wadleigh, who, thanks to the funding received by Warner Brothers, directed a crew of several camera operators to document the festival. The resulting documentary, simply titled Woodstock (1970), reportedly cost $600,000 to produce, grossed $50 million in the United States and is considered a milestone in the documentary film genre and an archetype of the so-called “rockumentary” subgenre of films documenting live music concerts. 18

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them about their ideas, their expectations, their lifestyle; and the unexpected logistic problems they faced during those four long days, such as the food and water supplies, the camp, and various related hygienic, medical, and public safety issues. While mainstream media had for years been presenting a stereotyped version of the hippies, the Videofreex’s Woodstock Tapes offered a truer portrait of a generation whose aspirations and lifestyle went beyond the trite peace-and-love refrain. The risks of media stereotyping of the counterculture had already been addressed multiple times. For example, Joselit recalls that, in 1967, the San Francisco-based collective the Diggers staged the performance Death of Hippie, Son of Mass Media—a funeral procession along the streets of Haight-Ashbury, the hippie neighborhood par excellence. “Your face on TV, your style immortalized without soul in the captions of the [San Francisco] Chronicle. NBC says you exist, ergo I am… The victim immortalized,”20 so reported a leaflet that was distributed around while people left symbols of the counterculture inside a moving coffin. If the ultimate objective of the various groups and communities that converged in the broader 1960s counterculture was to start a revolution, it appears logical that most of the artworks, actions, and projects discussed so far invited people to a physical confrontation: to escape the alienating staged reality pre-packaged by TV and confront each other on a physical level by invading the streets. This is what African American soul, jazz, and protohip-hop poet and musician Gil Scott-Heron talks about in “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” his epic hit from 1970: “The revolution will not go better with Coke. The revolution will not fight the germs that cause bad breath. The revolution WILL put you in the driver’s seat. The revolution will not be televised.”21 The Black Panther Party—an African American paramilitary organization whose core activity consisted in patrolling the neighborhoods with a majority black population to monitor police brutality and offer community social programs—expressed similar concerns with regard to the disempowering effect of media stereotyping. The organization specifically addressed media in the April 29, 1972, issue of its weekly newspaper: “From the beginning, those who enslaved and coloured us understood that by controlling communications they could control our minds,”22 begins the article. It then articulates, in eleven points, a proposal to “control television and radio  Joselit, Feedback: Television against Democracy, 67.  Lyrics of Gil Scott-Heron’s song “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” 1970. Retrieved from Metro Lyrics, accessed April 24, 2021, http://www.metrolyrics.com/the-revolution-willnot-be-televised-lyrics-gil-scottheron.html. 22  “All Black People Got to Seize the Time for Unity!” Black Panther, Vol. 8, No. 6 (April 29, 1972): 16. 20 21

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outlets”23 and “convince the white-owned mass media they can no longer invade our communities and lie about us at will.”24 To further this aim, the party promoted the use of CATV in the December 7 issue of the newspaper.

The Professionalization of Guerrilla Television As highlighted by Joselit, “it is impossible to appropriate power without understanding its structure, and this understanding requires access.”25 This is why, according to American media scholar, artist, and activist Dara Greenwald, the collectives of the guerrilla television movement and other countercultural figures like Hoffman and the Black Panthers “were not just criticizing the media, they were making their own.”26 The most enduring and effective result of their operations though has been the influence they had on mainstream media. It is true to say that, initially it was enough for them to make their own production and distribution network, but their ultimate goal was to change television forever—to make it more transparent, decentralized, inclusive, democratic, and open. The Videofreex were the first to have this opportunity. The raw energy of their Woodstock Tapes attracted the attention of Don West, a renowned journalist and executive assistant at CBS, who in 1969 decided to involve the group in a new pilot program, aptly titled Subject to Change. Provided with travel funds and equipment from CBS, the group—which at that point also included, among others, Davidson Gigliotti, Nancy Cain, Carol Vontobel, and Skip Blumberg—shot hours of footage in New York, Chicago, and California, including interviews with activists like Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden, and Fred Hampton, the young charismatic leader of Chicago’s Black Panthers, a few days before he was murdered during a police raid. CBS didn’t appreciate the material though, which they deemed too controversial. They fired West, canceled Subject to Change, and never aired the pilot. When tempers began to cool down and the thousands of youths who had protested for years began to get older, the main priority for the guerrilla television activists was to professionalize their activity by turning it into a profitable practice. This didn’t mean selling out to mainstream media but to infiltrate them in order to produce a true social change. In 1972, for example,

 Ibid.  Ibid. 25  Joselit, Feedback: Television against Democracy, 88–90. 26  Dara Greenwald, “The Grassroots Video Pioneers,” The Brooklyn Rail (May 2007). Retrieved from The Brooklyn Rail, accessed April 24, 2021, http://brooklynrail.org/2007/05/express/ video. 23 24

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Shamberg left New York and the Raindance Corporation for San Francisco, where, together with Allen Rucker, Megan Williams, and members of Ant Farm, he cofounded a new collective. Top Value Television (or TVTV) was the first to concretize what the Videofreex had not been able to (or was not fully committed to) achieve in the brief but intense collaboration with CBS—the marriage between VT and TV. The first test for TVTV was the US presidential nominating conventions, which took place in Miami in 1972 (the Democrat segment in July, followed by the Republican one in August). As recounted by American media historian Deirdre Boyle, the group was able to receive full press accreditation for the event but “knew there was no way they could compete with the networks,” she claims, “so their tape would be about ‘us trying to tape the Convention and have it make sense as tape.’ Their emphasis would be on the ‘feel of the events’ and on ‘the social space that has been neglected, rejected and missing from media coverage to date,’ in other words, on the reactions of real people involved, including themselves.”27 The resulting footage was edited and titled The World’s Largest TV Studio, and broadcast by a few small cable TV channels. An hour-long, freeform documentary, it focuses on the convention’s delegates (filmed while at dinner, in hotel, or at parties), media (i.e., TV journalists and their way to inform), and “pseudo-events” (e.g., Yippies’ pseudo-events, and various actions of disturbance and riots). The focus on the media coverage is particularly interesting because it makes The World’s Largest TV Studio a metatelevisual production that identifies with television only to expose its mechanism of fictionalization and its power to produce consensus. For the Republican convention, instead, the group focuses on the protests, notably that of the Vietnam veterans. The resulting documentary, Four More Years, received even more visibility thanks to Westington Broadcasting, who distributed it throughout the United States. TVTV reached popularity with Lord of the Universe (1973), an hourlong color documentary, which demystifies the teenage Indian guru Maharaj Ji by pointing at his delusional followers. Broadcast by PBS, it won the prestigious Alfred I. DuPont–Columbia University Award for journalism. From 1974 to 1977, TVTV made several spoof documentaries (sometimes even involving actors), in this way pioneering the “mockumentary” genre but also betraying the original spirit of the guerrilla television movement, which was based on people’s spontaneity. Other noteworthy works broadcast by PBS or WNET include: Adland (1974) on advertising; In Hiding: America’s Fugitive Underground—An Interview with Abbie Hoffman (1975), which talks about the making of the documentary itself; Super Bowl (1976), on

 Deirdre Boyle, Subject to Change: Guerrilla Television Revisited (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1997), 38–9.

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how CBS filmed the major media event; TVTV Looks at the Oscar (1976), on the famous award ceremony; and Super Vision (1976), a history of television recounted from a future perspective.

3.2 Community Television Community Television: Videofreex’s Lanesville TV TVTV’s real-time video style has deeply influenced the development of the TV documentary and resonates in most of the videos that are posted on the internet today, both amateur and professional. For this reason, it could be said that the group was able to achieve one of guerrilla television’s major goals: that is, to make television’s mode of production and language more direct, transparent, and mindful of an expanded public opinion. However, the more the group professionalized, the more it forgot that what had made the movement burst originally was the need to trigger a process of media ecology, notably to decentralize media by allowing anyone—thanks to that prosthesis of the human sensorium that was the Portapak—to awaken to the actualities of their time. This approach was new and groundbreaking in regard to television, but similar ideas had already been discussed and put into practice in cinema— notably by post–Second World War movements inspired by Vertov’s kinoglaz, such as Neorealismo, in Italy in the 1940s and 1950s, and cinéma vérité in France in the 1960s. Neorealist films, for example, were generally filmed with nonprofessional actors who performed mundane activities in rural areas or rundown cities, with the aim to “observe” the conditions of the poor and the lower working class. While the essence of Neorealismo is embodied in the films of Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, and Luchino Visconti, its ethos is synthesized in the writings of screenwriter and theorist Cesare Zavattini. “I believe that the world goes on getting worse because we are not truly aware of reality… The keenest necessity of our time is ‘social attention,’”28 claimed Zavattini. Unlike American cinema, which, according to Zavattini, fictionalized reality, the Neorealist movement aimed to portray reality without artifice—people for what they are and what they do—and in so doing, helping the audience to understand their social context. “People

 Cesare Zavattini, “Alcune Idee sul Cinema,” La Rivista del Cinema Italiano (December 1952) in Vittorio De Sica: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Howard Curle and Stephen Snyder, trans. Pier Luigi Lanza (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2001), 53.

28

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understand themselves better than the social fabric,” he went on, “and to see themselves on the screen, performing their daily actions—remembering that to see oneself gives one the sense of being unlike oneself—like hearing one’s own voice on the radio—can help them to fill up a void, a lack of knowledge reality.”29 After paving the way into the television industry with TVTV, Shamberg went on to become a Hollywood mogul. He cofounded Jersey Films with actor Danny De Vito and produced various blockbuster movies, including The Big Chill (1983), A Fish Called Wanda (1988), Pulp Fiction (1994), Gattaca (1997), and Django Unchained (2012). Meanwhile, other core members of guerrilla television kept faith in their original vision. For example, in 1973 (the same year TVTV released Lord of the Universe) the Videofreex published The Spaghetti City Video Manual, an instruction booklet for amateurs on how to use video equipment through basic instructions and cartoonish illustrations. Unlike the Raindance Corporation, which often put theory before practice, the Videofreex focused exclusively on practice. Indeed, there is no trace of intellectual speculations in The Spaghetti City Video Manual and, unlike TVTV, the Videofreex was not capable or willing to start a dialogue with the TV industry. After Subject to Change was rejected, the group kept the CBS equipment and, headquartered in a loft on 98 Prince Street in New York City’s SoHo district, continued filming street tapes. Soon they moved to the hamlet of Lanesville in upstate New York, and there established Lanesville TV, an early example of community television. With an enthusiasm reminiscent of Zavattini, Teasdale recounted that experience in the following terms: “Our one shared principle was the credo of the workshop—an evolving belief that placing video cameras and VTRs in the hands of ordinary people would make the world a better, more just and beautiful place.”30 With the same spirit that animated various hippie communes at the time, the Videofreex members lived in Lanesville’s Maple Tree Farm until 1978. In plain contrast to the pastoral environment, the group turned the farm into a media center topped with a handmade antenna that provided the surrounding area with a cable TV service. From 1972 to 1977, Lanesville TV aired 258 shows, ranging from a Saturday morning children’s program to comedy sketches, amateur boxing matches, and proto-reality shows. While some tapes were the result of expeditions with their “media bus,” and distributed through listings in magazines like Radical Software, most of them were shot and aired locally in Lanesville. An American transposition of Zavattini’s ideal of film as presenting “the real protagonist  Ibid., 55.  Parry D. Teasdale, Videofreex: America’s First Pirate TV Station & the Catskills Collective That Turned It On (Hensonville, NY: Black Dome Press 1999), 47. 29 30

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of everyday life,”31 according to Andrew Ingall—who in 2015 curated the first retrospective of the Videofreex, “Lanesville TV expanded the idea of participatory television by asking their audiences for feedback and involving members of the community directly in productions.”32

The Legacy of Guerrilla Television: PTTV The legacy of guerrilla television was inherited by various New York collectives who took advantage of the diffusion of public-access television in the 1980s and 1990s to challenge the increasingly pervasive forms of infotainment that were turning even the most dramatic facts into excuses to sell products, gain ideological consensus, or simply keep the “flow” flowing. Born in the United States in the late 1960s as an offshoot of cable television, public-access television originated as a “social” alternative to the commercial broadcasting system: a means to give voice to ordinary citizens. Grouped with other public, educational, and government access channels (a category also known as PEG), public-access television, whose distribution is strictly local, became the televisual equivalent of a speakers’ corner: a venue for social, political, and philosophical debate, but also for artistic experimentation and amateurish forms of entertainment. While some “artistic” uses of public-access television will be discussed in Chapters 4 and 5, it is important to mention here two exemplary models of autonomy that pointed at the anti-democratic nature of news in mainstream media, Paper Tiger Television, and various forms of AIDS-related video activism. Founded in 1981, Paper Tiger Television (or PTTV) is an open, nonprofit, volunteer organization still active today, which describes its mission as thus: Through the production and distribution of our public access series, media literacy/video production workshops, community screenings and grassroots advocacy PTTV works to challenge and expose the corporate control of mainstream media. PTTV believes that increasing public awareness of the negative influence of mass media and involving people in the process of making media is mandatory for our long-term goal of information equity.33

 Zavattini, 58.  Andrea Ingall, Videofreex: The Art of Guerrilla Television (New Paltz, NY: Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, 2015), 82. 33  Paper Tiger Television, Mission. Retrieved from Paper Tiger, accessed April 24, 2021, http:// papertiger.org/about-us/. 31 32

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The birth of PTTV was the result of the disillusionment with the commercial broadcasting system and the way information was produced and distributed in what Shamberg and the Raindance Corporation had called “Media-America.” The group’s earliest production was an untitled program originally made for Communications Update—an artist-run television series broadcast on Manhattan cable public-access channel D, in which media scholar Herbert Schiller comments on the New York Times— in a televisual transposition of his classes at Hunter College—wherein he focuses less on the content than on the structural strategies adopted by media. This activity echoes the poststructuralist theories of the time (e.g., Lyotard, Jameson) as well as the tactics of some Pictures Generation artists, notably Sarah Charlesworth who deconstructed newspapers in her series Movie-Television-News-History, June 21, 1979. Having artists and scholars “interpreting” a newspaper or magazine became a recurring format for Paper Tiger. With over 300 editions to date, the program has featured such figures as Martha Rosler, commenting on Vogue (1982); Joel Kovel on Life (1983); Joan Braderman on the National Enquirer (1982); Donna Haraway on National Geographic (1987); Stuart Ewen on the New York Post (1982); Tuli Kupferberg on Rolling Stone (1982); and Schiller and Noam Chomsky on the New York Times (1981 and 1985). Each subject approaches the topic in a different way: some through a workshop format and some through grotesque performances in costume. According to PTTV cofounder DeeDee Halleck, “By going over a publication in detail, by examining how it is enmeshed in the transnational corporate world and by pointing out exactly how and why certain information appears, a good critical reading can invert the media so that they work against themselves.”34 In the same essay, Halleck emphasizes the low-budget aesthetics of PTTV— “paper tiger” also being a phrase used by Mao Zedong to describe seemingly threatening but in fact harmless opponents of communism—to the point that the budget for each show, usually ranging from $19 to $150, is revealed at the end of each program. In the wake of guerrilla television, by taking advantage of the “wholesale” distribution means offered by public-access television, CATV, and satellite TV, PTTV not only decentralized television and offered more transparent forms of information but also taught viewers how to detect the lack of transparency in mainstream information. With the same ethos, in 1986, PTTV led a group of likeminded independent media organizations across the United States to the formation of Deep Dish TV, with the purpose of collecting and distributing documentary videos on issues such as war, housing, health, women, immigration, and human rights at large.  DeeDee Halleck, “Paper Tiger Television: Smashing the Myths of the Information Industry Every Week on Public Access Cable,” Media, Culture and Society, Vol. 6, No. 3 (1984): 313– 18, and Dee Dee Halleck, ed. Hand-Held Visions: The Impossible Possibilities of Community Media (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 115. 34

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“The idea is to get independent producers, media arts centers, public access organizations, art schools and grassroots organizations to chip in a regular ‘subscription fee’ to the transponder rental costs,”35 wrote Halleck in 1987, although the true distribution system was destined to become the internet—and that is why PTTV is still alive today and represents a model for current and future “alternative” media organizations. Of particular interest for media archaeologists would be PTTV’s insistence on the do-ityourself approach to television as it also emerges from the ironic booklet Paper Tiger Guide to TV Repair!, self-published in conjunction with a solo exhibition at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1992 and reminiscent of the Videofreex’s Spaghetti City Video Manual (1973).

The Personal Is Political: AIDS TV Often criticized for its unclear meaning, the term “alternative” is employed, in regard to media, to distinguish productions that are independent from or in opposition to mainstream, broadcast, or commercial television. A notable example of the alternative use of media was represented by those cable and public-access talk shows, documentation of performances and protests, educational tapes, and artists’ videos produced in the late 1980s and early 1990s in relation to the AIDS crisis. “The particular power of alternative media production is its unique capacity to allow individuals from the ‘minority,’ ‘disenfranchised,’ and ‘marginal’ communities of our culture to extract and distinguish themselves from the ‘general public’ by making and seeing diversified, individualized media images,”36 claims media scholar Alexandra Juhasz in her book exploring the use of media by AIDSaffected communities. The first case of a new unknown disease that was affecting gay men, soon to be called AIDS, appeared in 1981; however, mainstream media did not cover AIDS until 1983, mainly because it did not affect the general public that constituted their audience. Until the early 1990s, both media and various governments neglected the disease, approaching it with homophobia and disdain. This, in turn, generated one of the most important activist movements in the United States since the 1960s counterculture. What unites the two eras is condensed in the recurring slogan “the personal is political,” employed by students, feminists, veterans, and minorities in the 1960s and now by homosexual men and women who demanded their personal story to be the subject of political analysis and discussion. 35  DeeDee Halleck, “A Few Arguments for the Appropriation of Television,” High Performance, No. 37 (1987): 41. 36  Alexandra Juhasz, AIDS TV: Identity, Community and Alternative Video (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), 8–9.

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Feeling misrepresented by mainstream media, the AIDS-affected community self-represented itself. According to Juhasz, the first alternative videotapes on AIDS were produced in 1984 by AIDS service organizations. The media department of the New York-based Gay Men’s Health Crisis or GMHC, for instance (founded in 1982 and still active today), produced educational materials like safer-sex erotic videotapes (e.g., Chance of a Lifetime, 1985, and Current Flow, 1989)—but also interviews, and the talk show Living with AIDS, broadcast on cable TV twice a week from 1985 to 1994. Artists’ videos concerning the AIDS crisis were also produced by People With AIDS (PWA), a so-called “self-empowerment” movement initiated in San Francisco in the early 1980s by the first gay people who had been diagnosed with the disease. Artists, activists, and amateurs came together in groups like Testing the Limits and Women’s AIDS Video Enterprise (WAVE) to produce street tapes reminiscent of guerrilla television. Founded in New York in 1987 as “a diverse, non-partisan group of individuals united in anger and committed to direct action to end the AIDS crisis,”37 the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power or ACT UP also generated street tapes, mainly through DIVA TV (Damned Interfering Video Activists). A video-documenting affinity group, DIVA TV produced four videos: Target City Hall (1989), which documents ACT UP’s efforts to take over New York’s City Hall mixing documentation of the protest, interviews, and AIDS-related TV footage; Pride (1989); Be a Diva (1990) for Deep Dish TV; and Like a Prayer (1990), which chronicles a demonstration at St. Patrick’s Cathedral to protest the Catholic Church’s position against abortion and the use of condoms. ACT UP, which, according to American curator Helen Molesworth, “understood and deployed postmodernist theory’s insistence on representation as constitutive of power,”38 paired performative forms of civil disobedience (e.g., “kiss-ins,” “die-ins,” costumed marches) with an agitprop output designed by the Gran Fury group in a style close to coeval artists Barbara Kruger and the Guerrilla Girls. Gran Fury’s most striking project was Kissing Doesn’t Kill (1990): a series of billboards inspired by Oliviero Toscani’s Benetton campaigns that showcased heterosexual and gay couples kissing. Displayed on buses and in subway stations in San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and Washington, DC, these ads were soon defaced by outraged citizens. A video version was also created and aired by MTV in Brazil and Europe to promote the Red, Hot + Blue benefit music compilations. The same year, group member Donald Moffett created Call the White House (1990), a lightbox showing a colorful television signal with the invitation to phone the US president to solicit solutions to the AIDS crisis.  Retrieved from ACT UP, accessed April 24, 2021, http://www.actupny.org/.  Helen Molesworth, This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 30.

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Coproducer, with Jean Carlomusto, of GMHC’s Living with AIDS cable show—and a member of Testing the Limits and DIVA TV—a central figure in the history of AIDS television is Gregg Bordowitz, both as a practitioner and for his writings. His autobiographical video Fast Trip, Long Drop (1993) mixes homemade films and TV footage implicitly blaming mainstream media for misrepresenting the AIDS trauma, while in the 1996 essay “Operative Assumptions,” he proposes that the peculiarity of video art and video activism to reconsider “the relation between the speaking subject and the subject of address”39 can ease the formation of communities of disenfranchised AIDS-affected people. The essay even assumes the tone of a manifesto with the elaboration of “nine operative assumptions” that go from “1. Video is a medium, but television is a situation,”40 to “9. Television doesn’t belong to the producer.”41

Grassroots Television Initially employed by grassroots movements out of both necessity and will for transparency, camcorders made their way into mainstream TV during the 1980s. The amateurish feeling and shaky vibe of the camcorder is at the base of early reality shows, the likes of those following police officers on patrols, chases, shootings, and arrests. One of the earliest examples is the American half-hour series Cops, which premiered on March 11, 1989, and is today one of the longest-running television programs in the United States. Inspired by cinema vérité—and anticipated by Roger Graef’s BBC Television series Police (1982)—Cops celebrates the heroic role of the police to maintain order in society: a metaphoric extension of the power of TV itself to maintain the status quo. The first “event” that demystified the televisual archetype of the cop as the good hero, and revitalized the debate about police abuses of power, was an amateur videotape filmed in 1991 by Los Angeles resident George Holliday from his balcony. The videotape shows the near-fatal beating of the unarmed African American taxi driver Rodney King by LAPD officers after a high-speed car chase. Holliday gave the videotape to KTLA television who edited a piece highlighting the most violent moments, in which King is seen on the ground being beaten by the officers with batons. Once broadcast,

39  Gregg Bordowitz, “Operative Assumptions,” (1996) in The AIDS Crisis is Ridiculous and Other Writings: 1986–2003 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004), 86. 40  Ibid., 81. 41  Ibid., 85.

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these images triggered an irreversible process that went from indignation at first, before escalating into the riots, lootings, and arson attacks that erupted in Los Angeles during the following Spring, leaving fifty-five people dead. Holliday’s videotape of the Rodney King beating could be considered as the first user-generated viral news video. Nowadays, a video becomes viral through an intense process of online sharing, but the King video became viral through old media, namely TV and newspapers that for the first time— through overexposure—acknowledged the transformation of the “telespectator” into producer of content. Viral videos today contain various types of content from humorous to promotional, but sadly a recurring theme is still one of police misconduct: notably, the brutality against unarmed African American men that sometimes even results in murder, as in the cases of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and George Floyd between 2014 and 2020. The acquittal of the officers involved in some of these cases brought about the formation of the international activist movement Black Lives Matter, which campaigns against violence and racism toward the African American community. The media representation of African American identity has often been debated within the walls of museums. Take for example the polemics around Dana Schutz’s Open Casket—a painting displayed at the 2017 Whitney Biennial—accused of spectacularizing an African American tragedy by depicting the swollen face of Emmett Till, a black teenager lynched in Mississippi in 1955. Incidentally, Holliday’s videotape of the King beating also featured in the 1993 Whitney Biennial, along with productions by Paper Tiger Television, Deep Dish TV, and Not Channel Zero. The latter was a grassroots collective whose street tapes focused on the African American and Latino communities in the United States: a clear example being The Nation Erupts (1992) for Deep Dish TV, which reconstructs the post-Rodney King Los Angeles riots. In the catalogue, John G. Hanhardt considered these works to exemplify “the powerful ability of individuals and collectives, the two bookends of a production and distribution process, to shape our view of public events and the world.”42 What characterizes the grassroots use of the camcorder—“grassroots” being a term that refers to bottom-up forms of participatory democracy— is a growing sense of awareness of the democratic potential inherent in prosumer technologies. In the 1990s, every social movement had its own media division both for documenting and producing counterinformation, while at the same time mobilizing against dominant power systems, with a focus on the convergence of political and economic interests—as in the

 John G. Hanhardt, “Media Art Worlds: New Expressions in Film and Video, 1991–1993” in 1993 Biennial Exhibition, ed. Elisabeth Sussman (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art and Harry Abrams Inc. Publishers, 1993), 46. 42

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case of the anti-globalization movement. Indeed, starting from the 1999 Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO), a network of Independent Media Centers (IMC) or Indymedia began to develop, producing videotapes to be distributed through so-called infoshops, along with books, magazines, and pamphlets that criticized neoliberalism in the name of global justice. An offshoot of the Indymedia network, the Telestreet phenomenon was initiated in Bologna in 2002 with the aim of setting up free TV stations in several areas of Italy to produce content related to the neighborhoods where they took place in a similar vein to Videofreex’s Lanesville TV. A group of local intellectuals and activists, including Franco “Bifo” Berardi— whose late 1970s pirate radio station Radio Alice was associated with the Autonomia movement—founded Orfeo TV, a “microtelevision” channel broadcasting for a few hours a day within a range of 300 meters from its headquarter in Via Orfeo. A response to a peculiar situation in which Silvio Berlusconi’s control of television allowed him to increase his political power. According to its founders, Orfeo TV was “the simulation of a model of postmedia democracy, and a symbolic protest against the monopoly of information in Italy, an experimentation of what could be called the postmedia society.”43

3.3 Mediated War John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “Bed-In for Peace” Several artworks and actions that comment on television’s power to “represent” and reproduce reality are focused on war. It all started with the Vietnam War—the first major conflict to be largely reported by mass media, including television. Occurring in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1955 to 1975, it was fought between North Vietnam (supported by the Soviet Union, China, and other communist allies) and the government of South Vietnam (supported by the United States, South Korea, and other anti-communist allies). The ardent and fierce resistance of the communist regime of North Vietnam and its southern allies, the Viet Cong, turned the war into a long and costly odyssey for the United States, whose involvement reached a peak in 1969 with more than 500,000 military personnel being recruited unwillingly.

43  Franco Berardi, Marco Jacquemet and Giancarlo Vitali, Telestreet: Macchina Immaginativa Non Omologata (Milan: Baldini Castoldi Dalai, 2003), 23, my translation.

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In 1969, the newly elected American president Richard Nixon initiated a so-called policy of “Vietnamization,” which consisted in training and equipping South Vietnam’s forces while reducing the number of US combat troops, and eventually bringing about a final peace agreement in 1973. A major role in pushing the Nixon administration to withdraw American troops and end the war was played by the anti-war movement, which encompassed countless marches and gatherings throughout the country in 1968 and 1969. The largest one took place in Washington, DC, on November 15, 1969, where over 250,000 Americans gathered peacefully. The movement was a crucial component of the wider counterculture in the late 1960s; and although it is often depicted as an offshoot of the hippie movement, it also included a large number of veterans, with those mutilated or paralyzed usually marching in the front row. While mainstream media notoriously filtered the news and images coming from the conflict zone, they could not ignore the massive dissent among everyday people. And if they did so, a guerrilla videomaker would certainly be poised to trigger a bottom-up information process, intent on giving voice to that general public who normally didn’t have the right to reply. Music played an important role in the social justice, human rights, and the peace effort. Indeed, while many songs of that period reflected anti-war stances, some musicians also opted for collateral forms of communication as in the case of the Beatles member John Lennon and his wife, the Japanese conceptual artist Yoko Ono, for whom the idea of peace represented a major and enduring discourse that the two brought forward publicly. Peace was not just the theme of some of the songs and artworks they produced together, or individually, but also of a series of public statements and performances developed by taking advantage of their celebrity status— notably the “bed-in for peace” actions. With certainty that their marriage on March 20, 1969, would attract massive media attention, the couple turned their honeymoon into a promotional event for world peace by lying down or sitting on the bed for one entire week in the presidential suite of the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel, receiving nonstop questions from the world’s press. They repeated the action in May at Montreal’s Queen Elizabeth Hotel—this time even recording the peace anthem “Give Peace a Chance,” featuring the voices of some crucial countercultural figures, including Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg. A seventy-minute documentary film titled Bed Peace—containing edited scenes of the two bed-ins and featuring archive press photos and TV footage widely circulated at the time—was only made available in 2011 on Ono’s “Imagine Peace” website. What comes across through the media footage is the theatricality surrounding Lennon and Ono’s exhibitionism of fragility and intimacy, in a way that is reminiscent of Ono’s 1964 performance Cut Piece, in which she sat passively on a concert hall stage while members of the audience cut away her clothing with scissors: a seminal work, both within the Fluxus

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movement, to which she was associated, and in the history of performance art at large. After adorning the room with cartoonish self-portraits, flowers, and handwritten messages like “Remember Love,” Lennon and Ono, wearing comfortable pyjamas, peacefully answered any journalist’s question. What the couple elicited through these performances is, first, that their private happiness is subordinate to the message of world peace, but also that celebrities attract more media attention than real social issues, particularly when they are able to instigate a voyeuristic reaction from the general public—as they had been able to achieve by appearing naked on the cover of their first album together, Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins (1968). Using a performative mode fundamental to avant-garde art movements such as Fluxus and Happening, Lennon and Ono created a pseudo-event that—similar to Abbie Hoffman’s actions—was conceived precisely in order to attract the maximum press coverage, thus underlining the paradox of having a public debate on such an urgent issue as war in a luxury hotel suite.

War and Remoteness Lennon and Ono’s bed-ins focus more on media than on the dichotomy of war and peace. They attempt to awaken the conscience of both reporters and audience by enacting a metalinguistic act of disruption within the mechanism of media representation. By turning their honeymoon into a press conference, they show how disinterested media can be from the real issues of society, in comparison with celebrity gossip, and how alienating and desensitizing the “tele-vision” process is. The sense of remoteness embedded in the televisual images of war is at the core of several writings and artworks, notably the wars fought by the United States—from Vietnam through to the Gulf War and the “War on Terror” in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other Middle-Eastern countries that followed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In “Love and Napalm,” from his 1970 collection The Atrocity Exhibition, British novelist J.G. Ballard—best-known for his science-fiction works— speculates on the supposedly positive psychosexual reactions to the long-term exposure to Vietnam War newsreel material and TV screenings. According to Ballard, films showing the “atrocity” of war—killings, tortures, rapes, and the effects of napalm on the body—instigate pervert sexual fantasies on the general public; help psychotic patients to increase the quality of their condition; and bring “improvements in overall health, self-maintenance and ability to cope with tasks.”44 Taking to an extreme degree the dystopian

44  J. G. Ballard, “Love and Napalm” in The Atrocity Exhibition (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), 150.

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dimension of having a war brought home through media, Ballard provokes that the sense of remoteness of the tele-vision is a cure-all rather than a reason for indignation and disdain. In May 1970, British pop artist Richard Hamilton set up a camera in front of a TV set for a week, taking still pictures to be turned into screenprints. One of them was a news image of a notorious tragedy: a student being shot by National Guardsmen during an anti-Vietnam War protest at Kent State University in Ohio, the United States. In his notes, Hamilton describes the process of how information moves from the actual event to the camera film— from the antenna to the electrons that finally bring it to the audience through the cathode ray tube of the TV receiver. This is followed by a further process of image transference, from photographing the screen to the color separation process that generates the final print. Hamilton articulates this occurrence as such: “Out of the chemicals into the light another, this time random, mesh of coloured particles tells the story. The same message is there—the tone of voice is new, a different dialect, another syntax; but truly spoken.”45 Another artwork commenting on the anesthetizing effect of televisual remoteness in regard to the atrocities of war is Peter Weibel’s Time Blood (1972–79), which literalizes the TV set—similar to some of his other works discussed earlier, such as TV Aquarium (TV Death 1) (1970–72). Here, Weibel performs a live ritual of blood collection on Austrian TV station ORF, which he describes in the following terms: I am holding a speech about the end of time. At the same time blood runs out of my arm into a glass canvas, which covers the whole TV-screen (the camera is located behind the glass canvas and remains static). The glass canvas (= the TV screen) is filling up with blood until the whole screen is covered and I am no longer visible.46 Both Hamilton’s and Weibel’s artworks highlight the distance between cruel reality and the audience’s safe position by speculating on the transformation of reality into abstract information. As she had done earlier in Sweet Violence (1974), Sanja Iveković continued investigating the boundaries between reality and media representation into the 1980s. In 1982, she performed Osobni rezovi (Personal Cuts) on TV Zagreb’s cult show 3, 2, 1… kreni!47 in which she is seen cutting out holes into a balaclava

 Richard Hamilton, Collected Words: 1953–1982 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982), 96.  Retrieved from Digital Art Archive, accessed April 24, 2021, https://www.digitalartarchive.at/ database/general/work/zeitblut-blood-of-time.html. 47  Zagreb TV’s show 3, 2, 1… krevi! was mainly focused on cinema and was able to bring cinema directors such as Orson Welles and Francois Truffaut behind the iron curtain, even though their films were not welcome in communist countries. 45 46

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mask she is wearing. Each cut is followed by TV footage relating to the last twenty years of brainwashing socialist propaganda under Marshal Tito, who had died two years before. “Personal Cuts is modeled on a television documentary but formally and conceptually undercuts the totalizing, unified picture of official history,”48 writes Roxana Marcoci, who curated Ivekovic´’s retrospective at MoMA in 2011. Iveković also appropriates TV footage in General Alert (Soap Opera) (1995), which produces what Marcoci defines as “the cognitive dissonance of everyday life during wartime.”49 The video shows an excerpt of a Spanish soap opera with Croatian subtitles broadcast by a Zagreb public TV station during a missile attack in the midst of the Yugoslav Wars. The warning message at the top of the screen, “Opća opasnost Zagreb” (General Alert Zagreb), which informs on the undergoing attack, condenses the sense of danger brought by war, collapsing that distance normally produced by the tele-vision, and highlighting the fictional nature of its content (in this case the soap opera). As in some works previously discussed, General Alert (Soap Opera) literalizes the TV set by making it function as an actual window, not into a hyperreality or an event happening faraway but into the space the artist inhabits.

From the Gulf War to the War on Terror Iveković’s Personal Cuts and General Alert (Soap Opera) testify a transformation of television in ex-communist countries from a propaganda machine to a propeller of fantasies. Like a few other artworks discussed in this section, they are not related to US foreign policy; however, they are meaningful in this context because they offer another perspective on that peculiar phase of convergence of information and entertainment labeled as “infotainment.” A pivotal moment in the new genre of informationmaking occurred in 1990–91, when, in the Persian Gulf, a conflict was waged by a coalition of thirty-five nations (led by the United States) in defense of Saudi Arabia against Iraq’s invasion and annexation of Kuwait. The Gulf War, as it became known, was the first war in history to be heavily televised. What characterized the coverage of the Gulf War was its immediacy— namely that it allowed a global audience to watch live images of missiles

48  Roxana Marcoci, Sanja Iveković: Sweet Violence (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2011), 123. 49  Ibid., 134.

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being launched from aircraft carriers or dropped from fighter bombers and hitting their targets. Live images of war—with a focus on the mesmerizing, silent, greenish abstract trajectories produced by the missiles launched at night seen through night vision cameras—were instantaneously broadcast worldwide by TV crews sent by all the world’s main networks to the conflict zones, notably Iraq’s capital, Baghdad. With the United States being the leading force against the “evil” and “uncivilized” occupier, American TV networks such as ABC, CBS, NBC, and particularly CNN had a strong presence throughout the war and, in accord with the US government, maintained a high degree of control over the images that were broadcast. The underlying narrative to emerge from thousands of hours of live wartime footage is about a country, the United States, exerting control over a territory (from Saudi Arabia) out of a pure economic interest—chiefly that the Gulf regions own the world’s largest oil reserves. If it is true that controlling information and representation brings power, then it is also true that—thanks to the mass diffusion of video technologies—alternative media outlets can expose the mechanism of coercion exerted by official state-controlled media. A case in point of grassroots television during the Gulf War was Deep Dish TV (the aforementioned offshoot of Paper Tiger Television), responsible for the ten-hour series The Gulf Crisis TV Project, whose content ranged from investigating the connections between oil and war (i.e., “War, Oil and Power”) to media’s promotion of the war (i.e., “News World Order”). Founded in 1986, and still operating until the late 2010s, Deep Dish TV uses “television and the Internet for creative independent video that addresses issues and perspectives inadequately represented by corporate media.”50 In the best tradition of guerrilla television, The Gulf Crisis TV Project mixes appropriated TV footage, street tapes, and humorous scenes shot in the studio. At the crossroads of activism, art, comedy, and media, as mentioned earlier, the series was featured in the 1993 Whitney Biennial along with the Rodney King video, and other productions by PTTV and Not Channel Zero. In the exhibition catalogue, the project’s cofounders DeeDee Halleck and Martin Lucas stated that “these programs revealed that there were cracks in the seamless high-tech façade which mainstream press built around the war, and, moreover, that there were people who did not condone the ‘surgical’ bombings and ‘precise’ missile attacks.”51 During the 1990s, television’s representation of war created such an increasing sense of estrangement and numbness among viewers that when  Deep Dish TV, “Mission.” Retrieved from Deep Dish TV, accessed May 4, 2017, no longer available online as of April 24, 2021, http://www.deepdishtv.org/about/mission/. 51  DeeDee Halleck and Martin Lucas, “Gulf Crisis TV Project: Statement” in 1993 Biennial Exhibition, ed. Elisabeth Sussman (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art and Harry Abrams Inc. Publishers, 1993), 164. 50

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the attacks of September 11, 2001, happened, and were broadcast on TV, it was initially met with a widely shared sense of disbelief—as if it was fictitious. Of course, those professional and amateur filmmakers who pointed their cameras on the collapsing skyscrapers of the World Trade Center that day would say the opposite, and so also everyone directly and indirectly involved in this “war brought home.” In her 2002 essay Regarding the Pain of Others, which expanded upon ideas originally proposed in her seminal 1977 collection On Photography, American writer Susan Sontag talks about those images of war, both photographic and televisual, whose effect is “The frustration of not being able to do anything about what the images show.”52 After the September 11th attacks, the then US president George W. Bush declared the “War on Terror”: a military, political, and media struggle against Islamic terrorist organizations, such as al-Qaeda and the regimes accused of supporting them, including Afghanistan, Iraq, and other Middle-Eastern governments. An artwork addressing the “War on Terror”—with a focus on news broadcasting—is Austrian artist Rainer Ganahl’s multimedia series Road to War (2001–05), which includes the Iraq Dialogs (2002–03). The latter is made up of reconfigurations on paper, ceramic tiles of logos, titles, and other graphic elements from TV footage related to the Iraq crisis mixed with the responses from Iraqi people to the material selected. Ganahl defined these public reactions as “very confrontational, aggressive, opinionated if not even cynical, arrogant and scary,” toward media that “seem to be selling, branding, justifying, authenticating and even cheerleading news content and—in this case—the war with Iraq.”53

The Electronic War Since the Second World War, television and armed conflict have converged inextricably. One of the most acute interpreters of the bond between pictures and war is French poststructuralist thinker Paul Virilio, notably in his seminal works: War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (1989), The Information Bomb (2000), and Desert Screen: War at the Speed of Light (2002). The latter is a collection of essays written in 1990, commenting on the Gulf War as indicative of a new third epoch of war. According to Virilio, weapons of obstruction (e.g., ramparts, fortifications, armor) were used in the prehistoric tactical epoch; weapons of destruction (e.g., lances, bows, cannons, missiles) in the political strategic epoch; and weapons of

 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003), 117.  Rainer Ganahl, “Iraq Dialogs,” New York, May 2003. Retrieved from Ganahl.info, accessed April 24, 2021, http://www.ganahl.info/iraqdialogs.html. 52 53

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communication (e.g., lookout and signal towers, radio, radars, satellites) in the contemporary “logistical” era. Together with the concept of “dromology”—according to which reality is a resultant of the speed brought about by technologies—“logistics” is at the core of Virilio’s idea that the movement of images is as important in warfare as that of personnel, tanks, fuel, missiles, and so on. During the Gulf War, TV networks like CNN allowed its audience to view the same images as the military personnel involved in the conflict in real-time, thus instigating a proper tele-action.54 “The function of the weapon is first of all the function of the eye: sighting.” He wrote: “Before attaining his target, a hunter or a warrior must always take aim, to align his target between the eyepiece and the sight of his weapon, exactly as a cameraman frames the subject that he is about to shoot.”55 It is no coincidence that this collection of essays, originally released in France in 1991 under the title L’Ecran du désert (Editions Galilée), was translated into English in 2002, just as the United States were preparing for a new war in the middle east—a war to be fought on similar premises as those discussed by Virilio but at a more accelerated pace. A reference to understanding this “acceleration” is German filmmaker and media writer Harun Farocki’s seminal production War at Distance (2003) (Figure 3.3). Dating back to 1969, Farocki’s filmography comprises over ninety films: visual essays, mostly based on the exploration of cinematic techniques in order to expose the subliminal power of cinema and media to invent new ways of seeing and thus perceiving reality. War at Distance mixes TV footage, amateur films, and computergenerated imagery (CGI) produced for training, demonstration, or actual war footage. Whereas in the Gulf War the eye of the viewer still corresponded with that of the cameraman, it now aligned itself with a remote-controlled, electronic eye—a machine able to produce and navigate a hyperreality— only to be able to impact reality even more effectively. Such is the case of the topographic logic of drones, as well as the “life” of missiles, testified by the presence of attached aerial cameras whose transmission ceases as they impact the target. According to Farocki, these types of images “were shown in the context of ‘intelligent weapons,’ and because they record the viewpoint of the weapon and not that of a soldier taking aim, they appeared to be a new subjective type. They lend the projectile a subject-like quality, an empathy with the weapon.”56 Elements proper of warfare (e.g., strategies, pathos) are also echoed in the TV broadcasting of sports. Virilio had already compared the tele-spectators  Paul Virilio, Desert Screen: War at the Speed of Light (New York: Continuum, 2002), 22.  Ibid., 53–4. 56  Harun Farocki, “War Diary: March 24, 2003,” in Harun Farocki: Soft Montages, ed. Yilmaz Dziewior (Bregenz: Kunstaus Bregenz, 2011), 69. 54 55

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FIGURE 3.3  Harun Farocki, War at a Distance, video stills, 2003. © Harun Farocki.

of the Gulf War to “‘fans’ in the seats of a stadium, reacting to the feats of their favorite team.”57 Philippe Parreno and Douglas Gordon’s film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006) and Farocki’s Deep Play (2010–11) suggest analogies between soccer and warfare. Parreno and Gordon’s ninety-minute documentary mixes footage shot on seventeen cameras, capturing French soccer star Zinédine Zidane’s psychosomatic expressions during a single match—as if he was a fierce warrior on the battlefield. Instead, Farocki’s multichannel installation intercuts various perspectives on the final match of the 2006 World Cup, with his usual juxtaposition of actual TV footage and CGI, thus exposing the similarities between sport and warfare under the employment of the same technological tools. The quintessential commentary on the media dimension of the “War on Terror” can be found in American artist Jon Kessler’s immersive installation The Palace at 4 A.M. (2005)—characterized, like most of his artworks, by homemade, kinetic sculptures whose purpose is to reveal, via parody, how information is produced (Figure 3.4). According to American art historian

 Virilio, 48.

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FIGURE 3.4 Jon Kessler, The Palace at 4 A.M., installation views, MoMA PS1, New York (p. 122, upper panel), and Sammlung Falckenberg, Hamburg (p. 122, lower panel; p. 123, upper and lower panels), 2005–06. Photo: Tom Powel imaging (PS1) and Egbert Haneke (Sammlung Falckenberg). Courtesy of the artists.

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Hal Foster, the effect “is one of calculated rage against the current machine of American Empire… we are led to reflect on a general condition of obscenity, in contemporary news and entertainment alike, in which representations, bodies, and machines often converge violently.”58 On an even greater level, Kessler’s shaky devices allow the viewer (filmed by surveillance cameras) to spot himself or herself—in real or slightly delayed time—on piled-up TV screens, interspersed with TV news footage or scenes filmed live within mini-sceneries, along with uncanny dummies and action figures, propaganda symbols, and icons of George W. Bush.

3.4 Break the News The First Global TV News Event: The JFK Assassination In the early 1960s, when television was already in most homes in the Western world, news broadcasting transformed from a purely informational tool to a prime-time form of communication. The major event to trigger this change was the assassination of American president John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, which kept a worldwide audience glued to the screen for four consecutive days of reportage, from the gunshots in Dallas to the state funeral. Although a far cry from the shameless forms of infotainment that would emerge decades later, in terms of magnitude that such a political event reached in the media, this is unanimously considered the first global TV news event in history. One of the worst moments in the nation’s history, the Kennedy assassination has shaped America’s collective unconscious as the first media event to produce a sense of identification. Among the countless artists that have referred to this event over the decades, Bruce Conner and the Ant Farm collective (both incidentally from San Francisco) are the most paradigmatic examples of how artists were among the first to be concerned about the social impact of such media events. Emerged in the mid-1950s, Conner’s prolific output spans paintings to assemblages, but his most prominent mark on art and media history will be through his film works, which are considered one of the earliest uses of found footage from films and TV as creative material. Fast-paced, and often accompanied by orchestral or pop music soundtracks, Conner’s film montages are often viewed as precursors of music videos, the earliest example being A MOVIE (1958). Shocked as much

 Hal Foster, “Pandemonium” in Jon Kessler: Palace at 4am (Milan: Charta, 2007), unpaged.

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as galvanized by the Kennedy assassination, Conner collected footage from the TV coverage of the event—both during those four days and in the years that followed—and edited them into REPORT (1963–67), a thirteen-minute film that retells the story without showing the fatal shooting itself; rather, selecting images that evoke a sense of the tragedy, such as a bullet perforating a light bulb (Figure 3.5). Black-and-white images, all filmed directly from the TV screen through a 16 mm camera, are looped, sometimes to such a high speed that it reaches a flickering effect, producing a clash between altered visual perception and the informational nature of the aural segment (i.e., a soundtrack made of television commentaries and radio reports of the event). Not content with the eight different versions of REPORT that he created between 1963 and 1967, Conner later realized the installation TELEVISION ASSASSINATION (1963–95), consisting of a Bolex projector and a Zenith TV set onto which an edited 8 mm version of REPORT, is projected. With this installation, Conner goes further than REPORT, eliciting a confrontation of cinema and television by turning the TV screen into a mere passive surface and suggesting the inherent power of television to fictionalize and mythologize

FIGURE 3.5  Bruce Conner, REPORT, film still, 1963–67. Courtesy of The Conner Family Trust, San Francisco, and Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles. © The Conner Family.

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reality as cinema does. What comes in between these two realms, although not specifically addressed by the artist, is the fact that the topical moment of the tragic event—Kennedy being hit by the projectile while riding in the motorcade—was filmed by an amateur spectator, Abraham Zapruder, standing on a concrete block in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, with an 8 mm home-movie camera. Along with collectives like Archigram (UK) and Superstudio (Italy), Ant Farm was at the forefront of the radical architecture movement of the 1960s, thanks to its inflatable structures and other infrastructural speculations that proposed a new lifestyle in line with the coeval counterculture. However, as mentioned before, the group also occupies a crucial role within the guerrilla television movement for producing street tapes, providing illustrations to Radical Software magazine, and realizing the first and most efficient prototype for the “media bus,” which they called Media Van (1971). Their interest in mass media didn’t stop there, though. In August 1975, they went to Dallas, where—together with likeminded group T.R. Uthco—they reenacted the tragic event some twelve years after the Kennedy assassination, using the Zapruder film as a reference. The resulting mockumentary titled The Eternal Frame (1975) doesn’t simply satirize the way media reported the event but investigates the power of media to turn an image into a symbol, while pointing to the fact that, with Zapruder’s film, a new species of media, in line with that longed for by guerrilla television, had just emerged. A month before, Ant Farm had organized another happening, Media Burn (1975), a pseudo-stunt show the group promoted as the “ultimate media event.”59 Introduced by one of the group’s members, disguised as Kennedy, the comic situation culminated in a futuristically customized 1959 Cadillac— dubbed the “Phantom Dream Car”—crashing at high speed through a wall of forty-two TV sets. “Media Burn is not a sensational daredevil stunt,” said the press release, “rather it is a way of alleviating the frustration of watching television in America.”60 Ant Farm’s response to television’s brainwashing power is a literal act of liberation from a technological device that had become a tool to shape reality.

The News Anchor A recurring motif in artworks that address TV news is that of the news anchor. Part of his aforementioned series of video works literalizing television, Weibel’s TV News (TV Death 2) (1970–72), broadcast on

 Ant Farm, quote retrieved from Electronic Arts Intermix, accessed April 24, 2021, http:// www.eai.org/titles/1823. 60  And Farm, “Media Burn: Press Release,” 1975 in Living Archive 7: Ant Farm, ed. Felicity D. Scott (Barcelona/New York: Actar, 2008), 273. 59

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Austrian public TV station ORF in 1972, shows a news announcer smoking a cigar until the unseen glass box around him is completely filled with smoke (Figure 3.6). He reads a series of outdated news items until he starts coughing and almost disappears in the foggy atmosphere. “The medium has been taken by its words: the message occurred in the medium,” claimed Weibel. “Television’s day-for-day poisoning of communications has now turned on itself. The daily dose of fatal words read by the newsreader brings about his own death. He chokes on the noxious TV ecosystem of information and communication.”61 Conceived for the Television by Artists project at Toronto’s nonprofit venue A Space, Dara Birnbaum, and Dan Graham’s collaborative project Local TV News Program Analysis (1978–80) analyzes the correspondences between the production and reception of TV news, by alternating footage of a local TV station’s control room and a nuclear family living room while the newscast City Pulse plays in both locations. The project mixes Graham’s interest in the mirroring logic of the instant feedback (at the base of his 1970s CCTV-based video works) with Birnbaum’s poststructuralist impulse to expose TV as a dominant power system. Discussing the work in a series of notes the artists wonder, “can an analytical, didactic de-construction of media, such as we propose, be of cultural and political value to the community?”62 American artist Martha Rosler seems to pose the same question in many of her works and writings. The demagnetized image of an NBC Nightly News anchorman presenting items on US conflicts in Latin America is at the center of If It’s Too Bad to Be True, It Could Be DISINFORMATION (1985). The partial illegibility and inaudibility of the visual essay contrasts with scrolling excerpts from the report: deconstructing, via allegory, the deceptive syntax through which television formulates narratives—in this case with references to America’s “obsession” with communism and drug trafficking in South American countries as an excuse to control them. Turning to a kind of pedagogical logic, it is as if Rosler reminds her audience of the importance of being able to read between the lines in order to distinguish real information from dangerous forms of disinformation. Israeli-American artist Omer Fast’s CNN Concatenated (2002), one of his earliest works, is based on similar premises to Rosler’s. The eighteen-minute

 Peter Weibel, “TV-News (TV Death 2),” 1972. Retrieved from Medien Kunst Netz, accessed April 24, 2021, http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/tv-news/. 62  Dara Birnbaum and Dan Graham, “Local Television News Program Analysis (note 1)” quoted in Manuela Ammer, “Attempting to Talk Back to Television: Dara Birnbaum’s and Dan Graham’s Local TV News Program Analysis (1978–1980),” in Changing Channels: Art and Television 1963–1987, ed. Matthias Michalka (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2010), 179–80. 61

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FIGURE 3.6  Peter Weibel, TV News (TV Death 2), video stills, 1970–72. Courtesy of ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe.

video consists of a fast-paced sequence of excerpts from CNN newscasts, each showing an anchor, guest commentator, or reporter pronouncing a word. The resulting flow sounds like a metalinguistic deconstruction of the medium itself, ironically provoked by its own unaware presenters who give viewers messages ranging from accusatory to compliant, from metaphysical to poetic. It starts with: “Listen to me. I want to tell you something. Come

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closer.”63 It continues later with: “And so you watch and you listen you live and learn. You rent videotapes. You watch documentaries. You filter out information. You use your remote control. You think of your parents. You recycle. You visit accident sites. This is CNN.”64 The same year she made If It’s Too Bad To Be True, It Could Be DISINFORMATION, Rosler published her influential essay “Video: Shedding the Utopian Moment,”65 in which she proposed an alternative perspective to most art historians, on the birth of video art in relation to broadcast television on one side and the art world on the other. With the same feminist approach that characterizes most of her artworks, Rosler demystifies video art’s forefathers Nam June Paik and Marshall McLuhan for not having engaged critically with mass media. Regarding Paik, she writes: “He neither analyzed TV messages or effects, nor provided a counterdiscourse based on rational exchange, nor made its technology available to others.”66 On the Canadian thinker, Rosler asserts that he “gave artists a mythic power in relation to form that fulfilled their impotent fantasies of conquering or neutralizing the mass media.”67 Most of the works, phenomena, and ideas discussed in this chapter— that address the way news is produced and told by television—echo the postmodernist discourse, according to which, history and knowledge are fictional constructions developed by dominant power systems with the aid of technology. Does news become history after all? From the guerrilla television movement through to the various cases of community and grassroots television to those artists who have analyzed how war is “represented” by media, it seems that commenting on mass culture is not just a way for artists to bring their research toward new formal directions. Their ultimate goal was, in fact, to deconstruct the very mechanism of society by adopting its constituent tools, in this case television, and proposing new ways to impact the everyday life and sometimes “hijack” the course of history itself.

 Omer Fast, “CNN Concatenated”, 2002, transcription retrieved from Pastebin, accessed April 24, 2021, https://pastebin.com/DUdMg3bM. 64  Ibid. 65   The essay was originally delivered as a talk, “Shedding the Utopian Moment: The Museumization of Video,” at the conference “Vidéo 84” at Université de Québec in Montreal in 1984, and at the Association of Art Historians Conference at the City University of London in 1985. It was first published in Block, No. 11, (Winter 1985–1986). 66  Martha Rosler, “Video: Shedding the Utopian Moment,” Block, No. 11, Winter (1985–1986): 27–39; reprinted in Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer, eds., Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art (New York: Aperture, 1991): 45–6. 67  Ibid., 48. 63

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The Domestication of Fear: Johan Grimonprez Paradigmatic of the postmodernist approach to mass culture is the distinction between the concepts of “strategy” and “tactic” that emerges from French thinker Michel De Certeau’s seminal book The Practice of Everyday Life (1980; English translation, 1984), which examines, in short, people’s inclination to “customize” the surrounding reality through poaching on preexisting unilateral dynamics, products, and knowledge systems. Borrowing meanings from the military and the scientific vocabularies, according to De Certeau, strategies are actions performed by the empowered to “elaborate theoretical places (systems and totalizing discourses) capable of articulating an ensemble of physical places in which forces are distributed.”68 A tactic, in contrast, “is an art of the weak,”69 a bottom-up form of resistance to the dominant order—a “counterdiscourse,” as Rosler would put it. De Certeau does not call into cause contemporary art and design. Rather, he compares tactics to “an ageless art,” more similar “to the simulations, tricks, and disguises that certain fishes or plants execute with extraordinary virtuosity.”70 On the contrary, countless artists and designers found deep inspiration in his writings and developed works and projects whose raison d’être could be found in the notion of “tactic.” Two of them will be discussed in the remaining part of this chapter: Johan Grimonprez’s dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997), which historicizes airplane hijacks via the appropriation of television reports, and the Yes Men’s Bhopal project (2004), an early paradigmatic example of the power of fake news to impact the reputation of mass media. Emerged in the mid-1990s, Belgian multimedia artist and filmmaker Grimonprez’s production is identified by a deconstructive approach to television and cinema via the use of found footage and the form of the documentary to allegorize dominant narratives as fictional constructions. Grimonprez’s visual essay dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y is a montage of footage from TV newscasts covering various airplane hijackings since the 1970s, which foreshadows the tragic events of 9/11 (Figure 3.7). “TV technology has reinvented a way to look at the world and to think about death,” claims the artist. “That is, in fact, what the film is about. It analyzes how the media participates in the construction of reality… The film shows both how TV news has been historically presented, and how it has been accelerated by the new technological means of recording reality.”71

68  Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 38. 69  Ibid., 37. 70  Ibid., 40. 71  Catherine Bernard, “Supermarket History: An Interview with Johan Grimonprez,” Parkett, No. 53 (1998): 6–18; reprinted in Johan Grimonprez, ed., Inflight (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2000), 68.

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FIGURE 3.7  Johan Grimonprez, dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, video stills, 1997. Courtesy of the artist.

The idea of history is at the core of the film. If “The plane is a metaphor for history,”72 as Grimonprez suggests, then the goal of an airplane hijacker is to change the course of history or overturn its perspective. Most of the hijackings, indeed, particularly the earliest ones of the late 1960s and 1970s, were conducted by individuals or organizations who wanted to rise up or draw international attention to geopolitical situations they deemed to have been overlooked in the global scenario. Such was the case for the Palestinian fighter Leila Khaled, who hijacked two airplanes in 1969 and 1970 to demand the liberation of her country from the State of Israel. “There is so much available and history cannot be understood as singular,” continues Grimonprez. “It [the film] tells of how history is recorded and catalogued, and how these techniques accelerate and accumulate memory, almost as an excess of history.”73 The sixty-eight-minute film alternates footage from the coverage of hijackings with a host of other images, such as: a flying house, a training video for hijackers, an astronaut, buildings collapsing, cartoons, and pictures from communist countries. The audio track mixes pop music, original reports, and a voice-over monologue punctuated by excerpts from American writer  Ibid.  Ibid.

72 73

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Don DeLillo’s novels White Noise (1985) and Mao II (1991), the latter containing such quotes as, “What the terrorists gain, the novelists lose.”74 According to Vraath Ohner, the film claims that the reporting of daily news has now replaced narratives of social events in novel form. This cancels out not only the temporal difference between past and present, which is constitutive for all narratives, but also the spatial difference between observer and object: society is no longer reflected in the mirror of an individual perception but only in an image of itself.75 Grimonprez addresses media fiction again in Double Take (2009), whose plot (written by British novelist Tom McCarthy and inspired by a Jorge Louis Borges tale) is built around a meeting of two versions of Alfred Hitchcock— twenty years apart—amid the backdrop of television’s rise to prominence and its domestication of fear during the Cold War. Interspersed with five misogynistic TV commercials for Folgers instant coffee (the main sponsor of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, the famous director’s TV show), Double Take elicits a psychoanalytical reading of the mirroring effect produced by television: on the one side it ironizes upon Hitchcock’s frequent employment of doppelgängers (both as film characters and of himself), while on the other it compares the notion of the “duplicate”—inherent in video technologies— to that of identity split inherent in human nature. To avoid a confrontation, Grimonprez suggests: “If you meet your double, you should kill him.”76

Live on BBC: The Yes Men De Certeau’s notion of tactic is taken in literal terms by a group of artists emerged in the late 1990s whose work, at the crossroads of art and activism, is paradigmatic to understanding the concept of “tactical media.” According to David Garcia and Geert Lovink, authors of a proper manifesto, “Tactical Media are what happens when the cheap ‘do it yourself’ media, made possible by the revolution in consumer electronics and expanded forms of distribution (from public access cable to the internet) are exploited by groups and individuals who feel aggrieved by or excluded from the wider culture.”77  Don DeLillo, Mao II (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1991), 157.  Vraath Ohner, “On Seeing, Flying and Dreaming,” Camera Austria, No. 66 (1999): 29–30; reprinted in Benoit Detalle, ed., Johan Grimonprez: It’s a Poor Sort of Memory That Only Works Backwards (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2011), 241. 76  Mark Peranson, “If You Meet Your Double, You Should Kill Him: Johan Grimonprez on Double Take,” Cinemascope, No. 38, Spring (2009): 14–18. 77  David Garcia and Geert Lovink, “The ABC of Tactical Media,” Nettime, May 16, 1997. Retrieved from Nettime, accessed April 24, 2021, http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/ nettime-l-9705/msg00096.html. 74 75

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In other words, tactical media are bottom-up creative actions of disturbance, parody, or sabotage carried against institutions and corporations through the use of prosumer technologies and the Internet. Most of the artists associated with the tactical media movement work in groups, such as 0100101110101101.org, Critical Art Ensemble, RTMark, and the Yes Men. The core of the Yes Men, who formed in 1999, consists of Jacques Servin (a.k.a. Andy Bichlbaum) and Igor Vamos (a.k.a. Mike Bonanno), though their actions are produced with the help of an extended network that includes full-time collaborators as well as random volunteers. The peculiarity of the Yes Men is to impersonate representatives of reallife corporations, political organizations, or government institutions. The starting point is usually a fake website, as in their earliest satirical George W. Bush project. Established during the 2000 US presidential campaign, the duo—disguised as fanatic Bush supporters—carried out a series of pranks online and in the public sphere aimed at exposing the anti-democratic and conservative nature of the soon-to-be president. The Yes Men usually mimic the subject they want to criticize: the WTO (2004), ExxonMobil (2007), or Halliburton (2009), on the alleged behalf of whom they participated in the United Nations Climate Conference— introducing a humorous and dystopian, ball-like inflatable living unit called the SurvivaBall to meet the challenges of climate change. One of their most successful actions was the Bhopal project (2004), for which Andy Bichlbaum appeared live on BBC World as Jude Finisterra, a spokesman for Dow Chemical, an American chemical corporation whose subsidiary Union Carbide was responsible for the 1984 chemical disaster in Bhopal, India. The tragic event, which claimed 3,800 lives—with around 100,000 reported as still suffering from its effects—is considered one of the worst chemical catastrophes in history (Figure 3.8). The Yes Men established a fake Dow Chemical website and caused further news diffusion when they reported that, after twenty years, Dow still had no intention of taking responsibility for the damage, which resulted in an indignant and harsh response. Among the various journalists who thought they had contacted Dow through the website, the Yes Men accepted an invitation to appear on the BBC’s renowned international news channel BBC World. In the guise of the fictitious Jude Finisterra (the surname, incidentally, meaning “end of the world” in Latin), Bichlbaum appeared live from Paris, claiming in front of thousands of tele-spectators that Dow intended to pay $12 billion for the medical care of the disaster’s survivors and regenerate the area. In the two hours before Dow and the BBC admitted that they had been deceived and apologized for the fake news, Dow lost $2 billion of its market value. Born of a similar premise, but exploiting print media instead of television, is the New York Times project from 2008: another prank that involved 80,000 copies of a spoof edition dated (July 4, 2009) of the major daily

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FIGURE 3.8  The Yes Men, Bhopal Project, video still, 2004. Courtesy of the artist.

being distributed for free on the streets of New York and Los Angeles. A collaboration with the Anti-Advertising Agency group, the edition was made up entirely of fake positive news stories, from a front page headline announcing “Iraq War Ends” to articles outlining the establishment of a national healthcare system and a maximum wage for the CEOs, along with an article in which George W. Bush accuses himself of treason. The Bhopal project and the hoax New York Times are archetypal examples of the impact “fake news” can have in the internet era, an issue that became topical in the mid-2010s. An offshoot of the late 1990s anti-globalization movement, the practice of tactical media can be closely aligned with that of “culture jamming,” that is, a tactical form of subverting mainstream culture and mass media with satirical intent. Like poachers, culture jammers and tactical media artists, along with activists like the Yes Men, appropriate or simulate the visual identity of dominant power structures (institutions, corporations, and media) to deliver their messages to an unaware audience that put at risk both their reputation and very reason to exist—revealing their strategies to produce consensus. References could be made to Situationism and the 1960s counterculture, but tactical media is peculiar of its era because it incarnates those ideals of democracy and transparency associated with the internet— longed for with notable enthusiasm in the early years of its diffusion.

4 Artists as Media Stars

4.1 The Artist as a TV Personality The Surrealist Persona: Salvador Dalí So far, this book has considered artworks, projects, and phenomena that have either tried to challenge TV or provide an alternative to it. But what happens when artists embrace mainstream television? Does the intellectual and often disruptive status of art diminish when it is engulfed by TV? This chapter presents a number of case studies that are symptomatic of how art and artists present themselves or are “represented” on and by TV. The first to be examined are artists-cum-celebrities like Salvador Dalí. The eminent Spanish surrealist was among the first artists in history to popularize modern art, and not only through a more accessible iconographic language and style but also by using media to reinforce the social stereotype of the artist as eccentric visionary. Emerged in the late 1920s, in association with the Surrealist movement— along with artists, film directors, and writers, such as André Breton, Luis Buñuel, Max Ernst, and Man Ray—Dalí distinguished himself for an illustrative and narrative take on issues and subjects related to the unconscious. This approach garnered him several design commissions and collaborations, ranging from the clothing and fashion accessories made with Elsa Schiaparelli in 1937 to the scenography for a “dream” sequence in Alfred Hitchcock’s film Spellbound (1945). Dalí also designed record covers, cookbooks, theater sets and costumes, jewelry, advertisements, and cowrote the seven-minute Disney animation Destino (1946–2003). But his most successful “design” project by far was his own public persona, characterized by highly recognizable and caricatural features like his strong Spanish accent and signature mustache. Already well-known in Europe, Dalí debuted in the United States in 1934 with a solo show at New York’s Julien Levy Gallery and immediately became

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a media sensation. Two years later he appeared on the cover of Time, the era’s most popular American magazine. Henri Matisse had appeared on a Time cover in 1930, but Dalí was not simply a famous artist, he was also an absurdist “entertainer.” An early example of his self-promotional showmanship occurred only a few months before when Dalí delivered a “performative” lecture at the London International Surrealist Exhibition wearing a deep-sea diving suit and helmet—an excuse to bring to life illogical elements of his artworks. From the early 1950s Dalí began making regular appearances on TV, mostly in the United States where his solo show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1946, coupled with his eccentric public behavior, had made him an exotic type of celebrity. On January 19, 1954, he appeared on the ABC game show The Name’s the Same. In the program, three panelists have to guess, in a question-andanswer format, an action he secretly intends to perform—that is, to portray the host, Robert Q. Lewis. Dalí’s answers produce a hilarious effect, eliciting a discrepancy with TV’s longing for a linear content. As soon as a panelist understands Dalí’s intention is to create an artwork, the artist claims he would draw an object, although the host rectifies proudly that this object could, in fact, be human. Punctuated by loud laughter, the show ends with Dalí sketching an eight-shaped abstract body on a blackboard as if suggesting to the audience that reality could, in fact, disguise through or in different forms—beyond optical perception—an idea at the core of Surrealism itself. Considering the specific context, this could also be intended as an allegory of the mechanism of objectification implicit in television viewership. Another noteworthy appearance of Dalí on American TV was on the game show What’s My Line? aired by CBS on January 27, 1957. Three blindfolded panelists have to determine the guest’s identity in a questionand-answer format. Dalí enters the studio and paints his signature while the word “artist” overlays on the screen for the audience to see. His seemingly illogical answers suggest he wants to mislead the panelists, while, in fact, he is merely proposing an expanded interpretation of the artist’s role. He confirms his work is related to the arts but also that he is: a performer and a “leading man” (audience laughter), that he has something to do with sports and athletics (even louder audience laughter), and that he can be considered a writer. He keeps replying “yes” to most of the questions with each answer followed by louder and louder laughs until the puzzle is solved (Figure 4.1). Dalí made numerous TV appearances in his lifetime—sometimes in documentaries about his art, others on TV shows where he reinforced his self-parodies (e.g., I’ve Got a Secret, 1961; The Tonight Show, 1963 and 1967; and the Dick Cavett Show, 1971). He also starred in several commercials: Licor Veterano Sabor (1965), Brainiff Airline (1969), Chocolat Lanvin (1969), Nissan’s Datsun Car (1972), Iberia Airline (1972), and Alka-Seltzer (1974). Some would reduce these activities purely to Dalí’s self-aggrandizement and economic gain rather than any artistic intent or

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FIGURE 4.1  Salvador Dalí on the game show What’s My Line?, CBS, US, video stills, January 27, 1957.

merit, namely his $10,000 tariff for a minute’s appearance. Others would interpret them as attempts to bring a glimpse of Surrealism to the masses, perhaps secretly aspiring to turn reality into one of his deserted landscapes punctuated by uncanny shadows and meditative figures, as the one he realized for the cover of TV Guide in 1968, where TV screens appear on the

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nails of two gigantic fingers emerging from the ground as if they were the extensions of a giant creature controlling the world.

Television Happening: John Cage As a realm into which preexisting areas of the culture industry converged, it was not uncommon to see personalities from cinema, music, the arts, or other fields of entertainment on TV, particularly from the 1950s to the 1970s, that is, before television became self-referential as later postmodernist neotelevision theories suggested. A plethora of actors, writers, and performers, both established and emerging, would line up to appear on game and talk shows. Avant-garde artists were less commonly seen, mainly because TV networks were afraid of boring their audiences with overly intellectual content and thereby instilling an inferiority complex—considering that most of the TV viewers didn’t have any education that would let them appreciate avant-garde forms of art. On the other hand, most avant-garde artists were not interested in compromising the intellectual value of their production by dealing with the mass medium. The case of Dalí is definitely peculiar and should be seen as part of an expanded approach to art production where design projects, commercial commissions, transdisciplinary collaborations, and self-promotional acts were, in fact, intended by the artist to be integral rather than collateral to his artistic output. This was not exclusive of Dalí, though. American composer and artist John Cage, for example, approached TV as a context into which he could push the boundaries of the researches he conducted with experimental music in association with the postwar avant-garde movements Fluxus and Happening. By embracing the very mechanism of TV, Cage aimed to turn reality into an artistic event and challenge any preconceived notion of both entertainment and art itself. Cage began his career in the late 1930s, producing music for dance performances and teaching courses at UCLA and Mills College. During that period, he had already started experimenting with unorthodox instruments, such as household items, metal sheets, and “prepared pianos,” whose sound he altered by treating the strings with various objects. Cage’s belief that every sound could be used in musical compositions echoed Marcel Duchamp’s idea of the “readymade,” or else the notion that everything is art if an artist recontextualizes it as such. These ideas culminated in his controversial 1952 composition titled 4’33”, which consists of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of inactivity of a performer in front of a piano to allow the audience less to hear the silence—as it is usually said—than to appreciate the noises of the environment in which the event takes place, an environment that involves the audience itself—with its coughs, sighs, movements, and body sounds.

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In 1958, Cage went to Milan to collaborate with experimental musicians like Luciano Berio and Sylvano Bussotti at the Studio di Fonologia. The following year, having run out of money, his composer friends enrolled him to appear on the popular game show Lascia o Raddoppia?—the Italian version of the famous American show The $64,000 Question. The program was hosted by the same Mike Bongiorno, whose “phenomenology” Umberto Eco—responsible at that time for several Rai programs as one of the corsari—would later describe as being a symbol of media mediocrity. Five contestants were asked a series of questions on a specific subject. After five episodes, Cage—whose subject was on mycology (the study of fungi)—won the first prize of 5 million Italian lire, purportedly with the help of someone supplying him with answers to questions in advance. Being a renowned composer of “very weird music” (“musica strambissima” was the term used by Bongiorno), Cage was also invited to perform some of his newest compositions: “Amores,” “Water Walk,” and “Sound of Venice.” Except for a few photos and some press, no footage of the event is available, but one can get an idea of Cage’s performance by looking at his second appearance on TV, as a contestant on the popular American game show I’ve Got a Secret, broadcast on CBS in January 1960. On this occasion, Cage reperformed “Water Walk.” Implicitly framed by the host as a nonsensical act, the studio audience responded with loud laughs, starting from the list of instruments that Cage was going use that appeared as scrolling text on the screen: “a Water Pitcher, an Iron Pipe, a Goose Call, a Bottle of Wine, an Electric Mixer, a Whistle, a Sprinkling Can, ice cubes, 2 Cymbals, a Mechanical Fish, a Quail Call, a Rubber Duck, a Tape Recorder, a Vase of Roses, a Seltzer Siphon, 5 Radios, a Bathtub and a GRAND PIANO.”1 Italian philosopher and art and media scholar Marco Senaldi refers to Cage’s TV appearances in light of the Happening theory: that is, non-scripted artists-driven situations that demand the audience’s participation and suggest that life isn’t, in fact, spontaneous but a constructed performance. According to Senaldi, by inserting an artistic Happening into a constructed situation, in this case a TV show, “television ‘normality’ turns out, in contrast, to be hysterical, out of place, excessively cheerful and fundamentally contrived; on the other hand, the artistic event, in its affectation, shows itself to be almost comically ‘unconstructed,’ naïve, but marvelously ‘authentic.’”2 Laugh after laugh, the show ends with a tracking shot of the audience applauding, an audience whose mechanical, precoded functioning Cage has

 From the TV show I’ve Got a Secret, CBS, January 1960. Retrieved from YouTube, accessed April 24, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSulycqZH-U. 2  Marco Senaldi, “TV: A Gigantic Happening,” in TV/ARTS/TV, ed. Valentina Valentini (Madrid and Barcelona: La Fábrica and Arts Santa Mònica, 2009), 141. 1

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hopefully been able to put into crisis—at least for three minutes of pure avant-garde performance disguised as some sort of joke.

A Shy Apathetic Star: Andy Warhol Following a diachronic logic, the next artist-cum-celebrity to be taken into account at this point is Andy Warhol whose enduring fascination for television can be traced from his early paintings (i.e., TV $199, 1961) and films (i.e., Soap Opera, 1964–65; and Outer and Inner Space, 1965) through to his 1968 TV commercial “Underground Sundae” for Schrafft’s restaurant, and up to his own TV programs and music videos of the 1980s, which will be discussed later. However, in order to interpret these phenomena holistically, Warhol’s TV appearances merit consideration. This, in turn, allows for a better contextualization of his official art production—indicative as they are of the artist’s shy and apathetic reaction to television—perhaps an effect of his habit of watching four or more TV sets simultaneously. One of Warhol’s earliest TV appearances was on The Merv Griffin Show, broadcast by CBS on October 6, 1965. He and Edie Sedgwick—who by then had already starred in several of the artist’s films, including Outer and Inner Space—were invited as representatives of the then burgeoning underground film movement. As soon as the talk show begins, Sedgwick informs the host that Warhol won’t talk because “he is not used to making public appearances.”3 Aside from shy somatic expressions and whispering “yes” or “no,” Warhol keeps chewing a gum while Sedgwick mediates a Q&A session that aims to enlighten the audience on how Pop Art is art devoid of any emotional dimension. The topical moment is reached when Griffin asks why he paints Campbell’s soup cans if there is no emotional attachment involved, to which Sedgwick replies: “It’s part of the culture.”4 Despite some laughs, and the host’s attempt to force the conversation toward the market value of Warhol’s paintings, through his behavior Warhol not only proved to be in control of the situation himself—consciously shifting between indulgence and the unmasking of the media logic—he also embodied the same apathetic position that transpires from his artworks, expressly a blend of resignation and reverence. The more famous he became, the more he shaped his public persona on the audience’s expectations by self-parodying himself as a “fool” who believed contemporary pop icons corresponded to an art historical criteria of beauty. Indeed, in a 1969 commercial for airline Braniff International, he confides to the boxer Sonny

3  Edie Sedgwick, The Merv Griffin Show, October 6, 1965. Retrieved from YouTube, accessed April 24, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNforkVnsfU. 4  Ibid.

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Liston: “There is an inherent beauty in the soup cans that Michelangelo could not have imagined existed.”5 The artist reinforced his self-parody in the 1980s by starring in his own TV programs but also in various commercials. In 1981, Danish filmmaker Jørgen Leth convinced him to appear in his film 66 Scenes from America for the five-minute scene “Andy Warhol Eating a Hamburger.” Warhol unpacks and eats a hamburger: a daily action in the style of his early films, yet so similar to an ad for the brands showcased (i.e., Burger King and Heinz). Real commercials included those for TDK Videotape (1983) and Diet Coke (1985). In the former, Warhol is seen holding a TV set broadcasting the color bars test pattern while reciting out loud a list of audio-visual technology brands in Japanese with his eyes closed; as if enlightened, he opens his eyes when uttering TDK. In contrast, in the Diet Coke ad he appears flanked by contestants on a beauty pageant float, silent and deadpan as usual. The ad also features new wave band Devo, comedians Vicky Lawrence and Harvey Korman, and girls in bathing suits, all happily drinking Diet Coke. In this heterogeneous group of “entertainers” even the spastic moves of Devo (already stars of MTV at that time) seem to be in context. Warhol’s appearance is the only one at odds with the family-approved dimension of the ad. Although an artist and a queer with caricatural features—like the disproportionate white wig and the phlegmatic gestures—the fact that TV doesn’t make fun of him is symptomatic of the notion that perhaps media had finally validated the social role of artists, either in the search for a new type of audience formerly excluded or because the increasing market value of contemporary art has automatically legitimated artists as interesting persons for a generic audience. Significantly, when in 1985 Warhol appears in the third episode of the ninth season of Love Boat—the famous ABC series set on a cruise ship—the black bartender, Isaac Washington, approaches the artist hoping he will turn him into a star. Warhol simply replies, “Hi,” and his assistant declines Isaac’s offer on his behalf. In contrast with Isaac’s desire for stardom, the white straight American character played by Tom Bosley warns his wife that being portrayed by Warhol would be a “disgrace” and her “reputation would be ruined.” Beyond the undercurrent of racial and class stereotyping, unlike Bosley, Warhol is not afraid of embracing stardom and pop culture, which is why he and Pop Art in general have often been treated with skepticism— because the distinction between celebration and criticism is never clear. It is perhaps no surprise, therefore, that when an excited TV journalist for WWF WrestleMania interviewed Warhol backstage at a wrestling show at Madison Square Garden in 1985, with a menacing Hulk Hogan moving

 Andy Warhol, advertisment for Braniff International, 1969. Retrieved from YouTube, accessed April 24, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75wlL1K4RNI. 5

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around, he replied, “I’m speechless… It’s just so exciting I don’t know what to say… It’s the best I’ve ever seen in my whole life, the most exciting thing.”6

The Artist Diva: Charlotte Moorman and Cindy Sherman The cases of Dalí, Cage, and Warhol discussed so far prove that artists have a certain potential in controlling the way their media persona is shaped, and therefore the popular perception of art in television and in society at large. What the three had in common was not only that they deeply believed in what they did as attested by their reputation in the art world, they were also white males who, despite their “eccentricity”—or the visible gender ambivalence in the case of Warhol—occupied a position that has always existed in society. But what about women? Is the rise of women in the art world too new for mass media to accept them as equals of their male counterparts? In a famous billboard project from 1989, feminist art collective the Guerrilla Girls asked: “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?” Does the same logic apply to mass media? Do women artists have to be naked to appear on TV? American cellist and performance artist Charlotte Moorman seemed to pose precisely this question. Part of an extended network of artists associated with Fluxus and the Happening movement in the 1960s, Moorman collaborated extensively with Nam June Paik, achieving notoriety as the “topless cellist” after being arrested for performing with her breast exposed in Paik’s Opera Sextronique (1967) at the Film-Makers Cinematheque in New York. Following the arrest, Moorman was invited to appear on a dozen TV shows, including Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show and The Merv Griffin Show. As one would expect, Moorman’s music performances on these shows, and her explanations of her work, were usually met with laughter and a degree of ridicule, mostly generated by the host’s cynicism and at times insulting comments. Laughter was also the response in the case of the male artists, but the host never crossed the line and never ridiculed the artist-guest as happened with Moorman. Seen from a feminist perspective, there is definitely a sexist mechanism going on here, both on the part of Paik, who employed Moorman as a passive performer to eroticize technology, and of the TV hosts who mocked her. For German art theorist Bettina Funcke, Moorman’s TV appearances are better framed in light of a tension between high and low culture and “a demonstration mostly of the power of the moderator, the mass mediator over the mass public who can entertain his audience by presenting art in vulgar fashion, using ridicule and cliché… They generate a humor that

  Andy Warhol. Interview with Gene Okerlund, WWE Television, 1985. Retrieved from YouTube, accessed April 24, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fI3Oh1ELmBI. 6

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serves as protective shield against an Other that calls oneself into question, against the unknown, against one’s own total lack of stability.”7 The fact that this “Other” is a woman artist is paradigmatic of TV’s power to extend and reinforce the social dynamics of misogynism. Unlike Moorman, Cindy Sherman appears to be totally in control of her media image in Cindy Sherman: An Interview (1980–81), perhaps because this is not a real TV show but a mockumentary made by MICATV (Figure 4.2). A collaborative project of Carole Ann Klonarides and Michael Owen, from 1980 to 1988 MICA-TV produced a crossover series of documentaries about—and in collaboration with—then emerging artists, including Sherman, Richard Prince, and Laurie Simmons. Apart from a few slots on cable TV, none of the MICA-TV productions were ever intended to reach a real TV audience. Klonarides claimed that they “wanted to explore a creative reinterpretation of how art and arts are depicted in the media… We were interested in using television as an influence along with the ideas of artists who were also using the media environment as their source.”8 A pivotal figure of the so-called Pictures Generation, in her photographybased artworks Sherman uses mass media imagery as her source of inspiration, sometimes explicitly as in the series Untitled Film Stills (1977–80), sometimes implicitly as in the works in which she parodies a range of female stereotypes produced by the mass market for women. Unlike Moorman, Sherman doesn’t confront a real TV studio and audience; rather, by performing the role of a television personality she shapes a metalinguistic criticism of TV, albeit from the comfortable position of an artist’s studio. With the aid of costumes and set design, she conducts her usual critique of representation, focusing on the slight barrier between on-air mode and backstage to reveal the liminal distance between artificiality and real life in contemporary, media-saturated society. In the video, Klonarides plays the role of an art dealer-turned-TV host who interviews Sherman—an emerging artist who by then had already been acclaimed in the art world—about her life and work. Accompanied by an electronic soundtrack, the ten-minute conversation is punctuated by a continuous confrontation between Sherman’s own works (as they appear in a printed portfolio held by Klonarides) and the artist herself who talks about her work disguised in five consecutive characters from her acclaimed Untitled Film Stills series, including a film noir type, a femme fatale, and a schoolgirl. The masquerade doesn’t stop the conversation flow, as if suggesting that within a televisual framework the artist and the fragmentary identities she performs in her work have finally fused into a single hybrid persona: a television personality.

 Bettina Funcke, Pop or Populus: Art between High and Low (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2009), 108.   Carole Ann Klonarides and Michael Owen. Interview with Sarah Rogers-Lafferty in Breakthroughs: Avant-Garde Artists in Europe and America, 1950–1990, ed. John Owell (Columbus, OH, and New York: Wexner Center for the Visual Arts and Rizzoli, 1991), 237. 7 8

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FIGURE 4.2  Cindy Sherman on MICA-TV, Cindy Sherman: An Interview, video stills, 1980–81. Courtesy of MICA-TV (Carol Ann Klonarides and Michael Owen).

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4.2 The Artist as Intruder Violence and Disclosure: Chris Burden After this excursus on artists who, when invited on TV shows, embraced its very mechanism—albeit injecting it with some sort of deviancy and developing metalinguistic forms of reflection on the notion of art and its social perception—it is a timely juncture to focus on those artists who performed the role of intruders in TV, refusing to adhere to precoded roles. The first case is that of American artist Chris Burden, whose early production is characterized by a confrontation between artist and audience as it emerges from a controversial series of “violent” performances for which he started attracting attention while still an MFA student at the University of California, Irvine. A prime example would be his thesis project Five Day Locker Piece (1971), which consisted of him spending five days stuffed in a school locker with only five gallons of water available, or the notorious Shoot (1971), in which a friend shot him in the left arm with a rifle in front of about ten people. Often deemed the result of a pathological state—similar to other performances of the 1960s and 1970s (e.g., by the likes of Marina Abramović or the Viennese Actionists)—Shoot stands in art history as the ultimate example of how far an artist can push the tension between violence and passivity by affecting real life through art. According to art historian and theorist Frazer Ward, the most interesting aspect of Shoot is the ethical dilemma faced by the shooter and the audience: why did they not stop Burden from performing such a dangerous act? Ward suggests that Burden’s act of self-victimization is “reenacted in miniature, and in the context of art, the constitution of a public around a violent event and its representation,”9 namely the ongoing Vietnam War at that time. Like TV news viewers, Burden’s passive audience appears “as a gray zone, defined by the suspension of judgment and choice. What should I do, in this situation? Watch.”10 Following Shoot, a local TV station invited the artist to conceive a performance for live broadcast. After rejecting all of his proposals, they opted for an interview with journalist Phylls Lutjeans, which Burden turned into another controversial piece titled TV Hijack (1972). This is how Burden described it: I arrived at the station with my own video crew so that I could have my own tape… In the course of the interview, Phyllis asked me to talk about 9

 Frazer Ward, “Gray Zone: Watching Shoot,” October, Vol. 95, Winter (2001): 129–30.  Ibid., 130.

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some of the pieces I had thought of doing. I demonstrated a TV hijack. Holding a knife at her throat, I threatened her life if the station stopped live transmission… At the end of the recording, I asked for the tape of the show. I unwound the reel and destroyed the show by dousing the tape with acetone. The station manager was irate, and I offered him my tape which included the show and its destruction, but he refused.11 In both aforementioned pieces, Burden performed an act of violence using TV as a paradigm; however, while in Shoot he exposed the passive and voyeuristic nature of the viewer, in TV Hijack he claimed the right of the audience, here embodied in his own public persona of the emerging artist, to rage against and overturn TV’s dominant position. On this approach, American art curator and former Whitney Museum director David A. Ross remarked: “Burden has always been interested in television. Television as technology, as social force, as drug, as the mirror of an alienated culture— these were of real interest to an artist like Burden, who believed that he and his work must finally function within the real world.”12 Ross’ point might not be entirely true for either Shoot or TV Hijack, since both works remained confined to the art world and never reached a real TV audience, but it certainly is true for Burden’s following television works: four videos made between 1973 to 1977 (and broadcast by purchasing advertising slots on local TV stations), in which his role as intruder became more explicit. The first piece, TV Ad (1973)—aired nightly between November 5 and December 2 by KHJ in Los Angeles—was a ten-second excerpt from a black-and-white film documenting his recent performance Through the Night Softly. Here the artist, with hands tied behind his back, crawls through a vacant parking lot strewn with broken glass—another provocative and psychologically violent action in front of which the audience, this time a real TV audience, is powerless. In the other three “commercials” Burden explores TV’s power to produce absolute truths. The ten-second Poem for L.A. (1975), aired seventy-two times by KHJ and KTLA, mimics a newscast by showing a close-up of his face against a blue background as he makes three statements, reiterated by bold flashing graphics: “SCIENCE HAS FAILED,” “HEAT IS LIFE,” and “TIME KILLS.” Chris Burden Promo (1976) is a zany, iconoclastic act of self-promotion in which the artist’s name appears after those of the five best-known artists to the general public: Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Vincent Van Gogh, and Pablo Picasso. Burden’s final work in the series, Full Financial Disclosure (1977), operates in a similar way, this

 Chris Burden, Chris Burden: 71–73 (Los Angeles: self-published, 1974), 36.  David A. Ross, “Chris Burden’s Television,” in Chris Burden: A Twenty-Year Survey, ed. Paul Schimmel (Newport Beach, CA: Newport Harbor Art Museum, 1988), 30.

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time by disclosing the artist’s income from the past year, which is a reflection on TV’s cynical tendency to reduce individuals (and so also artists) to their market value.

Space Invaders Usually, artists who appear on TV aim to turn the broadcast into one of their artworks through mere participation, sometimes bringing the documentation back into the art world via publications or photographs and videos to be displayed in exhibitions. The moment they “invade” a TV studio, even when doing almost nothing, they contaminate the very notion of art, pushing the boundaries between art, entertainment, and marketing. One such peculiar approach was that of Austrian artist Richard Kriesche, who, in his early works of the 1970s, juxtaposed media practice and theory. For example, when, on December 12, 1974, he appeared in the ORF show Impulse 16 to talk about video art, he instructed a cameraman to slowly zoom in on his blindfolded eyes until, as he later explained, “my reality (I see nothing) became the viewers’ media reality (they see nothing).”13 Kriesche’s early production is all focused on the tension between reality and its media double. In Twins, a 1977 installation made for documenta 6, two female twins read excerpts from Walter Benjamin’s seminal 1936 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility in front of a camera, in two separate but identical rooms. Next to each girl stands a TV monitor showing live images of her twin, thus eliciting a displacement between the real and media duplicate. Kriesche mixes media practice and theory again in Nationalfeiertag (1978), this time addressing television straightforwardly. Invited by ORF to realize a piece for Austrian National Day, he appears in the guise of the nation’s president—giving a formal speech that sounds like a political statement on television’s unsuitability to accomplish such a commitment as a national celebration. The concern of many of the artists discussed in this section seems to prove that art remains an autonomous manifestation of critical thinking even when embedded in the conforming apparatus of television. The political attitude of Situationism, the tactics of pseudo-event makers such as Abbie Hoffman, and the awareness of artists like Cage, Burden, and Kriesche merge in the agenda of that generation who broke through in the 1990s. French curator Nicolas Bourriaud theorized upon their practice in his seminal 1998 book as “relational aesthetics.” Alluding to Debord, Bourriaud remarks, “This is

 Richard Kriesche, “Blackout,” undated. Retrieved from Medien Kunst Netz, accessed April 24, 2021, http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/blackout/. 13

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a society where human relations are no longer ‘directly experienced,’ but start to become blurred in their ‘spectacular’ representation.”14 In reaction, the artwork becomes “a proposal to live in a shared world, and the work of every artist is a bundle of relations with the world, giving rise to other relations, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum.”15 This ethos informs the production of French artist Mathieu Laurette, who blurs the boundaries between art, media, and economy through a series of real-life projects, some of which sought “legitimization” on TV. It all started in 1993, when Laurette took part as a contestant on the TV game show Tournez Manège (the French version of The Dating Game), where he presented himself as a multimedia artist. This does not suggest anything strange, apart from the fact that he sent out invitations to an art audience to watch the show, and thereby labeling his participation as a proper artwork. During the 1990s he kept “appearing” on TV, sometimes as part of the studio or street audience raising placards with messages like “Guy Debord Is So Cool,” on other occasions on talk shows where he made statements, such as asserting that today’s society allows us to do everything without leaving home. Laurette labeled and listed these events on his résumé as “Apparitions” (1993–ongoing). In his own words, Laurette approached television because he wanted to produce something with little financial means and no demand, working with what already exists, inside spaces that can be ‘filled,’ that need content. I decided on television because it was possible to produce something here. TV already has everything an artist needs: the necessary elements for production, the place for communication, and an audience. Economically valuable material can be created using few means. Appearing on TV is really easy; the only thing you have to do is follow its rules.16 Since one of the basic rules of TV is sensationalism, in Produits Remboursés (1991–2001) Laurette told the sensationalistic story that he lived exclusively on reimbursed products—food, detergents, clothing—an extreme take on the “money-back” logic at the base of corporate marketing. Television and printed media celebrated him as the “Freebie King” but few of them realized that it was, in fact, a work of art. The same could be said for Italian duo Arpiani e Pagliarini. In 1997, they took part in Uomini e Donne (Men and Women), a daytime talk show on Canale 5 in which couples discuss their problems in front of a live studio audience. Raffaella Arpiani was jealous of Emi Fontana, then dealer of her  Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Paris: Les Presses du Réel, 2002), 9.  Ibid., 22. 16  Mathieu Laurette. Interview with Jérôme Sans, “Guy Debord Is So Cool!,” UOVO, No. 11, June (2006): 55. 14 15

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fiancée Federico Pagliarini. Fontana’s denial in a phone call and the stereotyped allusions to art and the artist’s role expressed by host and audience prove that the interpretation of this “artwork” changed depending on the perspective adopted: a generic TV audience looking at just another couple’s story or the art world understanding this participation’s metalinguistic nature. The following year the duo went back on TV, this time on the Rete 4 courtroom show Forum, where Raffaella succeeded in convincing the judge to be legally acknowledged as a co-creator of Federico’s artworks.

Art, TV, and Mysticism: Christian Jankowski Laurette’s and Arpiani e Pagliarini’s TV appearances play with the dangerous conceit that the ontology of art depends upon the context. Normally art is considered art not only when an artist declares so but also when a gallery or museum displays it, thus legitimizing it. If Laurette has been able to qualify his real-life productions as proper artworks—in the form of sculptures or installations—the same cannot be said for Arpiani e Pagliarini. According to Marco Senaldi, in order for them to “put under discussion (to the eyes of the art system) the very role of the artist,” they have also “lost their identity as artists (after various group shows there are no news of any other activity), but most of all they broke up, they sacrificed their identity as a couple.”17 Often blamed as cheeky acts of self-promotion, both Laurette’s and Arpiani e Pagliarini’s TV appearances made them more popular to a TV audience than to the contemporary art audience when these works were made. Theirs was a genuine attempt to infiltrate media in order to expose the consumerist logic that regulates the contemporary society of the spectacle. In Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World (2002), the book that followed Relational Aesthetics, Bourriaud remarks that for the artist to find originality and meaning “is a matter of seizing all the codes of the culture, all the forms of everyday life, the works of the global patrimony, and making them function. To learn how to use forms, as the artists in question invite us to do, is above all to know how to make them one’s own, to inhabit them.”18 Looking back at the production of the artists associated with Bourriaud’s ideas of “relational aesthetics” and “postproduction,” the most successful ones are those that inhabit and adapt to existing forms of representation while, at the same time, being able to decontextualize them in the art world. A crucial figure among them who developed TV-related projects is German 17  Marco Senaldi, Arte e Televisione: Da Andy Warhol al Grande Fratello (Milan: Postmediabooks, 2009), 106, my translation. 18  Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World (New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2002), 18.

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artist Christian Jankowski. For example, when invited to the 1999 Venice Biennale, he did not have any artwork to show until a few days before the opening. While watching TV in his Venetian hotel room, he was inspired by the fortune-tellers that populated local Italian channels to produce the context-specific artwork Telemistica (1999), which consisted of him doing live phone-ins, with five of them asking if his participation in the Biennal would be successful (Figure 4.3). In the video, recorded directly from TV, to which Jankowski simply added English subtitles, the artist’s voice is heard speaking correct Italian with a German accent, while the TV fortune-tellers (three men and two women) give their readings on screen, appearing in front of a background of spiritualityevoking pictures and Chroma-keyed graphics, with their name and telephone numbers in overlay. Maestro Antonio Vitale tells him that “there will be a renewal.. like if you would start to do something fundamentally new;”19 and Barbara Feruglio advises him to “Listen, your career… in the future you will gain success.”20 The cartomante Chiara even conjectures on the artist’s personality by saying that “an artist is never satisfied, there is always something to cut and adjust,”21 which, incidentally, sounds like a literal description of the artist’s work as a “postproducer” in Bourriaud’s terms. On the one side, Jankowski reminds us that a confrontation with mass media today is inescapable—even for an artist. On the other, he creates a humorous debate on the value systems of art. In The Holy Artwork (2001), again he merges art, television, and “mysticism” through his collaboration with Pastor Peter Spencer of the Texas-based Harvest Fellowship Church, host of a weekly televangelical show. Jankowski enters the stage-pulpit of the show as a “special guest” and collapses on the floor. Then Spencer begins a sermon praising the creation of a “holy artwork” that could expand our definition of art. And let this artwork—Father, God, we pray—question and challenge the art world and bring it to a level of spiritual dimension. Father, we want this Holy Artwork to make people in The Church understand the value of contemporary art, and we pray that this artwork, this Holy Artwork, will be a bridge between art, religion and television.22 Moved by a real quest for the notion of art, Jankowski continued realizing other TV-related projects over the years. For Kochstudio (2004) he built a replica of his kitchen at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein and filmed an episode of an imaginary cooking show with Alfred Biolek, star of German  Edna Van Duyn, ed., Christian Jankowski: Play (Amsterdam: De Appel, 2001), 71.  Ibid., 76. 21  Ibid., 84. 22  Christian Jankowski, The Holy Artwork (Berlin: Revolver, 2002), 220–1. 19 20

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FIGURE 4.3  Christian Jankowski, Telemistica, video stills, 1999. Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York.

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cooking show alfredissimo! which alternated between cookery segments and talks about art. For Kunstmarkt TV (2008) Jankowski hired professional teleshopping dealers to sell artworks from Cologne Art Fair, diminishing the distance between the high art market and a mundane home shopping channel. In Casting Jesus (2011) he goes back to the “mystical,” setting up a casting show—typical of reality TV (although not meant to be broadcast)— with three real-life Vatican members evaluating actors auditioning for the character of Jesus as they complete tasks such as breaking bread or carrying a cross (Figure 4.4).

FIGURE 4.4  Christian Jankowski, Casting Jesus, video stills, 2011. Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York.

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The Bad Girl: Tracey Emin As a result of modern and contemporary art occupying a more and more relevant position in society, both in cultural and economic terms, the lives of the artists have also come into play. Some would object that artists’ lives have always been a major counterpart to their official production, at least since Giorgio Vasari’s 1550 classic Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects—an encyclopedic collection of gossip-infused biographies of painters, sculptors, and architects of the Renaissance. But what was then confined to an “art history” book—and shared by a literate few—has today become readily available in the public domain thanks to mass media. From newspapers and magazines through to radio and television up to the internet, every artwork’s interpretation interweaves with a life story. For some artists, the notion of art and life is so inextricably linked that the boundaries blur into a real-life Gesamkunstwerk, where anything they make or do, including daily activities, is considered art. A prime example is that of British artist Tracey Emin, whose biographical notes in the catalog of the controversial exhibition Sensation (1997) offer a glimpse into this paradigm: Tracey Emin’s art appears as a tautology: her art is her life, her history, and vice versa. It has meaning only insofar as Emin herself does. She recreates her past, memorializes it, and weaves it into a narrative performance. Casting herself as the star of her own seriocomic life, she literally re-inscribes it as objects: banners, quilts, chairs, bags, and a tent. She also makes videos, etchings and paintings, and writes books and poetry. Emin’s autobiographical confessional is always open to the public as the divide between art and life is willfully collapsed.23 A pivotal figure of that generation emerged in the early 1990s—labeled by its promoter, the advertising executive, and art collector Charles Saatchi, as the Young British Artists, or YBAs, which include the likes of Damien Hirst and Jenny Saville—Emin has also made numerous appearances on TV and considers these to be part of her art production, as confirmed in the 1998 exhibition catalogue I Need Art Like I Need God (published by White Cube gallery), wherein she listed them in her biography. Her most famous— or rather notorious—TV appearance was on the British public network Channel 4’s talk show The Death of Painting in 1997: a group discussion about that year’s Turner Prize (won by Gillian Wearing), which Emin turned

 David Bussel, “Tracey Emin,” in Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection, ed. Norman Rosenthal (London: Thames & Hudson in association with the Royal Academy of Arts), 196.

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into a sensationalistic moment of trash television, thus cementing her reputation as an enfant terrible among a generic public. Following the Turner Prize awards dinner, Channel 4 presented a live debate whose guest list included art historians, writers, and curators, such as Richard Cork, Waldemar Januszczak, Tim Marlow, Norman Rosenthal, Roger Scruton, and David Sylvester. Emin, the only artist, the only woman, and the only drunk person, smoked furiously and babbled: “I want to be with my friends. I’m drunk. I want to phone my mum… I want to leave. I’ve got to go somewhere. I’m going to leave now. Don’t you understand? I want to be free. Get this fucking mike off.”24 While she remembers it as “the most embarrassing moment” in her life, and the broadcasters wallowed in the high ratings, The Guardian newspaper judged it her “most significant, certainly her most entertaining, contribution to British art.”25 Two years later, British writer Will Self revisited the episode in The Independent, commenting, “At the time everyone seemed to think it was a marvelously subversive act, squarely within the anti-traditionalism that Tracey and the rest of the Brit-Art pack were espousing.”26 Although she never considered herself a feminist artist, Emin is definitely part of the so-called third wave feminism epitomized by the Riot Grrrl subculture and characterized by the focus on confessional micropolitical issues and an angry, “bad girl” attitude. Autobiographical elements such as rape (she was the victim of an unreported rape at age thirteen) and teen sexuality (the libertine lifestyle during her teenage years in the seaside town of Margate) meander throughout Emin’s production: from the installation My Bed (1998)—her own unmade bed with empty liquor bottles, worn panties, used condoms, and boxes of antidepressants scattered all over—to the home videos edited in short films like Why I Never Became a Dancer (1995), up to the photographic series Naked Photos: Life Model Goes Mad (1996), in which she appears naked while painting in the studio. Television, as a subject matter, has only ever featured in one work by Emin. A print from the series All the Girls (1997) showcases a girl lying on the floor in front of a TV set: an image that American critic and curator Joshua Decter has defined “at once pathetic and funny, hopeless and ridiculous, suggesting that television is just something that we use when nothing else

 Tracey Emin, from the TV show The Death of Painting, Channel 4, December 4, 1997. Retrieved from YouTube, accessed April 24, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKNr2LOkXYE. 25  Clare Longrigg, “Sixty Minutes, Noise: by Art’s Bad Girl,” The Guardian, December 4, 1997. Retrieved from The Guardian, accessed April 24, 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/ artanddesign/1997/dec/04/20yearsoftheturnerprize.turnerprize1. 26  Will Self, “The Will Self Interview: Tracey Emin, A Slave to Truth,” Independent, February 21, 1999. Retrieved from The Independent, accessed April 24, 2021, http://www.independent. co.uk/arts-entertainment/the-will-self-interview-tracey-emin-a-slave-to-truth-1072220.html. 24

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is available—perhaps a surrogate friend or lover.”27 Emin has appeared on television countless times, in documentaries (Mad Tracey from Margate, BBC Two, 1999), talk shows (Room 101, BBC Two, 2004), and reality shows, such as School of Saatchi (BBC Two, 2009)—a talent show for artists in which she played the juror—the latter example of which will be discussed in the last chapter. The extremely high value her works have reached over the years—in 2014 My Bed was auctioned for over £2.5 million GBP—is often called into question. A notable example occurred in 2011, when her twin brother, Paul (a retired carpenter), appeared on Channel 4’s reality show Four Rooms attempting to sell a print given to him by his sibling, “one of Britain’s best known living female artists,”28 to the highest bidder among four art dealers. Paul accepted an offer of £2,300 GBP though one of the other dealers later revealed he would have offered £12,000–13,000 GBP.

4.3 Representations of Art and Artists in TV The Loss of the Aura: TV Shows About Art After the Second World War, modern and contemporary art became increasingly popular in cities like New York, London, and Paris. In her crucial book TV By Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television (2008), American media scholar Lynn Spigel asserts that while going to museums became a habit for an increasing number of New Yorkers, more and more galleries opened their doors, and even department stores like Macy’s started selling paintings. Meanwhile, American television “presented the arts as a national, even patriotic concern,” searching for “a uniquely ‘American’ form of modern art, an American vernacular distinct from European art and capable of representing the U.S. as the leading center of the free world.”29 Old media did the same, a symbolic case being a long feature on Jackson Pollock in the August 8, 1949, issue of LIFE magazine significantly subtitled “Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” This new scenario elicited a tension between high and low culture, the intellectual and commercial value of art, authenticity and reproduction, academicism and popularization. On the one side, eminent art historians like Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and Meyer Shapiro championed the first American avant-garde movement, the New York School of  Joshua Decter, Tele[visions] (Wien: Kunsthalle, 2002), 15.  From the TV show Four Rooms, Channel 4, June 9, 2011. Retrieved from YouTube, accessed April 24, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95LmrDzABSk. 29  Lynn Spigel, TV By Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2008), 23. 27 28

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Abstract Expressionism, on the base of painting’s search for autonomy from anything popular, or what Greenberg called the “kitsch,” through abstraction. As early as 1939 Greenberg stated: “If the avant-garde imitates the processes of art, kitsch, we now see, imitates its effects,”30 which echoed Walter Benjamin’s 1936 warning that mechanical reproduction, notably photography, deprives the work of art of its aura, or else its authenticity. On the other side, major New York museums like the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan “tried to use television as a form of popular pedagogy,”31 observes Spigel, “hoping both to educate viewers and to advertise the museum itself.”32 In contrast with those congressmen who, during the Cold War, associated modern art with communism and un-American values, in 1952, MoMA initiated a “Television Project”—directed by the avant-garde filmmaker Sidney Peterson and the consultant Douglas MacAgy—that resulted in various in-house productions, some of which were broadcast. One such case was the CBS program Dimension (1954), which televised the museum’s twenty-fifth anniversary show. The program featured an actor playing an NYU art historian having an informal conversation about a Stuart Davis painting with a floor manager: “The script was based on the assumption that the viewing audience did not like to be lectured by intellectuals,”33 remarks Spigel. Another example is MoMA’s 1964 show, cohosted by NBC’s Aline Saarinen, whose stories “spoke to modern women with class aspirations,”34 and Frank Blair. The two chat with living artists, such as Alexander Calder, Marc Chagall, Alberto Giacometti, and Henry Moore, in their houses or studios—providing a candid glimpse into their lives. Unlike American television, European networks were not afraid to sound overly academic. Being primarily a public concern, European paleotelevision has always distinguished itself for its “pedagogic” intents, which were epitomized precisely in programs about the arts and culture. A peculiar case in point is Ways of Seeing, a 1972 series broadcast in the UK by BBC Two—comprising four thirty-minute episodes, and later expanded in a successful book. Here, the creator and host, British writer John Berger, offers the audience a poststructuralist analysis of the Western cultural and artistic canon, literally adopting new “ways of seeing” art and visual culture. Going from biblical art through to the Renaissance to modern art, Berger shows how the reading of artworks is associated with specific bodies of cultural knowledge (Figure 4.5). 30  Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” 1939 in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 15. 31  Spigel, 145. 32  Ibid., 147. 33  Ibid., 162. 34  Ibid., 165.

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FIGURE 4.5  John Berger, Ways of Seeing, BBC Two, video still, 1972.

British art critic John A. Walker discusses Ways of Seeing thoroughly in his 1993 book Arts TV: A History of Arts Television in Britain. According to Walker, the first episode suggests that “how we see paintings depends upon habits and conventions,”35 and that because of mechanical reproduction, photography and now television, “art works as images have become a form of transmittable information.”36 The second episode, which became a staple of feminist theory, “examined how representations of women in art and mass culture embody and reinforce patriarchy.”37 The third episode is a social critique of the oil painting technique constructed by bridging its tradition with the institutions and individuals who commissioned the works. The final episode, “the most confidently made and the most seductive in terms of pictorial rhetoric,”38 focused instead on the hyperrealistic effects of photography in contemporary advertising. In 1980, another shift occurred when the BBC broadcast Australian-born art critic and writer Robert Hughes’ landmark documentary series The 35  John A. Walker, Arts TV: A History of Arts Television in Britain (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993), 93. 36  Ibid. 37  Ibid., 94. 38  Ibid., 97.

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Shock of the New—also destined to become a popular spin-off book. Over the course of eight one-hour episodes, Hughes structures a commendable history of modern and contemporary art from Picasso to the postwar avantgardes; moreover, the program also symbolizes the opening of a gap, proper of neo-television, between pedagogical intent and the need to entertain, epitomized in the figure of the presenter as brand. Italian television has also been very prolific in this sense, with the advent of art specialists like Federico Zeri and Vittorio Sgarbi. Italian art and media scholar Vincenzo Trione describes the shift as such: “Immersed in that immense blob that is television programming, art loses its aura; it is embedded; it becomes part of the audience’s daily life. It evaporates into a sort of empire of signs without orders and hierarchies. It dissolves in an indistinct and continuous flow: always on, available to everyone.”39

Stereotypes Exposed: From General Idea to the Internet TV programs about art are a staple in today’s global programming. The advent of digital television in the 1990s allowed not only for a proliferation but also a differentiation and specialization of channels: movies, news, sport, content for children, pornography, and so also the arts. PanEuropean satellite broadcaster Sky, for example, offers exclusive programs dedicated to the visual and performing arts through its Sky Arts channel. With the need to engage a generic audience no longer a concern, today’s documentaries about arts sound less pedantic and more informational, leaving the aura of the artworks intact. As Trione remarked, “It is unnecessary to focus on too detailed explanations. You do not have to go into detail, which requires a wide network of insights and knowledge. We must limit ourselves to providing some indispensable information and few essential concepts. Do not pretend to solve the whole meaning of an artist’s work.”40 Since the 1980s, contemporary art has undergone a massive process of popularization. This is largely due to three key factors: first, to the fact that more and more artists employ a popular imagery and venture into collateral and often commercial productions (e.g., music, cinema, advertising, fashion, gadgetry, and design at large); second, to the “social prestige” resulting from art’s increased market value; and third, to a shift in the artists’ public persona—from introvert eccentrics to fashionable communicators, or

39  Vincenzo Trione, “La Strategia dell’Assimilazione: Televisione Contro Arte,” in Arte in TV: Forme di Divulgazione, ed. Aldo Grasso and Vincenzo Trione (Monza: Johan & Levi Editore, 2014), 21, my translation. 40  Ibid., 27, my translation.

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else their professionalization into what Germano Celant has defined as “artmakers.”41 Nowadays, being able to orchestrate studio assistants, write applications and statements, respect deadlines, produce on large-scales, deal with collectors and dealers, speak to the press or to art school students, participate in conferences are just some of the activities in which an artist has to be skilled. Appearing on television has also become one of them. Today, when an artist is interviewed for a museum’s YouTube channel or a Sky Arts documentary, he or she exudes self-esteem and enlightens the audience with clear insights without having to label or even worse “explain” his or her creative process. However, as some works point out, an embarrassing and derogatory gallery of parodies and stereotypes about artists also proliferated on TV. In the videos Pilot (1977), Test Tube (1979), and Shut the Fuck Up (1985), for example, Canadian group General Idea speculated on their own “brand identity” in reference to media and entertainment. More recently, others scavenged internet databases, collecting stills and clips showing how artists are represented in TV such as Framing the Artists (2005) by Chicago-based duo Temporary Services; ARTISTAR (2009) by Bologna-based artist Maurizio Finotto; and Public Collection (2015–16), a collaborative two-part project by New York-based duo Art and Science Project or A&SP and Milan-based duo NASTYNASTY©. Active between Toronto and New York from 1967 to 1994—when two of its three members, Jorge Zontal and Felix Partz, died of AIDS—General Idea investigated issues like glamour, celebrity, marketing, representation, and the AIDS crisis through the organization of beauty pageants, boutiques, talk shows, and FILE magazine, along with the production of ephemera such as postcards, posters, stamps, prints, and patches, as well as installations made of balloons or colored pills. A recurring concern in the group’s production was that “Art’s central myth is the myth of the individual genius,”42 as Zontal says in Pilot (1977), a half-hour video in the form of a prime-time news magazine produced for public broadcasting in Ontario. Pilot recounts the genesis of the group’s production ironizing upon their ambition to become “famous,” “glamorous,” and “rich,” that is “to be artists.”43 Similarly, in the first scene of the twenty-eight-minute video Test Tube (1979)—set in an alienating “Color Bar Lounge”—group member AA Bronson says: “More and more artists are turning to popular media in an effort to examine the effectiveness of their work, not only in an attempt to reach a larger audience, but also to obtain access to the immediacy of  Germano Celant, Artmakers: Arte, Architettura, Fotografia, Danza e Musica negli Stati Uniti (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1984). 42  Jorge Zontal in General Idea, Pilot, 1977, transcription by Fern Bayer, Toronto, November 7, 2011, supplied by Fern Bayer and AA Bronson. 43  AA Bronson in General Idea, Pilot, 1977, transcription by Fern Bayer, Toronto, November 7, 2011, supplied by Fern Bayer and AA Bronson. 41

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FIGURE 4.6  General Idea, Test Tube, video stills, 1979. Courtesy the artist and Electronic Arts Intermix, New York. © General Idea.

newspapers, magazines, rock ’n’ roll, and of course television itself.”44 The video parodies media stereotypes about art, for example through a soap opera narrative about an “abstract depressionist” artist’s rise to success (Figure 4.6). Shut the Fuck Up (1985), instead, mixes studio scenes with   AA Bronson in General Idea, Test Tube, 1979, transcription by Fern Bayer, Toronto, November 7, 2011, supplied by Fern Bayer and AA Bronson.

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archive television footage, including a hilarious scene from an episode of the1960s series Batman, in which the Joker participates in a painting contest. In the scene, one competitor delegates his painting to a monkey; another uses his feet à la Gutai artist Kazuo Shiraga. The Joker wins with a red dot on a plain canvas titled Death of a Mauve Bat, which the organizer explains to the jury as being “symbolic of the emptiness of modern life.”45 A recurring tactic adopted by the artists working in the first two decades of the twenty-first century has been to appropriate material from the internet—photographs, sound, texts, graphics, or moving images—to demystify dominant narratives, including the media representation of art and artists. Temporary Services’ Framing the Artists (2005) comprises an artist’s book, video, and installation presenting dozens of TV depictions of “artists’ unusual behavior, love affairs, or self-destruction through drugs and alcohol. Jokes about not being able to understand modern art are endless.”46 Similarly, Finotto’s ARTISTAR (2009) excerpts clips showcasing artists (alleged or real), while A&SP and NASTYNASTY©’s Public Collection (2015–16) use only still frames of scenes featuring artworks (real or copies) from movies and television shows. Both works follow the basic poststructuralist logic, according to which, displacing original sources in an artistic context turns them into allegories.

Downtown Television Excited by the possibilities offered by public-access television to achieve autonomy from the art system, in the late 1970s and early 1980s a new wave of artists’ television emerged—notably with an impressive concentration in Manhattan, the first metropolitan area to sign a franchise agreement with a cable company. The so-called Downtown Art Scene, which most New Yorkbased emerging artists were associated with at the time, was characterized by the search for hybrid forms of expression and new venues where art and life could come together. Along with artists-run spaces (e.g., The Kitchen, ABC No Rio, Anthology Film Archives) and East Village galleries (e.g., Fun and Gracie Mansion), some artists exhibited their artworks and also performed in nightclubs (e.g., Mudd Club, Club 57, Area), while others approached television.

45  From General Idea, Shut the Fuck Up—Parts I & II, excerpt from Test Tube, 1979. Retrieved from YouTube, accessed April 24, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2gVJ1IRxA0. 46  Temporary Services, Framing the Artists: Artists & Art in Film and Television Volume 1 (Chicago: Temporary Services, 2005), 3.

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One of the main goals of guerrilla television, public-access programming began in United States in 1971 as part of a series of public, educational, and government access channels or PEG, which cable providers with 3,500 subscribers or more were required to deliver. Manhattan had two—both viewable up to the Upper East and West Sides—through which anybody could apply to produce and distribute content. According to writer Leah Churner, “Over the course of the next decade, time slots on these channels became a hot ticket, as a subculture of independent, no-budget producers emerged, inventing new ones to fit the ephemeral, unspectacular logic of public access.”47 Thanks to grants from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) and National Education Association (NEA), between 1979 and 1983 the Artists’ Television Network (ATN) provided artists production and postproduction facilities, while The Kitchen hosted the Cable Review Lounge, a bi-monthly meeting where artists could discuss issues related to TV productions. Unlike the late 1960s pioneers, such as Gerry Schum, Nam June Paik, and all those who produced works for the likes of WBGH in Boston and WNET in New York, this new generation was less interested in bringing avant-garde to the masses than in creating a social venue for their own community and, at the same time, producing a metalinguistic commentary on mainstream television as a power system. Two cases discussed in the previous chapter, those of Paper Tiger Television and AIDS-related productions, are indicative of the grassroots nature of some public-access programming. Other programs produced by artists, more diversified in terms of content were Jaime Davidovich’s The Live Show (1976–84); Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party (1978–82); Colab’s Potato Wolf (1979–84); WARC Report/Communications Update/Cast Iron TV (1979–91); and Willoughby Sharp’s Downtown New York (1986). Collaborative Projects Inc., or Colab, was a loosely organized artists group active from 1977 to the mid-1980s and mainly known for curating the 1980 groundbreaking exhibitions The Real Estate Show and The Times Square Show. But the cooperative nature and the anti-authoritarian spirit that characterized Colab also emerged from the group’s lesser-known TV productions: All Color News (1977), Nightwatch (1979), and Potato Wolf (1979–84) (Figure 4.7), credited to a vast network of artists that include: Andrea Callard, Jane Dickson, Peter Fend, Coleen Fitzgibbon, Bobby G, Julie Harrison, Becky Howland, Alan W. Moore, Cara Perlman, Kiki Smith, and Jim Sutcliffe. In their own words, Potato Wolf, their most durable one, featured forms of “Visual documentary, allegorical comedy, fake  Leah Churner, “Un-TV. Public Access Cable Television in Manhattan: An Oral History,” Moving Image Source (February 10, 2011). Retrieved from The Museum of the Moving Image: Moving Image Source, accessed April 24, 2021, http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/untv–20110210. 47

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FIGURE 4.7 Colab, Potato Wolf, video stills, 1979–84. Conceived and initially produced by Cara Perlman. Potato Wolf logo by Becky Howland. Preserved and digitized by Andrea Callard and Coleen Fitzgibbon. Courtesy of the artist.

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newscasts, and video vérité chronicles of crimes,”48 or else documentation of performances, grotesque TV shows, computer animations, and Chroma key extravaganzas that exposed a fierce lack of professionalism as a tactic to dismantle whatever the canons of either art or television were at that time. Most characteristic of Potato Wolf and coeval artists’ programs in New York is the sense of community that emerges from an agenda of names, codes, tastes, and behaviors most Downtown artists shared, identified with and transmuted from their artworks into these hybrid TV productions. In a 1985 review of Communications Update, for example, New York Times reporter Steve Schneider wrote that “Most of them share a playful street-smartness and a deep affinity for the textures of life in New York City. Their looseness of form and less-than-lavish production values are frequently used for purposeful effect, to provide an ironic commentary on commercial television’s glossiness and tired formulas.”49 Furthermore, in 1983, Communications Update was renamed Cast Iron TV, a name that evoked SoHo’s cast-iron buildings—the neighborhood where most of these artists lived. WARC Report/Communications Update/Cast Iron TV (1979–91) mixed grassroots productions (i.e., reports on issues such as colonialism, racism, and police brutality), parodies of popular TV formats (e.g., The Very Reverend Deacon b. Peachy, a satire of televangelism), insightful documentaries on the visual and performing arts, live performances (often improvised), and community projects. The brainchild of Avalanche magazine cofounders Liza Béar and Willoughby Sharp, in collaboration with Rolf Brand and John Hawkins, WARC Report was born in 1979. The program was characterized by a strong sense of belonging and is indicative, like other artists’ TV productions mentioned, of the Downtown Art Scene’s search for a new independent system, both in terms of art and media production, distribution, and consumption.

The East Village Heterotopia: Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party Of the many artists’ programs broadcast by Manhattan Cable Television in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Glenn O’Brien’s weekly show TV Party (1978–82) is exemplary for understanding how cohesive and autonomous the transdisciplinary Downtown—or more specifically, East Village—

 From “Colab Annual Report,” 1982 in A Book About Colab (and Related Activities), ed. Max Schumann (New York: Printed Matter, Inc., 2015), 161. 49  Steve Schneider, “Cable TV Notes: Experimentation Shapes ‘Cast Iron TV,’” The New York Times (April 14, 1985). Retrieved from The New York Times, accessed April 24, 2021, http:// www.nytimes.com/1985/04/14/arts/cable-tv-notes-experimentation-shapes-cast-iron-tv. html?pagewanted=all. 48

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FIGURE 4.8  Glenn O’Brien, TV Party, video still, 1978–82.

art scene was from art institutions and the mainstream (Figure 4.8). A member of Andy Warhol’s Factory, and the first editor of Warhol’s lifestyle magazine Interview from 1971 to 1974, O’Brien understood the potential of television when Coca Crystal invited him to appear on her cable-access show The Coca Crystal Show: If I Can’t Dance, You Can Keep Your Revolution. The program, which ran from 1977 to 1995, consisted mainly of political debates with noted underground figures, such as the activist Abbie Hoffman, Living Theatre’s Judith Malina, and avant-garde rock band The Fugs’ Tuli Kupferberg in a laid-back, marijuana smoke-infused studio setting. Between the choice of broadcasting prerecorded footage or going live, O’Brien had no doubts about the second option. And, in line with the aesthetics of underground film and performance, as noted by Benjamin Olin, he “embraced ‘failure’ as a badge of success, valorizing—and repurposing—that which is deemed bad, trashy, and disposable.”50 O’Brien’s aptitude toward deskilling coupled with his preference for realism over

 Benjamin Olin, “TV Party: A Cocktail Party That Could Also be a Political Party,” in Downtown Film & TV Culture: 1975–2001, ed. Joan Hawkins (Bristol and Chicago: Intellect Ltd., 2015), 197. 50

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artifice stemmed from his experience at Warhol’s Factory. He wrote: “I was a great fan of his movies and I liked the ‘bad’ camerawork. Somehow the lack of technical slickness heightened the realism and impact of the films. So as long as TV Party looked and sounded as good as Andy’s Nude Restaurant, I was happy.”51 For the sum of sixty dollars, O’Brien could broadcast live for one hour, in black and white, from the E.T.C. Studios on 23rd Street—the same used by Coca Crystal and Colab. He was the main host, with Chris Stein (guitarist of new wave band Blondie) as co-host. Photographer Edo Bertoglio was the cameraman, underground filmmaker Amos Poe the director, with Warhol’s protégé Walter Steding as the house band’s leader. The format included a monologue by O’Brien, live phone calls (often insulting), guests intermingling with a studio audience, and music interludes by the highlights of the New York punk, new wave, and no wave scenes. Stein and Blondie’s lead singer Debbie Harry was a staple alongside acts produced by Stein, such as Steding, the Gun Club, James White, Tav Falco, and Iggy Pop. Other musicians who appeared on the show included: David Bowie, David Byrne, George Clinton, The Fleshtones, Robert Fripp, Mick Jones, Kraftwerk, Ikue Mori, Klaus Nomi, Robert Palmer, Nile Rodgers, and Tuxedomoon. As stated by Olin, TV Party enabled “the distribution of a shared sensation,”52 or else a sense of belonging to a tight-knit Bohemia, whose art and lifestyle O’Brien humorously dubbed “sub-realism.” The entire staff of TV Party and most of their regular guests (Jean-Michel Basquiat, Fred Brathwaite, Diego Cortez, Arto Lindsay, John Lurie, Maripol, and Klaus Nomi) are considered icons of the East Village scene—a community of artists that strived for autonomy in a city ruled by real-estate interests and where creative energies are turned into profit. “For those who felt the world situation was getting increasingly hopeless, throwing a party seemed like an appropriate response,”53 wrote Steven Hager, one of the first biographers of that creative moment. In his seminal book, Art After Midnight: The East Village Scene, Hager pointed at TV Party as setting “a standard for infantilism, chaos, and insanity that will probably never again be equaled on television.”54 According to Hager, the highly popular American talk show host David Letterman cited TV Party as his favorite program. Both he and O’Brien were influenced by Johnny Carson and shared a fascination of his power to launch the careers of so many performers through his longstanding The  Glenn O’Brien, “The TV Party Story,” 2005. Retrieved from TV Party: The Movie, no longer available as of April 24, 2021, http://tvpartythemovie.com/. 52  Olin, 201. 53  Steven Hager, Art After Midnight: The East Village Scene (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), 1. 54  Ibid., 63. 51

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Tonight Show. But O’Brien claimed he had also been influenced by Playboy’s Penthouse (1959–60) and Playboy After Dark (1969), two lesser-known TV shows produced and hosted by Playboy founder Hugh Hefner. These were set up as sophisticated cocktail parties at the publisher’s own apartment, where he chats with the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and Lenny Bruce surrounded by elegant jet setters. “TV Party was Playboy’s Penthouse twenty years later and with no money,” claimed O’Brien. “But TV Party was meant to be much more than a regular old talk show. It was meant to be art and it was also meant to be a political party.”55 TV Party became so popular that at some point O’Brien declared his intention to run for mayor of New York, though this turned out to be just another “sub-realist” joke. After all, TV Party “was punk TV” for O’Brien: “We were anti-technique, anti-format, anti-establishment, and anti-antiestablishment. We liked to break all the rules of good broadcasting.”56 TV Party’s ludic nature was its strength, while Manhattan Cable Television became the extension of the Downtown heterotopia: a liberated area where artists didn’t have to justify any act, artwork, or pose, neither in intellectual nor in commercial terms. In so doing, TV Party, “a platform that begins with personal relationships, personalities conspiring for fun,”57 was less an experiment in media broadcasting than a reinforcement of that bond between life and art that was peculiar to that and any bohemian community before, only this time brought via cable television to an unaccountable and generic audience.

4.4 Andy Warhol’s TV Programs The “Superstar” as a Dysfunctional Replica After discussing the role of the artist as television personality and intruder, and passing through various forms of representation of art and artists on TV—from those that reinforced the distance between art and society via stereotypes to those that invented new heterotopic sites for social networking and self-representation—this last section will be devoted to Warhol’s television projects. Long dismissed as collateral ventures into the realm of pure entertainment, and thus deemed devoid of any intellectual value relevant in art historical terms, Warhol’s three programs—Fashion (1979–80), Andy Warhol’s T.V. (1980–83), and Andy Warhol’s Fifteen  O’Brien, “The TV Party Story.”  Ibid. 57  Glenn O’Brien, “TV Party Manifesto,” BOMB, No. 1 (1981). Retrieved from Glenn O’Brien, accessed April 24, 2021, https://glennobrien.com/tv-party-manifesto/. 55 56

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Minutes (1986–87)—represent, in fact, the ultimate manifestation of the quintessential Pop artist’s sensibility, and not only because all the tropes of Pop Art are condensed therein but because they push the mimesis between reality and duplicate, on which his oeuvre is based, to an extreme degree. Warhol’s entire output is characterized by a genuine fascination for any “commodity”—be it supermarket items or celebrities—whose presence in the everyday scenario is so widespread to have become a natural element, and so pervasive to transform any viewer into a desiring consumer. Concurrently, the artist has also practiced a slow process of deconstruction of the said commodities through the dismantling of the mechanism of production and distribution enacted by what Debord defined as “the society of the spectacle.” While, in the 1960s, at the verge of the postwar economic boom, large swathes of the masses shunned the comfortable lifestyle promoted by mass media, condemning it as artificial and alienating, Warhol and the artists associated with Pop Art began a process of dissection and ultimately demystification of commodities through, on occasion, extremely ambiguous acts of simulation. The activity that best describes Warhol’s practice is recording: an act of replication carried through handmade techniques of painting like screenprinting and the use of prosumer technologies to appropriate the reality in movement (i.e., film and video cameras), as a set of pictures (i.e., Polaroid cameras), or its aural dimension (i.e., tape recorders). As early as 1963, the most crucial and prolific year in the artist’s career, talking about the screenprint, he claimed: “The reason I’m painting this way is that I want to be a machine.”58 There is, however, an inherent paradox in this statement, which a year later Arthur Danto revealed when, talking about one of Warhol’s earliest artworks, the Brillo Box (Soap Pads) (1964), he asserted: “What in the end makes the difference between a Brillo box and a work of art consisting in a Brillo box is a certain theory of art.”59 According to Danto, being contextualized in art terms, that is, according to intellectual and aesthetic paradigms through which the “artworld” legitimizes a phenomenon as art, Warhol’s replica of a box of the detergent Brillo—a popular item in any American supermarket at that time—suggests that, through industrial production and marketing, reality becomes increasingly artificial and standardized so that it becomes a set of ephemeral “simulacra,” to borrow a term from Baudrillard. This emerges even more clearly from his early films like Sleep and Kiss, both from 1963, in which Warhol limits himself to “recording” extended actions (360 minutes for the former and 58 minutes for the latter), performed by nonprofessional actors—members of his studio/cohort, also known as the Factory (another

 Andy Warhol in conversation with G. R. Swenson, “What is Pop Art? Answers from 8 Painters,” Art News, Vol. 62, No. 7, (November 1963): 26. 59  Arthur Danto, “The Artworld,” 581. 58

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association with the idea of industrial production)—to mark the distance between real life and fiction. By recording real life, whether in his films, photographs, or writings such as a: A Novel (1968)—which is a mere transcription of hours of conversation between the artist and his friend Ondine—Warhol invalidates the system of representation enacted by mass media and substitutes it with the linear nature of time, including its passages of boredom. Certainly, he became a machine, mostly because he did not practice any form of editing or montage. But is this not just another artistic choice rather than an abdication? Therefore, just as his Brillo box was a dysfunctional replica of a household item, so too the actors who performed in his movies were dysfunctional replicas of real movie and TV stars. To elicit this notion further, Warhol called them “superstars.” As counterparts to the real stars—Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor, and others—whose portraits he screenprinted on canvas, the artist’s “superstars”—Joe D’Alessandro, Candy Darling, Baby Jane Holzer, Edie Sedgwick, Jack Smith, and others—stand in between the hedonistic impulse of acting out and the temptation to reveal their true selves. In regard to television, this dynamic, which echoes the psychoanalytical dynamic of the mirror, clearly emerges from Outer and Inner Space (1965), discussed in Chapter 2, in which Sedgwick’s subjectivity is split in two: her media duplicate and her real self clumsily trying to get hold of it. “This dialectic of spectacle culture and collective compulsion,”60 as Benjamin H. Buchloh calls it, produces a collapse of that suspension of disbelief that legitimizes fiction as such, allowing the spectator to understand the mechanism of subjectivation enacted by mass media.

From Pop to Fashion (1979–80) Back in the 1950s when he worked as a commercial artist—a period usually dismissed by art historians—Warhol realized some illustrations for CBS and NBC. Television remained a recurring reference throughout his “official” art production. One of his early pop paintings, TV $199 (1961), reproduces an advertisement partially erased by white abstract-expressionist-like brushstrokes, while his last print cycle was supposed to focus on ten historical TV moments of which only Moonwalk (1987)—depicting Neil Armstrong’s photograph of Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, Jr. during the Apollo 11 mission in 1969—was completed before his death. Besides Outer and Inner  Benjamin H. Buchloh, “Andy Warhol’s One-Dimensional Art: 1956–1966,” in Andy Warhol: A Retrospective, ed. Kynaston McShine (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989), reprinted in OCTOBER Files: Andy Warhol, ed. Annette Michelson (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001), 28.

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Space (1965), other films in his early oeuvre also refer to television, such as Soap Opera or The Lester Persky Story (1964), which will be discussed in the following chapter, and the Screen Tests (1964–68); the latter composed of silent and slow motion headshots of stars and “superstars,” which have retroactively assumed the flavor of a casting for a reality TV show. But as the artist himself declared, his “movies have been working towards TV. It’s the new everything. No more books or movies, just TV.”61 As he had done during the 1960s with films, in the 1970s Warhol established a television production team. The first of his recruits was Vincent Fremont, a future cofounding director of the Andy Warhol Foundation. From 1974 to 1987 Fremont was also vice-president of Andy Warhol Enterprises, Inc., a pseudo-company Warhol had formed in 1957 to manage both his fine arts production and those collateral ventures he famously called “business art… the step that comes after Art. I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist,”62 he famously claimed. Examples of Warhol’s “business art” include the production and management of rock music acts—the Velvet Underground in the 1960s, and Walter Steding in the 1980s—Interview magazine, various advertisements, a modeling career, and countless portraits for the rich and famous. With regard to television, examples range from the TV commercial “Underground Sundae” (1968) to the artist’s own TV appearances, TV shows, and music videos of the 1980s. Warhol often referred to television in his writings and interviews. In another crucial passage from The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (1975), he marks the moment he was shot by radical feminist Valerie Solanas in 1968 as a turning point in his life: Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than allthere—I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. People sometimes say that the way things happen in movies is unreal, but actually it’s the way things happen in life that’s unreal. The movies make emotions look so strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you, it’s like watching television—you don’t feel anything. Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television. The channels switch, but it’s all television.63 In 1970, Warhol bought his first Sony Portapak camera, with which he and Fremont filmed life at the Factory. The resulting tapes, which John G. Hanhardt called Factory Diaries—for the occasion of his curated exhibition 61  Andy Warhol in John S. Margolies, “TV-The Next Medium,” Art in America, Vol. 57, No. 5, (September/October 1969): 48. 62  Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (London: Cassell, 1975), 92. 63  Ibid., 91.

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of the artist’s films and videos at New York’s Whitney Museum in 1991— focus on daily actions performed in reference not to real life (as in his early films) but to precoded poses, gestures, and dialogues borrowed from celebrity culture and television. “With their improvisational tableaus and unglamorous cast and settings,” notes Lynn Spigel, “these tapes all reveal Warhol’s broader fascination with television’s histrionic efforts to transform the lackluster everyday into the excitement of the ‘real.’”64 The artist confirms this in another passage from his Philosophy: “A whole day of life is like a whole day of television… At the end of the day the whole day will be a movie, a movie made for TV.”65 The first proper TV project by Warhol and Fremont was Vivian’s Girls (1973), ten half-hour episodes based on a group of roommate models and drag queens (a plot he had already used in the 1966 film Chelsea Girls), which, according to Spigel, “appear to experiment technically with staging, location shooting, and ambient sound”66 (Figure 4.9). Vivian’s Girls was followed by Phoney (1973) (Figure 4.10), a twenty-three videotape series of phone chats,

FIGURE 4.9 Andy Warhol and Vincent Fremont, Vivian’s Girls, 1973 [unfinished]. ½" reel-to-reel videotape (10 total), black and white, sound, 30 minutes each. © The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved.  Lynn Spigel, TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), 275. 65  Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), 5. 66  Spigel, 274. 64

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FIGURE 4.10  Andy Warhol, Phoney, 1973. ½" reel-to-reel videotape (23 total), black & white, sound, 30 minutes each. © The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved.

and later Fight (1975), seven videotapes of couples quarrelling. These three series were offered to TV networks along with other proposals like a dinnerbased talk show that was later illicitly appropriated by Metronomedia. Disappointed and angry, Warhol decided to produce his TV shows himself and broadcast them on cable television. With Fremont as producer, and Warhol, executive producer, the pair were joined by Don Munroe as director, and Sue Etkin as director of production. The four constituted the core of Andy Warhol T.V. Productions, a division of Andy Warhol Enterprises, Inc. The first show they realized was Fashion (1979–80), eleven half-hour episodes broadcast on Manhattan Cable Television. Introduced by a headshot of Warhol clicking a Polaroid camera while saying “Fashion,” the program alternated between various segments: makeup tutorials able to turn an average girl into a disco diva; footage from fashion shows of emerging designers like Stephen Sprouse; insider tours of New York underground venues like the Mudd Club; and interviews with fashion experts like the designer Betsey Johnson, legendary Vogue editor Diana Vreeland, and postpunk icon Debbie Harry. The program looked like a handbook for a new generation of wannabe-superstars, the same group who, at that time, were turning the East Village into a transdisciplinary heterotopia for artistic expression and liberated lifestyles.

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FIGURE 4.11  Andy Warhol, Andy Warhol’s T.V. [episode 9], 1983. 1" videotape, color, sound, 30 minutes. © The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved.

Andy Warhol’s T.V. (1980–83) A few months before recruiting Fremont, buying a Sony Portapak, and beginning to film the proto-reality show titled Factory Diaries, Warhol had launched a magazine called Andy Warhol’s Interview, later known simply as Interview. A popular periodical, Interview was one of the first magazines to offer a candid look at the life of real and aspiring celebrities through unedited transcriptions of long conversations with them and a focus on their ordinary life. “You need to be friends with people to be able to interview them well,”67 recounted Bob Colacello, editor of Interview and factotum at the Factory from 1970 to 1983, as one of the things Warhol had taught him. As the televisual extension of the magazine, Andy Warhol’s T.V. (1980–82), eighteen half-hour episodes broadcast on Manhattan Cable Television, maintained a similar structure (Figure 4.11). Warhol had originally envisioned calling the program “Nothing Special”—probably in the attempt to underline that there was neither an intellectual ambition nor the presumption of making a more entertaining program than those 67  Bob Colacello, in Warhol TV, ed. Judith Benhamou-Huet (Paris: La Maison Rouge et Angelo Crimele), 26.

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already offered by mainstream television. The same idea was epitomized throughout the episodes by Warhol’s own presence, characterized by the same shy and apathetic aura that accompanied his other TV’s appearances. As in Interview, he would share the role of the interviewer with Colacello. During conversations for Andy Warhol’s T.V. the artist appears as a co-host, sometimes even silent, alongside a temporary interviewer, blurring the lines between guests and hosts. The roster of personalities featured on the show included regulars of the artist’s milieu, mostly but not exclusively from New York. The music world was represented by, among others, Soft Cell’s Marc Almond, Philip Glass, Blondie’s Debbie Harry and Chris Stein, Velvet Underground lead singer Lou Reed, and Walter Steding. Representatives of the fashion world were Giorgio Armani, Betsey Johnson, Claude Montana, Sonya Rykiel, and Diana Vreeland. Warhol also invited writers: Victor Bokris (who, in 1989, would go on to publish what is Warhol’s most official biography to date) and Jim Carroll; artists David Hockney, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Larry Rivers; the movie directors Steven Spielberg and John Waters—the latter accompanied by his “anti-muse” Divine; and socialites like Bianca Jagger, Liza Minnelli, Pablo Picasso’s daughter Paloma, a jewelry designer, Studio 54’s owner Steve Rubell, and Mr. Chow’s restaurateur Michael Chow. Regular Interview contributor Glenn O’Brien recollected how at the time he thought Warhol was jealous of his TV Party and that “his TV shows were a bit too ‘normal.’ But if they were so reasonable it was because that represented an excellent strategy for Andy. A way of seeming more normal.”68 Marco Senaldi supports the same thesis when he states: being so close to the most conservative and commercial logic of the mass media product, that is the talk show, he [Warhol] is able to point to its symbolic frame not from a snobbish intellectual position, but from within, from a proximity that could be precariously confused with collusion… Andy Warhol’s TV manages to simulate the ultimate machine that makes the simulacrum, that is television, and thus produces both the object (a real media product, a talk show) and a mental process (a reflection on it). That’s why Andy Warhol’s T.V. is the media equivalent of the Brillo Box of twenty years earlier.69 Being both objects and reflections on them, Warhol’s TV shows configure as metalinguistic events that, while reinforcing the spectacle, slowly dismantle its mechanism: on the one side proposing counter-models—“superstars,” queers, and artists—that challenge the traditional and heterosexist logic of mainstream celebrity culture, and on the other side revealing the shaky  Ibid., 30.  Senaldi, Arte e Televisione: Da Andy Warhol al Grande Fratello, 69, my translation.

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apparatus that regulates the fabrication of media personae. Regarding the former, Spigel notes how, in his screen interview, the artist Larry Rivers confesses his penchant for sadomasochistic gay sex, which leaves Warhol apathetic as usual, but also that he had just undergone an eye surgery, to which Warhol responds with an incredulous gasp. “In this way,” according to Spigel, “as a TV interviewer Warhol reverses the mechanisms of popular scandal and Hollywood gossip that in his time outed gay men. Rivers’ coming-out narrative and frank discussion of his sexual preferences are presented as just one more banal bit of TV talk while Warhol features the makeover eye-job story as the shocking ‘reveal.’”70 Warhol’s metalinguistic deconstruction of the media spectacle, which winds throughout the eighteen episodes of Andy Warhol’s T.V., instead, emerges decisively in the three additional one-to-two-minute clips he realized for the popular NBC show Saturday Night Live in 1981. In the first, Warhol eats an apple: an action reminiscent of both his early film Eat (1963) and Jørgen Leth’s 1981 film scene Andy Warhol Eating a Hamburger. In the second clip, someone puts makeup on Warhol’s face as he talks about death but the increasing pixilation of the screen fragments the image into an ephemeral abstraction. In the third clip, the artist talks on the phone while, all of a sudden, his head comes down with the aid of an elementary Chroma key effect that, while nodding to Peter Campus’ Three Transitions (1973), mocks it and all the seriousness of video art.

Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes (1986–87) A new series of nine episodes of Andy Warhol’s T.V. was produced in 1983 and broadcast this time by Madison Square Garden Network (MSGN)—an unconventional production for the channel of the famous Manhattan arena that focused mainly on sports. The roster of guests included: artists Donald Baechler, William Copley, Cindy Sherman, Michael Smith, and William Wegman; emerging graffiti artists Jean-Michel Basquiat, Futura 2000, Keith Haring, and Kenny Scharf; photographers Peter Beard, Horst, and Francesco Scavullo; fashion designers Donna Karan and Issey Miyake; top models Carol Alt and Brooke Shields; and music stars James Brown, Duran Duran, Hall & Oates, Sparks, Sting, and Frank Zappa. Warhol’s peculiar taste for realism permeates all the episodes, although this is more mediated than usual, while the rhythm is accelerated by new digital techniques of montage. Conversations range from gossip (e.g., Carol Alt and hockey player Ron Greschner discussing their love story) to personal obsessions (e.g., comedian Pee Wee Herman showing his toy collection), from insider looks at current art practices (e.g., Cindy Sherman in conversation with curator Roselee  Spigel, 281.

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Goldberg; Haring and Scharf with dealer Tony Shafrazi) to the influence of television on music and pop culture (e.g., Warhol interviewing Duran Duran about MTV, makeup, and stardom). Sometimes Warhol is the only host; on occasions he delegates the interviews to someone else as, for example, when he invites a “fan” to ask rock icon Frank Zappa, coincidentally, about fandom. The artist sits next to them. His deadpan face is framed a couple of times during the interview but he doesn’t speak a word. Warhol’s next and final TV program was Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes (1986–87), five half-hour episodes produced as usual by the Andy Warhol T.V. Productions team (Figure 4.12). The show was aired on MTV, a channel dedicated almost exclusively to music videos at the time: that since its birth in 1981 (as will be discussed in the following chapter) had had a tremendous impact upon not only the music and moving-image industries but also pop culture at large. The title of the show was based on Warhol’s ultimate motto: “In the future, everyone will be world famous for fifteen minutes,” which had appeared for the first time in the catalogue of the artist’s solo show at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet in 1968. The statement, which Warhol constantly reformulated over the years, proved prophetic of the possibilities to be offered in the following decades by reality television and the internet— to achieve instant celebrity status without any particular talent. The show’s visual rhythm was more frenzied than the previous ones and in line with the aesthetics of MTV, based on cuts, loops, and electronic effects achieved through an Amiga computer that the artist had been experimenting with at that time. A key device of the program was the use of a split screen to introduce the guests; each immersed in a plain, ethereal space yet interacting with each other; aware of being part of a fabricated reality. The guest list included, among many others: Bryan Adams, William Burroughs, Phoebe Cates, Jerry Hall, Debbie Harry, Marc Jacobs, Grace Jones, Robert Longo, Courtney Love, Stephen Sprouse, the Ramones, and Yoko Ono. Studio scenes showing a less apathetic than usual Warhol interviewing his guests are intercut by interviews without an interviewer, drag queen shows, random Interview covers, fashion shoots, concerts, and music videos, including those made by Warhol’s team. In her in-depth study of Warhol’s broad set of relationships with television, Italian art historian Anna Luigia De Simone suggests that the artist’s TV programs could be read as a sort of trilogy that “tries to formulate and verify the rules for the construction of the media mask,”71 and the progressive loss of consistency and authenticity the body goes through when mediated. Fashion showcases glamorous models and teaches makeup techniques to disguise the true self behind an artificial persona. In Andy Warhol’s T.V. the artist “tries

 Anna Luigia De Simone, Andy Warhol’s TV: Dall’Arte Alla Televisione (Sesto San Giovanni, MI: Mimesis, 2017), 125, my translation.

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FIGURE 4.12  Composite image of stills from: Andy Warhol, Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes, 1985–87. Each episode: 1" videotape, color, sound, 30 minutes. © The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved.

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hard to make his guests undoing their public image,”72 revealing whatever truthfulness still lies behind. Finally, in Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes, the body is definitely fragmented and dispersed throughout the electromagnetic waves—a process that is accelerated by an abundant use of digital effects. On February 22, 1987, Warhol died of heart complications following a gallbladder surgery. Interestingly enough, the final episode of Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes ends with images of a memorial service that was held at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan two months after the official funeral in Pittsburgh. By then Warhol had become a true celebrity to the point that he was himself parodied on mainstream television, as in Greg Travis’ 1986 clip “15 Sec. Workout” for Saturday Night Live, which presented the artist zapping as if he was performing a new form of keep-fit exercise. The ultimate split between the body’s flesh and its ethereal image is epitomized in the memorial service, which was broadcast as if it was another report on Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes, or a mundane event to which “superstars” and socialites showed up all dressed up. After all, as the artist himself stated in one of the segments made for SNL a few years earlier, “Death can really make you look like a star,”73 thereby suggesting that death is the ultimate stage of stardom, when the body is buried and its image finally takes its place and lives forever.

 Ibid., 126.  Andy Warhol from Andy Warhol’s T.V. at Saturday Night Live, Episode 2, 1981. Retrieved from YouTube, accessed April 24, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjTrtCAnFsw. 72 73

5 Disentertainment: Music, Kids, Fun, and Soap Operas

5.1 The Art of the Music Video Birth and Evolution of the Music Video More than news and commercials, entertainment is the genre that most often becomes the subject of artists’ acts of resistance, appropriation, and parody of television. While some of them have already been touched upon, this chapter will focus on entertainment per se, that is, those programs able to delight their audience, accompanying their daily activities, yet holding their attention: music videos, children’s shows, standup comedies, and soap operas. Originally conceived as promotional tools, music videos started appearing consistently on television with the advent of MTV in the United States in 1981, and other coeval music channels and programs worldwide, such as Mister Fantasy in Italy and Platine 45 in France. By introducing moving-image processing techniques and effects—pioneered in the 1960s by experimental filmmakers and video artists like Nam June Paik and Bruce Conner—to a larger and more generic audience, music videos became the quintessential genre of postmodernist television, based as they are on a frantic flow of fragmented images, often metalinguistic in nature. The origins of the music video genre go back to the Phonoscènes: films produced in France and the UK between 1902 and 1917 and displayed in theaters, showing actors lip-synching to a synchronized sound recording. References could also be made to the golden age of the Hollywood musical film, from Busby Berkeley’s 1930s kaleidoscopic extravaganzas through to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers’ features, to classic musicals of the 1950s, such as An American in Paris (1951) and Singin’ in the Rain (1952). The

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1940s heralded the arrival in the United States of “soundies”: three-minute 16 mm films that matched classical and swing music, or patriotic songs, played in nightclubs, bars, and lounges on a special coin-operated jukebox called a Panoram. The concept was further developed in the late 1950s with the Scopitone 16 mm film projector jukebox, produced in France, and Cinebox in Italy. As soul, jazz, and rock ‘n’ roll attracted increasingly bigger audiences, since the 1950s, pop music started appearing more frequently in films, either fictional (e.g., the Italian film subgenre musicarello) or based on concerts (e.g., Woodstock, 1970) and TV shows (e.g., The Ed Sullivan Show in the United States, and Ready Steady Go! in the UK). Parallel and complementary to this genesis is the evolution of the animated music film, from the synesthetic abstractions produced between the 1930s and the 1960s by the likes of Oskar Fischinger, Len Lye, and Hans Richter, through to the cartoons of the Fleischer Brothers and Walt Disney, up to the mesmerizing psychedelia of George Dunning’s film for The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine (1968). Early examples of the music video as we know it—a short film matching a song, conceived for promotional purposes—include Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s 1966 promos for The Beatles’ “Paperback Writer” and “Rain,” Mick Rock’s 1972 video for David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” and Bruce Gowers’ 1975 video for Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Music videos soon spread, thanks to the development of video technologies and the diffusion of cable television. In aesthetic terms, music videos mix elements from cinema, advertising, art, fashion, and television. In cultural terms, they celebrate youth and leverage on shock effects based on controversial issues, such as sexuality, violence, and politics. MTV built its success through “narrowcasting”: a strategy inherited from radio, or else, as suggested by Rob Tannenbaum and Craig Marks in their history of MTV, “targeting a specific demographic and selling your popularity within that audience to advertisers, rather than aiming for the largest possible audience.”1 The demographic group addressed in this case were teenagers—the least interested in television up to that point. “Based on the dubious premise that advertising and art are mutually exclusive,”2 as John A. Walker remarked in a key study on the convergences of art and pop music, music videos were hardly considered artworks in the beginning. However, over the years, various theoretical investigations have proved that the music video is, in fact, or has become, an art form in its own right—especially considering how the directors took advantage of the degree of freedom that was given to them to experiment. The list of the most significant directors includes: Jonas Åkerlund, Roman Coppola, Anton Corbijn, Chris Cunningham, David Fincher, James Frost, Jonathan Glazer, Michel Gondry, 1  Rob Tannenbaum and Craig Marks, I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution (London: Plume, 2012), xlii. 2  John Walker, Cross-Overs: Art Into Pop, Pop Into Art (London: Methuen, 1987), 139.

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Jean-Paul Goude, Jamie Hewlett, Stephen R. Johnson, Spike Jonze, Jesse Kanda, Jean-Baptiste Mondino, Mark Romanek, Zbigniew Rybczyński, Stéphane Sednaoui, Shynola, Floria Sigismondi, Chuck Statler, Julian Temple, Hype Williams, and Andrew “W.I.Z.” Whiston. Thanks to them, the music video has become, as French media scholar Antoine Gaudin suggests, “a true pop art (that is to say, seductive, ephemeral, industrial) functioning as an experimental structure in the heart of the industrial system of production of cultural works.”3 The music video as a pop art form reached its golden age in the 1990s thanks to the availability of big budgets and the visionary talent of directors like Cunningham and Gondry. Cunningham’s twisted yet shockingly sublime videos for electronic music acts like Björk and Aphex Twin offer a dystopian interpretation of digital technologies and science in line with coeval posthuman theories and art. Robots, aliens, and genetically modified creatures, all built with the aid of the latest software, recur in his music videos as well as commercials and multi-screen installations displayed at contemporary art exhibitions such as the 2001 Venice Biennale. Conversely, Gondry—who, like others, has also become an appreciated movie director—brought art into the music video, through a ludic, handmade, sculptural approach to scenography and storytelling, often based on disorienting effects of repetition and mirroring, in antithesis to the digital technologies that were spreading at the turn of the millennium. Highlights of his production are the music videos for Beck, Björk, Chemical Brothers, and The White Stripes. Gondry has also exhibited in art venues such as the New York gallery Deitch Projects in 2008.

Music Videos Directed by Visual Artists Many visual artists have accepted music video commissions to expand their audience and create a metalinguistic discourse on pop culture by intermingling with it. Since the beginnings, some took advantage of the basic fact that unlike film and television, which are mostly built on linear narratives, music videos could present more images at a time or in quick succession. Theoretician of audio-visual relationships Michel Chion even suggests that this is a specificity of the music video: “The thing that most closely resembles the polyphonic simultaneity of sound or music on the visual level,” he claims, “is the rapid succession of single images. Upon seeing a fast montage, the spectator’s memory functions like an ideal mixer—far superior to a machine—of visual impressions interlinked in time.”4

 Antoine Gaudin, “Le Vidéoclip. De la forme brève ciématographique au médium autonome,” in Les formes brèves audiovisuelles: des interludes aux productions web, ed. Sylvie Périneau (Paris: CNRS éditions, 2013), 170. 4  Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, ed. and trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 167. 3

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With their fast-paced montage of cross-fading, repetitive, and accelerated images and found footage, music videos directed in the 1980s by the artists Bruce Conner, Derek Jarman, and Robert Longo are exemplary of the postmodernist distrust toward the grand narratives of history, ideologies, and authority. Conner’s agitprop aesthetics for America Is Waiting (1981) by David Byrne and Brian Eno demystifies American symbols of progress. Jarman’s films for Marianne Faithfull’s Broken English (1979) and The Smiths’ The Queen Is Dead (1986), each comprising clips for three songs, juxtapose fires, masquerades, riots, the Union Jack, the royal crown, and youths wandering through desolated areas of London. Similarly, Longo’s flickering videos for Megadeath, New Order, and R.E.M., all in collaboration with Gretchen Bender, use pastiche as an allegorical procedure for a semiotic deconstruction of economic and political power systems. The Andy Warhol T.V. Productions realized eight music videos in the 1980s. For the Factory’s assistant Walter Steding—with whom Warhol founded the record label Earhole Productions, and which released Steding’s single “The Joke/Chase the Dragon”(1980)—the team produced the videos for “Secret Spy” (1982) and “Dancing in Heaven” (1982)—light-hearted odes to New York’s street life, featuring drag queens in the former and breakdancers in the latter. While the video for Miguel Bosé’s “Fuego” (1983) comments on the ephemerality of celebrity, with the singer burning a photographic portrait of himself, The Cars’ “Hello Again” (1984) features unclad East Village “superstars” re-enacting Warhol’s own 1963 film Kiss (nude scenes were censured for television). Here, the artist also appears as himself in the role of a barman who observes the shooting, while in the video for Curiosity Killed the Cat’s “Misfit” (1986), Warhol and the band wander through Manhattan as a Mylar backdrop produces their distorted reflection. The depiction of youth and its subcultures is a common subject in music videos, as well as artworks that resemble music videos, a representative one being Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1985), a diarylike slide show comprising almost 700 snapshots referring to sex, drugs, violence, and AIDS, accompanied by a compilation soundtrack ranging from Maria Callas to the Velvet Underground. Part underground film and part music video is David Wojnarowicz’s controversial twenty-minute Super 8 work titled A Fire in My Belly (1986–87). Accompanied by Diamanda Galas’ ominous vocals, the film condenses the artist’s grief and outrage over the AIDS epidemic through a series of disturbing images, such as coins dropping into a bowl of blood, the artist sewing his lips, and ants infesting a crucifix. A proper music video dealing with pure teenage angst is “Death Valley ’69” (1986) by Sonic Youth and Lydia Lunch, codirected by Richard Kern and Judith Barry and featuring underground actress Lung Leg snarling and clawing at the camera. Anorexia is the topic of Sonic Youth’s “Tunic (Song for Karen)” (1990), based on young pop star Karen Carpenter’s eating disorder and related

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death. Tony Oursler’s music video for the song plays with tropes that recur in the abject art movement he was associated with in the 1990s, epitomized in the surrealist superimposition of the band’s lead singer Kim Gordon— one minute with a doll, the next with a skeleton. The uncanny doll personification is also used by Bender in the video for Babes in Toyland’s “Bruise Violet” (1992), which features a cameo of Cindy Sherman as the antagonist of the band’s lead singer. While Bender here departs from her 1980s “electronic theaters,” Sherman turns her appearance into another exploration of women stereotypes—the best friend who turns into an enemy—reinforcing the ambiguity between art and real life with scenes shot at her Soho’s loft. Since the mid-1990s more and more visual artists approached the music video, complicating the relationships between art, entertainment, and media. In Damien Hirst’s slapstick video for Blur’s “Country House” (1995), the band members and a comical businessman become trapped in a real-life board game set in a farm: an alternate reality punctuated by ironic references to medicine and death—as in Hirst’s official art production. Also worthy of note are the animated videos by those who, in the 2000s, revitalized the role of cartoons in art, such as Yoshitomo Nara for R.E.M.’s “I’ll Take the Rain” (2001), David Shrigley for Blur’s “Good Song” (2003), and Takashi Murakami for Kanye West’s “Good Morning” (2008). Among the most prolific visual artists-cum-video directors, for whom music is a recurring source of inspiration, two in particular deserve a mention: Doug Aitken (who made videos for Fatboy Slim, Interpol and LCD Soundsystem) and Wolfgang Tillmans (who made videos for Goldfrapp and Pet Shop Boys). The already long list of artists could perhaps be expanded to include film directors and photographers, but that would lead this compendium too far from its original scope.

Artistic Parodies and Appropriations of the Music Video Many music acts and videos of the 1980s developed metalinguistic discourses on electronic media and television. As is widely known, the first video broadcast by MTV on August 1, 1981, was The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star” (1979). Directed by Russell Mulcahy, the video extols a blend of technophilic euphoria and apprehension for the upcoming era of video stars. More philosophical is David Byrne’s approach with the lyrics and music videos for his band, the Talking Heads. It is enough to think of “Road to Nowhere” (1984)—whose video Byrne codirected with Stephen R. Johnson—which could be considered the visual counterpart of Jameson’s theories on the collapse of time and space, and for this reason, regarded by Bruno Di Marino as paradigmatic

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“of a postmodern conceit not only of existence but also of the electronic medium.”5 Television is evoked in countless songs and band names, the latter quite literally as with Television and Television Personalities, or metaphorically as with Talking Heads. To reveal the mechanism of media representation, prerecorded TV footage is sometimes appropriated in music videos, or broadcast on walls of TV sets used as backdrops of live performances, a stylistic device employed by such post-punk bands as Psychic TV from the UK and The Stupid Set from Italy. Parodies of stereotypical figures and genres associated with TV are frequent too, as in Rocky Schenck’s video for “Post Post-Modern Man” (1989) by new wave jesters Devo. The video lampoons a shopping channel with the band performing within home shopping programs that sell kitsch household ornaments, useless gadgets, fitness equipment, polyester clothing, a “male Caucasian” baby, and Devo-themed items like a “Booji Boy” mask, and the band’s notorious pyramidal hat. Parody and irony are also weapons adopted by some contemporary artists who approached the music television form. On July 3, 1982, for example, Joseph Beuys appeared on German music program Bananas accompanied by pop group BAP and performed a goofy new wave song titled “Sonne Statt Reagan” (Sun Instead of Rain). Unlike his previous song Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee (1968)—which consisted of the artist singing the title’s words a cappella for about an hour, shifting his voice from monotone to dramatic to ironic—“Sonne Statt Reagan” uses pop music standards to protest against NATO armament policies promoted by then American president Ronald Reagan. The music video form is used by Beuys to spread a political message, but it is also parodied as a symptom of the dumbing down process enacted by American pop culture. Many artists were instantly attracted by the experimental vibe of music channels and the open-mindedness of its young audiences. As early as 1982, MTV introduced a form of artistic intervention in its programming with the series Ten Second Films (1982)—surreal micro-narratives, some of which were directed by Judith Barry, who at that time worked at the station as producer. The best-known example, however, was Artbreaks (1985–87): a series of artists’ “interruptions” treated as liberated spaces that proffered a reassessment of television from an artistic perspective. The artists JeanMichel Basquiat, Robert Longo, and Richard Prince, whose fame in those years put them on a par with pop stars, used it as an unconventional moment of self-promotion. Prince, for example, introduced himself as one of “the best kept secrets in the artworld” as he is seen purchasing an ice cream in front of the Guggenheim—incidentally, the same museum that twenty-two

5  Bruno Di Marino, Clip: 20 Anni di Musica in Video (1981–2001) (Rome: Castelvecchi, 2001), 33–4, my translation.

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years later, in 2007, would dedicate a retrospective to him. Dara Birnbaum, on the other hand, overturned the sexist relationship between producer and product through an ironic animation that mocked the history of the animated film and the women stereotypes it perpetrated. Feminist parodies of music videos are exemplified by those performed in the late 1980s and early 1990s by Sondra Prill, Pipilotti Rist, and Cheryl Donegan. Unknown in the art world, Prill starred in her own public-access television show, which aired in Tampa, Florida, from 1987 to 1992. At the crossroads of teenage amateurism and avant-garde cabaret, Prill’s My Show featured music videos like Nasty Boys, wherein a group of classy women appear in a go-go dancing bar in a spoof of Janet Jackson’s 1986 hit “Nasty,” and a sensual beach party for the cover of Technotronic’s “Pump Up the Jam” (1989). Unlike Prill, Rist is well-known for her music-themed video artworks addressing media power. In I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much , 1986, the Swiss artist dances manically, topless, while singing the 1968 Beatles song “Happiness Is a Warm Gun.” In You Called Me Jacky (1990) she lip-syncs Kevin Coyne’s 1973 song “Jackie and Edna” (Figure 5.1), while I’m a Victim of This Song (1995) conceptualizes Chris Isaak’s 1989 hit “Wicked Game.” Finally, in Head (1993), Donegan deconstructs the artificial eroticism of music videos by repeatedly drinking and spitting out a milky liquid from a bottle as Sugar’s song “Helpless” is heard.

FIGURE 5.1  Pipilotti Rist, You Called Me Jacky, video (still), 1990. Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, and Hauser & Wirth. © Pipilotti Rist.

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In the 1990s and 2000s, other artists took on the music video form as a symptom of pop culture. Music is a recurring element in the early videos of Swiss artist Olaf Breuning, whose references to mythology, fairytales, and media fantasies leverage on clichés associated to specific music styles and subcultures, such as new age in Cris Croft (1999), trip-hop in King (2000) (Figure 5.2), and heavy metal in Ugly Yelp (2001). Instead, British artist

FIGURE 5.2  Olaf Breuning, King, installation view, 2000. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York.

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Phil Collins uses pop music as an empathic and relational tool in the world won’t listen (2004–07), a karaoke project that toured in Colombia, Turkey, and Indonesia, based on songs by quintessential English band The Smiths. The resulting three-part video, which echoes the coeval rise of YouTube, mocks the music video industry by celebrating amateurism—epitomized in static backgrounds with generic landscape scenes and lo-fi performances— while also investigating the globalization of pop music.

Music Videos by Visual Artists/Musicians Tired of the intellectual and economic obligations implied in the elitist art world, yet attracted by the possibility of reaching wider audiences, since the 1980s more and more visual artists embrace a music production that comprises records, music-based performances, and so also music videos. A peculiar case is Laurie Anderson, who, since the 1970s, has commingled art, sound, and technology in a Gesamtkunstwerk that inhabits art venues as much as pop music charts. Anderson directed only a few music videos for her songs, though all are representative of the overall tone of her oeuvre. “O Superman” (1983) features images from her multimedia spectacle United States (Brooklyn Academy of Music, 1983), a postmodernist allegory on American life that critiqued science, media, and war through dystopian sci-fi references, such as her bending arm overshadowing a planet. Her feminist stance emerges more clearly from the animated sequences of “Sharkey’s Day” (1984), which ironizes on men’s delusions of grandeur through a conceptual narrative based on an abundant use of Chroma key and other electronic effects. Other artists have adopted music to develop a visual commentary of the culture industry, and of pop music and the pop star as manufactured commodities. This is particularly true of music groups formed in art schools whose visual output is complementary to their music. The music video is a major visual component in the production of Kraftwerk, The Residents, Throbbing Gristle, Laibach, Yello, Talking Heads, Chicks on Speed, Fischerspooner, and Forcefield, to name but a few. A paradigmatic case is the One-Minute Movies series of four surreal vignettes by the Residents—active since the 1970s, and known for disguising behind eyeball masks—made to promote the forty one-minute pseudo-pop songs of their Commercial Album (1980), a poststructuralist project based on pastiche and parody of pop music and the upcoming wave of music video stars. The band enlisted Graeme Whifler to create videos for “Moisture” and “The Simple Song,” while directing clips for “The Act of Being Polite” and “Perfect Love” themselves. While Anderson is equally recognized as an artist and a musician (whereas the Residents, and the other aforementioned groups, are more known in the music world), other artists dealing with music and the music video form produce works that, although being mostly known and appreciated in the art

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world, have true potential as pop music products. Let us consider Canadian artist Rodney Graham, whose tragicomic art films often feature the artist performing pop songs, which he composes himself and releases as vinyl records. Examples include: How I Became a Ramblin’ Man (1999), in which Graham performs in the guise of a lonesome, singing, and guitar-playing cowboy; A Little Thought (2000), which alternates between nostalgic Super 8 footage of a trip out of town, with a woman caressing an electric guitar with a feather brush; and Phonokinetoscope (2001), which shows Graham as he experiences LSD while riding a bicycle through Berlin’s Tiergarden park. What is it that establishes a distinction between art and a music video if not the context in which it is displayed? Would it not be the case that more music videos would be instantly appreciated as artworks if shown in galleries and museums and, conversely, artworks such as Graham’s be accepted as proper music videos if broadcast by a music television channel? Another artist playing with this ambiguity is Martin Creed. Known for his relational installations (e.g., rooms full of balloons) and constructed situations (e.g., athletes running through Tate Britain), since 2012 the British artist has also released pop songs with accompanying videos—and, like Graham, vinyl records. While his music sounds like a stripped-down form of Britpop, the goofy lyrics and videos ironize on the very meaning of artistic creation. Thinking/Not Thinking (2012), for example, shows dogs passing back and forth in front of a camera inside an empty gallery, while You Return (2014) presents a parade of people with walking difficulties crossing a Manhattan street. Another ambiguous case is that of American feminist artist Wynne Greenwood, who adopted pop music in her video and performance project Tracy + the Plastics (1999–2006), also a fictional band associated with the electroclash music scene of the early 2000s. The project’s various components all converge in the live performances in which Greenwood (in the role of lead singer Tracy) interacts with the prerecorded projections of the other two band members, Nikki and Cola, both also personified by the artist. Far from being mere promos, the resulting music videos and excerpts from the documentation of the performances are indicative of the articulated psychoanalytical process the artist triggers to “negotiate representation and subjectivity in the digital era,” as Johanna Burton and Stephanie Snyder suggest, “deploying technology to explore constructions of the self and to address her concerns around queerness, collaboration, and survival.”6 One last example is controversial Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. Following his investigations on the substandard conditions of a school, where several students died during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, Weiwei went through a period of persecution by Chinese police—receiving fines, beatings, and  Johanna Burton and Stephanie Snyder, eds., Wynne Greenwood: Stacy … Kelly (Portland and New York: Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College, and The New Museum, 2015), 9. 6

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ultimately resulting in his arrest, which attracted worldwide attention. To denounce the anti-democratic nature of the Chinese government, the artist— whose personal activism often permeates his sculptural, photographic, or cinematic projects—has also embraced pop music. In 2013, he self-released the web-only album The Divine Comedy and produced music videos for the songs “Dumbass” and “Laoma Tihua” (Disturbing the Peace). The former reconstructs his eighty-one-day prison detention, while the latter is a commentary on his experience of being under state surveillance. Neither was ever broadcast in TV, but they are good examples of how the music video is still an effective media form to promote values of democracy and transparency in today’s global and convergent media scenario.

5.2 Kids Shows and the Aesthetic of Failure The Abused Child: Mike Kelley Among the late twentieth-century artists who have most effectively criticized the culture industry, Mike Kelley has used art to exorcise his malaise, which ultimately led him to commit suicide in 2012. Born in the suburbs of Detroit, the cradle of American economy, he spent his formative years in Los Angeles, the cradle of American show business, to emerge in the late 1970s—along with Paul McCarthy, Raymond Pettibon, Jim Shaw, Tony Oursler, and others—as a prophet of a certain “aesthetic of failure” hidden in the shadows of the Hollywood industry. Unlike the Pictures Generation artists, who emerged in New York at the same time, and who appropriated mass media imagery in their works, this Californian scene explored its effects by referencing subcultures (from pulp fiction to punk) and incorporating emotionally charged, everyday objects in their works, encompassing performances, videos, and installations. Their production is the perfect visualization of Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytical theories on abjection: “We may call it a border; abjection is above all ambiguity,” she claims. “Because, while releasing a hold, it does not radically cut off the subject from what threatens it—on the contrary, abjection acknowledges it to be in perpetual danger.”7 The abject—halfway between subject and object—is someone at the margins of society—often involved in perverted, deviant activities, though performed with a certain innocence and apparent harmlessness. The abject is not an active figure; its actions are automatic reactions to threatening social rules. Its favorite mode of expression is imitation, and its frustration stems precisely from  Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 9.

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FIGURE 5.3 Mike Kelley, The Banana Man, video stills, 1983. © Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. All Rights Reserved / VAGA at ARS, NY.

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the inability to replicate its “models.” The first exhibition to acknowledge this tendency in contemporary art was Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art (1993). Organized by the Whitney Museum in New York, the show featured Kelley’s and other artists’ representations of the human body: dissected, decomposed, or engaged in actions that are considered taboo, such as defecation or sex. Kelley’s work, whether it is installations, paintings, videos, or performances, is based on the theatrical replication of “deviant” everyday activities with recurring references to media codes. Obviously, it is a theater that ignores the traditional stage/audience structure; it is more like a private performance, like that of a kid in front of the TV screen or during extracurricular activities, without adults watching. Kelley’s work is supported by an obscure psychoanalytical apparatus of surrealist derivation (just as the origin of abjection itself): an apparatus which explores the relations between the functioning of society and the human body. To do so, it roams that liminal territory in the world of childhood and adolescence, where our relationship with the body (organic, mechanical, symbolic, but also aesthetic) reflects the education we are given at home, at school, or in places of worship, but shaped by the models of the society of the spectacle. Kelley approached video in the early 1980s, moved by the desire to deconstruct the mechanisms of “suspension of disbelief” enacted by movies and TV. In Banana Man (1983) he performs a minor character from the children’s show Captain Kangaroo, which the artist used to watch as a child (Figure 5.3). Kelley claimed he never got to see Banana Man, who appeared occasionally, so he based his personification on his memories of what other children told him. But what if, instead, he has forgotten Banana Man as a consequence of an involuntary repressed trauma? After all, Banana Man is an abject whose purely farcical function—taking long objects (like sausages or toy trains) out of his pockets accompanied by an “oooh”—injects creepiness into the TV mechanism. “As film viewers try to normalize time, so they also attempt to normalize character,” Kelley argued about this work. “No matter how inconsistent their actions are, actors are seen as portraying ‘beings’ driven by some unifying ‘psychology’. The viewer’s job is to figure out what that is.”8 Television is called into cause again in Kappa (1986), in collaboration with Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, in which Kelley performs as a Shinto god involved in violent or sexual acts. The documentary-style video alternates TV footage and an oedipal tale, in the style of a soap opera, over which Kelley/Kappa exerts his malignant influence. Similarly, Family Tyranny (1987), in collaboration with Paul McCarthy, exhibits the awful and perverted misbehavior of a dysfunctional family: Kelley plays the son

8  Mike Kelley, “The Banana Man” (1983) in Minor Histories: Statements, Conversations, Proposals, ed. John C. Welchman (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004), 186.

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whom McCarthy, as the father, freely abuses. The video is shot in a TV studio that evokes an anonymous sitcom interior. The artist dramatizes child abuse again in a 1996 proposal for an MTV show that never got made, called Zoo TV—this time performed by adults disguised as stuffed animals in a basement. “A television viewer would be spurred by some pop culture image to remember traumatic repressed memories,”9 he argues in the proposal. In all these video works, the physical abuse is a metaphor for the suppressive mechanisms perpetrated by authoritarian “educational complexes,” to quote a paradigmatic work by Kelley from 1995. As he aimed to do in Zoo TV, the artist often used stuffed animals: placed silently on the floor, hung in mushy balls from the ceiling, or laid out in maniacal order on kitchen tables as if they were on operating tables, ready to be dissected. As argued by Timothy Martin, these plush toys “seek specifically to strain the identification of a body with mutations and composites, with ‘selves’ divided along sexual lines.”10 For this reason they are victims of torture, manipulation, and abuse; they embody the human beings who have possessed them and the initiatory stages to adulthood which society, through indoctrinating power systems like television, has forced upon them.

Dysfunctional Kids For artists who deal with abject themes, childhood, puberty, and adolescence are ideal territories to explore the effects of civilizing processes on the body and behavior. Alongside Kelley, many American artists have referred more or less explicitly to television to depict troubled kids whose refusal of social norms often draws them to a sociopathic and even criminal conduct. Raymond Pettibon, for example, who emerged in the late 1970s in association with the California punk scene, often features rebellious teenagers in his comic-like drawings. On the record cover of the compilation Cracks in the Sidewalk (SST Records, 1980), two siblings—armed with knives, with haunted eyes, and what looks like the sinister symbol of a cult marked on their foreheads—enter the living room where their parents are watching an atomic explosion on TV (Figure 5.4). What happens next could be evinced from another untitled drawing from 1982 that shows a TV set broadcasting an unequivocal message: “KILL.”

9   Mike Kelley, “Three Proposals for Zoo TV” (1996) in Minor Histories: Statements, Conversations, Proposals, ed. John C. Welchman (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004), 216. 10  Timothy Martin, “Janitor in a Drum: Excerpts from a Performance History” in Mike Kelley: Catholic Tastes, ed. Elizabeth Sussman (New York: The Whitney Museum of American Art, 1993), 87.

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FIGURE 5.4  Raymond Pettibon, Cracks in the Sidewalk, 12" vinyl compilation, record cover, SST Records, 1980.

A role model for both Kelley and Pettibon, Paul McCarthy began addressing transgressive issues of abjection like scatology and rape in the early 1970s. McCarthy’s films show performances of torture and abuse to the detriment of innocent characters often borrowed from popular fairytales, such as Heidi (another collaboration with Kelley), Pinocchio, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. With roots in Viennese Actionist body art, McCarthy criticizes American consumer culture by exposing the despair hidden behind the hypocritical façade built by mass media. Although never an issue per se, television is a recurring paradigm in opposition to which these farces are constructed. This emerges clearly from the immersive installations in which the films are displayed, comprising the remnants of the scenes in which the performances were enacted: masks, props, and scenography that are more reminiscent of television sets rather than that of cinema or theater.

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From the few works mentioned, what emerges is the realization that the grotesque, and at times disconcerting, imagery produced by Kelley, Pettibon, and McCarthy is built upon the dichotomy between the primitive instincts of the human being and society’s attempt to control them: a sanction that is first enacted within the family. As argued by Cary Levine: “Viewing American parenthood and childhood—and particularly male parent-child relations— as ciphers for American values at large, all three artists present the ‘civilizing process’ as society’s most essential agent of control, effective because it is concealed by the commonest of habits, gestures, and daily rituals. That process not only fixes gender, sexual and other behavioral norms but naturalizes them.”11 With the stereotypical identity models and codes it perpetrates, that are based on an authoritative and sexist social order, mass media set the paradigms within which this process of negotiation is conducted publicly. Episodes of juvenile abjection and delinquency are usually associated with suburban life. Countless are the examples of media and literary fictions that demystify the plastic, mechanical, consumerist lifestyle of American suburbia by opposing human dramas or stories of deviancy resulting from the inability to adhere to it. Representative of a younger generation of Californian artists, Cameron Jamie’s multimedia production is based on references to folk cultures and subcultures, such as Halloween, heavy metal music, amateur wrestling, the Krampus ritual, and so also public access television. His 1995 video compilation The Neotoma Tape (1983–95) condenses the most bizarre snippets of public access television the artist recorded during his teenage years in the San Fernando Valley, America’s quintessential suburb, including born-again talk shows, interviews with porn stars, galvanized punk rock fans, parents discussing Satanism, and kids vomiting in a shopping mall. The anxieties around sexuality and drugs related to the coming-of-age are the focus of photographer and filmmaker Larry Clark’s oeuvre. His most known works are Tulsa (1971), an autobiographical series of black-andwhite photographs documenting the life of a group of heroin junkies from his hometown Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Kids (1995), a movie centered on a group of brash and libertine New York City teenagers. One of Clark’s most controversial works is a series of photographic portraits of teen criminals taken off the TV screen, featured in his books Perfect Childhood (1993) and LC (Groninger Museum, 1999). These include Lyle and Erik Menendez, who in 1989 murdered their parents with a shotgun in their Beverly Hills villa, before embarking on a lavish spending spree with their family fortune. The series illustrates the media’s voyeuristic and pitiless impulse of turning even the darkest of human dramas into entertainment, but also children’s innate propensity to act out whenever the camera is on, no matter what the context is. 11  Cary Levine, Pay for Your Pleasures: Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Raymond Pettibon (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 171.

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Since his debut at twenty-two as the screenwriter of Clark’s film Kids, Harmony Korine has explored teenage debauchery and unease through feature films but also zines, photographs, paintings, and music videos. Television is never an issue per se but is evoked as an upside-down mirror held up to a degraded reality of outcasts, outsiders, mentally ills, and losers. Composed as a series of clips rather than following a conventional plot, Korine’s “surrealistic realist”12 films, as he defined them, expose a grotesque parade of young and bored antiheroes and abjects, like the siblings who murder their catatonic grandmother in Gummo (1997), or the four girlfriends who turn into robbers in Spring Breakers (2012). Even more reprehensible than dysfunctional teenagers are the sociopathic seniors in Trash Humpers (2009), an anti-Cocoon (Ron Howard’s 1985 blockbuster), shot in VHS, and reminiscent of Kelley’s and McCarthy’s works. Their juvenile idea of fun includes being outrageous with children, masturbating in public, improvising brawls, kicking trash cans at night, and smashing their old TV sets with big hammers.

The Troubled Girl: Alex Bag Like Korine, who came from Nashville, Alex Bag left her native New Jersey to move to New York in the early 1990s. Incidentally, both artists were exposed to TV production from very early on. In the 1970s, Korine’s father produced documentaries for PBS, while Bag’s father made ads and her mother was the host of popular children’s shows. Moreover, both shared an interest in youth subcultures—punk rock for Bag and skateboarding for Korine—from which they borrowed a vocabulary of symbols and codes, but most of all a barefaced attitude against the prepackaged models built up by youth marketing and television. For them television in the early 1990s looked exactly as American writer David Foster Wallace defined it at that time: “like the overlit bathroom mirror before which the teenager monitors his biceps and determines his better profile,” but also a “window on nervous American self-perception.”13 Bag’s earliest art project was a public-access television program made in collaboration with Patterson Beckwith, a former member of the collective Art Club 2000. The weekly thirty-minute show entitled Cash from Chaos/Unicorns & Rainbows (1994–97) aired on New York’s cable Channel 34, accessible only in Manhattan, at 2:30 am on Tuesday nights (Figure 5.5).  Harmony Korine. Interview with Mike Kelley, “On Gummo,” Filmmaker Magazine (Fall 1997). Reprinted in Mike Kelley, Interviews, Conversations, and Chit-Chat (1986–2004) (Zurich and Dijon: JRP Ringier and Les Presses du Réel, 2005), 138. 13   David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” Review of Vontemporary Fiction, Vol. 13, No. 2, (Summer 1993): 152. 12

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FIGURE 5.5 Alex Bag and Patterson Beckwith, Cash from Chaos/Unicorns & Rainbows, video stills, 1994–97. Courtesy of the artist.

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“It was really exciting that we could essentially be competing with network television shows or cable television shows,” recalls Bag, who also defines public-access television as a “no man’s land or outlaw land.”14 The program featured a variety of segments, including: hilarious phone calls; 1-800 numbers to give live feedback on everyday products; pseudo-documentaries with a penchant for the mechanization of labor; urban night tours; interviews with friends or random passers-by; and pre-recorded TV footage, shown sometimes with a mocking intent, sometimes out of a true interest, as in the case of some music videos. Bag and Beckwith shift from the role of hosts to actors, as in the case of a drug documentary in which they experiment live with the effects of drugs as they perform daily actions, such as preparing a peanut butter sandwich. In another improvised episode, also involving drugs, the two take LSD at a press event in Central Park, before test driving the BMW car featured in a new James Bond movie at speed. By dialing the 807-5779 phone-in number, the audience could leave a voice message. More rambling ruminations than coherent arguments, the tone of the phone calls echoed the artists’ intent to parody television and sabotage its incessant flow by injecting it with a critical and surreal, yet entertaining content. As argued by American curator Margot Norton, the reason was that television “reflected how Americans saw themselves and provided a mainstream barometer against which identity could be calibrated and compared.”15 During this intense four-year experience, Bag developed a unique style of scripted performance based on parody—partially reminiscent of Cindy Sherman’s re-presentations of media stereotypes of women— that gave rise to a prolific production of video works. Some are satirical commentaries on the art world. One such example is Untitled Fall ’95 (1995), in which she parodies an art student and how her maturing process, semester after semester, is influenced by art world and media clichés, whereas, in The Van (2001), she personifies three emerging women artists as they discuss their expectations of success with their dealer, in a customized Dodge van en route to the opening of the Armory Show art fair. “Anybody who’s everybody is gonna be there,” assures them the dealer. “Don’t worry. You’ll have your pick of the beefcake. Besides, you’re fucking beautiful.”16

14  Alex Bag on Cash from Chaos/Unicorns & Rainbows, MOCAtv, 2014. Retrieved from YouTube, accessed April 24, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rqSoP9Kbqc. 15  Margot Norton, “Public Access: Taking Ownership of the Moving Image in 1993” in NYC 1993: Experimental Jet Set, Trash and No Stars, eds. Massimiliano Gioni and Gary CarrionMurayari (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 2013), 44. 16  Alex Bag, The Van, 2001, transcription in ed. Raphael Gygax and Heike Munder, Alex Bag (Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2011), 135.

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Bag’s parodies of television tropes often refer to youth and their struggles to define their identity through the adoption of stereotypical media models or the consumption of products designed for them. In Untitled (Spring ’94) (1994), she mimics the ad for a perfume branded Electric Youth, while Coven Services (2004) features a black metalstyled girl advertising Carefree panty liners. Instead, His Girlfriend Is a Robot (1996) is a pseudo-sitcom based on the story of a robot girlfriend who, after watching a Public Image Ltd. concert on the TV music show American Bandstand, rebels against the mad scientist who invented her. She starts repeating punk mottos like “there is no future” and “I’m an antichrist,” becomes a vegetarian, and talks about “TV as a construction made and controlled by advertisers.”17 Other videos mock drama-infused reality shows (i.e., Untitled (Project for the Andy Warhol Museum), 1996), talent shows (i.e., Fancy Pantz, 1997), soap operas (i.e., Harriet Craig, 1998), and dating game shows (i.e., Gladia Daters, 2005). The artist, who studied at The Cooper Union art school, recounts her desire to react to the seriousness of “classic” Video Art. “My own influences were so much coming from television and why can’t this be something that I can chew on and spit out in my own way?”18 she argued. Bag’s work is paradigmatic of the technological revolution brought by the mass diffusion of VCRs in the 1990s. “It feels so good to trap something with your VCR, because then you have proof that it has happened,”19 she claimed in an early interview. However, it also proved prophetic of the productive and creative possibilities offered a decade later by digital technologies and the internet, notably YouTube.

Surreal Children’s Shows and Cartoons As most of this section has focused on works regarding teenagers in relations with television, to close the circle with Kelley’s traumatic child memories discussed in the beginning, this last part will exclusively look at artistic versions of children’s shows and cartoons, starting with Bag’s Untitled (Project for the Whitney Museum) (2009), a parody of The Patchwork Family, and The Carol Corbett Show, a popular 1970s children’s program in which the artist’s mother was the host. Bag turns a psychoanalytical investigation

17  Alex Bag, His Girlfriend Is a Robot, 1996, transcription. Retrieved from Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York, accessed in person in August 2011. 18  Alex Bag on Cash from Chaos/Unicorns & Rainbows, MOCAtv, 2014. Retrieved from YouTube, accessed April 24, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rqSoP9Kbqc. 19  Alex Bag. Interview with Elen Fleiss and Jeff Rian, “Alex Bag’s Gorl World”, Purple Prose, No. 10, (Winter 1996): 94.

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(of the liminal overlaps between her true mother and the Carol Corbett as a stage persona) into another satirical masquerade: alternating sophomoric conversations between herself and a dragon puppet, a wheelchair-bound man singing Neil Young and David Bowie songs to children, grotesque characters like witches and conspiracy theorists, footage of the original shows, and Chroma key juxtapositions with references to hell. As an indoctrinating tool, television enacts its “civilizing process” on its audience from a very young age. Education and entertainment go hand in hand in children’s shows and cartoons, and it is precisely this ambiguity that some artists and cartoonists play with in their adultoriented cartoons (based on parody), which, at the same time, circulate within the art world, underground circles, and on television. An alternative history of comics and cartoons in which their work would fit would certainly include the so-called Tijuana bibles (pornographic versions of comic strips popular in the United States during the Great Depression era), 1960s underground comics, experimental animation, the politically incorrect animated sitcoms of the 1990s (e.g., The Simpsons, Beavis and Butt-Head, and South Park), and a countless number of graphic novels and zines from different times. In the 2000s, a new generation of artists, mostly Brooklyn-based, brought this alternative history of cartoons to a new degree of appreciation. This includes Ben Jones, Paul B. Davis, and Takeshi Murata, along with collectives like Paper Rad, Dearraindrop, and PFFR, whose multidisciplinary production encompasses zines, paintings, installations, music releases and performances, and web-based projects, but what is of primary interest in this context are their animations, which represent a quintessential form of bottom-up appropriation and parody of TV in the years of the mass diffusion of smart phones, the internet, and prosumer software. Psychedelic in nature, these videos are loosely inspired by the popular 1980s cartoons and kids shows these artists were captivated by when they were children, alongside videogames and toys from the same era. A nostalgic world populated by the likes of Alf, Gumby, and My Little Pony turns into an animated lo-fi dystopia characterized by a fluorescent palette, and built through techniques of digital pastiche reminiscent of Surrealism as much as punk culture and postmodern design. According to Raphael Gygax: “Their works realize an exaggerated and garishly colorful aesthetic, whose excessive density of signification reacts to this consumerism in Western society and, as it were, can take shape only by emerging out of this state of affairs.”20 Initially screened in underground venues, these

20  Raphael Gygax, Deterioration, They Said (Zurich: Migros Museum of Contemporary Art and JRP Ringier, 2009), 1.

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visionary animations also circulated through DVDs released by the video label Cartun Xprez, and obviously online. Concurrently, art galleries and institutions like the New Museum in New York and Migros Museum in Zurich featured some of these artists in group shows. Finally, it was the time of commercial commissions for music videos or series for channels like MTV2, Cartoon Network, and the cult adult-oriented nighttime block [adult swim]. Paul B. Davis and Takeshi Murata pioneered techniques that speculate on the visionary effects of file compression and decoding: “datamoshing,” a process of manipulation of two or more interleaved media files, and “transcoding,” based on how motion and color information is processed when a file is transcoded into another video format. In Monster Movie (2005) Murata turns the 1981 B-movie Caveman into a mesmerizing blob of data, while in Video Compression Studies I-IV (2007) Davis turns music videos, boxing matches, and Video Art classics into cartoonish abstractions. By inverting the degree of definition, Murata’s following works explore the uncanny appeal of hyperreality achieved through digital rendering. I, Popeye (2010) sees the famous cartoon sailor immersed in conceptual narratives, while OM Rider (2013) reimagines media archetypes through a series of vignettes featuring a punk werewolf and an angry, long-haired, switchbladewielding old man. Paper Rad have often referred to TV in videos they have screened in galleries or posted online, so when the group’s founding member Ben Jones was commissioned to create a series by Cartoon Network, he simply transposed some of the characters he created for the group’s works into more coherent plots, as in The Problem Solverz (2011–13). PFFR’s Wonder Showzen (2005–06), aired by MTV2, alternates between puppetry, TV footage, and children interviews—satirizing politics, religion, war, sex, and culture—while Xavier: Renegade Angel (2007–09), aired by [adult swim], is a CGI-based surrealist dark comedy centered on a humanoid shaman named Xavier. The way these artists displace children’s television characters and codes into customized narratives could be interpreted in light of the fandom subculture. Henry Jenkins has offered an explanation for their psychedelic dimension by arguing that “lots of times fans… use metaphors from religion, or sometimes from addiction, to refer to intense emotional experiences of texts that our culture doesn’t give them an adequate vocabulary to talk about.”21 What prevails, though, is the artistic interpretation, because like other artworks discussed, these mind-blowing animations are, first and foremost, critical commentaries on media fantasies.

 Henry Jenkins, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture (New York and London: New York University Press, 2006), 21.

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5.3 Comic Personae Absurdist Humor: Ernie Kovacs A common thread among the artists who deal with children’s shows and cartoons, like Jones, Murata, Paper Rad, and PFFR, is their surreal take on comedy, which puts their work in line with the broader genre of surreal or absurdist humor—a form of illogical or cynical humor based on irrational or absurd situations, monologues, poses, or expressions. Forms of surreal or absurdist humor could be tracked back to Symbolist writer Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi (1896), and to Futurist, Dada and Surrealist performance. Following on from the existentialist playwrights of what Martin Esslin defined “The Theatre of the Absurd” in 1962 (e.g., Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet), absurdist humor since the late twentieth century has been employed by various TV comedians—either stand-up, that comic style in which a comedian performs in front of a live audience, or sitcoms, a comedy centered on a set of characters. Absurdist comedians have been particularly appreciated in American and British television, the most relevant examples being Ernie Kovacs and Andy Kaufman in the United States, and the Monty Python group in the UK. Of them, Kovacs is not only celebrated as a groundbreaking innovator of television but has, since the 1980s, been increasingly acknowledged as a pioneer of Video Art. Lynn Spigel describes his programs as being “filled with sight gags and artfully rendered musical montages that incongruously edit together sound and image in ways that deviate from and often self-reflexively comment upon the typical TV conventions of synch-sound editing, televisual liveness, and the realist illusion of time and space.”22 In other words, like many of the artists discussed in this chapter, Kovacs deconstructs television but does so from within television, as a commercial broadcaster. Kovacs’ metalinguistic approach to television via comedy manifested from the moment he was offered his first television show. Three to Get Ready, which premiered on NBC in November 1950, was a surreal early morning variety show that included situations and gags like theatrical interpretations of daily weather conditions—with Kovacs climbing a ladder and pouring water down if rain was forecast; auditions with goats; streams of consciousness with a micro woman appearing on his shoulder; tin toy orchestras; and other absurdist skits and jokes, some shot in open space— like the occasion when Kovacs visited a Philadelphia restaurant in a gorilla costume—some in a stripped-down TV studio with the backstage in open view, no audience in the seats, and cheap props. It was in this program that 22  Lynn Spigel, TV by Design: Modern Art and the Rise of Network Television (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 179.

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FIGURE 5.6 Ernie Kovacs performing on the TV show Kovacs Unlimited, CBS, US, 1952–54.

Kovacs invented his signature character, Percy Dovetonsils, an effeminate “poet laureate”—with kiss curl hair, gag sunglasses with fake eyeballs, and a zebra-patterned jacket—who read his poems from a big book, while sipping a martini cocktail and smoking through a long cigarette holder. Throughout the 1950s until his death in 1962, Kovacs was the host of many variety and quiz shows, the best known being Kovacs Unlimited (CBS, 1952–54) and The Ernie Kovacs Show (1952–56), all featuring non-sequitur gags, the element of surprise, and sneering visual and textual deconstructions of the mechanism of suspension of disbelief through which television produces illusionism (Figure 5.6). For example, as American film scholar Andrew Horton describes, in one episode of Time for Ernie (NBC, 1951): Ernie arrives onstage as the TV image keeps flipping and turning as if something is terribly wrong with the camera on your home set. He then walks offstage down a hallway, talking about foreign movies, and finally puts a set of knobs around his neck and a wood frame like a TV screen around his head. Then looking at “us” (the camera), he explains how to

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adjust our sets, turning his knobs as his face contorts according to which dial he has turned.23 Kovacs’ unsought positioning as a video art pioneer consists on the one side in his metalinguistic absurdist take on television and on the other in his use of camera tricks, video effects, superimpositions, and quick blackouts that visualize and breach the fourth wall, often showing crew members and the studio itself, that is the space in which fiction is manufactured. As discussed in detail by Spigel, a major role is played by the aural dimension: that is, a use of sound and vocalism based, at times, on cut-up techniques, and at other intervals on speculations on silence that are reminiscent of Bertold Brecht’s theater as well as John Cage’s coeval experimental compositions. “By turning sight gags into sound gags and mismatching sound and images,” argues Spigel, “Kovacs reveals the fact that television is not a ‘window on a world’ but an art form replete with audio-visual tricks created through editing (as well as a battery of other techniques).”24 The culmination of Kovacs’ conceptual approach to television were his “silent sketches,” in which Kovacs replaced all human conversation with sound effects accompanying the actions performed by the character of Eugene. In a 1956 silent episode of the Ernie Kovacs Show titled “Library Bit,” for example, when Eugene opens a copy of Leo Tolstoy’s book War and Peace, cannons and gunfire are heard, then a chirping dove appears from inside the book and flies away. Kovacs revived the character of Eugene a year later in the Silent Show, a half-hour comedy special commissioned to him by NBC to introduce the audience to color television. Reminiscent of silent-era slapstick comedy, notably Buster Keaton, Kovacs disrupts the apparatus of communication and for a moment stops the evolution of television technology: as color television is introduced, conversation is banished, and noise is implicitly pointed at as a quintessential symptom of the illusionistic reality enacted by TV.

Satire and Argentinean Conceptualism Kovacs’ absurdist humor informed the work of Monty Python and Andy Kaufman, who emerged around 1970, and inspired subsequent generations of comedians and hosts of variety, quiz, and talk shows worldwide. As a matter of interest, since the late 1970s forms of absurdist humor were also

 Andrew Horton, Ernie Kovacs & Early TV Comedy: Nothing in Moderation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), 13. 24  Spigel, 190. 23

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revived within performance and video art practice, reabsorbed thus in the original context from which historical avant-garde artists had given rise to them. At that time, two artists—incidentally, both of whom were born in Buenos Aires but left Argentina for the United States independently of each other—David Lamelas and Jaime Davidovich made works based on conceptual forms of comedy that, especially as seen from today’s perspective, could be interpreted as satirical commentaries on the subordinate condition of Argentinean people to authoritarian governments. In the late twentieth century, notably from the 1960s to the 1980s, several Argentinean cartoonists, film directors, and visual artists employed satire as a response to the brutal dictatorships, political upheavals, and sudden social changes that shocked their country, and to expose the subliminal role of mass media in producing propaganda for anti-democratic regimes. Inspired by the readings of French structuralists and McLuhan’s media theory, in 1966 a group of conceptual artists gathered around the theorist Oscar Masotta and the Centro de Artes Visuales at the Instituto Torcuato di Tella. This included Eduardo Costa, Raúl Escari, Roberto Jacoby, and Marta Minujín, who founded the short-lived movement Arte de Los Medios de Comunicación (Art of Communication Media), which mainly produced happenings and installations. For Simultaneidad Envolvente (Envolving Simultaneity, 1966), Minujín filmed sixty representatives of mass media and the arts as they commented on live news being broadcast on TV and radio. A crucial figure to emerge from this Buenos Aires Conceptual Art scene, David Lamelas was arrested and jailed several times in the 1960s as a result of the military junta’s suppression of any form of political opposition that came from universities, youth, and the arts. In 1968, the year he left Argentina to study at Saint Martin’s School of Art in London, Lamelas participated in the Venice Biennale with The Office of Information About the Vietnam War at Three Levels: The Visual Image, Text and Audio. The installation—a key example of that Conceptual Art subgenre called Information Art—consisted of a speaker sitting at a desk in an office reading live news about the Vietnam War, in different languages, as they were transmitted by the Italian news agency ANSA through an Olivetti teletype machine. The following decade Lamelas directed his attention toward the culture industry. Soon after his move to Los Angeles, where he is still based, he realized two satirical videos on television, both centered on the fictional journalist Barbara López, a parody of famous American reporter Barbara Walters. In The Hand (1976), a talk show made for Halifax Cable Television in Canada, López interviews fictional rock star Kevin Gold about accusations made against him for being involved in a plot to smuggle weapons for a terrorist attack. The scene is intercut with a black-gloved hand seen moving in the control room and throwing a knife, at which point the journalist announces Gold has been murdered. In The Dictator (1976), a collaboration with Hildegarde Duane, López conducts an exclusive interview with

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Colonel Ricardo Garcia Perez, the caricature of a dictator of the fictional Latin American country St. Ana, who lives in exile in Los Angeles. Perez, played by Lamelas, discusses freedom of press and human rights but ends up in tears recounting how all his five ex-wives had died in tragic accidents. A decade older than Lamelas, Davidovich moved to New York in the early 1960s, where, over the course of the following two decades, his work came to be associated with Downtown art practices (i.e., Fluxus, PostMinimalism, and then the East Village scene), although its satirical take on mass media is clearly reminiscent of Argentinean Conceptualism. After expanding his painting practice to a peculiar form of adhesive tape-based installation and video, Davidovich embraced public-access television to achieve autonomy from the art world. “The gallery or the museum had to give their seal of approval before we could even show anything,” he claimed. “I wanted to change that.”25 In 1976, he helped establish the network Cable SoHo and two years later founded the nonprofit organization Artists’ Television Network, which provided production and post-production facilities to most of the Downtown artists’ TV programs discussed before. Davidovich produced also several TV programs, which, according to John G. Hanhardt, “treated television as an open forum for an intimate, virtual art form that could play on the viewer’s television set.”26 The longstanding one was The Live! Show (1979–84), a variety program reminiscent of performances by historical avant-gardes and the absurdist humor of Kovacs, with whom the artist shared the Ukrainian Jewish heritage. The program featured live phone calls, a home-shopping segment, and interviews and performances by the likes of Laurie Anderson, Eric Bogosian, Richard Hell, Les Levine, Robert Longo, Ann Magnuson, Linda Montano, Tony Oursler, Walter Robinson, and Michael Smith. Each of the weekly thirtyminute episodes opened with a monologue by Dr. Videovich, “specialist in curing television addiction,”27 played by the artist, discussing the current status of cable television and often raising his hands—a parody of beloved president of Argentina, Juan Domingo Perón. References to Argentinean politics punctuate the show, but the real targets of Dr. Videovich’s satire are television and art—recurring subjects of monographic episodes like those on PBS and the Whitney Biennial.

 Jaime Davidovich, Jaime Davidovich: In Conversation with Daniel R. Quiles (New York: Fundación Cisneros, 2017), 82. 26  John G. Hanhardt, “Strange Disclocations: The Art of Jaime Davidovich” in Jaime Davidovich, Jaime Davidovich: In Conversation with Daniel R. Quiles (New York: Fundación Cisneros, 2017), 9. 27  Jaime Davidovich, The Live! Show Promo, 1982. Retrieved from YouTube, accessed April 24, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfERww4I7cA. 25

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Fun TV: New Wave Vaudeville at Club 57 Davidovich was not the only Downtown artist who employed humor as a form of resistance to media’s increasingly pervasive power in the 1980s. Other artists’ TV programs produced in New York at that time—like O’Brien’s TV Party and Colab’s Potato Wolf—were also characterized by a humoristic take on art and television, while at the same time looking for avenues of cultural production that were alternative and autonomous from art institutions and the market. Characteristic of Downtown art practices was the tight bond between art and life that brought artists to embrace not only a multidisciplinary production but also to privilege performance— encompassing music, theater, and film—to reimagine the social role of the artist and deconstruct media-manufactured stereotypes corresponding to precoded notions of class, ethnicity, gender, and so on. Humor about media became a defining aspect of the work of a group of artists based in the East Village neighborhood, most of whom were students at the School of Visual Arts, which included: Joey Arias, Tseng Kwong Chi, David McDermott, Keith Haring, Ann Magnuson, Klaus Nomi, Kenny Scharf, and John Sex. The group’s first gathering was a six-night performance program at the Irving Plaza concert hall in November 1978 hosted by McDermott, named New Wave Vaudeville. Reminiscent of Cabaret Voltaire and the Futurists’ serate (evenings), this postmodern generation adopted the old school format of vaudeville to evince, as suggested by Peter Frank and Michael McKenzie, authors of a compendium on the American art of the 1980s, “a sense of critical insight mixed with an awareness of the sheer power of spectacle, enabling these artists to transcend television even if they pay it homage.”28 Susan Hannaford, Ann Magnuson, and Tom Scully, who organized the event, joined forces with Frank Holliday and Andy Rees to start a more enduring program in the basement of a church at 57 St. Marks Place in the East Village, which the owner rented out as Club 57 from five to twenty dollars a night. They ended up running it from 1978 to 1983. Ron Magliozzi, who in 2017 curated a retrospective show on Club 57 at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, wrote in the catalogue that the “exceptional combination of young artists and their followers made the club a forum for questioning American values, gender politics, the mass media, and sexual identity.”29 The almost daily schedule of Club 57 included B-movie screenings, themed

 Peter Frank and Michael McKenzie, New, Used & Improved: Art for the ‘80s (New York: Abbeville Press, 1987), 76. 29  Ron Magliozzi, “Art Is What You Make It: Club 57 and the Downtown Scene,” in Club 57: Film, Performance and Art in the East Village 1978–1983, ed. Ron Magliozzi and Sophie Cavoulacos (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2017), 11. 28

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parties, music shows, art exhibitions, improvised performances, and theater productions. Television and its iconography were recurring topics at Club 57. For instance, its logo designed by Scharf—a TV set broadcasting the club’s name, with the word “FUN” in the lower right-hand corner—set the tone of the club’s overall atmosphere. In the name of what he calls “pop surrealism,” Scharf has made several humoristic references to TV throughout his production, ranging from painterly depictions of 1950s TV sets and appropriations of Hanna-Barbera cartoons like the Jetsons to customized home appliances, including TV sets, adorned with brightly colored tribal decorations, or by gluing plastic toys on them. Technoprimitivism also characterizes Keith Haring’s two-dimensional sign-like compositions, which echo McLuhan’s concept of the “global village” and Umberto Eco’s semiotics with their universal language. TV sets constantly appear in Haring’s drawings and paintings, sometimes in the place of heads, sometimes as divine manifestations as in Untitled (1983), in which a group of figurines, coordinated by Mayan gods, pile up TV sets in the shape of a triangle reminiscent of Ant Farm’s 1975 Media Burn event. Both Scharf and Haring also participated in various performances, which represented the heartbeat of Club 57. For the second installment of the live improvisations event Acts of Live Art in April 1980, curated by John Sex, Haring recited a freeform poem from inside a television cutout, which consisted of him repeating the words “fat,” “boy,” and “lick,” at various paces and in ever-changing sequences. By far the most crucial figure of the club was Ann Magnuson, who shifted from the role of manager to host to performer, developing an impressive array of parodies based on stereotypical female types from music and TV. After the end of Club 57, she condensed some of her TV characters in the fifteen-minute video Made for TV (1984), directed by Tom Rubnitz. After being shown in small art venues, it was featured in Alive from Off Center—a program coproduced by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and Twin Cities Public Television (KTCA)—aired on PBS from 1984 to 1996, and devoted to dance, theater, comedy, and the visual arts. Made for TV recreated the experience of zapping through an imaginary daily schedule, with Magnuson performing close to fifty comic characters, including: a morning variety show host, a workout trainer, an MTV VJ, a goth singer, a game show contestant, a televangelist, a soap opera housewife, the testimonial for a department store, a surly art historian, a sexy sitcom maid, and a deadpan newsreader (Figure 5.7). Toward the end of the video, the pace becomes more and more frantic with some of the scenes reaching a climax, and the channel-flipping turning into a cacophonic machine gun-like deconstruction, with the characters annihilating each other. With its emphasis on postmodernism’s quintessential tropes of fragmentation and parody, Made for TV aligns with the allegorical appropriations by female Pictures Generation artists like Barry, Bender, Birnbaum, and Sherman. Magnuson

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FIGURE 5.7 Ann Magnuson and Tom Rubnitz, Made for TV, video stills, 1984. Courtesy of Ann Magnuson.

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adopts humor as a critical weapon that, coupled with her versatility, would also inform the roles—in parallel with her artistic projects—the artist would increasingly play in mainstream movies and TV series alike, injecting the mainstream with a glimpse of the irreverence that characterized the new wave vaudeville scene of Club 57.

The Inadequate Spectator: Michael Smith A native of Chicago, Michael Smith moved to New York in the late 1970s, where he started performing in nonprofit art spaces, like The Kitchen and Artists Space, and nightclubs, such as the Bottom Line. One of the first and most prototypal artists to bring television comedy into the artistic context, his whole production revolves around the character of Mike, his alter ego, and the protagonist of live performances, videos, TV appearances, and installations based on the linguistic and aesthetic models of stand-up and sitcoms. Mike is an average American: clumsy, trusting, and motivated by a desire to succeed, which often pushes him to embark upon exciting business enterprises. Through the Mike persona, Smith shapes an aesthetic of failure, animated by “a feeling of inadequacy,”30 which the artist confesses TV has given him since he was a child. Unlike the outcasts in Kelley, McCarthy, and Korine’s oeuvre, the “civilizing processes” enacted by mass media don’t turn Mike into an abject; rather, they push him to do better and better, with hilarious results, thus pointing to the fact that “most of us are losers,”31 as Dan Graham argues in a conversation with Smith. The artist shows off an innate ability to make the audience laugh through farces that could also be potentially appreciated by a general audience, as happened in the case of his peer, Eric Bogosian. Both started out as performance artists in association with the Pictures Generation; however, following Oliver Stone’s successful film adaptation of his play Talk Radio in 1988, Bogosian transitioned from art to commercial entertainment as an actor, playwright, and novelist whose resume includes Broadway shows, Hollywood adaptations, and various parts in TV series. Smith’s association with the Pictures Generation is due to the fact that he also explores how mass media influence viewers to shape their identity based on preconstituted models. However, unlike Barry, Bender, and Birnbaum, who appropriate media imagery, Smith’s allegories are based on original productions in which he performs a fictional character within sets  Michael Smith. In Conversation with Francesco Spampinato, “The Inadequate Spectator,” Apartamento, No. 11, May (2013): 203. 31  Dan Graham in Tim Griffin, “In Conversation: Dan Graham and Michael Smith,” Artforum, May (2004). 30

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reminiscent of American sitcoms from the 1950s to the 1980s. Television is not only an aesthetic and cultural reference but also the recurring subject of Smith’s work. In his early performance Down in the Rec Room (1979) at Artists Space, for example, the artist tunes in various programs on a TV set and mimes to some of them, including the disco dancing of Donny and Marie. “I think it was the embarrassment quotient of those shows that originally drew me to them,” he claims, “but also, their pop look and feel of each.”32 Now an impromptu dancer, now an aspiring entrepreneur, now a proud graduate, Mike is portrayed at the center of humorous vignettes in which his destiny is conveyed by forces greater than him—situations that he clumsily tries to control. Secret Horror (1980), his first video, tells a nightmare in which a group of ghosts burst into Mike’s bedroom to steal his television, which they will return only after submitting him to an embarrassing yet exhilarating television quiz (Figure 5.8). The sound here plays a central role: the host’s voice has a solemn, godlike tone—particularly when saying, “we moved his entire living room down to the studio”33—and the scenes are accompanied by slapstick sound effects and pop hits. The aural dimension is so prominent that the narrative even turns into a proper musical at some

FIGURE 5.8  Michael Smith, Secret Horror, production still, 1980. Photo: Kevin Noble. Courtesy of the artist.  Smith, “The Inadequate Spectator,” 200.  Michael Smith, Secret Horror, 1980. Retrieved from Mike’s World, accessed April 24, 2021, http://www.mikes-world.org/videos/secrethorrorvideo.html.

32 33

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FIGURE 5.9 Michael Smith, Go for It Mike, video still, 1984. Courtesy of the artist.

point, with the ectoplasms (actors with sheets on their heads) dancing, and Mike, alone in underwear, contemplating the scene. The video that best represents Smith’s production is Go for It Mike (1984), which tells the story of a small-town boy who pursues what he believes is his destiny, from popular classmate to successful businessman who brings progress and economic growth to his city (Figure 5.9). Go for It Mike is a satire of the American dream and the pathetic myth of the white male dominator. “Some people are born to win. Yes, they are people like me and you,”34 sing some telegenic young cowboys and cowgirls in chorus, while Mike struts aboard a red Ford Pinto, imagining he is a cowboy riding his stallion. The work’s highly symbolic vocabulary—epitomized in the terms “history,” “destiny,” and “future”—resonates with the coeval “Morning in America” television commercials campaign, launched by the then president Ronald Reagan to promote a return to traditional values centered on family, religion, work, but most of all devotion to the country. Over the years, Smith has collaborated with many artists, including Mark Fisher, Mike Kelley, Doug Skinner, and Joshua White, and produced works that have also reflected on other TV genres other than comedy, like talent shows and children’s shows. However, his biggest accomplishment undoubtedly 34  Michael Smith, Go For It Mike, 1984. Retrieved from Mike’s World, accessed April 24, 2021, http://www.mikes-world.org/videos/goforitmikevideo.html.

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remains the Mike saga, chiefly because of Smith’s peculiar invention of a comic persona through whom he was able to pursue a psychoanalytical investigation on the appealing nature of televisual illusionism. “Mike is a vehicle for me. He is kind of an empty shell, so his emotional life is hardly as nuanced as mine,”35 Smith confesses to Mike Kelley in a conversation. What Smith is able to enact through the Mike mise-en-scène is that childish desire to, all of a sudden, make life as better as it looks on TV—an illusion that is all condensed at the opening of MIKE (1987), which was commissioned by the Saturday Night Live show: “It seemed to be another regular day, but a voice kept telling me: ‘This is going to be the first day of the rest of your life.’”36

5.4 The Semiotics of the Soap Opera Infiltrating the Soap Opera Another genre of television entertainment that is the recurring subject of artistic forms of resistance, appropriation, and parody is the soap opera, a serial drama originally born for radio in the 1930s, transposed to television in the early 1950s in the United States, and later worldwide. The genre’s defining characteristic are its plots, based on an articulated set of emotional relationships between a group of characters, usually members of the same family or restricted communities of friends, roommates, or coworkers. Soap opera storylines unfold over time, and, episode after episode, season after season, they let viewers get acquainted with the characters, to the point that they would feel sympathetic, take positions, express judgments, rejoice, suffer, or get angry with and for them. More than silent observers, viewers identify with the life of a set of fictional human beings struggling with overly dramatized emotions to the point they begin to feel it as an imprint on their own reality. Because of the emphasis on the emotional and moral aspects of the sentimental relationships staged, the soap opera is the televisual incarnation of the melodrama: a theatrical representation born in the Victorian age, characterized by a style of acting and a use of music that accentuated the dramatic dimension of life stories with a penchant for love dramas. This

35  Michael Smith. In conversation with Mike Kelley, “Is It ‘Mike’ Enough?” in Mike’s World, ed. Michael Smith and Joshua White (Austin: Blanton Museum of Art, 2007), 15. 36  Michael Smith, MIKE, 1987. Retrieved from Mike’s World, accessed April 24, 2021, http:// www.mikes-world.org/videos/mikevideo.html.

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was particularly true in the beginning, when the soap opera occupied the daytime segment exclusively and targeted an audience of housewives. The term “soap opera” derives from its early sponsors—generally manufacturers of household items like Procter and Gamble and Colgate-Palmolive—with the intent to reinforce the domestic condition of women in order to sell them their products. In the twenty-first century the term has mutated from soap opera—or soap for short—into more generic labels, such as “TV series,” and its various subgenres like detective stories, teen dramas, and medical dramas. The earliest known artwork to refer to a soap opera is Andy Warhol’s Soap Opera or The Lester Persky Story (1964). The artist’s only reference to TV at that point was the expressionist TV set painted in TV $199 (1960); his first proper TV project Vivian’s Girls (1973) would come only a decade later. Warhol approaches the soap opera genre from an ambivalent perspective. First, he filmed a series of silent scenes of individuals and couples in intimate moments, in his already typical amateur style, featuring among others, his upcoming “superstar” Baby Jane Holzer. He then intercut this material with a series of TV commercials provided to him by film and TV producer Lester Persky, including those for Pillsbury cake mix, Miracle Edge knife, and Seven Day Beauty Set shampoo. According to Dieter Daniels, with this contradictory approach, “The usual hierarchy of content over advertising is stood on its head, and the commercials become the true message for which the mostly actionless Soap Opera delivers only the background.”37 By turning the caesura into the real (entertaining) content, and substituting the fictional emotions with extended actions performed by nonprofessional actors, Warhol highlights the distinction between reality and the media representation of love and sex, as he did in the same years with his films Kiss (1963) and Blow Job (1963–64). Spigel even claims that “Soap Opera is one of the first (if not the first) theories of television aesthetics. The film rearticulates the relationship between commercials and narrative time on television. Whereas television soaps are notorious for their stagy dialogue and cliff-hanger effects, Warhol’s television soap scenes have no dialogue and pose no enigmas.”38 A quintessential work of postmodernist feminism, American artist Joan Braderman’s Joan Does Dynasty (1985), is based on a similar idea of caesura. Through Chroma key and other editing techniques, Braderman infiltrates portions of Dynasty (1981–89), one of the world’s most popular soap operas of the 1980s. For about thirty-two minutes, the artist’s face, bust, and full body interweave with original scenes, which she turns into

37  Dieter Daniels, “Viewing Television (as Art),” in Telegen: Art and Television, ed. Dieter Daniels and Stephan Berg (Munich: Hirmer Verlag GmbH, 2015), 25. 38  Spigel, 252.

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allegories through sarcastic commentaries—reminiscent of the works of Barry, Bender, and Birnbaum of the same period. Although not officially associated with the Pictures Generation, Braderman appropriates television with the same intent of deconstructing media fantasies; in this case, those enacted by a series notoriously based on intrigue, patriarchy, and opulence, which perpetrated a false and stereotyped notion of women. Like Birnbaum’s videos, Joan Does Dynasty is conceived as a poststructuralist visual essay, or as Braderman herself defines it in the opening, a “stand-up theory” in which the artist plays the role of “TV infiltrator and media counter-spy and image cop.”39 A different type of infiltration of a soap opera was conducted in ChineseAmerican artist Mel Chin’s In the Name of the Place (1995–97) based on Melrose Place (1992–99), another series by Dynasty producer Aaron Spelling, whose plot centers on a group of neighbors. Here the covert infiltration occurs at the outset of the production stage. In agreement with the set designer, Chin coordinates a group of students and faculty from the University of Georgia and CalArts (operating under the moniker of the GALA Committee) who produce over 150 objects and artworks that are embedded in the soap’s sets. The objects include: bedroom sheets adorned with a pattern of condoms, Chinese food bags with the ideograph for human rights, a painting based on a bombing of Baghdad, and pictures of famous Los Angeles murders. Their inclusion, unbeknownst and unnoticed by the viewers, as Joshua Decter suggests, “moved far beyond theoretical fantasies of critical media infiltration and into an unprecedented framework of cross-cultural and inter-media collaboration.”40 Before being auctioned at Sotheby’s and their proceeds donated to charities, these artworks were displayed at the 1997 Los Angeles MOCA show Uncommon Sense within reconstructions of real sets used in Melrose Place. The work was reinstalled in 2016 at Red Bull Studios, New York.

The Double on the Screen As dramatized versions of everyday life, soap operas leverage on the intensification of words, poses, and gestures. Rather than being an imitation of life, a soap opera reconstructs life based on a series of stereotypical situations, characters, and emotions. Examples of stereotyped characters

39  Joan Braderman, Joan Does Dynasty, 1985. Retrieved from Vimeo, accessed April 24, 2021, https://vimeo.com/203886769. 40  Joshua Decter, “Prime Time: In the Name of the Place of Art and Television,” in Mel Chin: The GALA Committee, ed. Joshua Decter (Kansas City, MO: Grand Arts, 1998), unpaged.

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include the strong independent woman, the authoritarian man, the villain, the rebel, the rival, the matriarch, and the wise old man. What allows viewers to identify with them is the theatrical illusionism of their performance to the point that, as British media scholar John Ellis notes, the characters “tend to become confused with the people who play them. The casting for a TV series demands types rather than performers, actors who can live their particular phantasy-selves through the parts that they play.”41 Mimesis may reach an extreme degree, as proved by cases of actors being stalked or blackmailed in real life for the fictional misbehaviors they performed on the screen. Similar to the works of Warhol, Braderman, and Chin, German artist Julian Rosefeldt’s Global Soap (2000–01) is a visual essay on the genre of the soap opera, but one conducted from a strictly semiotic perspective that exposes how emotions are in fact manufactured. The multiscreen installation consists of the alignment of somatic expressions and body gestures decontextualized from various soap operas. The project, which also led to a series of grid-like prints titled Mnemories/Samples, exposes what a critical viewer might have always suspected: that soap operas are based on a very specific vocabulary of emotional codes, each corresponding to a determined body language. The project is reminiscent of a late 1970s series of works by Richard Prince, in which the Pictures Generation artist aligned portraits of men and women looking in the same direction, appropriated from ads and fashion shoots, to expose how a pose conveys a certain meaning and is used to sell a product through giving the illusion of proposing a lifestyle. Rosefeldt applies the same logic to the body language of soap operas. A recurring theatrical gesture he employs is that of open hands pressed against the chest, which convey a person’s desire to be believed (Figure 5.10). Another example is the raised index finger, which, paired with a stern look, means the person is giving advice. But there are also hands praying, heads leaning sideways, and disconsolate glances downward. According to German curator Stephan Berg: the supposedly individual appearances give rise to a fascinatingly uniform and repetitive overall picture that reveals the universally stereotyped vocabulary and operetta-like choreography of the faces. Admittedly, this is true not only of the protagonists in the series… we also realize to what extent our own forms of expression have come to be infected by a conscious or unconscious imitation of the media-staged surrogates that we thereby transfer from televised illusion into the real world.42

 John Ellis, Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 164. 42  Stephan Berg, “Julian Rosefeldt,” in Telegen: Art and Television, ed. Dieter Daniels and Stephan Berg (Munich: Hirmer Verlag GmbH, 2015), 310. 41

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FIGURE 5.10  Julian Rosefeld, Mnemories / Samples (Nr. 5, Global Soap, Series 2), 2000–2001. © Julian Rosefeld and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020.

A quintessential form of televisual fiction, the soap opera never forgot about its original scope, that is, to hold the viewer’s attention until the next promotional segment. As American media scholar John Thornton Caldwell pointed out, “The relationship between soaps and the daytime viewerhomemaker, however, is posed artificially as congruent, since their ads work together to connect the viewer’s world to the televised world.”43 For this reason, soap opera tropes not only often migrate to ads, they are also intensified in order to convey the maximum emotional effect in the shorter time frame of a commercial. Thus, it is also worth mentioning in this context

43  John Thornton Caldwell, Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 130.

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two video artworks that, even if based on televisual advertising, show how the emotional fantasies of soap operas reincarnate into ads for ephemeral products. Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli, who has investigated television in artworks and curatorial projects that will be discussed in the following chapter, in 2009 realized Greed, a one-minute video constructed as an ad for an imaginary perfume, directed by Roman Polanski. The micro-narrative contains the usual clichés in a perfume commercial: elegant environments, persuasive voice-over, piano music, and two intriguing female figures (played here by Hollywood actresses Natalie Portman and Michelle Williams). However, as soon as Williams enters the room and notices the bottle of Greed on Portman’s dressing table, the two start a violent fight to get hold of the object of desire, which turns the story into a narrative. The video is representative of Vezzoli’s interest in celebrity culture and advertising, whose ephemeral dimension is embodied here in a product as intangible as a perfume. The same feeling is evoked through American artist Richard Phillips’ “motion portraits”44 Sasha Grey (2011) and Lindsay Lohan (2011). Unlike Vezzoli’s Greed though, here the two provocative yet melancholic actresses do not seem to advertise anything other than their conflictive perception of their media persona. Phillips films Grey as she wanders through John Lautner’s futuristic Chemosphere house in Los Angeles, and Lohan as she contemplates the screening images of herself bathing in an aquamarine infinity pool. In a vein that is reminiscent of Warhol’s Outer and Inner Space (1965), in which Edie Sedgwick interacts with her media duplicate—as well as Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), Carpenter’s Videodrome (1983), and any film in which a character touches an Other on video—Lohan touches the image of herself on a screen in the attempt to grasp whatever materiality is left of her media persona. Unlike the commercial contexts in which they usually perform emotional characters, Phillips offers the actresses a liberated moment of self-reflection.

A Postcolonial View: Bruce and Norman Yonemoto Media fantasies produced by soap operas, ads, and movies are at the core of Japanese-American siblings Bruce and Norman Yonemoto’s videos and installations produced from the late 1970s to the late 1990s. Born two years

 Richard Phillips quoted in the press release for the exhibition “Richard Phillips,” Gagosian, New York, September 11–October 20, 2012. Retrieved from Gagosian, accessed April 24, 2021, https://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/richard-phillips–september-11-2012. 44

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apart, right after the Second World War, from a Japanese couple who met while being incarcerated in American internment camps, the Yonemotos grew up in Northern California as members of a minority community who absorbed the lifestyle, represented through mass media, of a country that had just persecuted it. As noted by late Asian American art curator Karin Higa, their work explores “the creation of meaning through filmic representation and analyze mass media’s hold on our perceptions of personal identity… Yet at the same time, the Yonemotos recognize the seductiveness of media and the viewer’s complicity in believing, desiring, and consuming all that TV and movies have to offer.”45 Although Japan has never been an American colony, the Yonemotos adopt a postcolonial perspective which, as an offshoot of postmodernist and poststructuralist approaches, aims to deconstruct the dominant narratives built up by Western societies with regard to history, gender, ethnicity, and more generally the way meaning is manufactured to maintain the privileged status of white male-dominated lobbies, who exert their economic and political power with the aid of mass media. The Yonemotos challenge this idealized social order portrayed in television, advertising, and cinema by presenting the minority communities they belong to Japanese-Americans, artists, and queers (considering Norman’s gay sexuality). The brothers’ first collaborative project, a 16 mm film titled Garage Sale (1976), overturns the stereotyped representation of Hollywood heterosexist love by recounting the troubled love story of the male character Hero (a name that emphasized the work’s allegorical intention) and his transvestite wife, played by famed drag queen Goldie Glitters. The clash between media fantasies and the struggles of real sentimental relationships is also the topic of the Yonemotos’ following trilogy of videos based on soap operas recounting the love dramas of the imaginary members of the Southern California art scene: Based on Romance (1979), An Impotent Metaphor (1979), and Green Card: An American Romance (1980). Based on Romance recounts the story of a Caucasian couple forced to question their bohemian identity. When she thinks she might be pregnant, Anastasia leans toward abortion, scared that her maternity could damage her art career, while her boyfriend assumes a more traditional male position in regard to the possibility of having a family. Played by Norman Yonemoto himself, the autobiographical tale of An Impotent Metaphor, instead, is based on an Asian American artist’s struggles with technological and media issues in reference to art making on the one side, and his homosexuality on the other.

 Karin Higa, “Bruce and Norman Yonemoto: A Survey,” in Bruce and Norman Yonemoto: Memory, Matter and Modern Romance, ed. Sherri Schottlaender (Los Angeles: Japanese American National Museum, 1999), 8. 45

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Most of the duo’s production is based on the syntax and codes of the melodrama updated to a camp sensibility. In her seminal essay “Notes on Camp” (1964), Susan Sontag defined the aesthetics of camp as a function of “its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.”46 Unlike kitsch, which could be shortly defined as a pejorative imitation of high art that appeals to popular taste, camp is a self-aware theatrical and exhibitionist form of entertainment based on parody. The most recurring trope of camp is the exaggeratedly effeminate behavior, be it performed by females or males in drag. Camp are the music acts of Carmen Miranda and Cher, but also glam rock and its derivatives. Camp are John Waters’ movies and the Rocky Horror Picture Show musical. And camp are the 1950s Hollywood melodramas directed by Douglas Sirk and the soap operas of the 1980s, both declared sources for the Yonemotos. The artists’ soap operas trilogy ends with the ambitious seventy-nineminute-long Green Card: An American Romance, which tells the story of young Japanese artist Sumie, played by Bruce Yonemoto’s real wife Sumie Nobuhara, who arranges a marriage of convenience with Jay, a California surfer and filmmaker, in order to get the green card to remain in the United States to pursue an art career. While Jay’s behavior is affected by stereotyped notions of Japanese identity, as the Yonemotos write, Sumie “finds herself drawn into Hollywood’s ‘modern,’ socially constructed definition of marriage and romance…. Her search for the freedom to create art and live an independent life is thwarted by the very media that launched her dreams in the first place.”47 The relationship between fictional and real romance is complicated when, during the film’s premiere at Los Angeles non-profit space LACE, Bruce Yonemoto and Sumie walked down the aisle in a show of matrimonial unity. The banality of the romantic fantasies and psychosexual crises represented in soap operas, ads, and movies, coupled with a postcolonial view of the media representation of the Other, remain recurring topics throughout the duo’s oeuvre—passing through their aforementioned collaborative work with Mike Kelley, Kappa (1986), and finding an ultimate outlet in the fifty-six-minute-long video Made in Hollywood (1990). The plot is based on the professional and sentimental relationships between the small town aspiring actress Tammy (played by emerging movie star Patricia Arquette), a Hollywood mogul, his gay son, and a New York art world couple who reinvent themselves as screenwriters approaching “traditional Hollywood  Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp” (1964) in A Partisan Century: Political Writings from Partisan Review, ed. Edith Kurzweil (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 232. 47  Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, “Green Card: An American Romance. A Treatment for a Video Feature and Discussion of Aesthetic Strategies,” originally written in 1980 and revised for Bruce and Norman Yonemoto: Memory, Matter and Modern Romance, ed. Sherri Schottlaender (Los Angeles: Japanese American National Museum, 1999), 74. 46

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narrative formulas as ‘alternative’ art structures.”48 The differentiation between real life and fantasy is reinforced by the use of black and white for the former and color for the latter. The film ends with Tammy, who, after many ethical hesitations, finally embraces the hyper-colored fantasy of commercials, both as an actress and in her true life.

Identity and the Telenovela: Phil Collins A postcolonial view and related issues of identity, migration, and globalization inform most of British artist Phil Collins’ multimedia production. baghdad screen tests (2002), filmed right before the start of the Iraq War, is a series of casting auditions for young Iraqis for an imaginary Hollywood movie. they shoot horses (2004) consists of two seven-hourlong videos documenting a disco dance marathon featuring nine Palestinian teenagers in a Ramallah studio. Based on the typical British anthems by The Smiths, the already mentioned the world won’t listen (2005) is a video installation documenting various karaoke sessions, filmed in Colombia, Turkey, and Indonesia. What these three works have in common is their attempt to understand how geopolitical dynamics affect pop culture and, vice versa, how pop culture affects cultural identity reinforcing the world’s geopolitical order. When Collins approached the soap opera format, he did so with the same intent. His 2008 work, soy mi madre, is a twenty-eight-minute-long 16 mm film resembling the episode of a telenovela—the more theatrical and dramatic Latin American version of the soap opera (Figure 5.11). Commissioned by the Aspen Art Museum, the film was conceived in resonance with the cultural context of the large Mexican and Latino community living in Colorado, USA, who provide labor to the tourism industry—hotels, restaurants, boutiques—which constitutes the main economy of the upscale winter tourist destination of Aspen. To maintain authenticity of this specific type of working-class melodrama, soy mi madre was filmed in Mexico City by a professional crew. Featuring a cast of prominent telenovela actors, and based on a typical plot revolving around a series of secrets, betrayals, and a murder involving a bourgeois family and its service staff, the film is loosely inspired by Jean Genet’s play Les Bonnes (The Maids) (1947)—a seminal example of the Theatre of Absurd.

 Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, “Made in Hollywood. A Treatment for a Video Feature and Discussion of Aesthetic Strategies,” originally written in 1986 and revised for Bruce and Norman Yonemoto: Memory, Matter and Modern Romance, ed. Sherri Schottlaender (Los Angeles: Japanese American National Museum, 1999), 78. 48

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FIGURE 5.11 Phil Collins, soy mi madre, production stills, 2008. Courtesy of Shady Lane Productions, Berlin.

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The story unfolds the disparity between an elegant, jeweled, and unscrupulous lady, Sable Sainte, and her innocent, beautiful, submissive young maid in uniform, Solana—whom the viewer discovers to be the mistress’ secret younger sister. Clara, the humble housekeeper, gave Sable to her employer to compensate for the death of his daughter, with the condition that she could remain to serve in the house, all unbeknownst to Sable. Curiously, each character is played by more than one actor, perhaps to underline the stereotypical nature of the types represented. The plotline culminates with Sable’s murder of her working-class lover Ramón, who was also Solana’s husband. In accordance to the typical classist and racist undertones of the telenovelas produced since the genre was born in the 1950s to the 1980s, the interplay echoes the conservative and fragmented social order based on ethnic hierarchies of many Latin American countries. soy mi madre was not only meant to replicate the genre’s cultural specificity, though, but as a critical analysis conducted from a Euro-American perspective. Although shot in Mexico with telenovela professionals, Collins worked on the script with a Hollywood screenwriting couple, and included references to Genet, not to mention the influence of British soap operas on the artist’s upbringing. Moreover, the 16 mm format gave the pseudotelenovela an unusually cinematic dimension, allowing the viewer to linger on the camp aesthetic of body gestures, expressions, and ornamental details, such as the costumes and the interiors. Far from a lo-fi episode of a new potential telenovela, the film is a high-definition artistic simulation that exposes telenovela codes and tropes as allegories of an enduring social order based on inequality and the exploitation of subordinate classes, both in Latin America and worldwide, as well as Latin America’s subordinate position in respect of the United States. In the publication accompanying the project, Mexican art critic and curator Magalí Arriola claims that through the telenovela, Collins “reactivates an irresolvable cultural and political space in which the dreams, illusions, and delusions of conflicting social classes are played against one another.”49 At the same time, Arriola continues: the transparency of the construction process opens an interstitial space that realizes itself as a zone for the articulation of private tensions and social conflicts. If we take for granted that telenovelas as cultural artifacts—notwithstanding their capitalization on social fractures—still provide a democratic space by means of an egalitarian access to drama and emotions, then the subjectivities at play in soy mi madre could

 Magali Arriola, “Happy Together?,” in Phil Collins: soy mi madre, ed. Siniša Mitrović (Aspen: Aspen Art Museum, 2008), 19.

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potentially subvert the power of the media and thus sketch a social site for identification that… would be liberated from spectacle.50 The temporal issue (making a typical 1980s telenovela in the late 2000s), paired with the geographic issue (producing a Mexican telenovela for the upscale institution of the Aspen Art Museum), suggests that many of the stereotypical inequalities elicited by this television format remain not only at stake in our society but have reached a global scale. In parallel with the social and political interpretation, Collins’ own statements suggest that soy mi madre could also be intended, like many artworks discussed so far, as another mirror held up to the viewer to reveal how real life could assume the melodramatic disproportionality of television fiction—mainly because of “the preposterousness of its narrative conventions, and the potential to address, within such a highly predicated framework, some of the pains and dilemmas of the private sphere.”51 The same concerns also motivate Collins to embrace another television genre, that of reality shows, which will be discussed in the following chapter.

 Ibid., 23.  Phil Collins. In Conversation with Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson, “The Edge of Aspen” in Phil Collins: soy mi madre, ed. Siniša Mitrović (Aspen: Aspen Art Museum, 2008), 67.

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6 The Age of Prosumers: Reality TV and the Internet

6.1 Processing Reality TV Early Artistic Responses to Reality TV As this compendium on the relationships between art and television moves toward an end, this last chapter will focus on artistic forms of appropriation, resistance, and parody of television emerged from the 1990s to the late 2010s: that is, a period in which reality TV on the one side and the impressive diffusion and pervasiveness of the internet on the other have drastically mutated and somehow degraded what was the late twentieth-century’s quintessential mass medium. The competition with new “prosumer” media and the internet pushed television producers in the 1990s to look for new forms of entertainment, fiction, and storytelling based on reality, or else reality TV (also known as factual television) in all its delineations. Thus, the ultimate product of the market chain was finally enacted by television, with reality TV viewers becoming the subject of programs in which they are invited to perform themselves. Reality TV encompasses a wide range of programs based on supposedly unscripted real-life situations that elicit a tension between fact and fiction, with a focus on the relationships and conflicts among a cast of individuals or their struggles to achieve appreciation from a jury and the audience in talent competitions. Every genre of television programming has been revised according to the “reality” factor (e.g., news, entertainment, documentary, fiction, etc.) and has not only brought ordinary people and talented wannabe professionals their fifteen minutes of fame—as prophesied by Warhol—but also media celebrities to reveal their supposed true selves, leveraging on

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the voyeuristic logic at the base of celebrity culture (incidentally, another mechanism investigated by Warhol). Like various projects by Warhol, John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s 1969 “bed-in for peace” actions (discussed in Chapter 3) also prefigured reality TV. By lying down in a hotel bed for days—an intimate setting, unusual for celebrities—they used their media spotlight to highlight the urgent issue of the Vietnam War. At that time, the couple’s exhibitionism of fragility and intimacy to challenge media power was also the subject of Rape (1969), a work produced and broadcast by Austrian TV channel ORF. A twoman camera crew pursues an unsuspecting ordinary Austrian woman, Eva Maijlata, through the streets of London and even into her own apartment (with the complicity of her sister). For seventy-seven minutes, Maijlata shifts from being surprised to increasingly worried and upset as her privacy is violated and her image is exposed to the camera’s mechanical eye, thereby being metaphorically raped, even though no actual physical violence takes place. Rape ends with Maijlata curled up on the floor shielding her face with her hands: an act of protection from the intruding lens—symptomatic of an era in which the distinction between private and public sphere was clearly marked. That era was coming to an end though, as proved by the mass diffusion of portable cameras and their consequential influence on commercial television. Although precedents of television programs that portrayed ordinary people in unscripted situations go back to the 1940s (e.g., Candid Camera), it is in the early 1970s that the first concrete examples of reality TV emerged, namely the documentary-style series based on the lives of two nuclear families: the Louds in An American Family (1973, but filmed in 1971), produced in the US by PBS, and the Wilkins in The Family (1974), produced in the UK by the BBC. In a 1979 essay, Dan Graham—who, as discussed in Chapter 2, developed several installations and performances based on CCTV technology in the 1970s—argued that “TV might be metaphorically visualized as a mirror in which the viewing family sees an idealized, ideologically distorted reflection of itself represented in television’s typical genres”:1 a reflection which he thought the Loud family “placed in doubt”2 with its harsh truthfulness (unusual for TV at the time), ranging from the parents’ divorce to the gay sexuality of Lance, the oldest son. At the same time, what emerged clearly from An American Family was what Warhol had been suggesting—namely, that the mere presence of a camera pushes the filmed person to act some sort of persona. Of the various thinkers who commented on reality TV since

 Dan Graham, “An American Family,” 1979 in TV Guide: A Collection of Thoughts about Television, ed. Barbara Kruger (New York: Kuklapolitan Press, 1985), 13. 2  Ibid. 1

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the genre’s popularization in the 1990s, Slavoj Žižek went even further on this point as to argue that “in everyday lives, we act already, in the sense that we have a certain ideal image of ourselves and we act that persona,”3 which somehow echoed Rosalind Krauss’ reference to the pre-media myth of Narcissus used to explain early video art practices. Created by Dutch producer Jon de Mol in 1997, Big Brother remains the quintessential example of the reality TV phenomenon. Based on a group of contestants living together in a custom-built house, under constant surveillance, the format has gone on to achieve worldwide success as an international franchise, also sparking numerous imitations. In commenting on a French epigone of the show called Loft Story, in 2001 Jean Baudrillard coined the term “telemorphosis” to explain the uncanny transposition of reality into televisual fiction. Unlike his previous idea of hyperreality—a simulation of reality that has lost its original referent—the notion of telemorphosis stresses upon the banality of life represented in reality TV. “Today, the screen is no longer the television screen; it is the screen of reality itself—of what we can call integral reality,” he argued. “The immanence of banality, the more real than real, is integral reality.”4

Emotions for Sale: Artists’ Reality Shows The late German artist, theater director, and filmmaker Christoph Schlingensief was among the first to employ artistic means to respond to reality TV, when the genre saw a surge in global popularity. Inspired by Neuer Deutscher Film (New German Cinema) directors like Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Alexander Kluge, Schlingensief began making films in the mid-1980s and came to prominence with his “Germany Trilogy” (1989– 94), a series of politically incorrect satirical films blending influences from historical avant-gardes and B-movies, focused on three key phases of recent German history: Hitler’s last days, the 1990 reunification, and the postreunification struggles. Issues like xenophobia, violence, and identity in reference to German culture and history, which dominated his films, are also at the core of his theater and opera productions, including the restaging of classics like Hamlet and Parsifal. Animated by political concerns, Schlingensief also staged confrontational public performances, and in 1998

3  Slavoj Žižek. In conversation with Dianna Dilworth, The Believer, Vol. 2, No. 7, (July 2004): 174. 4  Jean Baudrillard, Telemorphosis, trans. Drew S. Burk (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2011), 49–50.

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FIGURE 6.1  John Miller, Everything Is Said 22, painting, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York.

he even founded a political party called Opportunity 2000—a project reminiscent of Joseph Beuys’ “social sculpture” actions. Schlingensief’s impellent need to impact upon Germany’s everyday life led him to produce and host some controversial reality TV shows at the turn of the millennium. Talk 2000 (1997) was an eight-episode talk show filmed in the basement of Berlin’s Volksbühne theater, which alternated between interviews with figures like the popular actress Hildegard Knef and Schlingensief’s monologues on personal problems, or wrestling with the guests. The eight-episode MTV series U3000 (2000), filmed on Berlin’s subway trains, was conceived as a parody of TV’s fastspeed and shock logic, with its unbalanced shots, extravagant guests, and free-form syntax. The same year, Schlingensief staged the play Bitte liebt Österreich (Please Love Austria), a Big Brother parody with asylum seekers competing for a residency Visa. Similarly, Freakstars 3000 (2002) was a six-episode spoof of talent shows like American Idol, following a group of individuals with mental disabilities being selected by a merciless jury to form a new band called Mutter Sucht Schrauben (Mother Seeks Screws). Like his films and performances, with these TV-related works,

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FIGURE 6.2 Phil Collins, the return of the real, 2007. Eight-channel video installation; color, sound; 60 minutes. Courtesy of Shady Lane Productions, Berlin.

the artist makes a harsh commentary on the persuasive role of media on German culture and identity. Active since the late 1970s, American artist John Miller has addressed issues of mass culture and consumerism throughout a genre-defying multidisciplinary practice that includes painting and installation, as well as writing and teaching. Reality TV has become a recurring topic in Miller’s production since the late 1990s. In the essay “Playing the Game” (1998), he argued that in reality TV emotions are reduced to commodities and that, “Without tight shots of the faces of hysterical women overwhelmed in their newfound riches, the game show would lose its ‘human’ interest.”5 In another essay, “The Phantom Audience” (2000), Miller reinforced the claim, asserting, “All these programs begin with the premise that social reality is intrinsically fictive and therefore changeable. The contestants are stand-ins for the viewing audience… Yet instead of becoming an entity in itself, the audience ends up a marketer’s dream—determined, overdetermined, entirely calculable.”6 By the time he wrote these texts, Miller had already started featuring TV imagery in his artworks. A series of paintings from 1998 reproduce scenes 5  John Miller, “Playing the Game,” in a/drift, ed. Joshua Decter (Annandale-on-Hudson: Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, 1998), 93–5. 6  John Miller, “The Phantom Audience,” unpublished, 2000. Retrieved from Lownoon, accessed April 24, 2021, http://lownoon.com/theatricality1.pdf.

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from game shows with hosts and contestants rendered in black and white, in sharp contrast with the studio and audience in pastel colors. The same year, for an exhibition at Le Magasin in Dijon, Miller installed a game show set with an abstract wheel of fortune and other sculptural props reminiscent of Minimalism’s concern for repositioning the beholder. Game show imagery is also the subject of other various paintings and installations he made in 1999 and 2000. Again, television becomes the artist’s favorite topic in 2009, this time focusing on the emotional factor, with a series of painted portraits of reality TV contestants crying as in the series Everything Is Said (2009–12) (Figure 6.1), Profile (2013), and Here in the Real World (2015). Of British artist Phil Collins, two works have already been mentioned in the previous chapter, the karaoke project the world won’t listen (2004– 07)—a response to the music video genre—and soy mi madre (2008), a film that looks at the telenovela genre from a geopolitical perspective. Although elements of factual television are already present in these works, Collins’ first proper response to reality TV was the multichannel video and photographic project the return of the real (2005–07), which documented a forum of former reality show participants in Turkey and the UK, the latter organized by the artist and his at time fictional company, Shady Lane Productions, as his participation in the Turner Prize exhibition (the prestigious British art award that is itself a media spectacle). Through individual interviews and a press conference, the invited guests shared their experiences of how their life was ruined by the participation in reality shows, which, in some cases, also brought upon an identity crisis (Figure 6.2). Collins’ concerns for the exploitative nature of reality TV and its marketing of emotions assume a more ambiguous dimension in This Unfortunate Thing Between Us (2011), which simulates a real television program. The project consisted of two segments—performed over two consecutive nights at Berlin’s Hebbel am Ufer theater and broadcast live on the digital channel ZDFkultur—in which Collins, as Irish media scholar Maeve Connolly argues, “explores through his interactions with viewers as consumers, the mysterious and yet apparently enduring appeal of televisual selfexploitation.”7 Adopting a shopping channel format, the program, dubbed TUTBU.TV, sold real-life experiences for the price of 9.99 euros—including a Stasi-style interrogation, starring in a historical porno, or insulting one’s relative on their deathbed. These experiences were enacted on the first night in a highly theatrical manner by a cast of actors and performers, with the main roles then substituted on the second night by three buyers selected from home viewers calling in live from all over Germany (Figure 6.3).

7  Maeve Connolly, TV Museum: Contemporary Art and the Age of Television (Bristol and Chicago: Intellect and the University of Chicago Press, 2014), 121.

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FIGURE 6.3  Phil Collins, This Unfortunate Thing Between Us, stills from a live TV broadcast, 2011. Courtesy Shady Lane Productions, Berlin.

Italian Love Meetings: From Pasolini to Vezzoli An Italian example of cinéma verité, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1964 featurelength documentary Comizi d’Amore (Love Meetings) was a pioneering example of reality TV in Italian television. The camera follows Pasolini travelling through Italy—from north to south, from beaches through to  cities and rural villages—interviewing people of different ages, social

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classes, and cultural backgrounds, on sex-related topics like virginity, prostitution, homosexuality, and sex education. Structured around a set of dichotomies (e.g., north/south, men/women, adults/youth, divorce/ marriage, prostitution/fidelity, heterosexuality/homosexuality), Pasolini poses his questions to both ordinary people and friends, such as the writer Alberto Moravia and the journalist Oriana Fallaci. What emerges is a contradictory portrait of a population showing emancipated points of view, on the one side, and conservative and ignorant assumptions and beliefs, on the other. Inspired by the 1961 film Chronique d’un Été (Paris 1960) (Chronicle of a Summer)—a representative example of cinéma vérité by filmmaker Jean Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin—Pasolini’s Comizi d’Amore is less an inquiry on the sexual attitudes of 1960s Italians than an investigation on whether or not it is possible to act sincerely in front of a camera. In his preparatory notes, Pasolini wrote that he wanted to make a “therapeutic film.”8 His goal was to make people realize, by viewing the film, that their points of view were hypocritical. The film was prohibited to minors and had a very limited distribution. Nonetheless, over the decades it has become highly popular and inspired future television producers in understanding the potential of ordinary people: an approach that, since the 1990s, would be taken to the extreme by reality TV, which would turn certain aspects of cinéma vérité into spectacle, and ordinary people’s naïveté, authenticity, and emotions into products. A peculiar art project inspired by Pasolini’s documentary—but commenting on contemporary reality TV at its peak in popularity— was Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli’s Comizi di Non Amore (Non-Love Meetings, 2004), made to coincide with his solo exhibition at Fondazione Prada in Milan (Figure 6.4). Commissioned by Einstein Multimedia (a major Italian TV production agency), and filmed in a TV studio in Rome with Ela Weber (a popular showgirl on Italian TV at that time) playing the host, the one-hour video performance reframed the social reality of Pasolini through the lens of popular coeval, emotion-filled reality shows produced by Silvio Berlusconi’s TV networks, like C’è posta per Te (You’ve Got Mail) and Stranamore (Strangelove). The objective of the pseudo-show consisted in having a group of actresses, including Catherine Deneuve and Antonella Lualdi (the latter also appeared in Pasolini’s documentary), choose a partner among various competing suitors. The entire apparatus—audience, host, dancers, set, lights, sound—was put together to create an entertaining pilot that could potentially have ended up as a real series. Massive cultural changes occurred between 1964 and 2004, notably that people’s genuine shyness in front of the camera 8  Pier Paolo Pasolini and Laura Betti, Pier Paolo Pasolini: A Future Life (A Cinema of Poetry) (Rome: Fondo Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1989), 51.

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FIGURE 6.4 Francesco Vezzoli, Comizi di non amore, film still, 2004. Photo: Matthias Vriens. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada.

turned into confrontational self-confidence as a consequence of decades of pervasive intrusion of mass media into daily life. However, as argued by the artist, Pasolini’s lesson had not been learned, as proved by the fact that “People’s reaction to certain subjects has remained pretty much the same.”9 And the artist is cynical enough to simulate them without judgment, as the curator of the exhibition, Germano Celant, points out in a conversation in the book published by Fondazione Prada to accompany the exhibition: “It is clear that your generation has rejected moral indignation and polemical reflection.”10 Each “meeting” has a sexual connotation, whether the seducers strip for the guest or the coupling is perceived as “transgressive” (e.g., a threesome, one of the suitors is a transgender, etc.). Bigotry and hypocrisy recur in the comments of the audience invited on stage to debate after each new couple is formed. One of Lualdi’s seducers, for example, quotes her contribution to Pasolini’s Comizi: “I remember your

9  Francesco Vezzoli. In conversation with Germano Celant, in Francesco Vezzoli, ed. Germano Celant (Milan: Fondazione Prada, 2004), 269. 10  Ibid., 274.

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words ‘I love talking about sex.’ So, I’d like to show you my body,”11 he claims, reducing Lualdi’s original feminist statement to a vulgar sexual desire. Homosexuality is the topic that raises the harshest responses. In regard to a lesbian seducer named Michela, a particularly aggressive lady comments with indignation: “If this is trendy, you’d better kill yourself in my opinion.”12 Vezzoli himself, who plays a cameo, replies that, for him, “Michela has been truly sincere,” 13 thus suggesting that queer identity is a more truthful model in comparison with the stereotypical pretended identities of the other participants. As a scripted performance not meant for broadcast, this metalinguistic production uses TV as both form and content for an anthropological analysis on the impact of TV entertainment on Italian society. Both Pasolini and Vezzoli’s Comizi aim to reveal the mechanisms through which media produce consensus by coercing people to take a position—to choose among existing models rather than develop a critical but rational dialogue. Vezzoli does so by adopting a tactic of displacement typical of contemporary art, or what Marco Senaldi calls “a televisual sample, a proper readymade.”14 Freed from the obligations and paradigms of the art world, Pasolini’s work achieves a more effective goal though, in that he fights “a kind of crusade against ignorance and fear,”15 as he admits in the film, in the attempt to develop a primordial sense of awareness that would hopefully trigger a slow but more efficient and permanent therapeutic impact on society. Vezzoli’s interest in television’s impact on Italian society led him to join forces again with Fondazione Prada in 2017, in the role of curator of TV 70: Francesco Vezzoli Guarda la Rai, an exhibition that explored the cultural dimension of Italian public TV network Rai in the 1970s.

Reality TV and the Collective Unconscious: Gillian Wearing Another contemporary art project that examined the social impact of reality TV is Gillian Wearing’s Family History (2006), which revisited the UK’s proto-Big Brother documentary The Family (1974). Produced by Paul Watson—a painter-turned-documentary filmmaker and television

 Francesco Vezzoli, Comizi di Non Amore, 2004. Retrieved from Vimeo, accessed April 24, 2021, https://vimeo.com/95838514. 12  Ibid. 13  Ibid. 14  Marco Senaldi, Arte e Televisione: Da Andy Warhol al Grande Fratello 96, my translation. 15  Ibid. 11

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producer—the pioneering BBC series followed the daily life of the Wilkins, a working-class family of six from Reading. The twelve half-hour episodes were broadcast as they were being filmed, from April to June. Like its predecessor, An American Family (1973), Watson’s program attracted lots of criticism, mainly for providing an overly truthful model of the British family. Selected from a small set of applicants, the Wilkins contrasted with the idealized image of the family that had hitherto been homogenized by mass media, as well as with the only other British family at the center of public attention, namely the Royal one. Like the Loud family, the Wilkins displayed typically dysfunctional traits, which became the recurring focus of the production. Terry and Margaret would divorce only a few years after the show, though some problems already began to emerge during the broadcast, as epitomized by Margaret’s confession that one of her children, the nine-year-old Christopher, was born out of an affair with a dustman. Marian, unwed and nineteen, lived together with the lodger Tom (not yet her husband). Gary and his wife Karen confessed she was pregnant when they married at sixteen. And Heather, eighteen years old, rebellious and outspoken, was in love with a West Indian guy. Although mixed-race couples are increasingly accepted in today’s Western society, back in the 1970s this, like the other individual family members’ stories, caused widespread outrage among viewers. Emerged in the early 1990s in association with the so-called Young British Artists or YBAs scene—unlike some of her better-known peers, such as Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin—Wearing’s work is less concerned about shocking representations of the body with allusions to death or sex than how individual identity is constructed and exposed in the public sphere. The artist came to prominence with a series of confessional photographic and video works showing ordinary people encountered in the streets or recruited through classified ads, such as the near 600 individuals portrayed holding signs—a series whose long self-explanatory title reads: Signs That Say What You Want Them to Say and Not Signs That Say What Someone Else Wants You to Say (1992–93). In other works, Wearing emphasizes the tension between reality and self-representation through the employment of masks, as in the ongoing series of self-portraits in which she disguises as herself at various ages, her mother, or role models like the photographers Diane Arbus and Robert Mapplethorpe. Wearing approaches television in an attempt to understand how media influence the collective unconscious and provide models with respect to which audiences shape their identity. The artist focuses on the Wilkins’ youngest daughter Heather, with whom she identified at that time. Family History consists of two videos. One is a daytime TV-style conversation—filmed in a replica TV studio—between Heather Wilkins and popular presenter Trisha Goddard—ranging from gossip facts to thoughts on the program’s impact on British society, intercut with original footage (Figure 6.5). The other

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FIGURE 6.5  Gillian Wearing, Family History, video still, 2006. Produced by Film and Video Umbrella. Courtesy of Maureen Paley, London/Hove; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/Los Angeles; and Regen Projects, Los Angeles. © Gillian Wearing.

video documents a stand-in for the young Gillian Wearing in a replica of the front room from the artist’s former family home in Birmingham. After watching television, the girl shares her observations on the series, eliciting a psychoanalytic interpretation reminiscent of the artist’s self-portraits. “I wanted to show how my past includes the memory of being a passive observer of someone else’s life,”16 confessed Wearing in a conversation with Stuart Comer, published in the gossip magazine-like catalogue. Both videos end with the camera zooming out to reveal the mock-up setting. Family History echoes a mode of artistic investigation that is so peculiar of the 2000s—a decade during which reality and its media representation became a popular discourse. Wearing’s focus on Heather, for example, is reminiscent of Pierre Huyghe’s The Third Memory (2000), in which the artist interviewed former thief John Wojtowicz on his recollections of the 1972 Brooklyn bank robbery he conducted, whose television coverage was not only an early case of a media event but also became the subject of Sydney Lumet’s critically acclaimed film Dog Day Afternoon (1976), starring Al  Pacino. As Wojtowicz’s third memory of the event blends facts (first memory) and 16  Gillian Wearing. In Conversation with Stuart Comer, in Gillian Wearing: Family History, ed. Steven Bode (London: Film and Video Umbrella and Maureen Paley, 2006), unpaged.

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fiction (second memory)—both televisual and cinematic—Heather Wilkins’ recollections too are the result of a telemorphosis, although she is definitely more aware than Wojtowicz of how media affected her public image and how to play with its mechanism now that she is an adult and a mother who lives in a TV-saturated society. The project’s investigation on the disconnection between reality and its media duplicate does not end up with Heather but expands to include the artist’s own self, and potentially that of every individual viewer of the series. Indeed, as British curator Steven Bode suggests, Wearing “uses the language of television, not in a spirit of appropriation or the service of reconstruction or deconstruction, but as a shared vernacular language with which both artist and subject are familiar; a language, indeed, with which we are all familiar; a language which, even more now than in the 1970s, is real to us—a language of the everyday.”17 To highlight this universal and contemporary dimension of television and its ubiquity in everyone’s personal history, the two videos were not originally installed in a conventional exhibition space but in real, newly refurbished apartments in Reading and Birmingham: a choice underlining the change in the lifestyle of British families—from nuclear to atomized—of which the change of residential architecture (from houses to apartments) is clearly symptomatic.

6.2 Performing Selves Imitation of Life: The Truman Effect With their projects, both Vezzoli and Wearing seemed concerned not only with tracing the evolution of the telemorphosis process a few decades before the emergence of reality TV proper but also with exploring how the audience’s response to factual television has changed over time, to the point that somewhere between the 1990s and the early 2000s, almost every single world citizen became self-aware as to what persona to perform in front of a camera. When Žižek argues that “in everyday lives, we act already,”18 he suggests this was also true in a pre-media society, but the advent of reality shows, and concurrently prosumer technologies and the internet, certainly amplified human beings’ propensity to act out a persona. By intermingling constantly with everyday life, reality TV, in particular—despite the openly

 Steven Bode, “Family History,” in Gillian Wearing: Family History, ed. Steven Bode (London: Film and Video Umbrella and Maureen Paley, 2006), unpaged. 18  Žižek, 2004. 17

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fictional and supposedly scripted context—has established a morbid specular relationship with reality. The blurring of fact and fiction in regard to reality TV was the subject of the 1998 American feature film The Truman Show, written by Andrew M. Niccol and directed by Peter Weir. Like many art projects discussed in this study, the film offers a satirical commentary on the exploitative nature of television by showing the absurd story of Truman Burbank, played by Jim Carrey, a twenty-nine-year-old who was adopted by a television production company and raised inside a real-life simulated world revolving around his life, filmed and broadcast live around-the-clock worldwide. Truman—as his name aptly suggests—is the only “true” person in the show, while everybody else, from his parents through to his wife, friends, boss, and so on, are actors, in most cases lifetime employees. After a series of weird coincidences, Truman becomes increasingly unstable and suspicious about his life until he realizes that he is the protagonist of a staged reality. The show is set inside a giant arcological dome in Hollywood: an artificial habitat that allows the producers to control even the weather, and in so doing influence Truman’s behavior accordingly. Interestingly enough, most of the scenes were filmed in Seaside, a small resort in Northwest Florida, founded in 1981 as an ideal master-planned community, designed on the principles of New Urbanism. The film follows Truman’s breakdown, which leads him out of sleeping in the basement to finally sail through Seahaven (the habitat’s fake sea) until he arrives at the end of the dome—the end of his world as he knew it—where the cloudy horizon reveals itself to be part of a cyclorama. Camouflaged on the painted skyscape is a staircase that leads up to an exit door, which Truman finally opens and passes through (Figure 6.6).

FIGURE 6.6  The Truman Show, movie directed by Peter Weir, film still, 1998.

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Before leaving, Truman has a short aural encounter with the show’s director, significantly named Christof, whose voice resounds inside the dome as “the voice of god,” which unusually does not address the audience (as normally happens in plays and films) but the protagonist himself. When Truman asks who this is, Christof simply replies: “I’m the creator.”19 Truman then argues that nothing was real in his life, to which Christoph replies: “You were real. That’s what made you so good to watch.”20 And, urging him not to leave, he continues, “there’s no more truth out there than in the world I created for you—the same lies and deceit. But in my world you have nothing to fear.”21 Careless of the exhortation, Truman says goodbye to his audience, which he addresses consciously for the first time, and leaves. The movie offered such a pungent commentary on the implied dangers of reality TV that one could even venture as far as to define as a Truman effect, or a Truman phase—that moment in life in which a person becomes conscious of being constantly monitored by an external gaze: a moment that today could be situated in childhood. In his 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell identified this external gaze with the “all-seeing eye” of totalitarian governments or what he called “big brother,” which exerts control over the citizens of a given country by watching over their actions in private as well as in public. As discussed in Chapter 2, issues of surveillance were at the core of various relational installations employing CCTV technologies in the 1970s, like those of Ira Schneider and Frank Gillette, Dan Graham, Bruce Nauman, and Peter Weibel. With reality TV, live streaming websites, and the spread of CCTV cameras in public spaces, in the early 2000s surveillance, once more, became an issue at stake. Weibel, also a curator and theorist of art’s relationships with media and technology, made it the topic of CTRL [Space]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, a massive exhibition he curated at ZKM | Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, in 2002. Interpretations of reality TV in reference to the panoptic principle abound in the show and in the catalogue’s essays. “The TV viewers at home are members of a television society, inhabitants of a mediatized world,” argues Weibel in regard to Big Brother-like programs. “They observe the inhabitants of a long lost, ‘near society’ without newspapers, TV, fax, phone, etc…. The container is prison as entertainment… They are the objects of seeing. They cannot see the TV observers like the prisoners could not see the guards.”22

19  Andrew M. Niccol, The Truman Show, shooting script, 1998, 90. Retrieved from Dailyscript, accessed April 24, 2021, http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/the-truman-show_shooting.html. 20  Ibid. 21  Ibid., 91. 22   Peter Weibel, “Pleasure and the Panoptic Principle,” in CTRL [Space]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, ed. Peter Weibel (Karlsruhe: ZKM | Center for Art and Media, 2002), 215.

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Video Performance as Identity Research Practice Whereas Weibel highlighted the panoptical dimension of reality TV, Žižek’s essay on Big Brother for the CTRL [Space] catalogue focused on its voyeuristic and even scopophilic dimension. According to the Slovenian philosopher, reality TV shows like Big Brother are based on human beings’ inner exhibitionist fantasies. Like those who have sexual intercourse in public spaces or indoors with open curtains to fulfill the fantasy of being incidentally watched by incidental voyeurs, participants of reality shows are moved by “the same urgent need for the fantasmatic Other’s Gaze serving as the guarantee of the subject’s being … today, anxiety seems to arise from the prospect of NOT being exposed to the Other’s gaze all the time, so that the subject needs the camera’s gaze as a kind of ontological guarantee of his/her being.”23 Unlike Truman Burbank, Žižek argues, who is genuinely himself, reality show participants perform themselves—the act of performance fulfilling the fantasy of being objectified by an external anonymous Other. Considering the increasingly various and advanced opportunities that prosumer technologies and social media give viewers and users to manufacture their identity, it would be correct to identify the Truman phase as symptomatic of the rise of a new era in which human beings are turned into performing selves. A crucial feature of factual television since its beginnings, which will also characterize future forms of self-customization, is the blurring of real life and acted life. As highlighted by media scholar Annette Hill in her early seminal study on reality TV: “Audiences frequently discuss the difference between performed selves and true selves in reality programming, speculating and judging the behavior of ordinary people, comparing the motives and actions of people who chose to take part in a reality program. And they discuss the behavior of ordinary people in a reality program on an everyday basis.”24 Since the late 1990s, many artists have employed video performance to investigate forms and codes of media self-representation, such as Bjørn Melhus, Shana Moulton, and in particular Ryan Trecartin, and Kalup Linzy. A decade older than the others, and the only non-American, Melhus addressed television specifically in the single channel autobiographical video Out of the Blue (1997). Hidden behind a brown paper bag, the artist analyzes the influence of media entertainment on his upbringing in West

 Slavoj Žižek, “Big Brother, or, the Triumph of the Gaze Over the Eye,” in CTRL [Space]: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, ed. Peter Weibel (Karlsruhe: ZKM | Center for Art and Media, 2002), 225. 24  Annette Hill, Reality TV: Audiences and Popular Factual Television (London and New York: Routledge 2005), 68. 23

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Germany and later on his video art practice. The Smurfs, an AmericanBelgian production, but mostly American TV icons such as Western and sci-fi series, and Hanna-Barbera cartoons—which he saw as a transfiguration of American geopolitical power—influenced his upbringing so much apparently that at one point he admitted: “My work is identity research in the mass media imprints of a specific generation. The impersonated models of my recent work are copies of icons which were generated by mass media, the pop culture of mass production.”25 Out of the Blue is a unique case in Melhus’ production in that he adopted a confessional lecture-type format to deliver a declaration of intents—almost a manifesto. On the contrary, most of his other videos, often presented within immersive installations, are based on surreal situations in which the artist parodies various media characters embedded in CGI landscapes. Examples include: Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz in Far Far Away (1995), a Smurf in Blue Moon (1997), a TV evangelist in The Oral Thing (2001), a talk show host and his guests in Primetime (2001), a Star Trek-like character in Captain (2005) (Figure 6.7), and an anchorman in Deadly Storms (2008). More than an exploration of television as an outer space, Melhus’ performed selves

FIGURE 6.7  Bjørn Melhus, Captain, video still, 2005. Courtesy of the artist.

 Bjørn Melhus, “Out of the Blue,” 1997–1998, in Bjørn Melhus: You Are Not Alone, ed. Bernd Schulz (Heidelberg: Kehrer Verlag, 2001), 47.

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appear to be the steps of a psychoanalytical process enacted by the artist to discern glimpses of true identity amid the countless media characters he has identified with or fantasized about while growing up. Similarly, Shana Moulton’s videos, installations, and performances echo Surrealism and Metaphysical Art, although seen in light of reality TV and prosumer technologies for their use of lo-fi techniques in digital animation— from Chroma key to playful digital editing tools, increasingly available to a mass audience since the mid-2000s. A recurring reference in Moulton’s production is new age culture, or else that alternative form of Western spiritualism based on mysticism, holism, astrology, and environmentalism, that draws elements from ancient cults and Eastern mythologies. In the tenpart video series Whispering Pines (2001–10), for instance—admittedly inspired by the surreal atmosphere of David Lynch’s groundbreaking TV series Twin Peaks—Moulton conducts a therapeutic search for a balance between mind, body, and spirit, in accordance with nature and the cosmos, through cosmetic treatments, massage therapies, meditative exercises, pastime activities such as creating a multicolored sand vase, and stress-relief rituals like rolling Baoding balls. Through the filmic alter ego of the hypochondriac Cynthia, often attired in clothes that incorporate medical devices, such as bandages or slings, Moulton performs in surreal, tragicomic situations within a world “constantly in danger of material or corporeal collapse,”26 as American curator of experimental film Thomas Beard has defined it. The sets are reminiscent of the generic IKEA-furnished settings of Big Brother, but adorned with psychedelic décor, plug-in waterfalls, fluorescent knickknacks, plasma globes, and other useless, kitschy ornaments, and relaxation devices sold by American gadget retailers Brookstone, Sharper Image, or SkyMall. Sometimes, scenes are intercut with TV footage, such as Murder, She Wrote in Feeling Free with 3D Magic Eye Poster Remix (2004), or a yogurt commercial with Latin pop star Shakira in Detached Inner Eye (2014). Moulton’s search for the perfect balance serves as a reminder of the manufacturing process of media identity conducted by reality shows participants, whose feeling of displacement is evoked even more effectively in the live performances in which the artist interacts with prerecorded scenes projected in the space, blurring factual and virtual reality a step further.

The Schizophrenic Prosumer: Ryan Trecartin The work of Moulton, as well as that of Ryan Trecartin and Kalup Linzy— that is about to be discussed—is the result of, and a commentary on, what

26  Thomas Beard, “Now That I’m a Woman, Everything Is Strange,” in Deterioration, They Said, ed. Raphael Gygax (Zurich: JRP Ringier and Migros Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, 2009), 60.

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Henry Jenkins has called a new “convergent culture,” in which media circulate through different platforms, and users are assigned a new creative role. Of particular interest is that these artists emerged concurrently with the rise of YouTube—the leading online video sharing service—which, since its launch in 2004, has radically changed viewers’ habits of watching and producing moving images. Apart from revolutionizing the way media are consumed, even YouTube’s most groundbreaking feature has been to provide the new prosumers with a platform to showcase their productions to the cry of “Broadcast Yourself”—a slogan that encapsulated the utopian potential of the early days of the internet when the World Wide Web appeared as a new democratic bottom-up space. As had happened with public-access TV in the United States, many visual artists—along with comedians, singers, and performers of various kinds— immediately looked at YouTube (and other platforms such as Vimeo) as an avenue to develop alternative forms of artistic production and find new and larger audiences. Among them was Ryan Trecartin, whose early production was not only appreciated online first but became synonymous with the YouTube generation. “Videos on the Internet are changing the way we see ourselves and the way people act,”27 argued Trecartin, whose videos depict delirious scenes of a lysergic nature, typically shot in generic domestic interiors and performed by nonprofessional actors, usually from the artist’s cohort. Trecartin’s camp and queer use of the grotesque, mainly achieved through costumes and makeup, is reminiscent of the masquerades enacted by American filmmakers Jack Smith and John Waters, but is peculiarly exaggerated in postproduction by digital effects, such as distortions and loops. Through these absurdist mises-en-scène, the artist deconstructs various stereotypical media types that recur in sitcoms and reality TV shows, presenting in their place a universe of alien-like, gender-defying characters whose appearance, paired with a nonlinear recitation and schizophrenic syntax, epitomizes the potential given by the internet to open up new autonomous zones in which to experiment with new lifestyles and identities, and thereby redefine the criteria of intercommunication and the codes of representation. In a conversation with Cindy Sherman, whose postmodern allegories of media representation Trecartin’s work is obviously indebted to, the artist confessed: “It’s important to me that the work invents new or alternate meanings in the context of something familiar, rather than merely demonstrate something already known.”28 A Family Finds Entertainment (2004), the forty-two-minute video, which garnered Trecartin attention in the art world, already exposed what came to be recognized as the artist’s distinctive, overwhelming style (Figure 6.8). The  Ryan Trecartin. In conversation with Francesco Spampinato, recorded at MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York, May 18, 2011. 28  Ryan Trecartin. In conversation with Cindy Sherman, in Ryan Trecartin: Any Ever, ed. Kevin McGarry (New York: Skira Rizzoli Publications, Inc. and Elizabet Dee, 2011), 143. 27

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FIGURE 6.8 Ryan Trecartin, A Family Finds Entertainment, video stills, 2004. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada.

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fast-paced narrative centers on the struggles of a clownish teenager named Skippy in “coming out” as a queer amid a set of hyperactive characters that include his dysfunctional parents, a group of hysterical friends, and a documentary filmmaker who wants to make a movie about him. As Trecartin progressed in his career, the underlying presence of a storyline became increasingly hard to distinguish. In I-Be Area (2007), P.opular S.ky (section ish) (2009), and Center Jenny (2013), for example, the coordinates of time and space in which the nonlinear plot takes place collapse under a massive use of abstract visual effects and animated sequences (Figure 6.9). What remains are disoriented selves struggling to find an identity in a mediasaturated and increasingly immaterial reality. Trecartin’s work puts into crisis commercial media, not only in terms of content and representation but also in terms of production, through the deconstruction of the traditional director-actor hierarchy, the emphasis on collaboration, and the blurring of art and life typical of the artistic avantgardes of every era. Some projects could be considered proper happenings. The video Any Ever (2010), for example, was produced during two years of cohabitation with various friends/collaborators in a house in Miami—a sort of Big Brother turned into a Warholian production. Recurring coconspirators of Trecartin’s productions are Lizzie Fitch, Ashland Mines, Telfar Clemens, and members of the DIS collective, Solomon Chase and David Toro. Among them, Fitch plays a pivotal role shifting from actor to screenwriter to set designer—the latter being of major importance, considering that parts of the sets are often expanded into immersive installations into which the videos are displayed. Cases in point of walkthrough installations in which various films were displayed, all credited to both Fitch and Trecartin, were Any Ever, a large body of work that toured various exhibition spaces, the constructed sets made for the 9th Berlin Biennale in 2016, and the concentration camp-like mansion, topped with a watchtower, made at Fondazione Prada in Milan as part of their exhibition project Whether Line (2019).29 In the era of reality TV, YouTube, and prosumer technologies, the viewer’s reaction to media fantasies has become increasingly schizophrenic because although understanding the mechanisms of media representation, one continues to passively absorb the negative influence of stereotypes and fictions, perhaps by inertia, perhaps to escape from everyday reality. No wonder then, if when one is given the opportunity to be oneself, as in reality shows or online, one  For more insights on Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin’s exhibition project Whether Line (2019) at Fondazione Prada, Milan, refer to Francesco Spampinato. “The Schizophrenic Prosumer: Television in the Production of Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin.” In Whether Line: Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin, ed. Chiara Costa and Mario Mainetti. (Milan: Fondazione Prada, 2019), 131–45 (English version) and 444–448 (Italian version); and Francesco Spampinato. “Neighborhood Watch: Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin.” Mousse, No. 67 (Spring 2019): 64–7.

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replicates the models and codes of mass media. The more these “sculptural theaters,”30 as Trecartin calls them, increase the confusion between audience and performing selves, precoded social life and staged reality, the more the viewer is confronted with his or her own complicated relationship with media reality. The frustration deriving from the lack of identification with it produces a profound sense of bewilderment in the viewer, just like the one felt by the overactive characters in Trecartin’s hallucinatory masquerades—suspended in a dangerous limbo between fact, fiction, and imagination.

Identity Politics and the Melodrama: Kalup Linzy Born and raised in a small African American community in Central Florida, Kalup Linzy moved to New York in the mid-2000s and came to prominence with his humoristic video performances inspired by soap operas and R&B music acts—highlighting issues of celebrity, community, family, religion, race, and gender. Linzy, who often performs in drag, uses performance—in video and sometimes live—to emulate the forms of popular entertainment that affect his life, though more as a fan rather than assuming a critical stance. Being an African American and a queer, two identities long ignored or stereotyped by mainstream media, Linzy’s impersonations are exemplary forms of artistic investigation on identity politics. In terms of race issues, he aligns with African American artists like Hank Willis Thomas or Kara Walker. His camp style, like that of Trecartin, harks back to the films of Warhol, Smith, and Waters. In cultural and aesthetic terms, his videos are close to the aforementioned public access programs by Sondra Prill, Alex Bag, and Jaime Davidovich, not to mention El Chow De Faustina, a mid-1990s talk show by Puerto Rican drag performer Fausto Fernós. Linzy’s domestic melodramas, not unlike Phil Collins’ cinematic soap opera soy mi madre (2008), are built around passionate stories, intrigues, tragedies, and betrayals, in which the artist usually impersonates more than one female character. Sometimes other nonprofessional actors are featured. “Soap operas were a part of life. Every house you went to had the soap opera on… People would talk about the characters as if they were real people. There was so much pride in them,”31 confessed Linzy in an interview about the role TV has played in his growth. “When I was a small child, my aunts would go, ‘Kalup, how does so and so act?’ And I would imitate them. I’ve had that in me, and it was nurtured, watching these soap operas and thinking that I wanted to be in them someday.”32  Ryan Trecartin. In conversation with Francesco Spampinato, 2011.  Kalup Linzy. In conversation with Nick Stillman, BOMB, No. 104 (Summer 2008): 47. 32  Ibid. 30 31

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FIGURE 6.9  Ryan Trecartin, I-Be Area, video stills, 2007. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada.

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The artist’s take on the soap opera is epitomized in the series Conversations Wit de Churen (2002–06) and Melody Set Me Free (2007–12). The former is made up of five episodes, each with different plots but all featuring characters interacting through phone calls. In “Ride to da Club” (2002), the first fiveminute episode, Nina and Misha discuss options of borrowing a car to go to a club, nothing more mundane. “All My Churen” (2003), the second and longest episode (almost half an hour), revolves around Nucuazia’s emotional response to her lover JoJo’s murder, epitomized in her dramatic phone conversations with her family members, all played by Linzy. While these early episodes echo the artist’s background in Florida, the following ones reflect his new life in New York. “Da Young & da Mess” (2005) and “As da Artworld Might Turn” (2006), the third and fifth episodes, respectively recount a telephone interview of an aspiring diva, and the anxieties of the emerging artist Katonya. Popular American actor and filmmaker James Franco, whose recurring ventures in the art world brought him to collaborate with Linzy on several projects, so described his first encounter with Conversations Wit de Churen: I was immediately struck by the pared down, do-it-yourself aesthetic and the underplayed humor… But, on top of this blunt presentation, there was something else that was unusual about these performances— there was something undermining the straightforward mimesis of the portrayals, something besides the cheap sets, wigs, and costumes…. He had prerecorded all the voices on his own and the actors had lipsynched to Kalup’s recording. So, while the actors were giving earnest portrayals with their facial expressions and body language, ‘their’ voices were signifying something else: Kalup’s own, very personal expression.33 Indeed, the lip-syncing on prerecorded dialogues elicits a tension between Linzy’s own self and the various characters performed. Thus, Linzy’s artistic process—screenwriting, audio recording, performing in front of a camera, and video editing—is more like a psychoanalytic search for identity based on the contrast between the human types he represents as an African American and a queer, and the various media selves performed. In Melody Set Me Free, the distinction between life and performance blurs even more. The series follows a group of wannabe pop stars longing for fame through the various stages of an American Idol-type talent show (Figure 6.10). By self-producing his soap operas, highlighting  James Franco, “Kalup Linzy” (2010). Text written for the exhibition Fantasies, Melodramas, and a Dream Called Love, LTD Los Angeles, September 20–October 23, 2010. No longer available online.

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FIGURE 6.10  Kalup Linzy, Melody Set Me Free: KK Queen and Patience, video still, 2007–12. Courtesy of the artist and David Castillo, Miami, Florida.

the lo-fi dimension of costumes and sets, and playing on the exaggerated modulation of visual and aural components, Linzy reveals the artificial structure underlying media fiction. Invited by Franco, in 2010 Linzy appeared in the long-running American daytime TV soap General Hospital playing the R&B singer Kalup Ishmael, an unconventional character for the series but nothing comparable with the artist’s televisual parodies. Among various collaborative works, the two also realized the psychedelic music video for Linzy’s song “Rising” (2011), a commentary on celebrity culture based on intercuts of Franco’s grinning face and Linzy’s romantic performance on a fiery sunset as it appears from behind a backstage through an elementary Chroma key effect. Unlike his pseudo-soap operas though, when Linzy performs as an R&B pop star, there is no intent of parody; these are more like karaoke-style impersonations. As argued by American performance studies scholar Tavia Nyong’o: “Like those singer-songwriters, Linzy shares his feelings, but on terms that are not quite confessional. Instead, through a series of stage personae that almost imperceptibly shade into each other, Linzy slowly and deliberately produces across the surface of his body an intimate presence that evades, in its roving and restless appetites, its capture as spectacle.”34  Tavia Nyong’o, “Brown Punk: Kalup Linzy’s Musical Anticipations,” TDR: The Drama Review, Published by The MIT Press, Vol. 54, No. 3 (Fall 2010): 72. 34

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6.3 Art After Reality TV TV and Participatory Art The establishment of reality TV as a form of primetime media entertainment in the 1990s coincided with the rise of participatory practices in the art world. The origins of participation in art go back to the historical avantgardes when, in parallel with paintings and sculptures, various Futurists, Dadaists, and Surrealists also produced performances, installations, and events that stimulated the audience to interact and sometimes participate. In their wake, after the Second World War, neo-avant-gardes, such as Situationism, Happening, Fluxus, Tropicália, and Radical Architecture, put relational dynamics at the core of their practice. Since the 1960s, audience participation has also become a key goal of performance art, counterculture, and various experimental types of theater and dance. Participation became a primary element again in art practices during the 1990s, both in what Nicolas Bourriaud termed “relational aesthetics”— which presented the work of art “as a period of time to be lived through”35—and those that addressed social and political issues outside the museum’s walls through community projects, street events, and reallife interventions. Partly attracted by the democratic potential of reality TV, and partly moved by an inner desire to critique mass culture, various artists have developed participatory events based on television. As early as 1992, a collective of Austrian and German artists and technicians called Van Gogh TV (formed in 1986 at Hannover’s Ponton European Media Art Lab) produced the participatory television project Piazza Virtuale at documenta 9. For 100 days, the visitors of the contemporary art quinquennial could broadcast themselves live via videophones and surveillance cameras installed in Kassel. People could also participate from home, live or by sending videos, pictures, music, or animations on specific topics, via phone, fax, or modem (for the few who already had one). The program was broadcast nationwide in Germany via satellite, and in sparse areas of Europe, Japan, and the United States. By applying the idea of the square as a place for public discourse, Piazza Virtuale proposed a “new communicative structure, which designs an alternative to the ideas pursued by industry,”36 Roberto Ohrt and Ludwig Seyfarth suggested in the catalogue: an experimental model of cooperative

 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 15.  Roberto Ohrt and Ludwig Seyfarth, “Van Gogh TV—Piazza Virtuale: 100 Days of Interactive Art-Television,” in Documenta IX—Vol. 3: Artists L-Z, Appendix L-Z, ed. Roland Nachtigäller, ed. Nicola von Velsen, Documenta GmbH (Stuttgart: Edition Cantz, 1992), 250–1. 35 36

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television that transformed people into active producers, foreshadowing the bottom-up potential of the internet as a networking and democratic tool. Based on similar premises, in 1995, French artist Pierre Huyghe contributed Mobil TV to the group exhibition Aperto 95 at the Institut d’Art Contemporain in Villeurbanne, Lyon. The project consisted of a fully functioning television station installed in the museum’s auditorium, which the artist put at the disposal of visitors, as well as various artists and intellectuals. The installation also featured some videos filmed by Huyghe that mimicked coeval forms of reality TV, including street interviews that focused on the public’s attitude toward collaboration, and the casting for a dance show. In addition, the artist also broadcast a series of “filmed events,”37 as Australian art historian Amelia Barikin called them—realized over the days preceding the opening—featuring himself in dysfunctional everyday activities; ironic tutorials, such as “how to roll a joint”; and comic skits involving contemporary art works from the museum’s collection. According to Barikin, more than making fun of television technology, Huyghe was “interested in displacing the site of the exhibition itself. The content of his work was visibly elsewhere, with only the apparatus for production illuminated in an empty space.”38 Bourriaud too—for whom Huyghe was a paradigmatic figure in articulating his discourse on “relational aesthetics”—puts the accent on the renewed role of the exhibition space in creating “free areas, and time spans whose rhythm contrasts with those structuring everyday life, and it encourages an inter-human commerce that differs from the ‘communication zones’ that are imposed upon us.”39 In other words, by inventing new forms of sociability, both the Van Gogh TV collective and Huyghe transform the exhibition space into a liberated time frame where viewers can reinvent the traditional power dynamics of mass media, notoriously based on the dichotomy of user-producer. Emerged in the 1980s, in association with the Pictures Generation, American artist and writer David Robbins explores the overlaps of art and entertainment, producing a humoristic form of institutional critique that targets the very meaning and social role of art and artists. His longstanding project The Ice Cream Social (1993–2008) consisted of a series of gatherings where people of different ages and backgrounds were invited to eat cakes and ice cream—a small-town tradition turned into social observatory. Over the years the participatory events have also taken the form of installations, performances, books, relational sculptures, and even a TV pilot—realized in 2003 on the occasion of a competition for new TV series sponsored by the TV channel of the Sundance Film Festival (Figure 6.11). The eight-minute 37  Amelia Barikin, “Broadcast Piracy: On Pierre Huyghe’s Mobil TV,” in Parallel Presents: The Art of Pierre Huyghe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 33. 38  Ibid. 39  Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 16

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FIGURE 6.11  David Robbins, Ice Cream Social: Sundance TV Pilot, video stills, 2003. Courtesy of the artist.

pseudo-variety show features a community of people in pink clothing as they eat cakes and ice cream while socializing, participate in amateur dance choreography, and listen to a poetry reading and a live rock band. In the catalogue, published by the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville in Paris (where The Ice Cream Social pilot was screened in 2004), Robbins argued: “The artistic context is just another communication context, characterized by its strengths, inadequacies and institutionalized habits of thought.”40 As a further point of interest, in the early 2010s two artists, Christian Jankowski and Marinella Senatore, developed projects based on the idea of casting, which threw into crisis the spectacular dynamics of reality TV. With Casting Jesus (2011), already mentioned in Chapter 4, Jankowski ironizes upon the unethical propensity of television to turn even religion into a show— all with the complicity of real Vatican members who play the jury appointed to select candidates for a new media role of Jesus. Instead, for Senatore, the mode of casting is an excuse to explore and stimulate the inner artistic spirit of everyday people. Variations (2011), for example, was a participatory  David Robbins, “Note Sur The Ice Cream Social,” in Art, Télévision et Vidéo, ed. David Robbins and Olivier Bardin (Paris: Muée d’Art Moderne de la Ville, 2004), unpaged.

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project that involved around 200 residents of Manhattan’s Lower East Side neighborhood, to whom the Italian artist (having ascertained their abilities through the casting) assigned various roles for a film production. Adopting the format of reality TV, Senatore turned a film production into a full-scale cooperative workshop. Not unsurprisingly, the project documentation is not the film that was made but alternates between scenes of the casting, interviews with the jury, and the actual making of the film.

Talent Shows for Artists A few years before starting The Ice Cream Social, Robbins made the photographic installation Talent (1986), a series of eighteen portraits of contemporary artists, including himself, all associated to the Pictures Generation and the coeval so-called Neo-Geo art tendency—the moment they were becoming established (Figure 6.12). The roster included the aforementioned Gretchen Bender, Robert Longo, and Cindy Sherman, but also Jeff Koons, who in those years also portrayed himself as a popular school teacher, or in sex acts with his then wife, the porn actress Cicciolina. Similarly, in Talent, Robbins highlighted these artists’ telegenic features, fashionable haircuts, and self-confident gazes and smiles, to elicit a tension between their role as cultural producers and as protagonists of an art world increasingly regulated by show business logic. “I wanted to make a picture of this entertainment context that artists share with one another regardless

FIGURE 6.12  David Robbins, Talent, 18 gelatin silver photographs, 1986. Courtesy of the artist.

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of which medium they use or which context they represent—the context of a specific public life,” argued Robbins. “To do this I had to take the point of view of the audience.”41 By assuming the audience’s point of view, Robbins’ Talent presented the contemporary artist as just another entertainer of the society of the spectacle. The critical dimension of this work resides in the fact that it appropriated, and decontextualized in an artistic context, a mode of self-promotion proper of mainstream media and corporations, in the same way the Pictures artists appropriated and recontextualized stereotypes manufactured by the film, television, and advertising industries. What guarantees the intellectual integrity of a work of art is, after all, the fact that it is displayed in an art context; a logic notoriously invented by Marcel Duchamp with the “readymade” and reinforced over time as a conditio sine qua non for the work of art to be legitimated as such, and the artist as someone entitled by a self-regulating community—the art world—to create it. No matter how similar to the original it is, what allows us to read appropriated media in allegorical terms is their presence in the art context in which artists displace them. Now, if we consider how the mechanism of reality TV influenced this logic, we can get a sense of how mass media and market dynamics affected the meaning and role of art and the artist in society. An early example of a talent show whose aim was to discover and promote new artists was the Japanese program Takeshi no dare demo Picasso (Takeshi’s Anybody Can Be a Picasso, 1997–2009), broadcast by TV Tokyo and co-hosted by Takeshi Kitano as a juror. Critically acclaimed internationally, both as actor and director of crime dramas, such as Hana-bi (1997), Zatoichi (2003), and the Outrage trilogy (2010–17), Kitano is also popular in Japan as a comedian, TV personality, and host of various TV shows. Takeshi no dare demo Picasso adapted the extreme nature of a peculiar Japanese postwar avant-garde, such as Gutai—notorious for its absurdist use of the body and everyday objects as artistic tools—to “create a ‘televisual event’ in which the barriers of every genre of ‘taste’ have long since collapsed,” argued by Marco Senaldi, “according to the dictates of an avant-garde which in the meantime has become truly ‘mass.’”42 Despite the attempts to legitimate the artists discovered and launched by dedicated talent shows through prize exhibitions in galleries or even museums—such as the Tokyo’s Bunkamura Museum in the case of Takeshi no dare demo Picasso—the intellectual component is irredeemably lost,  David Robbins. In conversation with Susan Morgan, “Write When You Get Word: Susan Morgan Interviews David Robbins on his installation Talent,” Artscribe International, (September–October 1987). Retrieved from David Robbins Artist, accessed April 24, 2021, http://www.davidrobbinsartist.com/comedies/talent/. 42  Marco Senaldi, Arte e Televisione: Da Andy Warhol al Grande Fratello, my translation 111. 41

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assuming there was one in the first place. The same is true also for the various talent shows for artists that proliferated in the late 2000s in the wake of programs aimed to discover and promote talented creative people such as new singers, dancers, fashion designers, or chefs. However, seen a posteriori, only in a few instances has television opened up a successful career for a creative person who didn’t deserve it. In most cases—this being particularly true of the talent shows for artists—these programs simply created a new genre of wannabe professional-cum-celebrity, peculiar of the age of reality TV and the internet. In 2005, the New York art dealer and promoter Jeffrey Deitch, together with MTV producer Abbie Terkhule, the artist Christopher Sperandio, and the emerging art dealer James Fuentes, produced Artstar for the cable channel Gallery HD (Figure 6.13). A jury composed of renowned New York critics and curators, such as RoseLee Goldberg, Carlo McCormick, David Rimanelli, and Debra Singer, selected eight artists from an open call of over 400 applicants, to participate in a group exhibition at Deitch Projects, which back then was one of the world’s most influential contemporary art galleries. The resulting program consisted in eight forty-five-minute episodes that documented the casting, the making of floats and costumes for Deitch’s annual Art Parade, and the unscripted interaction of the eight candidates with established artists, including Jon Kessler, Jeff Koons, and Kehinde Wiley. None has become a celebrity yet, but at least two of them (Abigail DeVille and Zackary Drucker) have started a discreetly successful career since being launched by Artstar. Artstar was not only the first reality show involving artists but also pioneered the “observational” genre of reality TV, a decade before its popularization. On the contrary, its epigones followed a typical talent show format presenting the “art assignment”—a core component of art school education—as just another competitive activity, where talent and vision bend to media and market dynamics. It is also the case of The School of Saatchi (2009), a four-part BBC series made to discover the new genius of British art under the tutelage of YBAs’ patron Charles Saatchi and the guidance of ex-enfant terrible Tracey Emin. Another instance is Work of Art: The Next Great Artist (2010–11), produced in the United States by Sarah Jessica Parker for Bravo TV, and featuring popular art critic Jerry Saltz as a mentor. “Through their quasi-educational settings and scenarios,” according to Maeve Connolly, these two shows “emphasize the overarching significance of professional networking, while also suggesting that traditional modes of legitimation (such as the award of an exhibition in a public museum) may be determined by institutional requirements for media coverage and publicity.”43

 Maeve Connolly, TV Museum: Contemporary Art and the Age of Television, 243.

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FIGURE 6.13  Line at the casting and group photo of Artstar participants, Deitch Projects, New York, 2005. Courtesy of Jeffrey Deitch.

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Live from the Art World What is most striking about these talent shows for artists are the long lines that form at the casting sessions, featuring ranks of amateurs carrying their paintings in the hope of finally being appreciated, and extravagant characters whose idea of art is subordinated to a sensationalistic behavior or a carnivalesque aspect, à la Salvador Dalí to be clear. On the one hand, we have artists who attend art schools with enthusiasm and commitment, and then retreat to their studios to labor their whole life, in most cases without getting proper recognition. On the other hand, we have artists excited by the possibilities offered by media and the market to have their work exposed and sold to the best bidder, and be themselves consumed as any other celebrity produced by the society of the spectacle. More than Warholian superstars, indeed, who embodied a critical model of representation and were somehow really famous in their own circles, albeit arty or underground, the artists “produced” by dedicated talent shows are like any other media personality—famous for being famous. In parallel with, and in contrast to, the talent shows in which artists were subjected to media and celebrity dynamics, other artists opted to approach reality TV from a different perspective: as producers. More than talent shows, a generation emerged in the 2000s and 2010s that includes the duo K8 Hardy and Wynne Greenwood, the collective LuckyPDF, Alex Israel, and Casey Jane Ellison, all of whom appropriated traditional TV formats such as news, the talk show, and the variety show to rethink the role of art institutions and venues—museums, galleries, biennials, and art fairs—in shaping the personality of the contemporary artist, and filtering the presentation and interpretation of art through a series of collateral activities, notably publicity. What distinguishes these artists from those who line up for the casting of a talent show is a certain metalinguistic impulse that allows us to interpret their work as an ironic form of institutional critique, more in line with some of the participatory art projects discussed before, like Huyghe’s or Robbins’. Unlike historical figures of institutional critique like Hans Haacke or Daniel Buren, who adopted an iconoclastic approach that denounced either the presence of hierarchical structures or economic and political interests behind art institutions, these artists move more in the wake of Andrea Fraser, Martin Creed, or Maurizio Cattelan, who invented new playful ways to critique or expose the art world’s functioning. Setting aside for a moment her longstanding Tracy + the Plastics art-rock venture, Wynne Greenwood joined forces with K8 Hardy (another feminist artist) for two collaborative projects about television. In Lip Synch (2002), they lip synch to various daytime TV programs marketed toward women, such as the Oprah Winfrey Show and a soap opera; while in New Report (2005–07), they play two radical feminist news reporters from the fictional station WKRH, discussing

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various issues related to the feminist and lesbian communities. The identity politics project assumed a polemic twist when, in 2007, they broadcast live from London’s Tate Modern to coincide with the group exhibition Media Burn. In this context WKRH expanded the discussion to power systems, such as colonialism, slavery, capitalism, and so also art—with Tate inevitably pointed at as a scapegoat. LuckyPDF is a London-based multimedia art collective formed in 2009 whose work explores new modes of networking and cultural production in reference to the internet, based on customized forms of media entertainment, ranging from TV shows to musicals. “LuckyPDF projects aim to push new ways of displaying art and the physical and social spaces it can exist in,”44 they claimed. One such case is Live From Frieze Art Fair this is LuckyPDF TV (2011) made for Frieze Projects, a program of artist’s commissions at London’s international art market gathering (Figure 6.14). The project

FIGURE 6.14 LuckyPDF, Live From Frieze Art Fair this is LuckyPDF TV: Episode 1, installation and performance, Frieze Art Fair, London 2011. Photo: Linda Nylind. Courtesy of the artist.

44  LuckyPDF. Interview with Francesco Spampinato, in Francesco Spampinato, Come Together: The Rise of Cooperative Art and Design (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2015), 136.

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consisted of a live daily broadcast from a fully functioning TV studio set up amid the fair’s corridors—later condensed into four one-hour episodes— featuring around fifty likeminded, technology-savvy artists, such as Cory Arcangel and Rafael Rozendaal, involved in interviews or performances, either live, via internet, or prerecorded. Each segment was separated by music interludes and wrestling matches, dangerously improvised among the fair’s booths. While LuckyPDF’s TV project used an art fair as both content and broadcasting platform at the same time, Alex Israel chose his city, Los Angeles, and its quintessential culture industry, Hollywood show business, as the focus of his internet series. AS IT LAYS (2011–12) consisted of thirty-three interviews—filmed at Freeway Studios in the Pacific Design Center, and occasionally at the interviewees’ home or office—conducted by the artist in a suit, sunglasses, and a deadpan tone reminiscent of Warhol’s TV programs, with culture industry professionals, the likes of Paul Anka, Bret Easton Ellis, Jamie Lee Curtis, Marilyn Manson, Christina Ricci, and Oliver Stone. After being released online, the series was presented by the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, in a special onenight screening at Charlie Chaplin’s famed Jim Henson Studios, where Israel recorded three new interviews in front of a live audience, one of them with the actress Melanie Griffith. Displaced into an artistic context— that being a MOCA-sponsored event—and set in a famous film studio, on that occasion Israel’s pseudo-talk show definitively revealed itself to be a metalinguistic commentary on celebrity culture and its influence on contemporary art. What for Israel was a kind of mirror held up to Los Angeles’ media and art worlds, for Casey Jane Ellison, also from LA, the talk show format is a tool to reflect upon the very reasons and modes of artistic creation. A multimedia artist and stand-up comedian, Ellison came to prominence with the all-female web series Touching the Art (2014–15) produced by Ovation TV. The fourteen episodes (each around ten minutes long) are structured around basic art-related topics, such as postmodernism, the internet, education, criticism, and the market. Shifting from arrogant to malicious and satirical, the artist poses generic though serious questions, which address the fundamental values of art, such as: “Is art for everyone?… Should art be entertaining?… Who decides what is art?” Her interviewees are made up of artists, curators, and critics like Andrea Bowers, Lauren Cornell, K8 Hardy, Marilyn Minter, Catherine Opie, Kembra Pfahler, and Jennifer Rubell. Interestingly enough, the first season was filmed at the Los Angeles galleries Regen Projects and Night Gallery, while the second was filmed at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York (as Ellison’s contribution to the museum’s triennial in 2015), which, that year, was aptly titled Surround Audience.

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Video Art and Edutainment A recurring concern for artists developing projects about TV is the way they are misrepresented by mass media and, by extension, in society. Chapter 4 of this study was dedicated to forms of self-representation of artists on TV: some reinforced media clichés of eccentricity as in the cases of Salvador Dalí, John Cage, Charlotte Moorman, and Andy Warhol; some tried to control TV’s mechanism by turning their participation in TV programs into a work of art, like Chris Burden, Mathieu Laurette, and Christian Jankowski; and yet others invented their own TV heterotopias as the East Village artists of the 1980s did thanks to public-access channels. The latter tendency survived in the age of reality shows and the internet as in the projects by LuckyPDF and Casey Jane Ellison. What motivated them was to offer viewers a truer portrait of the artist as a cultural producer, in contraposition with the stereotypical caricature of the artist as an outsider. As art goes increasingly hand in hand with entertainment, it is becoming more and more difficult to grasp the critical dimension of some of the TV-related artists-centered projects produced in the 2000s and 2010s—a particularly ambiguous case being that of talent shows for artists which, as discussed before, situate on the brink of art, education, and entertainment. Similar ambiguities characterize those video artworks made in the 2010s that mimic edutainment, a media genre whose aim is notably to educate through entertainment, epitomized in the format of the documentary. One example, Matthew Day Jackson’s In Search of… Eidolon (2010), presents the artist as an object of quasi-scientific exploration, suggesting convergences of art with history, mysticism, and nature, and following a mode and language typical of science documentaries. The American artist, whose multimedia production revolves around the dichotomy of beauty and horror through references to science and mythology, conceived In Search of… Eidolon—one of a series of four videos—as a kind of self-portrait, presented as a remake of the popular American TV series In Search Of… (1977–82), originally hosted by Leonard Nimoy (who played the character of Spock in the sci-fi saga Star Trek) and devoted to mysterious phenomena. “The history of man is the history of the pursuit of his own reflection,”45 recites a voice-over while stock clips echoing history, religion, nature, and everyday life alternate on the screen. Among explorations of fossils and mild philosophical speculations on extra-terrestrial realities, one story tells of the imaginary disappearance of the artist Matthew Day Jackson. By also featuring Caspar David Friedrich’s famous painting Der Wanderer

 Matthew Day Jackson’s In Search of … Eidolon, 2010. Retrieved from a file courtesy of the artist.

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über dem Nebelmeer (Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, 1818), Jackson associated the fictional mysterious disappearance of himself to the German romantic tradition of the wanderlust—that irresistible desire to explore the world. One of the values ​​exalted by German Romanticism was that of the “sublime,” often associated with the Kantian concept of self-reflection, and the exploration of nature as a form of self-exploration—a process pursued by philosophers and artists in the romantic era. As far as the story goes, Jackson disappears during a similar journey in search of himself, as an elusive fictional article from the New York Times reports. The assemblage of photographic finds, notes, and personal objects he left in his van, and are shown by his parents, are reminiscent of the artist’s installations. Jackson inserts the fake story of his disappearance into a caricatured media cauldron, demonstrating how the image of the artist in society could also be subjected to mysterious conjectures, and often associated with mystical or supernatural phenomena. His search for himself is also the metaphoric search for the social identity of the artist, which would be impossible today without acknowledging the media power of edutainment in eliciting that tension between known and unknown, reality and fiction. Similarly, in Video Art Manual (2011), Israeli artist Keren Cytter enacts a metalinguistic form of reflection on the mechanism through which edutainment fictionalizes reality, implicitly pointing at video art as an antidote against media fantasies (Figure 6.15). The fifteen-minute video is built around the news that a change in the activities of the sun could interfere with the electric field of the planet Earth, causing the end of our communication systems. Found footage from TV and low-resolution clips from the internet are accompanied at times with the voice-over of a presenter, and at other intervals with subtitled phrases in overlay, one openly critical of media being: “By mixing fictional stories with documentary language, the viewer can’t distinguish what’s true and what’s false. As a result, the viewer doubts the truth in documentation and the lies in fiction.”46 Looped images of Clark Kent transforming into Superman (a clear homage to Dara Birnbaum’s Wonder Woman), or throwing a “villain” against the giant Coca-Cola light sign in Times Square, are followed by the announcement that solar tsunamis could actually turn out to be an extraordinary fireworks display for the human race. The blurring of art, education, and entertainment is a defining feature of the multidisciplinary activities developed by DIS, a New York-based art collective formed in 2010 by Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, Marco Roso, and David Toro. The group operates both as a networking hub for

 Keren Cytter, Video Art Manual, 2011. Retrieved from Vimeo, accessed April 24, 2021, https://vimeo.com/28508769.

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FIGURE 6.15  Keren Cytter, Video Art Manual, video stills, 2011. Courtesy of the artist.

online projects and occasionally as a curatorial team, as in the case of 9th Berlin Biennale (2016). Their main focus is on the conventions of imagemaking and circulation today: that is, how and with what purpose media manufacture “pictures.” References to television have appeared in various projects the group commissioned for their former web platform DIS Magazine. One example, Hooper Place (2010–12), a three-episode series by Grant Worth and Patrick Sandberg, parodied the popular 1990s soap opera Melrose Place, follows a group of young ambitious New Yorkers employed in the immaterial labor fields of fashion and advertising. Edutainment is also the main focus of DIS.ART, the streaming channel DIS launched in January 2018, which once a week hosts a diverse range of content, such as a cooking

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show, by Will Benedict and Steffen Joergensen; a nature program, by Korakrit Arunandochai; a cartoon, by Amalia Ulman; new videos by Ryan Trecartin; and a new talk show, by Ellison on mother–daughter relationships.

6.4 Remediation, Rematerialization, Abstraction Artists’ TV Series, Sharing Economy, and Biopower As the present study draws to a close, the last section in this final chapter focuses on works that are paradigmatic of how television has undergone a massive process of remediation, rematerialization, and abstraction since the proliferation of the internet and prosumer technologies. Television will not disappear any time soon, but as both a noun and referent, it is rapidly mutating. This is evident through the rise of edutainment programs, reality shows, and new forms of storytelling—expanding to countless channels and platforms (thanks to the video-sharing possibilities offered online and to ondemand services like Netflix and Amazon Prime) and migrating outside the home (thanks to smart phones and other mobile devices). As usual, artists have been among the first to take note of these changes and explore how this transmuted cross-media scenario affects our perception of reality. Along with edutainment, another quintessential TV genre in the age of what Henry Jenkins has called “convergence culture” is that of the TV series, a format based on stories that unfold through numerous episodes grouped and broadcast in “seasons,” usually separated by long breaks. According to both media scholars and the audiences, TV series are a new form of cinematic entertainment that fascinates the viewer mainly because, thanks to the dilution over time, they are able to develop more in-depth and empathetic characters and stories. As with edutainment, no sooner did TV series become a form of mass entertainment than artists got hold of them. The first examples of artists’ videos based on TV series date back to the early 2010s. British artist Nathaniel Mellors was one of the first to incorporate into his work elements coming from the new forms of storytelling on which TV series are based. Ourhouse (2010–present), his ongoing and most comprehensive work to date, comprises six thirty-minute videos and a series of hyperrealistic animatronic sculptures reproducing some of the characters’ faces. Set in a dilapidated English country house, the plot revolves around the disruptive arrival of a middle-aged man in sportswear in the life of a family consisting of Charles “Daddy” Maddox-Wilson, his younger wife “Babydoll,” their sons “Truson” and “Faxon,” Charles’ brother “Uncle Tommy,” and the Irish gardener “Bobby.” The mysterious man, labeled

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“The Object” or “Thingy,” is involved in a series of surrealistically abject actions, such as ingesting books. The work makes references to mystery, dark humor, and TV drama series, from Twin Peaks (1990–91) to Six Feet Under (2001–05). According to Maeve Connolly, it “reiterates the emphasis on television as site of the articulation of cultural and class difference,”47 notably through Babydoll’s affair with Bobby, but it also adopts the multiepisode structure proper of mainstream entertainment to highlight a change in the means of artistic production and distribution, in that it develops over time and through multiple collaborations and installations in various exhibition spaces. After Video Art Manual (2011), Keren Cytter continued her exploration on the pervasive power of media entertainment with the eight fourteen– eighteen-minute episodes of Vengeance (2012–13). The plot revolves around the betrayal, harassment, and retribution conducted in the name of power, money, and success, by a group of ambitious women coworkers at an advertising agency—an obvious reminder of the coeval TV series Mad Men (2007–15). According to British art writer Melissa Gronlund, Vengeance “investigates how different styles of acting and direction can be used to intensify the action—how an everyday interchange can be given thrums of foreboding and suspense, but also the ways in which melodrama (and perhaps even reality TV), with its finite stock of plot points, accommodate both the shrilly over-dramatic as well as the numbingly banal.”48 Through the occasional replacement of dialogue with music and voice-over, the amateurish acting, and the employment of overlays and split-screens, Cytter produces a dysfunctional narrative that exposes the superficiality of the lifestyle promoted by mass media—epitomized in the convergence of the dialogues with the commercial slogans manufactured at the agency. While Cytter appropriates a television format to show how cynicism migrates from media to the real life of a group of immaterial workers, Melanie Gilligan borrows the fast-paced syntax of sci-fi thriller TV series à la Black Mirror, to explore issues of biopower in connection with technology and the internet. In the five ten–fifteen-minute episodes of Popular Unrest (2010), the Canadian artist allegorizes the much-debated issue of “big data”: voluminous complexes of information collected here by a technological system named “World Spirit” to increase market profits. Set in a futuristic London, the story revolves around a cast of characters who, while being inexplicably pushed to come together in “groupings,” also become the targets of mysterious murders. Intercut with CGI and imaginary ads, the narrative unfolds around the dichotomy of media as utopian versus  Maeve Connolly, TV Museum: Contemporary Art and the Age of Television, 83.  Melissa Gronlund, “Mean Girls: Keren Cytter and ‘Vengeance,’” Art Agenda, Dossier #2, (December 17, 2013). Retrieved from No Gallery, accessed April 24, 2021, http://www. nogagallery.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Art-Agenda-17.12.13-vengeance.pdf.

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dystopian tools. Ultimately, their passive condition as mere data providers prevails over the cooperative potential as active producers, as the group agrees to become the object of a scientific research. The biopolitical aspect of the sharing economy is also the topic of The Common Sense (2014). Here Gilligan manufactures another sci-fi dystopia, this time based on the diffusion of a device called “The Patch”: a transmitter that, when installed on the palate, allows users to exchange thoughts and emotions via brainwaves. Sold to promote a more empathetic society, “The Patch,” in fact, reveals itself to be a tool of biopower, providing users with intense connective experiences in exchange for alienation, surveillance, data collecting, and the reduction of their emotions to commodities. Through an articulation typical of TV series, the three seasons—of five six-minute episodes—recount the dramatic break in the system that leaves people disoriented and isolated as they have forgotten natural ways to communicate. The feeling is recreated for the viewer through a rhizomatic installation comprising various screens in sparse order and position, and all connected to each other (Figure 6.16). The main target of the artist’s critique is clearly social networks and mobile devices, which seem to increasingly absorb users. However, the adoption of a mode of storytelling proper of contemporary TV series is an acknowledgment that television still has a major role within this mutated and expanded mediascape.

FIGURE 6.16 Melanie Gilligan, The Common Sense Substitution, installation view, Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien, Graz, 2016. Courtesy Galerie Max Mayer, Düsseldorf.

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TV, Accelerationism, and EDM Gilligan’s works leverage on the peculiar appeal of science fiction to speculate on the future to elicit insights on the present. As reminded in Chapter 1, many sci-fi stories are built around the brainwashing role of mass media, notably television. Such is the case of classic novels that allegorize the role of television as a propaganda machine in the hands of totalitarian governments like in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1931), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953). A new wave of dystopian sci-fi stories speculating on the role of television emerged in the 1980s when popular movies, such as Tobe Hopper’s Poltergeist (1982), David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983), and John Carpenter’s They Live (1988), reinforced the idea of TV as a tool of biopolitical control— definitively demystifying McLuhan’s idea of media as extensions of man being a symptom of techno-utopianism. When McLuhan’s ideas of technological determinism spread during the 1960s, two conflicting interpretations of his theories arose from the countercultural movement. On the one side, his speculations on the Third World War as a guerrilla information war inspired the rise of the guerrilla television movement, aimed at decentralizing the communication system. On the other side, in reaction to McLuhan’s unbiased position, others started to highlight the dangers of technology and invoke the need for media ecology. Such is the case of the architects, designers, and artists associated with the Radical Architecture movement, interested in exploring the impact of media and technology on life and society. A crucial commentary on television was provided at that time by Austrian architect Walter Pichler’s TV-Helmet (1967), a futuristic submarine-like white helmet that isolates the viewer while producing an immersive experience of television viewing (Figure 6.17). Similarly, in 1998, Italian architecture collective LOT-EK presented TV-TANK, an installation of floating cabins, cut from a petroleum trailer tank, suitable for lounging in, and equipped with TV screens. Pichler’s futuristic devices, like various coeval speculations by figures associated to the Radical Architecture movement (e.g., the collectives Ant Farm, Haus-Rucker-Co. and Superstudio), exposed the dangers implicit in technology, as far as to anticipate the future tendency of media and software industries to produce devices that would alienate users from their surroundings. Let us think, for example, of those devices sold to manage stress and sleep disorders—sleep masks emitting glows and the like—or wearable tech based on biofeedback mechanisms, such as the much-debated smart glasses of the Google Glass project. All promise to enhance the human sensorium while in fact they induce users to forms of machinic enslavement. Based on the same premise as Radical Architecture, of revealing the dangers of technology, “accelerationism” is a loosely defined contemporary idea with

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FIGURE 6.17 Walter Pichler, TV-Helmet (Portable Living Room), wearable technology, 1967. Courtesy of Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman Innsbruck/Wien. © Nachlass Walter Pichler.

roots in Marxism, which advocates for the “acceleration” of the language and aesthetics of capitalism in order to expose its negative impact. Although the editors of the seminal anthology #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader (Urbanomic, 2014) contextualized the concept in a historical perspective—also containing texts by Kark Marx, J.G. Ballard, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari—it was in the 1990s that accelerationism took shape as a distinct idea, in connection with the cyberpunk subculture,

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and thus with frequent references to sci-fi and rave culture. A pivotal figure of a controversial right-wing accelerationism path, English philosopher Nick Land has drawn inspiration from sci-fi movies like Blade Runner (1982) and Terminator (1985), which, according to another crucial exponent of accelerationism, the late English cultural theorist Mark Fisher, “made his texts part of a convergent tendency—an accelerationist cyberculture in which digital sonic production disclosed an inhuman future that was to be relished rather than abominated. Land’s machinic theory-poetry paralleled the digital intensities of 90s jungle, techno and doomcore, which sampled from exactly the same cinematic sources.”49 A major element of rave culture—a youth movement born in the 1990s around parties organized either illegally in woods and abandoned factories or in nightclubs—was its psychedelic visual component, epitomized in the flyers, record covers, and videos (prerecorded or live) projected to accompany DJ sets encompassing a variety of genres of electronic dance music or EDM, including techno, house, trance, hardcore, drum and bass, jungle, and goa. While cinematic sci-fi foreshadowed the integration of human life with machines or alien types, television was recurrently echoed as a symptom of the everyday consumerist daily culture club-goers and ravers searched to escape from. German artist Daniel Pflumm, for example, filled Elektro—the landmark techno club he founded and ran in Berlin in the early 1990s—with TV screens broadcasting hypnotic video loops sampling TV news, ads, and corporate logos, which created a synesthetic feeling when combined with the pulsating techno beats of the records spinning on the turntables. Something similar happened in Italy when, in 1998, Krisma—an experimental music duo at the forefront of the Italian post-punk scene since the late 1970s—established themselves as occasional resident DJs at techno club Cocoricò in Riccione, performing live EDM acts accompanied by live footage and disorienting prerecorded video loops of samples from a variety of sources, distorted through fisheye filters and other lysergic editing techniques. Thanks to Eutelsat Communications, Krisma had the opportunity to turn the show into a proper TV program broadcast randomly by a dedicated satellite channel aptly named Krisma TV, active until 2002 when new commercial interests led satellite TV to withdraw any experimentalism. As accelerationism became a staple of cultural theory and art and music circles in the 2010s, a peculiar new convergence of electronic music and television emerged from vaporwave: an audio-visual tendency championed by figures like Daniel Lopatin aka Oneohtrix Point Never and James Ferraro that explored the nostalgic nature of contemporary digital culture through a surrealist recontextualization of the sounds and aesthetics  Mark Fisher, “Terminator vs. Avatar: Notes on Accelerationism,” 2012 in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, ed. Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian (Famouth, UK: Urbanomic, 2014), 344. 49

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of 1980s consumerist culture—soft rock, new age, library music—with a penchant for the fading atmospheres of TV ads and the retro-techno-utopian appeal of the early personal computer age.

The TV Stage Abandoned The works discussed in this last section of the chapter treat television as an obsolete but still major actor in a media scenario that has drastically mutated since the mass diffusion of prosumer technologies and the internet. In their own way, each acknowledges the persisting influence of television on life and society, but at the same time explores how new media and the internet have changed the role of viewers and their perception of both television and external reality. One thing that emerges is that television is no longer absorbed passively but is increasingly approached with skepticism by the viewers, who now have the chance to know what is behind the TV screen. Indeed, thanks to reality TV, viewers now understand how the mechanism of the spectacle works and how to become part of it. And thanks to the internet, they also have a better and more direct understanding of facts and news before TV actually presents them. As a consequence, in the 2000s and 2010s, many artists have referred to the TV studio not as a site of production but as a space that has been abandoned and sometimes reappropriated for unconventional activities. One such example is Monitor (1998–2003), a series of twelve mesmerizing pictures by German photographer Caroline Hake, which present the TV stages of popular German shows “photographed in the studios under the original lighting conditions from the location of a TV camera during a break.”50 In Hake’s shots, the stages become abstract configurations that, through the artist’s penchant for neon lights, polished surfaces, and minimalist props, look more like the futuristic sets of a sci-fi movie. Devoid of human life, and transposed onto the flat surface of a print installed in an exhibition space, these stages expose all their cheap artificiality and ephemerality as backdrops of a mise-en-scène that has lost its appeal. While in Hake’s photographs it is clear that the spectacle machine is about to start again any time soon, the TV studio filmed by Belgian artist Michel François in Fox (2005) seems to have been truly abandoned. Indeed, the artist shot the four-minute video at night as if he was a thief, a stalker, or a saboteur sneaking into the facilities of a Fox Television studio. The shaking single shot opens with a close-up of a circular test pattern and then zooms

 Caroline Hake, “Monitor: Information.” Retrieved from Caroline Hake, accessed April 24, 2021, https://carolinehake.com/work/#monitor. 50

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out to the space, while a TV set strangely left on broadcasts an episode of Fox legal drama The Practice, whose dialogues resonate in the studio devoid of human life (with the exception of the intruder, of course). The feeling of doing something forbidden is reinforced by the visual juxtaposition between a side of the space occupied by turned-off cameras, ladders, and wires, or else the backstage, and a long minimalist blue and white bench from which TV news is usually delivered, with a printed skyline as backdrop. François then focuses on the control room and finishes with a fading close-up on a commercial interrupting The Practice. An empty TV studio is also the set of the second part of British artist Cally Spooner’s And You Were Wonderful, On Stage (2013–15). The work, commissioned by Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, consisted of a scripted performance featuring an all-female cast: some sing harmonies acapella, while others perform simple choreographies. While the first part was a live performance at the Stedelijk (later reenacted at London’s Tate Britain), the second adopted the format of a TV variety show and was set in 2015 at EMPAC studio in Troy, New York, for a live web broadcast, then edited as a five-channel video installation (Figure 6.18). In the typical style of Spooner, whose work elicits a tension between the mechanization of life and the cooperative and open-ended possibilities offered by art, the performance is based on a free-form reinterpretation of a series of media events from 2013, such as Beyoncé’s “scandalous” lip-synching of the American national anthem at the presidential inauguration, and cyclist Lance Armstrong’s apologizing on the Oprah Winfrey Show after doping allegations. Shot by six cameras in one single take, the video zooms in and out from a production team filming and coordinating the event to the performing crew. The chorus starts whispering gossips, such as those about Beyoncé and Armstrong, which gradually evolve into proper songs in the style of a Broadway musical. The lyrics are the result of the guidance the artist received from an advertising agency with whom she discussed a TV ad campaign for a fictional corporation based on its employees’ personal aspirations. Rather than a cinematic experience, the immersive five-screen installation gives viewers the impression of a live event, more like a rehearsal though than an actual theatrical piece. As the title suggests, a major role is played by the stage itself, a dark environment punctuated by white-taped areas on the floor reminiscent of Lars von Trier’s Dogme 9551-influenced

 Dogma 95 was a filmmaking movement initiated in 1995 by Danish directors Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg. The movement was based on two manifestoes, which listed a set of strict rules to create filmmaking, such as shooting on location or using handheld cameras. Fellow Danish directors Kristian Levring and Søren Kragh-Jacobsen later joined them, forming the Dogme 95 Collective or the Dogme Brethren. A series of thirty-five films by various directors of many nationalities, produced from 1995 to 2005, are officially listed in a dedicated website as belonging to the Dogme 95 movement. Although not on the list, Von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark clearly echoes the style of Dogme 95 and conforms to many of its rules. 51

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FIGURE 6.18  Cally Spooner, And you were wonderful, on stage, film still, 2013– 15. Courtesy of the artist, gb agency, Paris, and ZERO, Milan.

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musical film Dancer in the Dark (2000) starring Björk. However, unlike the aforementioned works by Hake and François, here the TV stage looks less as if it was abandoned than reappropriated to an artistic performance that would hardly fit into a real TV schedule, one which allegorizes TV as that space in which subjectivities are manufactured and sold like any other commodity. The work of emerging Italian artist Adelita Husni-Bey shares many similarities with Spooner’s, in particular for the collectivist and open-ended nature that makes her performances more akin to workshops. Drawing from her parallel activity as a pedagogue, the artist’s work often explores forms of unconventional grouping and alternative education. La Luna in Folle (The Moon in Neutral, 2016), presented as her participation in a group exhibition for the Premio MAXXI (a prize awarded to emerging Italian artists by the MAXXI museum in Rome), was a performative installation that consisted of a hand-painted rotating stage, surrounded by a circular dolly track, onto which various local theater groups were invited to reinterpret popular Italian TV shows for the duration of the exhibition. Political debates, talk shows, and reality shows become, in the hands of these performers, allegories of the still massive influence that television plays on Italian society, while acknowledging its demise from a pedagogical tool (as it was at its inception in the 1950s) to a machine that fictionalized reality, driven by pure economic and political interests.

Television and Abstraction At its core, television is an abstract phenomenon. When in 1925 John Logie Baird gave a demonstration of his television prototype at Selfridges department store in London, what the audience saw were grainy silhouette images in motion. Things haven’t changed so much over time. Throughout its evolution, television has remained on the brink of low and highdefinition, reality, and imagination. Even today’s digital television networks are not immune from losses of frequencies, which manifest in the form of annoying glitches, reminding viewers how the televised image is, in fact, a pure phantasmagoria. A reminder of the abstract nature of television are the test cards—black-and-white or multicolored abstract pattern configurations used for the calibration and alignment of the cameras—a technical tool that even most audiences are familiar with as they used to be broadcast when a channel stopped its schedule at night. Associated to the Young British Artists group, Angela Bulloch explores the abstract nature of media through videos and installations based on systems and patterns configured as sequences of geometric units referred to as pixels. The smallest visible element of a digital image, the pixel is

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often pointed at as a metaphor of how in the era of computers reality has become increasingly immaterial. Through numerous installations of threedimensional pixels—cubes softly changing in pulsing colors reminiscent of Minimalism—Bulloch tries to make immaterial reality tangible again while acknowledging the impossibility of restoring its original recognizable form. Television is the topic of TV Series (2002), a group of 50 cm pixels inserted in modules reminiscent of flat TV sets, each based on an RGB light system controlled by a software that transforms film and television footage into a spectrum of 16 million colors. The narrative information of the talk shows and TV news the artists processed are irredeemably lost. In their place, viewers are immersed into a purely abstract space into which television has regressed to its primary form—a magical emission of light. The clash of television with the internet is well summed up by Hito Steyerl in her writings and video installations: “Around 1989, television images started walking though screens, right into reality,” she argued in one of her most seminal essays. “This development accelerated when web infrastructure started supplementing TV networks as circuits for images circulation. Suddenly, the points of transfer multiplied. Screens were now ubiquitous, not to speak of images themselves, which could be copied and dispersed at the flick of a finger.”52 In her immersive video installations, such as Liquidity Inc. (2014) and Factory of the Sun (2015), Steyerl reinforces the links between the mass proliferation and dissemination of images and the global economic and political interests. With open references to sci-fi for highlighting the role of images in our current cyberspace, and by theorizing upon the idea of “circulationism,” or else “postproducing, launching, and accelerating [an image],”53 Steyerl set the paradigms for a new conceptual genre of image-making based on acts of “acceleration”: that is, overidentification with recurring symbols of power systems blamed for reducing users to mere consumers and data providers. While Steyerl’s circulationist practice results in an audio-visual amalgam—mixing TV footage, CGI, and original films—that through immersive installations invoke the ephemerality of the cyberspace, others have developed different forms of “circulationism” with regard to television. American artist Tauba Auerbach, for example, addressed television in Static (2008–11)—a series of prints based on photographs the artists took of her television displaying static, or white noise produced when no transmission signal is obtained by the receiver. In line with her explorations of the mechanization of information through the emphasis on pattern variations—  Hito Steyerl, “Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?,” e-flux journal, No. 49, (November 2013), accessed April 24, 2021, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/49/60004/too-much-world-isthe-internet-dead/. 53  Ibid. 52

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with a penchant for optical geometries—the resulting sequences that appear on screen look as if a ghostly presence has actually infiltrated the transmission. The further processes of scanning, editing, and printing do nothing but accelerate the lysergic nature of the malfunctioning, harking back to the video synthesizer practices of the psychedelic era with a dystopian view of media as it emerged from 1980s sci-fi movies like Videodrome and They Live—a retrospective look at the early electronic age in the vein of vaporwave and other contemporary accelerationist practices. Obsolete technologies are also at the core of New Zealander artist Simon Denny’s sculptures, installations, and publications. By accelerating signs and symbols of corporate media and governmental organizations, they explore the role of image-making in today’s convergent media scenario. Denny first addressed television in Deep Sea Vaudeo (2009), a video installation comprising TV sets from different eras, all broadcasting non-synchronized footage of an aquarium. Through a series of prints on the walls, reproducing ads, and user guides of the actual TV sets on display, the work elicits a tension between illusionism and the actual mechanics of television. The

FIGURE 6.19 Simon Denny, Deep Sea Vaudeo Multimedia Double Canvas, installation view, 2009. Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York. Collection of Julia Stoschek. Photo: Lothar Schnepf.

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effect is reinforced by a second part of the installation, made of rows of freestanding printed canvases reproducing the TV sets (Figure 6.19). The artist adopted the same tactic in other installations, such as Introductory Logic Video Tutorial (2010), Corporate Video Decisions (2011), and Analogue Broadcasting Hardware Compression (2013). Through the contrast between working hardware and its printed replica, they highlight the rematerialization of old media into new open, dispersed, and more ephemeral media. Now that analog transmission technology has become obsolete and television as we knew it is on the verge of extinction, television sets are increasingly used only as screens: either at home, connected to online platforms based upon on-demand criteria, or in exhibition spaces to display video artworks. One last original “circulationist” approach to television is that made by American artist Ken Okiishi, who uses flat TV screens as vertical canvases in the series gesture/data (2013–14), which consist of abstract brushstrokes on an ever-changing broadcast of TV footage recorded by the artist on VHS since the 1990s. By reintroducing a performative element, Okiishi imagines the artistic relationship with television in the internet era in physical terms, as an ultimate, primitive, concrete act of action painting. Surprisingly, painting and performance (the oldest forms of artistic expression) are recombined here to fight the dehumanizing and alienating effects produced by digital technologies and the internet, harking back to the taped memory of television on such an obsolete analog format as VHS, to trigger a process of retrospection that would eventually lead to a more transparent distinction between reality and fiction.

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CHRONOLOGY OF EXHIBITIONS ON ART AND TELEVISION Title: TV as a Creative Medium Venue: Howard Wise Gallery, New York, United States Date: May 17–June 14, 1969 Curator: Howard Wise Catalogue: Howard Wise Gallery, 8 pages Title: Visions and Televisions Venue: Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, United States Date: January 21–February 22, 1970 Curator: Russell Connor Catalogue: Rose Art Museum, 14 pages Title: From the Academy to the Avant Garde Venue: The Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, NY, United States Date: 1981 Curator: Richard Simmons Catalogue: The Visual Studies Workshop, 22 pages Title: TV Generations Venue: LACE Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibition, Los Angeles, United States Date: February 21–April 12, 1986 Curators: John Baldessari and Bruce Yonemoto Catalogue: LACE Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibition, 72 pages Title: Television’s Impact on Contemporary Art Venue: The Queens Museum, New York, United States Date: September 13–October 26, 1986 Curator: Marc H. Miller Catalogue: The Queens County Art and Cultural Center, 49 pages Title: The Arts for Television Venue: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, United States; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands (the exhibition toured in 11 other museums) Date: September 4–October 18 and October 6–November 15, 1987 Curators: Kathy Rae Huffman and Dorine Mignot

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Catalogue: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and Stedelijk Museum, 104 pages Title: From the Receiver to the Remote Control: The TV Set Venue: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, United States Date: September 14–November 25, 1990 Curator: Matthew Geller Catalogue: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 144 pages Title: The New Frontier: Art and Television, 1960–65 Venue: Austin Museum of Art, Austin, United States Date: September 1–November 26, 2000 Curator: John Alan Farmer Catalogue: Austin Museum of Art, 104 pages Title: The Search for a Personal Vision in Broadcast Television Venue: Patrick and Beatrice Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University, Milwaukee, United States Date: September 7–December 2, 2001 Curator: Fred Barzyk Catalogue: Patrick and Beatrice Haggerty Museum of Art, 98 pages Title: Tele[visions] Venue: Kunsthalle Wien, Vienne, Austria Date: October 18, 2001–January 6, 2002 Curator: Joshua Decter Catalogue: Kunsthalle Wien, 312 pages Title: Satellite of Love Venue: Witte de With, Rotterdam, Netherlands Date: January 26–March 26, 2006 Curator: Edwin Carels Catalogue: Witte de With, 62 pages Title: Television Delivers People Venue: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, United States Date: December 12, 2007–February 17, 2008 Curator: none Catalogue: none Title: Broadcast Venue: Contemporary Museum Baltimore, Baltimore, MD, United States (the exhibition was produced by the organization Independent Curators International, New York, and has toured in four other museums from 2007 to 2011)

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Date: April 17–November 17, 2007 Curator: Irene Hofmann Catalogue: none Title: Broadcast Yourself: Artists’ Interventions into Television and Strategies for Self-Broadcasting from the 1970s to Today Venue: Hatton Gallery, University of Newcastle, Newcastle and Cornerhouse, Manchester, United Kingdom Date: February 28–April 4 and June 13–August 10, 2008 Curators: Sarah Cook and Kathy Rae Huffman Catalogue: none Title: Changing Channels: Art and Television 1963–1987 Venue: MUMOK Museum of Modern Kunst, Vienna, Austria Date: March 5–June 6, 2010 Curator: Matthias Michalka Catalogue: Cologne, Verlag Der Buchhandlung Walther Konig, 296 pages Title: TV/ARTS/TV: The Televisions Shot by Artists Venue: Arts Santa Mònica, Barcelona, Spain Date: October 15–December 5, 2010 Curator: Valentina Valentini Catalogue: Barcelona, La Fábrica, 160 pages Title: Channel TV Lieu: Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Hamburg, Germany; cneai= (centre national de l’édition et de l’art imprimé), Paris, France; Halle für Kunst, Lüneburg, Germany Date: October 29–December 19, 2010; October 19–December 19, 2010; November 20–January 16, 2010 Curators: Sylvie Boulanger (cneai=), Marie Luise Birkholz and Britta Peters (KVHBF), Hannes Loichinger (HfK Lüneburg) Catalogue: special issue of the quarterly journal MULTITUDES: Art TV Clash, Paris, Éditions Amsterdam, 240 pages Title: Are You Ready for TV? Venue: MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona, Spain Date: November 11, 2010–April 25, 2011 Curator: Chus Martínez Catalogue: digital catalogue, 116 pages, available online for free https:// issuu.com/macba_publicacions/docs/ready4tv_eng Title: Experimentelles Fernsehen der 1960er und 70er Jahre Venue: Deutschen Kinemathek—Museum für Film und Fernsehen, Berlin, Germany

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Date: May 19–July 24, 2011 Curator: Gerlinde Waz Catalogue: none Title: Forbidden Love: Art in the Wake of Television Camp Venue: Kölnischer Kunstverein et Kunstverein Medienturm, Graz, Germany Date: September 25–November 27, 2011 Curator: Sandro Droschi Catalogue: Cologne, Verlag Der Buchhandlung Walther Konig, 182 pages Title: Vidéo Vintage Venue: Centre Pompidou, Paris, France Date: February 8–May 7, 2012 Curator: Christine Van Assche Catalogue: Centre Pompidou, 64 pages Title: Remote Control Venue: ICA Institute of Contemporary Art, London, United Kingdom Date: April 3–June 10, 2012 Curator: Matt Williams Catalogue: none Title: Amuse Me Venue: Mestna Galerija Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia Date: June 27–September 22, 2013 Curator: Alenka Gregorič Catalogue: Mestna Galerija Ljubljana, 152 pages Title: This is Television Venue: Daadgalerie, Berlin, Germany Date: September 7–October 19, 2013 Curator: Judy Radul Catalogue: Berlin, Sternberg Press, 240 pages (2018) Title: Telegen: Art and Television Venue: Kunstmuseum, Bonn and Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Germany Date: October 1, 2015–January 17, 2016 and February 19–May 16, 2016 Curators: Dieter Daniels and Stephan Berg Catalogue: Munich, Hirmer Verlag GmbH, 352 pages Title: Revolution of the Eye: Modern Art and the Birth of American Television Venue: Jewish Museum, New York Date: May 1–September 27, 2015 Curator: Maurice Berger Catalogue: New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 172 pages (2015)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Theoretical References Adorno, Theodor W. “How to Look at Television.” The Quarterly of Film Radio and Television, Vol. 8, No. 3 (Spring 1954): 213–35. Adorno, Theodor W. “Prologue to Television.” In Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. Translated by Henry W. Pickford, 49–57. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Arnaud, Diane and Dork Zabunyan. Les Images et Les Mots: Décrire le Cinéma. Lille: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2014. Arnheim, Rudolf. “A Forecast for Television.” In Film as Art, 188–98. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Baudrillard, Jean. “Requiem for the Media.” In For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. Translated by Charles Levin, 164–84. Saint Louis, MO: Telos Press, 1981. Baudrillard, Jean. “The Ecstasy of Communication.” In The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster, 126–34. Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. New York: Semiotext[e], 1983. Baudrillard, Jean. Fatal Strategies, edited by Jim Fleming, translated by Phil Beitchman and W. J. G. Niesluchowski. New York and London: Semiotext[e] and Pluto, 1990. Beller, Jonathan. The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle. Lebanon, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2006. Benjamin, Walter. Aura e Choc: Saggi sulla Teoria dei Media. Edited by Andrea Pinotti and Antonio Somaini. Turin: Einaudi, 2012. Casetti, Francesco. L’Occhio del Novecento: Cinema, Esperienza, Modernità. Milan: Bompiani, 2005. Casetti, Francesco. The Lumiére Galaxy: 7 Key Words for the Cinema to Come. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Citton, Yves. The Ecology of Attention. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016. Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990. Crary, Jonathan. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001. D’Aloia, Adriano and Ruggero Eugeni. Teorie del Cinema: Il Dibattito Contemporaneo. Milan: Raffaello Cortina, 2017.

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McGarry, Kevin, ed. Ryan Trecartin: Any Ever. New York: Skira Rizzoli Publications, Inc. and Elizabet Dee, 2011. Spampinato, Francesco. “Interview with Ryan Trecartin.” Audio recorded at MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York (May 18, 2011). Spampinato, Francesco. “The Schizophrenic Prosumer: Television in the Production of Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin.” In Whether Line: Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin, edited by Chiara Costa and Mario Mainetti, 131–48 (English version) and 444–8 (Italian version). Milan: Fondazione Prada, 2019. Spampinato, Francesco. “Neighborhood Watch: Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin.” Mousse, No. 67 (Spring 2019): 64–7. Van Gogh TV Ohrt, Roberto and Ludwig Seyfarth. “Van Gogh TV—Piazza Virtuale: 100 Days of Interactive Art—Television.” In Documenta IX—Vol. 3: Artists L–Z, Appendix L–Z, edited by Roland Nachtigäller and Nicola Von Velsen, 250–3. Stuttgart: Documenta GmbH and Edition Cantz, 1992. Stan Vanderbeek Vanderbeek, Stan. “Social Imagistics.” In The New Television: A Public/private Art: Essays, Statements, and Videotapes Based on “Open Circuits: an International Conference on the Future of Television” Organized by Fred Barzyk, Douglas Davis, Gerald O’Grady, and Willard Van Dyke for the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, edited by Douglas Davis and Allison Simmons, 58–63. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1977. Francesco Vezzoli Celant, Germano, ed. Francesco Vezzoli. Milan: Fondazione Prada, 2004. Spampinato, Francesco. “Comizi di Non Amore: Francesco Vezzoli Revisits Pasolini Through Reality TV.” Senses of Cinema, No. 77 (December 2015). Accessed April 24, 2021. http://sensesofcinema.com/2015/pier-paolo-pasolini/ comizi-di-non-amore-and-reality-tv/ Vezzoli, Francesco and Chiara Costa, eds. Francesco Vezzoli Guarda la Rai. Milan: Fondazione Prada, 2017. Videofreex Ingall, Andrea. Videofreex: The Art of Guerrilla Television. New Paltz, NY: Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, 2015. Teasdale, Parry D. Videofreex: America’s First Pirate TV Station & the Catskills Collective That Turned It On. Hensonville, NY: Black Dome Press, 1999. Videofreex. The Spaghetti City Video Manual: A Guide to Use, Repair, and Maintainance. New York and Washington: Praeger Publishers, 1973. Andy Warhol Danto, Arthur. “The Artworld.” Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 61 (October 15, 1964): 571–84. Benhamou-Huet, Judith. Warhol TV. Paris: La Maison Rouge, 2009. Buchloh, Benjamin H. D. “Andy Warhol’s One-Dimensional Art: 1956–1966.” In Andy Warhol: A Retrospective, edited by Kynaston McShine. New York: Museum

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of Modern Art, 1989. Republished in Andy Warhol, edited by Annette Michelson, 1–48. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001. De Simone, Anna Luigia. Andy Warhol’s TV: Dall’Arte Alla Televisione. Sesto San Giovanni, Milan: Mimesis, 2017. Swenson, G. R. “What Is Pop Art? Answers from 8 Painters.” Art News, Vol. 62, No. 7 (November 1963): 40–3, 62–7. Warhol, Andy. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again). London: Cassell, 1975. Gillian Wearing Bode, Steven, ed. Gillian Wearing: Family History. London: Film and Video Umbrella and Maureen Paley, 2006. Joe Weintraub Weintraub, Joe. “AC/TV (Audio-Controlled Television).” In TV as a Creative Medium, edited by Howard Wise, unpaged. New York: Howard Wise Gallery, 1969. The Yes Men Thompson, Nato, ed. Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art From 1991–2011. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012. Bruce and Norman Yonemoto Schottlaender, Sherri, ed. Bruce and Norman Yonemoto: Memory, Matter and Modern Romance. Los Angeles: Japanese American National Museum, 1999.

310

WORKS CITED

Artworks Vito Acconci Centers, 1971, video, black and white, sound, 22 min. 43 sec. A&SP and NASTYNASTY© Public Collection II, 2016, artist’s book published by blisterZine and series of c-prints. Ant Farm Media Burn, 1975, happening and video, color, sound, 23 min. 02 sec. ANT Farm and T.R. Uthco The Eternal Frame, 1976, video, color, sound, 22 min. 19 sec. Michael Asher Via Los Angeles, Portland Center for the Visual Arts, Portland, Oregon, January 8–February 8, 1976, 1976, video, color, sound, 30 min. Tauba Auerbach Static, 2008–2011, series of 19 c-prints, variable dimensions. Alex Bag and Patterson Beckwith Cash from Chaos/Unicorns & Rainbows, 1994–1997, weekly cable TV series, New York, United States, color, sound, 30 min. Alex Bag Coven Services, 2004, video, color, sound, 14 min. 40 sec. His Girlfriend Is a Robot, 1996, video, color, sound, 14 min. Untitled (Project for the Andy Warhol Museum), 1996, video, color, sound, 22 min. Gladia Daters, 2005, video, color, sound, 30 min. Untitled (Project for the Whitney Museum), 2009, video, color, sound, 38 min. John Baldessari Blasted Allegories, 1978, series of c-prints, variable dimensions. Judith Barry Casual Shopper, 1980–1981, video, color, sound, 28 min.

312

WORKS CITED

Judith Barry and Ken Saylor From Receiver to Remote Control: The TV Set, 1990, installation, variable dimensions, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. Stephen Beck Illuminated Music II & III, 1972–1973, video, color, sound, 29 min. 36 sec. Gretchen Bender Wild Dead, 1984, two-channel digital video installation, transferred from videotape, number of screens variable from 27 to 33, color, sound, 1 min. 41 sec. Total Recall, 1987, eleven-channel digital video installation, transferred from videotape and 16 mm, 24 screens and 2 projections, color, sound, 18 min. 02 sec. Will Benedict and Steffen Joergensen The Restaurant, 2018, web series for DIS.ART, video HD, color, sound, variable length. Lynda Benglis Now, 1973, video, color, sound, 11 min. 45 sec. Joseph Beuys Filz-TV, 1970, performance and video, black and white, 10 min. 08 sec. Sonne Statt Reagan, 1982, video, color, sound, 2 min. 42 sec. Dara Birnbaum Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, 1978–1979, video, color, sound, 5 min. 50 sec. Kiss the Girls: Make Them Cry, 1979, installation, two-channel video, color, sound, 6 min. 50 sec. Pop-Pop Video: General Hospital/Olympic Women Speed Skating, 1980, video, color, sound, 5 min. 30 sec. Pop-Pop Video: Kojak/Wang, 1980, video, color, sound, 3 min. Animation for the series Artbreaks, 1987, MTV, United States, video, color, black and white, sound, 30 sec. Dara Birnbaum and Dan Graham Local TV News Program Analysis, 1978–1980, video, color, sound, 61 min. 08 sec. Gregg Bordowitz Fast Trip, Long Drop, 1993, video, color, sound, 54 min. 04 sec. Joan Braderman Joan Does Dynasty, 1985, video, color, sound, 31 min. 40 sec. Olaf Breuning Cris Croft, 1999, video, color, sound, 5 min. 29 sec. King, 2000, video, color, sound, 9 min. 24 sec. Ugly Yelp, 2001, video, color, sound, 5 min.

WORKS CITED

313

Angela Bulloch TV Series, 2002, installation, variable dimensions. Chris Burden Shoot, 1971, performance, F Space, Santa Ana, California, United States. TV Hijack, 1972, performance, California, United States. TV Ad: Through the Night Softly, 1973, video, color, sound, 30 sec. Poem for L.A., 1975, video, color, sound, 30 sec. Chris Burden Promo, 1976, video, color, sound, 30 sec. Full Disclosure, 1977, video, color, sound, 30 sec. Peter Campus Three Transitions, 1973, video, color, sound, 4 min. 53 sec. Ensemble de Télévision, 1961, installation, welded painted sheets, TV on Plexiglas, castors, 166 × 76 × 50 cm. Mel Chin and The Gala Committee In the Name of the Place, 1995–1997, series of interventions in the TV series Melrose Place, Fox, United States. In the Name of the Place, 1997, video, color, sound, 15 min. 35 sec. TOTAL PROOF: The Gala Committee 1995–1997, 2016, installation, Red Bull Studios, New York. Daniele Ciprì and Franco Maresco Cinico TV, 1992–1996, TV series, video, black and white, sound, variable length. Larry Clark Untitled series of photographs published in the book LC, Groninger Museum, Groningen, NL, 1999. Colab Potato Wolf, 1979–1984, cable TV series, New York, United States, color, sound, variable length. James Coleman Clara and Dario, 1975, installation, 2 slide projectors (35 mm.), black and white, sound, 46 min. 25 sec. Phil Collins the world won’t listen, 2004–2007, three-channel video installation, color, sound, 56 min. soy mi madre, 2008, 16 mm, color, sound, 26 min. the return of the real, 2007, video, color, sound, 64 min. This Unfortunate Thing Between Us, 2011, two-nights performance at the theater Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin, broadcast live on the channel ZDFkultur, Germany. This Unfortunate Thing Between Us (TUTBU TV), 2011, video, color, sound, 60 min.

314

WORKS CITED

Bruce Conner REPORT, 1963–1967, 16 mm, black and white, sound, 13 min. TELEVISION ASSASSINATION, 1963–1995, installation, Bolex film projector, 8 mm film, Zenith television set with painted screen, film reel, electric cord, black and white, silent. Keren Cytter Video Art Manual, 2011, video HD, color, sound, 14 min. 43 sec. Vengeance, 2012–2013, video HD, color, sound, 8 episodes from 14 to 18 min. Salvador Dalí Painting for the cover of the magazine TV Guide, June 8–14, 1968. Jaime Davidovich The Live! Show, 1979–1984, cable TV series, Channel J, Manhattan Cable, New York, United States, color, sound, variable length. Paul B. Davis Video Compression Study II, 2007, video, color, sound, 1 min. 31 sec. Deep Dish TV The Gulf Crisis TV Project, 1991, cable TV series, New York, United States, color, sound, variable length. Guy Debord The Society of the Spectacle, 1973, 35 mm, black and white, sound, 88 min. Simon Denny Deep Sea Vaudeo, 2009, multimedia installation, Sprengel Museum, Hannover. Introductory Logic Video Tutorial, 2010, multimedia installation, Artspace, Sidney. Corporate Video Decisions, 2011, multimedia installation, Friederick Petzel Gallery, New York. Analogue Broadcasting Hardware Compression, 2013, multimedia installation, Venice Biennale. Jan Dibbets TV as a Fireplace, 1969, video, color, sound, 23 min. 48 sec. The Diggers Death of Hippie, Son of Mass Media, 1967, performance, San Francisco, United States. DIVA TV Target City Hall, 1989, video, color, sound, 28 min. Like a Prayer, 1990, video, color, sound, 28 min. DIVA TV and Deep Dish TV Be a Diva, 1990, video, color, sound, 58 min.

WORKS CITED

315

Cheryl Donegan Head, 1993, video, color, sound, 2 min. 49 sec. Stan Douglas Television Spots, 1987–1988, video, color, sound, 12 videos from 15 to 20 sec. Monodramas, 1991, video, color, sound, 10 videos from 30 to 60 sec. Casey Jane Ellison Touching the Art, 2014–2015, web series, video HD, color, sound, 14 episodes from 8 to 10 min. Mothers and Daughters, 2018, web series for DIS.ART, video HD, color, sound, variable length. Harun Farocki Ein Tag im Leben der Endverbraucher, 1993, video, color, sound, 44 min. War at Distance, 2003, video, black and white and color, sound, 54 min. Deep Play, 2010–2011, eight-channel video installation, sound, 135 min. Omer Fast CNN Concatenated, 2002, video, color, sound, 18 min. 17 sec. Fausto Fernós El Chow De Faustina, Années 1990, cable TV series, color, sound, variable length. Maurizio Finotto ARTISTAR, 2009, video, color, sound, variable length, from 30 to 180 min. Oskar Fischinger An Optical Poem, 1938, 35 mm, color, sound, 7 min. Lucio Fontana Untitled, event and installation, Rai, Turin, Italy, May 17, 1952. Valie Export Facing a Family, 1971, video, black and white, sound, 4 min. 37 sec. Lee Friedlander The Little Screens, 1961–1970, series of photographs, variable dimensions. Rainer Ganahl Iraq Dialogs: Arab Dialog with Ghazi Al Delaimi, CNBC, Make It Your Business, Back to the Gulf, 2002–2003, painting on ceramic tiles, 80 × 100 × 1 cm. General Idea Pilot, 1977, video, color, sound, 28 min. 56 sec. Test Tube, 1979, video, color, sound, 28 min. 15 sec. Shut the Fuck Up, 1985, video, color, sound, 14 min.

316

WORKS CITED

Karl Gerstner Auto-Vision, 1965, boxed TV set on Miller foot, six lunettes, variable dimensions. Frank Gillette and Ira Schneider Wipe Cycle, 1969, multimedia installation, 9 screens, video, black and white, sound, Howard Wise Gallery, New York. Melanie Gilligan Popular Unrest, 2010, video HD, color, sound, 5 episodes from 10 to 15 min. The Common Sense, 2014, video HD, color, sound, 3 seasons of 5 episodes of 6 min., total length 97 min. 05 sec. GMHC Living With AIDS, 1987, cable TV series, New York, United States, color, sound, variable length. Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville Six Fois Deux/Sur et Sus la Communication, 1976, TV series, FR3, France, 12 episodes from 40 to 55 min., total length 600 min. Nan Goldin The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, 1985, installation, slide projector, sound, variable number of slides, variable length. Dan Graham Project for a Local Cable TV, 1970, performance, Nova Scotia College of Arts and Design, Halifax, Canada. TV Camera/Monitor, 1970, performance, Nova Scotia College of Arts and Design, Halifax, Canada. Present Continuous Past(s), 1974, closed-circuit video installation, 1 black-andwhite camera, 1 black and white screen, 2 mirrors, 1 microprocessor. Paul Graham Television Portraits, 1989–1995, series of photographs, variable dimensions. Rodney Graham How I Became a Ramblin’ Man, 1999, 35 mm, color, sound, 9 min. A Little Thought, 2000, 8 mm, color, sound, 3 min. 54 sec. Phonokinetoscope, 2002, 16 mm, color, sound, 5 min. Wynne Greenwood and K8 Hardy New Report, 2005, video, color, sound, 12 min. New Report, 2007, performance and live broadcast from Tate Britain, London, variable length. Johan Grimonprez dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, 1997, video, color, sound, 68 min.

WORKS CITED

317

Michel François Fox, 2005, video installation, color, sound, 3 min. 51 sec. Gran Fury Kissing Doesn’t Kill, 1990, video, color, sound, 4 episodes of 40 sec. Caroline Hake Monitor, 1998–2003, series of 12 photographs, 120 × 160 cm. David Hall TV Interruptions: Interruption Piece, 1971, video, black and white, sound, 2 min. 20 sec. TV Interruptions: Tap Piece, 1971, video, black and white, sound, 3 min. 31 sec. Richard Hamilton Just what is it that makes today’s home’s so different, so appealing?, 1956, collage, 26 × 25 cm. Kent State, 1970, screenprint on paper, 67 × 87 cm. Keith Haring Untitled, 1980, performance for Acts of Live Art, Club 57, New York. Untitled, 1983, Sumi ink on paper, 182.9 × 335.3 cm. Abbie Hoffman Action in Washington D.C., October 9, 1968. Adelita Husni-Bey La Luna in Folle, 2016, three-channel video installation and series of performances, MAXXI, Rome. Pierre Huyghe The Third Memory, 2000, two-channel video installation, color, sound, 9 min. 32 sec. Mobil TV, 1995, multimedia installation and performance, Institut d’Art Contemporain, Villeurbanne, Lyon. Isidor Isou La Télévision Déchiquetée ou L’Anti-Crétinisation, 1962, installation, cut black Canson paper, TV set, black and white, 48 × 68, 5 × 39 cm. Alex Israel AS IT LAYS, 2012, web series, video HD, color, sound, 33 episodes, variable length. Sanja Iveković Slatko Nasilje (Sweet Violence), 1974, video, black and white, 6 min. Personal Cuts (Osobni Rezovi), 1982, video, color, sound, 3 min. 43 sec. General Alert (Soap Opera), 1995, video, color, sound, 5 min.

318

WORKS CITED

Matthew Day Jackson In Search of … Eidolon, 2010, video HD, color, sound, 25 min. Cameron Jamie The Neotoma Tape (1983–95), 1995, video, color, sound, 58 min. Christian Jankowski Telemistica, 1999, video, color, sound, 15 min. 52 sec. The Holy Artwork, 2001, video, color, sound, 16 min. 30 sec. Kochstudio, 2004, video, color, sound, 97 min. 26 sec. Kunstmarkt TV, 2008, video, color, sound, 45 min. 15 sec. Casting Jesus, 2011, two-channel video installation, color, sound, 60 min. Ben Jones The Problem Solverz, 2011–2013, animated television series, Cartoon Network, United States, color, sound, 2 seasons of 13 episodes of 11 min. Wolf Kahlen Mirror TV, 1969–1977, installation, mirror applied to a TV set, dimensions unknown. Young Rock, 1971, installation, TV set, red granite in two parts, 65 × 60 × 43 cm. Allan Kaprow Hello, 1969, video, black and white, sound, 4 min. 23 sec. Mike Kelley Banana Man, 1983, video, color, sound, 28 min. 15 sec. Jon Kessler The Palace at 4AM, 2005, multimedia installation, variable dimensions. Harmony Korine Trash Humpers, 2009, video, color, sound, 78 min. Ernie Kovacs Three to Get Ready, 1950, NBC, United States, video, black and white, sound. Time for Ernie, 1951, NBC, United States, video, black and white, sound. Ernie Kovacs in the role of Eugene, “Library Bit,” Ernie Kovacs Show, 1956, NBC, United States, video, black and white, sound. Silent Show, January 19, 1957, NBC, United States, video, color, sound, 30 min. Richard Kriesche Blackout, December 12, 1974, performance live on the program Impulse 16, ORF, Austria. Twins, 1977, multimedia installation and performance, Documenta 6, Kassel, Germany. Nationalfeiertag, October 26, 1978, performance live on the channel ORF, Austria.

WORKS CITED

319

David Lamelas The Office of Information About the Vietnam War at Three Levels: The Visual Image, Text and Audio, 1968, multimedia installation, Venice Biennale. The Hand, 1976, video, color, sound, 37 min. 08 sec. The Dictator, 1976, video, color, sound, 15 min. 22 sec. Mathieu Laurette Apparition: Tournez Manège, March 16, 1993, performance live on the channel TF1, France. Apparition: The Today Show, NBC, 31 December 2004, 2004, performance live on the channel NBC, United States. Mobile Information Stand for Moneyback Products (International Version), 1999, video, color, sound, 25 min. John Lennon and Yoko Ono Bed-in for Peace, March 25–31, 1969, happening, Hilton Hotel Amsterdam. Bed Peace, 2017, video, color, sound, 70 min. 55 sec. Rape, 1969, 16 mm, color, sound, 75 min. 33 sec. Jørgen Leth Andy Warhol Eating a Hamburger, 1981, 35 mm, color, sound, 8 min. Les Levine Iris, 1968, multimedia installation, 6 screens, dimensions unknown. Kalup Linzy Conversations Wit de Churen I: Ride to da Club, 2002, video, black and white, sound, 05 min. 06 sec Conversations Wit de Churen II: All My Churen, 2013, video, color, sound, 29 min. 14 sec. Conversations Wit de Churen III: da Young & da Mess, 2005, video, color, sound, 16 min. 56 sec. Conversations Wit de Churen V: As da Artworld Might Turn, 2006, video, color, sound, 12 min. 10 sec. Melody Set Me Free, 2007, video, color, sound, 15 min. 16 sec. Kalup Linzy and James Franco Rising, 2011, video, color, sound, 3 min. 53 sec. LOT-EK TV-TANK, 1998, multimedia installation, Deitch Projects, New York. LuckyPDF Live From Frieze Art Fair This Is LuckyPDF TV, 2011, installation and program broadcast live from Frieze Art Fair, London, variable length. Ann Magnuson and Tom Rubnitz Made for TV, 1984, video, color, sound, 15 min.

320

WORKS CITED

Chris Marker Zapping Zone: Proposal for an Imaginary Television, multimedia installation, 14 video monitors, 13 laser disc players, 13 loudspeakers, 13 video recorders, 7 programs on floppy discs, 10 black-and-white photographs, 4 projectors with 20 slides, color, sound, variable dimensions, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Fabio Mauri Il Televisore che Piange, 1972, performance live on the program Happening, Rai 2, Italy, black and white, sound, 2 min. 41 sec. Paul McCarthy WS, 2013, multimedia installation, Park Avenue Armory, New York. Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley Family Tyranny, 1987, video, color, sound, 8 min. 8 sec. Bjørn Melhus Far Far Away, 1995, 16 mm on video, color, sound, 39 min. Out of the Blue, 1997, video, color, sound, 6 min. 27 sec. Blue Moon, 1997, two-channel video installation, color, sound, 4 min. The Oral Thing, 2001, video, color, sound, 8 min. Primetime, 2001, three-channel video installation, 28 screens, 1 projection, 5 video cubes, color, sound, 10 min. Captain, 2005, two-channel video HD installation, color, sound, 14 min. 20 sec. Deadly Storms, 2008, three-channel video HD installation, color, sound, 7 min. Nathaniel Mellors Ourhouse, 2010–2018, video HD, color, sound, 6 episodes from 20 to 35 min. John Miller Sans titre, 1998, series of paintings, variable dimensions. The Lugubrious Game, 1998, installation, Le Magasin, Dijon, France. Everything is Said, 2009–2012, series of paintings, variable dimensions. Profile, 2013, series of paintings, variable dimensions. Here in the Real World, 2015, series of paintings, variable dimensions. Marta Minujín Simultaneidad Envolvente, 1966, multimedia installation, Instituto Torcuato di Tella, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Shana Moulton Whispering Pines, 2001–2010, video, color, sound, 10 videos of variable length. Feeling Free with 3D Magic Eye Poster Remix, 2004, video, color, sound, 8 min. 13 sec. Detached Inner Eye, 2014, projection and performance, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Body + Mind + 7 = Spirit, 2009, performance, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich.

WORKS CITED

321

Donald Moffett Call the White House, 1990, photograph on light box, 102.9 × 153.7 × 17.1 cm Antoni Muntadas Media Ecology Ads: Fuse, Timer, Slow Down, 1982, video, color, sound, 14 min. Takeshi Murata Monster Movie, 2005, video, color, sound, 3 min. 55 sec. I, Popeye, 2010, video HD, color, sound, 6 min. 05 sec. OM Rider, 2013, video HD, color, sound, 11 min. 39 sec. Bruce Nauman Live-Taped Video Corridor, 1970, installation, wallboard, video camera, two video monitors, video recording, and video playback device, variable dimensions. Not Channel Zero and Deep Dish TV The Nation Erupts, 1992, video, color, sound, 58 min. Glenn O’Brien TV Party, 1978–1982, cable TV series, New York, United States, color, sound, variable length. Ken Okiishi gesture/data, 2014, series of installations, Chroma key, paintings on flatscreen TV sets, variable dimensions. Oneohtrix Point Never Memory Vague, 2009, DVDr, produced by Root Strata, color, sound, 33 min. 21 sec. Orfeo TV Orfeo TV, 2002, pirate TV station, Bologna, Italy, number of episodes and length unknown. Yoko Ono Sky TV, 1966, installation, TV set and video camera, variable dimensions. Nam June Paik Exposition of Music. Electronic Television, 1963, multimedia installation, Galerie Parnass, Wuppertal, Germany. Kuba TV, 1963, modified TV set, Galerie Parnass, Wuppertal, Germany. Participation TV, 1963–1966, TV set with attached microphone, dimensions unknown. Magnet TV, 1965, TV set modified with a magnet, 98.4 × 48.9 × 62.2 cm. TV Bra for Living Sculpture, 1969, performance by Charlotte Moorman for the exhibition TV as a Creative Medium, Howard Wise Gallery, New York. Concerto for TV Cello and Videotapes, 1971, performance by Charlotte Moorman, Galleria Bonino, New York. Global Groove, 1973, video, color, sound, 28 min. 30 sec. TV-Buddha, 1974, Buddha statue and TV set, variable dimensions.

322

WORKS CITED

Good Morning Mr. Orwell, 1984, video, color, sound, 38 min. Dadaikseon (The More the Better), 1988, installation, 1003 monitors, The Seoul Museum of Modern Art, Seoul, Korea. Nam June Paik and Otto Piene Untitled, 1968, modified TV set and plastic pearls, 22.9 × 33 × 25.4 cm. Paper Rad Trash Talking, 2006, DVD, produced by Load Records, color, sound, 60 min. Paper Tiger Television Herbert Schiller Reads the New York Times, 1981, video, color, sound, 28 min. Martha Rosler Reads Vogue, 1982, video, color, sound, 25 min. 22 sec. Donna Haraway Reads the National Geographic, 1987, video, color, sound, 28 min. Philippe Parreno and Douglas Gordon Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, 2006, two-channel video HD installation, color, sound, 90 min. Raymond Pettibon Cracks in the Sidewalk, 1980, record cover, SST Records, 1980. Untitled (KILL), 1982, ink on paper, dimensions unknown. PFFR Wonder Showzen, 2005–2006, TV series, MTV 2, United States, video, color, sound, 2 seasons of 13 episodes of 21–23 min. Xavier: Renegade Angel, 2007–2009, animated television series, [adultswim], United States, video HD, color, sound, 2 seasons of 10 episodes of 11 min. Richard Phillips Sasha Grey, 2011, video HD, color, sound, 1 min. 30 sec. Lindsay Lohan, 2011, video HD, color, sound, 1 min. 37 sec. Walter Pichler TV Helmet, 1967, helmet with integrated TV set. Otto Piene and Aldo Tambellini Black Gate Cologne, 1968, happening and TV program on the channel ZDF, Düsseldorf, Germany, black and white, sound, 23 min. Sondra Prill Nasty Boys, late 1980s, video, color, sound, 3 min. 47 sec. Pump Up the Jam, late 1980s, video, color, sound, 3 min. 47 sec. Richard Prince Artbreaks, 1985, MTV, United States, video, color, sound, 20 sec.

WORKS CITED

323

Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg Leben mit Pop—Eine Demonstration für den Kapitalistischen Realismus, October 11, 1963, happening, interior design store Bergers, Düsseldorf, Germany. Pipilotti Rist I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much , 1986, video, color, sound, 7 min. 46 sec. You Called Me Jacky, 1990, video, color, sound, 4 min. 02 sec. David Robbins Talent, 1986, 18 gelatin silver photographs, 25.4 × 20.3 each. Ice Cream Social: Sundance TV Pilot, 2003, video, color, sound, 7 min. 43 sec. Albert Robida Forecast: Watching a War, 1882, illustration on paper. Julian Rosefeldt Global Soap, 2000–2001, four-channel video installation, color, sound, 22 min. Global Soap: Mnemories/Samples (nr. 1–16), 2000–2001, series of Lamda prints, variable dimensions. Martha Rosler If It’s Too Bad to Be True, It Could Be DISINFORMATION, 1985, video, color, sound, 16 min. 26 sec. Kenny Scharf Having a Television Pizza Party, 1979, acrylic on canvas, 45.7 × 55.9 cm. Club 57, 1980, logo of the club. Untitled, 1983, decorated TV set, dimensions unknown (under the pseudonym of Van Chrome). Christoph Schlingensief Talk 2000, 1997, TV program, Kanal 4, Germany, 8 episodes, variable length. U3000, 2000, TV program, MTV, Germany, 8 episodes, variable length. Bitte liebt Österreich (Please Love Austria), June 9–16, 2000, performance, Vienna International Festival, Vienna, Austria. Freakstars 3000, 2002, video, color, sound, 6 episodes, total length 75 min. Gerry Schum Land Art, 1969, black and white, sound, 32 min. Marinella Senatore Variations, 2011, event and video HD, color, sound, 21 min. Richard Serra Television Delivers People, 1973, video, color, sound, 6 min. Prisoner’s Dilemma, 1974, performance and video, black and white, sound, 45 min.

324

WORKS CITED

Richard Serra and Nancy Holt Boomerang, 1974, video, color, sound, 10 min. Cindy Sherman and MICA-TV Cindy Sherman: An Interview, 1980–1981, video, color, sound, 10 min. 20 sec. Eric Siegel Psychedelevision in Color, 1968, video installation, color, sound, dimensions and length unknown. Michael Smith Down in the Rec Room, 1979, performance, Artists Space, New York. Secret Horror, 1980, video, color, sound, 13 min. 19 sec. Go For it Mike, 1984, video, color, sound, 4 min. 41 sec. MIKE, 1987, video, color, sound, 3 min. 35 sec. Cally Spooner And You Were Wonderful, On Stage, 2015, video, color, sound, 46 min. Hito Steyerl Liquidity Inc., 2014, video HD installation, color, sound, 30 min. Factory of the Sun, 2015, video HD installation, German Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 23 min. Thomas Tadlock Archetron, 1969, video installation, dimensions and length unknown. Temporary Services Framing the Artists: Artists & Art in Film and Television, 2005, artist’s book and video, color, sound, 40 min. 27 sec. Ryan Trecartin A Family Finds Entertainment, 2004, video, color, sound, 42 min. I-Be Area, 2007, video, color, sound, 108 min. P.opular S.ky (section ish), 2009, video HD, color, sound, 43 min. 51 sec. Center Jenny, 2013, video HD, color, sound, 53 min. 15 sec. Any Ever, 2009–2010, video HD, 3 hours 55 min. Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch Any Ever, 2011, installation, MoMA PS1, New York. (As Yet Untitled Sculptural Theater), 2016, installation, Berlin Biennale, Berlin. Whether Line, installation, Fondazione Prada, Milan. TVTV The World’s Largest TV Studio, 1972, video, black and white, sound, 59 min. 04 sec. Four More Years, 1972, video, black and white, sound, 61 min. 28 sec. Lord of the Universe, 1973, video, black and white and color, sound, 58 min. 27 sec.

WORKS CITED

325

Adland, 1974, video, black and white and color, sound, 58 min. 25 sec. TVTV Looks at the Oscar, 1976, video, color, sound, 59 min. TVTV Goes to the Superbowl, 1976, video, color, sound, 46 min. 50 sec. Günther Uecker TV, 1963, TV set, nails, glue, 120 × 100 cm. Stan Vanderbeek Violence Sonata, 1969, happening produced for the TV channel WGBH, Boston, video, color, sound, 51 min. 34 sec. Van Gogh TV Piazza Virtuale, 1992, multimedia installation, Documenta 9, Kassel. Piazza Virtuale, 1992, video, color, sound, 32 min. 30 sec. Francesco Vezzoli Greed, 2009, directed by Roman Polanski, video HD, color, sound, 1 min. Comizi di Non Amore, 2004, video, color, sound, 63 min. TV 70: Francesco Vezzoli Guarda la Rai, 2017, exhibition curated by Francesco Vezzoli, Fondazione Prada, Milan. Videofreex The Woodstock Tapes, 1969, video, black and white, sound, 46 min. 50 sec. Lanesville TV, 1971–1974, series of programs for the channel Lanesville TV, Lanesville, NY, United States, number and length of programs unknown. Bill Viola Reverse Television–Portraits of Viewers, 1983, video, color, sound, 15 min. Wolf Vostell German View from the “Black Room” Cycle, 1958–1959, installation, decollage, wood, barbed wire, tin, newspaper, bone, TV set with cover, 115,5 × 130 × 30,5 cm. Sun in Your Head, 1963–1972, 16 mm transferred on video, black and white, sound, 5 min. 30 sec. Electronic Dé-coll/age, Happening Room, 1968, installation, Venice Biennale, variable dimensions. Concrete TV Paris, 1974, sculpture, 170 × 81 × 50 cm. TV Burying, 1983, happening at the farm of George Segal, New Brunswick, New Jersey. Andy Warhol TV $199, 1961, acrylic and oil on canvas, 172.7 × 132.7 cm. Outer and Inner Space, 1965, installation, double projection, 16 mm, black and white, sound, 33 min. Underground Sundae, 1968, video, color, sound, 1 min. Screen Tests, 1964–1968, 16 mm, black and white, sound, number and length variable and unknown. Soap Opera or The Lester Persky Story, film stills, 1964.

326

WORKS CITED

Factory Diaries, 1965, video, black and white, sound, 11 videos of 30 min. Factory Diaries, 1971–1978, video, black and white and color, sound, number and length variable. Interview, 1969–2018, magazine. Moonwalk, 1987, screenprint, 96,5 × 96,5 cm. Andy Warhol and Vincent Fremont Vivian’s Girls, 1973, video, black and white, sound, 10 videos of 30 min. Phoney, 1973, video, black and white, sound, 23 videos of 30 min. Fashion, 1979–1980, TV program, Manhattan Cable Television, New York, video, color, sound, 11 episodes of 30 min. Andy Warhol’s T.V., Season 1, 1980–1982, TV program, Manhattan Cable Television, New York, video, color, sound, 18 episodes of 30 min. Andy Warhol T.V. on Saturday Night Live, 1981, videos for the program Saturday Night Live, NBC, United States, video, color, sound, 3 videos of 1 min. Andy Warhol’s T.V., Season 2, 1983, TV program, MSGN (Madison Square Garden Network), New York, United States, video, color, sound, 9 episodes of 30 min. Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes, 1986–1987, TV program, MTV, United States, video, color, sound, 5 episodes of 30 min. Gillian Wearing Secrets and Lies, 2009, video HD, color, sound, 53 min. Family History, 2006, video HD, color, sound, 35 min. 32 sec. Peter Weibel TV Aquarium (TV Death 1), 1970–1972, video, black and white, sound, 1 min. 27 sec. The Endless Sandwich (Tele-Aktion I), 1969–1972, video, color, sound, 4 min. 07 sec. Time Blood, 1972–1979, performance live on TV channel ORF, Austria, video, color, sound, length unknown. TV News (TV Death 2), 1970–1972, video, black and white, sound, 5 min. 47 sec. Tom Wesselmann Still Life #31, 1963, acrylic and collage on wood and functioning TV set, 122 × 152 × 28 cm. David Wojnarowicz A Fire in My Belly, 1986–1987, 8 mm, color, sound, 20 min. 55 sec. Grant Worth and Patrick Sandberg Hooper Place, 2010, web series for DIS magazine, video HD, color, sound, 3 episodes, variable length. The Yes Men George W. Bush Project, 2000, website. Bhopal Project, 2004, action on the program BBC World, BBC, International, 5 min. 30 sec.

WORKS CITED

327

The New York Times Project, 2008, 80,000 copies of a fake edition of the issue of July 4, 2009 of the New York Times. Bruce and Norman Yonemoto Garage Sale, 1976, 16 mm, color, sound, 85 min. Based on Romance, 1979, video, color, sound, 24 min. 15 sec. An Impotent Metaphor, 1979, video, color, sound, 42 min. 54 sec. Green Card: An American Romance, 1980, video, color, sound, 79 min. 15 sec. Made in Hollywood, 1990, video, color, sound, 56 min. 12 sec. Bruce and Norman Yonemoto and Mike Kelley Kappa, 1986, video, color, sound, 26 min.

Music Videos Laurie Anderson Laurie Anderson, O Superman, 1983, music video, Warner Bros. Records, video, color, sound, 8 min. 21 sec. Laurie Anderson, Sharkey’s Day, 1984, music video, Warner Bros. Records, video, color, sound, 4 min. 30 sec. Doug Aitken LCD Soundsystem, Someone Great, 2007, music video, DFA Records/EMI, video, color, sound, 6 min. 27 sec. Gretchen Bender Babes in Toyland, Bruise Violet, 1992, music video, Southern Records, video, color, sound, 2 min. 52 sec. Bruce Conner David Byrne and Brian Eno, America Is Waiting, 1981, music video, Sire/Warner Bros. Records, video, color, sound, 3 min. 53 sec. Martin Creed Martin Creed, Thinking Not Thinking, 2012, music video, Telephone Records, video, color, sound, 1 min. 39 sec. Martin Creed, You Return, 2014, music video, The Vinyl Factory, video, color, sound, 4 min. 36 sec. Chris Cunningham Björk, All Is Full of Love, 1997, music video, One Little Indian/Elektra, video, color, sound, 4 min. 50 sec. Aphex Twin, Windowlicker, 1999, music video, Warp, video, color, sound, 10 min. 33 sec.

328

WORKS CITED

Michel Gondry Chemical Brothers, Let Forever Be, 1999, music video, Virgin/Astralwerks, video, color, sound, 3 min. 40 sec. Derek Jarman Marianne Faithfull, Broken English, 1979, Island, 8 mm and 16 mm transferred on 35 mm, black and white and color, sound, 12 min. The Smiths, The Queen Is Dead, 1986, Rough Trade, 8 mm and 16 mm transferred on 35 mm, black and white and color, sound, 13 min. Stephen R. Johnson and David Byrne Talking Heads, Road to Nowhere, 1984, music video, Sire, video, color, sound, 4 min. 19 sec. Bruce Gowers Queen, Bohemian Rhapsody, 1975, music video, EMI/ Elektra, video, color, sound, 5 min. 55 sec. Wynne Greenwood Tracy + the Plastics, 1999–2006, music videos, self-produced, video, color, sound, variable lengths. Damien Hirst Blur, Country House, 1995, music video, Food/ Virgin, video, color, sound, 3 min. 57 sec. Richard Kern and Judith Barry Sonic Youth and Lydia Lunch, for Death Valley ’69, 1986, music video, Homestead Records, 8 mm transferred on video, color, sound, 5 min. 20 sec. Robert Longo Megadeath, Peace Sells, 1986, music video, Capitol Records, video, color, sound, 4 min. 03 sec. New Order, Bizarre Love Triangle, 1986, music video, Factory Records, video, color, sound, 4 min. R.E.M., The One I Love, 1987, music video, I.R.S., video, color, sound, 3 min. 17 sec. Russell Mulcahy Buggles, Video Killed the Radio Stars, 1979, music video, Epic, video, color, sound, 2 min. 49 sec. Takashi Murakami Kanye West, Good Morning, 2008, music video, Roc-A-Fella/Def Jam, video animation, color, sound, 3 min. 15 sec. Yoshitomo Nara R.E.M., I’ll Take the Rain, 2001, music video, Warner Bros. Records, video animation, color, sound, 5 min. 51 sec.

WORKS CITED

329

Tony Oursler Sonic Youth, Tunic (Song for Karen), 1990, music video, DGC, video, color, sound, 6 min. 17 sec. The Residents and Others The Residents, One-Minute Movies, 1980, series of 56 music videos of 1 min., Cryptic Corporation and Ralph Records, 8 mm, 16 mm and video, black and white and color, sound, 56 min. Mick Rock David Bowie, Space Oddity, 1972, video, color, sound, 5 min. Rocky Schenck Devo, Post Post-Modern Man, 1989, music video, Enigma, video, color, sound, 3 min. David Shrigley Blur, Good Song, 2003, music video, Parlophone, video animation, color, sound, 3 min. 10 sec. Wolfgang Tillmans Goldfrapp, Lovely Head, 2000, music video, Mute, video, color, sound, 3 min. 41 sec. Andy Warhol T.V. Productions Walter Steding, Secret Spy, 1981, music video, Earhole Productions, video, color, sound, 3 min. Walter Steding, Dancing in Heaven, 1982, music video, Elektra, video, color, sound, 3 min. 16 sec. Miguel Bosé, Fuego, 1983, music video, CBS, video, color, sound, 3 min. The Cars, Hello Again, 1984, music video, Elektra, video, color, sound, variable length from 4 to 5 min. Curiosity Killed the Cat, Misfit, 1987, music video, Mercury Records, video, color, sound, 4 min. Ai Weiwei Ai Weiwei, Dumbass, 2013, music video, Zuoxiao Zuzhou, video, color, sound, 5 min. 13 sec. Ai Weiwei, Laoma Tihua, 2013, music video, Zuoxiao Zuzhou, video, color, sound, 4 min. 52 sec.

Appearances of artists in TV programs Arpiani e Pagliarini Uomini e Donne, Canale 5, Italy, 1997. Forum, Rete 4, Italy, September 1998.

330

WORKS CITED

John Cage Lascia o Raddoppia?, Canale 5, Italy, January 29, 1959. Performance of Water Walk on the program I’ve Got a Secret, CBS, United States, January 1960. Salvador Dalí The Name’s the Same, ABC, United States, January 19, 1954. What’s My Line?, CBS, United States, January 27, 1957. Licor Veterano Sabor, commercial, Spain, 1965, 15 sec. Chocolat Lanvin, commercial, France, 1968, 15 sec. Alka Seltzer, commercial, United States, 1974, 30 sec. Tracey Emin The Death of Painting, Channel 4, United States, 1997. Paul Emin auctions a work of his sister, the artist Tracey Emin, Four Rooms, Channel 4, United States, 2011. Kalup Linzy Kalup Linzy in the role of Kalup Ishmael in the series General Hospital, ABC, United States, 2010. Andy Warhol The Merv Griffin Show, CBS, United States, October 6, 1965. Braniff Airline, commercial, United States, 1969, 27 sec. TDK Videotape, commercial, Japan, 1983, 30 sec. Diet Coke, commercial, United States, 1985, 30 sec. Andy Warhol as himself in the series Love Boat, season 8, episode 200, ABC, United States, 1985, 50 min. Andy Warhol interviewed in the program WWF WrestleMania, United States, 1985. The Yes Men BBC World, BBC, International, December 3, 2004.

TV programs and events First demonstration of the video technology Ampex of CBS Television City in Hollywood, November 30, 1956. Non è Mai Troppo Tardi, 1960–1968, hosted by Alberto Manzi, Rai, Italy, program of elementary education, number of episodes unknown, 30 min. Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, November 22, 1963, filmed by Abraham Zapruder, Dallas, Texas. TV program of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1964, hosted by Aline Saarinen, NBC, United States, program on modern art. Playboy After Dark, 1969, CBS, United States, variety program, 52 episodes of 48 min. Ways of Seeing, January 1972, created and hosted by John Berger, BBC Two, United Kingdom, program on art, 4 episodes of 30 min.

WORKS CITED

331

An American Family, 1973 (filmed in 1971), PBS, United States, 16 mm, program documenting the life of an English family, 12 episodes of 60 min. The Family, 1974, produced by Paul Watson, BBC, United States, 12 episodes of 30 min. The Shock of the New, 1980, created and presented by Robert Hughes, BBC, United Kingdom, program on modern art, 8 episodes of 60 min. Dynasty, 1981–1989, ABC, United States, TV series, 9 seasons, 220 episodes of 45 min. Mister Fantasy, 1981–1984, created by Carlo Massarini, Paolo Giaccio, and Stefano Pistolini, hosted by Carlo Massarini, Rai 1, Italy, program dedicated to music videos, number of episodes unknown, 50 min. Launch of MTV, August 1, 1981, MTV, United States. Artbreaks, 1985, MTV, United States, series of commercials made by artists. Cops, 1989–ongoing, Fox Broadcasting Company, United States, TV programs halfway between documentary and reality TV, number of episodes unknown, 30 min. Bagdad under bombings, 1990, CNN, United States/International. Twin Peaks, 1990–1991, ABC, United States, TV series, 48 episodes from 46 to 50 min. Beating of Rodney King, March 3, 1991, filmed by George Holliday. Melrose Place, 1992–1999, Fox, United States, TV series, 7 seasons, 226 episodes of 45 min. Beavis and Butt-Head, 1993–1997, animation series, MTV, United States, 200 episodes from 5 to 11 min. Takeshi no dare demo Picasso, 1997–2009, TV Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan, talent show for artists, number of episodes and length unknown. Krisma TV, 1998–2002, created by Krisma, Eutelsat Communications, Europe, TV channel dedicated to visual experiments made by Krisma, number of episodes and length unknown. Two airplanes crash on the towers of the World Trade Center, September 11, 2001, CNN, United States/International. Artstar, 2005, filmed in the gallery Deitch Projects, New York, broadcast in 2006 by Gallery HD, United States, talent show for artists, 8 episodes, 46 min. Sky Arts, 2007–ongoing, TV channel dedicated to the arts, Europe. Mad Men, 2007–2015, AMC, United States, TV series, 7 seasons, 92 episodes of 47 min. The School of Saatchi, 2009, BBC, United Kingdom, talent show for artists, 4 episodes of 30 min. Work of Art: The Next Great Artist, 2010–2011, Bravo TV, United States, 10 episodes of 40 min. Black Mirror, 2011–ongoing, Netflix, United States, TV series of science-fiction, 22 episodes from 40 to 90 min.

Films Minnie the Moocher, 1932, United States, produced by Fleischer Brothers, animation film, black and white, sound, 8 min. 42nd Street, 1933, United States, directed by Busby Berkeley, 35 mm, black and white, sound, 89 min.

332

WORKS CITED

Dumbo, 1941, United States, produced by Walt Disney Productions, animation film, color, sound, 64 min. Singin’ in the Rain, 1952, United States, directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, color, sound, 103 min. Comizi d’Amore, 1964, Italy, directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini, black and white, sound, 89 min. Yellow Submarine, 1968, United Kingdom, directed by George Dunning, animation film, color, sound, 87 min. Poltergeist, 1982, United States, written by Steven Spielberg, directed by Tobe Hopper, color, sound, 120 min. Videodrome, 1983, United States, directed by David Cronenberg, color, sound, 89 min. They Live, 1988, United States, directed by John Carpenter, color, sound, 94 min. The Truman Show, 1998, United States, written by Andrew Niccol, directed by Peter Weir, color, sound, 103 min.

FIGURES

1.1

Albert Robida, Forecast: Watching a War, illustration, 1882  18

1.2

Lucio Fontana, Moving Luminous Images, video stills, 1952. Related to the television experiment, Rai TV, Milan, 1952. Photo: Attilio Bacci. Courtesy of Fondazione Lucio Fontana. © Fondazione Lucio Fontana by SIAE 2020  26

1.3

Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, film still, 1973  31

1.4

They Live, movie directed by John Carpenter, film still, 1988  44

2.1

Nam June Paik, Magnet TV, installation view, 1965, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Purchase, with funds from Dieter Rosenkranz, 86.60 a-b. Photo courtesy of Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. © The Estate of Nam June Paik  55

2.2

Nam June Paik, Global Groove, video stills, 1973. © The Estate of Nam June Paik  62

2.3

Nam June Paik, TV-Buddha, installation view, 1974. Collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Photo courtesy of Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. © The Estate of Nam June Paik  67

2.4

Dan Graham, Present Continuous Past(s), installation view, New York, 1974. © Dan Graham; Courtesy of Lisson Gallery  68

2.5

Andy Warhol, Outer and Inner Space, 1965. 16 mm film, black and white, sound, 66 minutes or 33 minutes in double screen. © The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved  70

2.6

Richard Serra, Television Delivers People, video still, 1973. Singlechannel video, color, sound, 5:55 minutes. Collaborator: Carlota Fay Schoolman. Collection: MoMA, New York. Courtesy of the artist  72

2.7

Videodrome, movie directed by David Cronenberg, film still, 1983  75

334

FIGURES

2.8

Peter Weibel, The Endless Sandwich (Tele-Aktion I), video still, 1969–72. From the series TV + VT Werke, black and white, mono, 5:50 minutes, 1970. Courtesy of ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe  78

2.9

Bill Viola, Reverse Television—Portraits of Viewers, video stills, 1983. Broadcast television project. Videotape playback, color, stereo sound; forty-four portraits, 30 seconds each, broadcast in between television programs as unannounced inserts. Produced by WGBHTV New Television Workshop, Boston. Photo: Kira Perov. © Bill Viola Studio  80–1

2.10 Gretchen Bender, Total Recall, installation view, 1987. Eight-channel video on twenty-four monitors and three rear projection screens. Duration: 18’02”. Courtesy of the Gretchen Bender Estate and Metro Pictures, New York  89 2.11 Dara Birnbaum, Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, video still, 1978–79. Single-channel video, color, stereo sound, 5:50 minutes. Courtesy of the artist, Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York, and Marian Goodman Gallery. © Dara Birnbaum  90 3.1

Michael Shamberg & Raindance Corporation, Guerrilla Television, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, book cover, 1971  99

3.2

Videofreex in their control room in Soho, New York, 1970. Photo courtesy of Videofreex.com  101

3.3

Harun Farocki, War at a Distance, video stills, 2003. © Harun Farocki  121

3.4

Jon Kessler, The Palace at 4 A.M., installation views, MoMA PS1, New York (p. 122, upper panel), and Sammlung Falckenberg, Hamburg (p. 122, lower panel; p. 123, upper and lower panels), 2005–06. Photo: Tom Powel imaging (PS1) and Egbert Haneke (Sammlung Falckenberg). Courtesy of the artists  122–3

3.5

Bruce Conner, REPORT, film still, 1963–67. 16 mm, black and white with sound, 13 minutes, dimensions variable. Courtesy of The Conner Family Trust, San Francisco, and Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles. © The Conner Family  125

3.6

Peter Weibel, TV News (TV Death 2), video stills, 1970–72. From the series TV + VT Werke, black and white, mono, 00:05:50, 1970. Courtesy of ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe  128

3.7

Johan Grimonprez, dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, video stills, 1997. Courtesy Johan Grimonprez  131

FIGURES

335

3.8

The Yes Men, Bhopal Project, video still, 2004. Courtesy The Yes Men  134

4.1

Salvador Dalí on the game show What’s My Line?, CBS, US, video stills, January 27, 1957  137

4.2

Cindy Sherman in MICA-TV, Cindy Sherman: An Interview, video stills, 1980–81. Courtesy of MICA-TV (Carol Ann Klonarides and Michael Owen)  144–5

4.3

Christian Jankowski, Telemistica, video still, 1999. Single channel DVD projection, 22 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York  152–3

4.4

Christian Jankowski, Casting Jesus, video still, 2011. Dual channel video projection, 60 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York  154

4.5

John Berger, Ways of Seeing, BBC Two, video still, 1972  159

4.6

General Idea, Test Tube, video stills, 1979. Video, color, sound, 28:08 minutes. Produced by Stichting de Appel, Amsterdam. Image © General Idea, courtesy of the artist and Electronic Arts Intermix, New York  162

4.7 Colab, Potato Wolf, video stills, 1979–84. Conceived and initially produced by Cara Perlman. Preserverd and digitized by Andrea Callard and Coleen Fitzgibbon. Courtesy of the artist. First row, left to right: Becky Howland, Potato Wolf animated logo; documentation of the “Island of Negative Utopia” event at The Kitchen, 1983; uncredited, animation based on a “Dondi” graffiti. Second row: Maria Sutcliffe and Jim Considine; back of George Shustowicz’s head in a scene from Alan W. Moore’s “Strife;” Jody Culkin and Leonard Abrams in Alan W. Moore’s “Strife.” Third row: Peter Fend in a “commercial” for a Potato Wolf show; two stills of Bruce Tovsky and Robert Raposo’s Invaded, 1984. Fourth row: Sophie Vieille, producer, “Four Fashion Horses;” Maria Sutcliffe and Jim Considine; Alan W. Moore, Andrea Callard, Joe Lewis from Fashion Moda, and a crowd walking on 42nd Street, New York, in Matthew Geller’s ad for the Times Square Show, 1980. Fifth row: Hank Linhart’s short “Whipped;” countdown animation from fond footage; Kiki Smith’s performance at “Island of Negative Utopia” event at The Kitchen, 1983  165 4.8

Glenn O’Brien, TV Party, video still, 1978–82  167

4.9

Andy Warhol and Vincent Fremont, Vivian’s Girls, 1973 [unfinished]. ½" reel-to-reel videotape (10 total), black and white,

336

FIGURES

sound, 30 minutes each. © The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved  173 4.10 Andy Warhol, Phoney, 1973. ½" reel-to-reel videotape (23 total), black & white, sound, 30 minutes each. © The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved  174 4.11 Andy Warhol, Andy Warhol’s T.V. [episode 9], 1983. 1" videotape, color, sound, 30 minutes. © The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved  175 4.12 Composite image of stills from: Andy Warhol, Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes, 1985–87. Each episode: 1" videotape, color, sound, 30 minutes. © The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved  179 5.1

Pipilotti Rist, You Called Me Jacky, video (still), 1990. Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, and Hauser & Wirth. © Pipilotti Rist  187

5.2

Olaf Breuning, King, installation view, 2000. Sneakers, sport shorts, fake knight armor, sword, video projector, video “King”. 9:25 minutes, 24 × 32 × 72 inches (60 × 80 × 180 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York  188

5.3

Mike Kelley, The Banana Man, video stills, 1983. © Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts. All Rights Reserved / VAGA at ARS, NY  192–3

5.4

Raymond Pettibon, Cracks in the Sidewalk, 12" vinyl compilation, record cover, SST Records, 1980  196

5.5

Alex Bag and Patterson Beckwith, Cash from Chaos/ Unicorns & Rainbows, video stills, 1994–97. Courtesy Patterson Beckwith  199

5.6

Ernie Kovacs performing in the TV show Kovacs Unlimited, CBS, US, 1952–54  205

5.7

Ann Magnuson and Tom Rubnitz, Made for TV, video stills, 1984. Courtesy of Ann Magnuson  211

5.8

Michael Smith, Secret Horror, production still, 1980. Photo: Kevin Noble. Courtesy of the artist  213

5.9

Michael Smith, Go For it Mike, video still, 1984. Courtesy of the artist  214

5.10 Julian Rosefeld, Mnemories / Samples (Nr. 5, Global Soap, Series 2), 2000–2001. © Julian Rosefeld and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020  219

FIGURES

337

5.11 Phil Collins, soy mi madre, production stills, Mexico City, 2008. 16 mm film transferred to HD video; color, sound; 28 minutes. Courtesy of Shady Lane Productions, Berlin  224 6.1

John Miller, Everything is Said 22, painting, 2012. Acrylic on canvas, 48 × 60 inches (121.9 × 152.4 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York  230

6.2

Phil Collins, the return of the real, 2007. Eight-channel video installation; color, sound; 60 minutes. Courtesy of Shady Lane Productions, Berlin  231

6.3

Phil Collins, This Unfortunate Thing Between Us, 2011. Stills from a live TV broadcast, 60 minutes. First still—Performers: Sharon Smith and Susanne Sachsse, first night, September 15, 2011. Second still—Performer: Julia Hummer, September 15-6, 2011. Courtesy of Shady Lane Productions, Berlin  233

6.4

Francesco Vezzoli, Comizi di non amore, film still, 2004. Photo: Matthias Vriens. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada  235

6.5

Gillian Wearing, Family History, video still, 2006. Produced by Film and Video Umbrella. Courtesy of Maureen Paley, London/ Hove; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/Los Angeles; and Regen Projects, Los Angeles. © Gillian Wearing  238

6.6

The Truman Show, movie directed by Peter Weir, film still, 1998  240

6.7

Bjørn Melhus, Captain, video still, 2005. Two-channel installation, 14 minute, loop. Courtesy of the artist  243

6.8

Ryan Trecartin, A Family Finds Entertainment, video stills, 2004. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada  246–7

6.9

Ryan Trecartin, I-Be Area, video stills, 2007. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada  250–1

6.10 Kalup Linzy, Melody Set Me Free: KK Queen and Patience, video still, 2007–12. Courtesy of the artist and David Castillo, Miami, Florida  253 6.11 David Robbins, Ice Cream Social: Sundance TV Pilot, video stills, 2003. Courtesy of the artist  256 6.12 David Robbins, Talent, 18 gelatin silver photographs, 1986. Courtesy of the artist  257 6.13 Line at the casting and group photo of Artstar participants, Deitch Projects, New York, 2005. Courtesy of Jeffrey Deitch  260

338

FIGURES

6.14 LuckyPDF, Live From Frieze Art Fair this is LuckyPDF TV: Episode 1, installation and performance, Frieze Art Fair, London 2011. Band: Bo Ningen. Set: Hannah Perry/Oliver Hogan. Graphics: Daniel Swan. Commissioned and produced by Frieze Foundation for Frieze Projects 2011. Photo: Linda Nylind. Courtesy of the artist  262 6.15 Keren Cytter, Video Art Manual, video stills, 2011. Courtesy of the artist  266 6.16 Melanie Gilligan, The Common Sense Substitution, installation view, Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien, Graz, 2016. Installation that combines The Common Sense, Phase 1 (2014–15) and Substitution (2014). Courtesy of Galerie Max Mayer, Düsseldorf  269 6.17 Walter Pichler, TV-Helmet (Portable Living Room), wearable technology, 1967. Courtesy of Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman Innsbruck/Wien. © Nachlass Walter Pichler  271 6.18 Cally Spooner, And you were wonderful, on stage, film still, 2013–15. Five-channel HD film installation, single-channel flat screen monitor, stereo sound 43’26. Commissioned by EMPAC, New York and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Courtesy of the artist, gb agency, Paris, and ZERO, Milan  275 6.19 Simon Denny, Deep Sea Vaudeo Multimedia Double Canvas, installation view, 2009. Inkjet on canvas, stretchers, metal hardware, 160 × 117 × 896 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York. Collection of Julia Stoschek. Photo: Lothar Schnepf  278

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks are due to many people for helping during the production of this book, starting with the staff of Bloomsbury Academic in New York. First of all, Katie Gallof, senior commissioning editor of film & media studies, with whom I started exchanging ideas for a book project on contemporary art and TV back in 2014 and whose enduring enthusiasm over the years has made this publication possible. I’m thankful also to Erin Duffy, editorial assistant, and to Jonathan Nash from the production department, for their attentioon to all the production details, and Eleanor Rose, designer at Bloomsbury Academic, for highlighting the spirit of such hybrid phenomenon, in between art and media, through her graphic concept. Thank you also to Vishnu Muruganandhan, project manager, and all the staff at Integra Software Services, India, for the meticulous work of copyediting, composition, and proofreading. I’m also grateful to all the referees who have kindly accepted to peer-review the manuscript at various stages, both those who preferred to remain anonymous and those who disclosed their names: Julia Ramírez Blanco (University of Barcelona) and Timotheus Vermeulen (University of Oslo). And, of course, my extreme gratitude also goes to Ramírez Blanco and Mieke Bal for their generous endorsements published as blurbs on the back cover of the book, and to Jon Kessler for allowing to use the image of one of his artworks for the cover. My warmest thanks go to those artists, scholars, curators, artists’ collaborators, and studio managers who have answered my requests of information and sent me insights, videos, or documents that have proved crucial at various stages of the research that brought to this publication: Vito Acconci, Charles-Marie Anthonioz (producer of various Harmony Korine’s films), Art & Science Project, Judith Barry, Tilman Baumgärtel, Fern Bayer, Patterson Beckwith, Raymond Bellour, Ina Blom, Skip Blumberg (cofounding member of Videofreex), Joan Braderman, Olaf Breuning, Katerina Valdivia Bruch (Christian Jankowski studio), AA Bronson (cofounding member of General Idea), Colab (in the persons of Andrea Callard, Jane Dickson, Coleen Fitzgibbon, Becky Howland, Alan Moore, and Cara Perlman), Phil Collins, Luca Corbetta (Francesco Vezzoli studio), Keren Cytter, Matthew Day Jackson, Joshua Decter, Jeffrey Deitch, Simon Denny, DIS, Antje Ehmann (Harun Farocki studio), Maurizio Finotto, Lizzie

340

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Fitch, Hal Foster, James Fuentes, Melanie Gilligan, Terry Green (Bjørn Melhus studio), Johan Grimonprez, John Hanhardt, Ken Hakuta (executor, The Estate of Nam June Paik), Mike Hentz (Van Gogh TV), Christian Höller, Christian Jankowski, Ben Jones (cofounding member of Paper Rad), Jon Kessler, Mathieu Laurette, Maurizio Lazzarato, Chip Lord (cofounding member of Ant Farm), Kalup Linzy, LuckyPDF (in the persons of James Early, John Hill, and Yuri Pattison), Ann Magnuson, Trina Mckeever (Richard Serra studio), Bjørn Melhus, MICA-TV (Carol Ann Klonarides and Michael Owen), John Miller, Daan Milius (Johan Grimonprez studio), Siniša Mitrović (coproducer with Phil Collins in the “company” Shade Lane Productions), NASTYNASTY© (Emiliano Biondelli and Valentina Venturi), Roberto Ohrt, Richard Phillips, PFFR, Kristina Lee Podesva, Cay Sophie Rabinowitz, Raindance Corporation (in the persons of Davidson Gigliotti, Michael Shamberg, and Ira Schneider), David Robbins, Jerome Sans, Marinella Senatore, Kenny Scharf, Michelle Silva (Conner Family Trust), Michael Smith, Christopher Sperandio, Mary-Clare Stevens (executive director, Mike Kelley Foundation), Hito Steyerl, Abby Terkuhle, Temporary Services (Brett Bloom and Marc Fischer), Ryan Trecartin, Francesco Vezzoli, Grant Worth, The Yes Men, Gene Zazzaro (Bill Viola studio), Slavoj Žižek, and Flinder Zuyderhoff-Gray (Julian Rosefeld studio). A sign of appreciation also goes to the following museums, foundations, artists’ estates, and galleries for their assistance with the collection of my data, for putting me in touch with some of the artists whose work I discussed, and in some cases for providing me the images that are published in this book: Gretchen Bender Estate, New York; Peter Blum Gallery, New York; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; The Conner Family Trust, San Francisco; Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milan; Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York; Deitch Projects, New York; The Estate of Nam June Paik; Fondazione Lucio Fontana, Milan; Fondazione Prada, Milan; Gagosian, New York; gb agency, Paris; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York; Hauser & Wirth, New York; Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, Los Angeles; Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles; Lisson Gallery, London; Luhring Augustine, New York; Giò Marconi, Milan; Galerie Max Mayer, Düsseldorf; Metro Pictures, New York; Maureen Paley, London; Petzel Gallery, New York; Regen Projects, Los Angeles; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf; Team Gallery, New York; Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman, Innsbruck/Wien; The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; ZERO, Milan; ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. Most of the bibliographic sources I used as references have been retrieved after long phases of research in various libraries: Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library at Columbia University, New York; Elmer Holmes Bobst Library at New York University, New York; Butler Library at Columbia University, New York; Fleet Library at Rhode Island School of Design,

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

341

Providence; Kandinsky Library at Centre Pompidou, Paris; MoMA Archive and Library, New York; New York Public Library, New York. Along with the videos and video documentation that I received directly from some of the artists or their representatives, I also took advantage of the precious services offered by Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York. Although some of the videos discussed are freely circulating online through platforms such as Vimeo and YouTube, in accessing video material, as well as related data, the organizations Film and Video Umbrella, London, Medien Kunst Netz (Media Art Net), UbuWeb, and Video Data Bank (VDB), Chicago also proved fundamental. Over the years, I have written various times about some of the artists and phenomena discussed in this book for magazines and academic journals, including Flash Art, LINK, Mousse, NECSUS, and Senses of Cinema. A special thank-you to Chiara Costa, head of programs at Fondazione Prada, Milan, for commissioning me an essay on the influence of television on the work of Ryan Trecartin, one of the most crucial and inspirational artists discussed in this book. I’ve also presented some of my researches on these issues and artists in papers for conferences such as the one promoted by NECS (European Network for Cinema and Media Studies) and the International Film and Media Studies Conference promoted by the University of Udine/ Gorizia, as well as part of my courses at Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, and the University of Bologna. I’m grateful to Marco Senaldi and Lynn Spigel, whose books on art and television, respectively Arte e Televisione and TV by Design, both incidentally published in 2009, have inspired me to embark on this journey across this fascinating and liminal territory and, through their personal insights and advices, showed me ways to navigate through it. My deepest gratitude also goes to Antonio Somaini for his incisive guidance as advisor of my PhD thesis at Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris, of which this book represents the natural output, and to Philippe Dubois, Ruggero Eugeni, Sandra Lischi, and Dork Zabunyan, members of the jury for the thesis dissertation, who have provided me invaluable feedback and critiques on the work done. I’m also indebted to Vincenzo Trione and Valentina Valentini, who, since my return to Italy after many years in New York, are the academics whose scholarship and friendship have played an increasingly influential role in my understanding and appreciation of the dynamics intercurring between art and media.

INDEX

Abe, Shuya 61 Abramović, Marina 146 Acconci, Vito 70–1, 76, 100 Adams, Bryan 178 Adorno, Theodor W. 10, 22–4, 27, 34, 36, 46 Agamben, Giorgio 30 AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) 110 Aitken, Doug 185 Åkerlund, Jonas 182 Alberti, Leon Battista 25 Aldrin, Edwin “Buzz” 171 Almond, Marc 176 Alt, Carol 177 Anderson, Laurie 63, 189, 208 Anka, Paul 263 Ant Farm 96, 98–9, 104, 124, 126, 210 Antin, David 35 Aphex Twin 183 Arbus, Diane 237 Arcangel, Cory 263 Archigram 126 Arias, Joey 209 Armani, Giorgio 176 Armstrong, Lance 274 Armstrong, Neil 171 Arnatt, Keith 58 Arnheim, Rudolf 10, 20–2, 24, 34 Arpiani, Raffaella and Pagliarini, Federico 149–50 Arquette, Patricia 222 Arriola, Magalí 225 Art and Science Project (A&SP) 161, 163 Art Club 2000 198 Arunandochai, Korakrit 267 Asher, Michael 60

Astaire, Fred 181 Auerbach, Tauba 12, 277 Babes in Toyland 185 Baechler, Donald 177 Bag, Alex 12, 198–201, 249 Baird, John Logie 17, 276 Baldessari, John 85–6, 89, 281 Balla, Giacomo 24 Ballard, J. G. 11, 115–16, 271 BAP 186 Barikin, Amelia 255 Barry, Judith 11, 42, 86–9, 184, 186, 210, 212, 217 Barthes, Roland 22 Barzyk, Fred 59, 65, 282 Basquiat, Jean-Michel 79, 168, 177, 186 Baudrillard, Jean 10, 38–42, 45, 76, 88–9, 170, 229 Béar, Liza 73, 166 Beard, Peter 177 Beard, Thomas 244 Beatles, The 182 Beck 183 Beck, Stephen 59 Beckett, Samuel 204 Beckwith, Patterson 198–200 Beller, Jonathan 10, 48–9, 84 Bellour, Raymond 77, 82 Bender, Gretchen 11, 42, 86, 88–9, 184–5, 210, 212, 217, 257 Benedict, Will 267 Benglis, Lynda 70–1, 79 Benjamin, Walter 23, 46, 48, 148, 158 Bentham, Jeremy 66 Berardi, Franco “Bifo” 47, 113 Berg, Stephan 218, 284

INDEX

Berger, John 158–9 Berger, Maurice 284 Bergman, Ingmar 220 Bergson, Henri 45, 48 Berio, Luciano 139 Berkeley, Busby 181 Berlusconi, Silvio 40, 44–5, 83, 113, 234 Berners-Lee, Tim 2, 49 Bertoglio, Edo 168 Beuys, Joseph 57–8, 63, 186, 230 Beyoncé 274 Bichlbaum, Andy (Jacques Servin) 133 Biolek, Alfred 151 Birkholz, Marie Luise 283 Birnbaum, Dara 11, 42, 79, 86, 89–92, 127, 187, 210, 212, 217, 265 Björk 183, 276 Blair, Frank 158 Blom, Ina 82 Blondie 168, 176 Blumberg, Skip 103 Blur 185 Bobby G 164 Bode, Steven 239 Boetti, Alighiero 58 Bogosian, Eric 208, 212 Boice, Bruce 73 Bokris, Victor 176 Bonanno, Mike (Igor Vamos) 133 Bongiorno, Mike 32, 139 Boorstin, Daniel 101 Bordowitz, Gregg 42, 111 Borges, Jorge Louis 132 Borsellino, Paolo 84 Bosé, Miguel 184 Bosley, Tom 141 Boulanger, Sylvie 283 Bourdieu, Pierre 10, 45, 49 Bourriaud, Nicolas 148, 150–1, 254–5 Boutourline, Serge 64 Bowers, Andrea 263 Bowie, David 168, 182, 202 Boyle, Deirdre 104 Boyle, Lauren 265 Bradbury, Ray 43–4, 270 Braderman, Joan 12, 42, 108, 216–18 Brand, Rolf 166

343

Brathwaite, Fred 168 Braun, Karl Ferdinand 17 Brecht, Bertold 23, 206 Breton, André 135 Breuning, Olaf 188 Broadside TV 96 Brock, Bazon 57 Bronson, A. A. 161 Brown, James 177 Brown, Michael 112 Bruce, Lenny 169 Buchloh, Benjamin H. D. 92, 171 Buggles, The 185 Bulloch, Angela 276–7 Buñuel, Luis 135 Buonarroti, Michelangelo 141 Burden, Chris 11, 146–8, 264 Buren, Daniel 58, 261 Burri, Alberto 25 Burroughs, William S. 42, 100, 178 Burton, Johanna 190 Bush, George W. 119, 124, 133–4 Bussotti, Sylvano 139 Byrne, David 168, 184–5 Cage, John 11, 42, 59, 62–3, 138–40, 142, 148, 206, 264 Cain, Nancy 103 Calder, Alexander 158 Caldwell, John Thornton 219 Callard, Andrea 164–5 Callas, Maria 184 Campiglio, Paolo 25 Campus, Peter 59, 70–1, 177 Carels, Edwin 282 Carlomusto, Jean 111 Carpenter, John 44, 220, 270 Carpenter, Karen 184 Carrey, Jim 240 Carroll, Jim 176 Cars, The 184 Carson, Johnny 142, 168 Castelli, Leo 73 Cates, Phoebe 178 Cattelan, Maurizio 261 Celant, Germano 161, 235 César 74 Chagall, Marc 158

344

INDEX

Chandler, David 78 Chaplin, Charlie 263 Charlesworth, Sarah 108 Chase, Solomon 248, 265 Chemical Brothers, The 183 Cher 222 Chicks on Speed 189 Chin, Mel 12, 42, 217–18 Chion, Michel 183 Chomsky, Noam 108 Chow, Michael 176 Churner, Leah 164 Cicciolina 257 Ciprì, Daniele and Maresco, Franco 82–4 Citton, Yves 48 Clark, Larry 197–8 Clemens, Telfar 248 Clinton, George 168 Colacello, Bob 175–6 Coleman, James 11, 93 Collaborative Projects Inc. (Colab) 11, 164–5, 168, 209 Collins, Phil 12, 42, 189, 223–6, 231–3, 249 Colombo, Furio 32 Comer, Stuart 238 Commediation 96 Conner, Bruce 124–5, 181, 184 Connolly, Maeve 232, 259, 268 Connor, Russell 281 Cook, Sarah 283 Copley, William 177 Coppola, Roman 182 Corbett, Carol 202 Corbijn, Anton 182 Cork, Richard 156 Cornell, Lauren 263 Cort, David 101 Cortez, Diego 168 Costa, Eduardo 207 Coyne, Kevin 187 Crary, Jonathan 88 Creed, Martin 190, 261 Crimp, Douglas 41, 85 Crippa, Roberto 25 Critical Art Ensemble 133 Cronenberg, David 5, 75, 89, 270

Crystal, Coca 167–8 Cunningham, Chris 182–3 Cunningham, Merce 62–3 Curiosity Killed the Cat 184 Curtis, Jamie Lee 263 Cytter, Keren 12, 265–6, 268 D’Alessandro, Joe 171 Dalí, Salvador 11, 135–8, 142, 261, 264 Daniels, Dieter 53, 63, 216, 284 Danto, Arthur 7, 170 Darling, Candy 171 Davidovich, Jaime 12, 164, 207–9, 249 Davis, Douglas 60 Davis, Paul B. 202–3 Davis, Stuart 158 De Certeau, Michel 130, 132 De Dominicis, Gino 58 De Maria, Walter 57, 59 De Mol, Jon 229 De Sica, Vittorio 105 De Simone, Anna Luigia 178 DeVille, Abigail 259 De Vito, Danny 106 Dearraindrop 202 Debord, Guy 10, 29–32, 34, 37–9, 89, 148–9, 170 Decter, Joshua 156, 217, 282 Deep Dish TV 108, 110, 112, 118 Deitch, Jeffrey 259–60 Deleuze, Gilles 1–3, 9, 14, 83, 271 DeLillo, Don 132 Demos, T. J. 90–1 Deneuve, Catherine 234 Denny, Simon 12, 14, 51, 278 Derrida, Jacques 46 Devo 141, 186 Di Marino, Bruno 185 Dibbets, Jan 57–8, 76 Dickson, Jane 164 Diggers, The 100, 102 Dine, Jim 77 DIS 248, 265–6 Disney, Walt 182 DIVA TV (Damned Interfering Video Activists) 110–11 Divine (Harris Glenn Milstead) 176

INDEX

Donegan, Cheryl 187 Douglas, Stan 11, 49, 93 Droschi, Sandro 284 Drucker, Zackary 259 Duane, Hildegarde 207 Dubois, Philippe 7–8, 14 Duchamp, Marcel 7, 30, 138, 258 Dunning, George 182 DuPont, Alfred I. 104 Duran Duran 177–8 Eco, Umberto 10, 32–4, 39–41, 95–7, 139, 210 Eisenstein, Sergei M. 10, 21–2, 34 Ellis, Bret Easton 263 Ellis, John 218 Ellison, Casey Jane 261, 263–4, 267 Emin, Tracey 11, 155–7, 237, 259 Eno, Brian 184 Enzensberg, Hans Magnus 38 Ernst, Max 135 Escari, Raúl 207 Esslin, Martin 204 Etkin, Sue 174 Eugeni, Ruggero 12–13 Ewen, Stuart 108 Export, Valie 77 Faithfull, Marianne 184 Falco, Tav 168 Falcone, Giovanni 84 Fallaci, Oriana 234 Farmer, John Alan 282 Farocki, Harun 11, 49, 79, 120–1 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner 229 Fast, Omer 127 Fatboy Slim 185 Fend, Peter 164 Fernós, Fausto 249 Ferraro, James 272 Feruglio, Barbara 151 Fincher, David 182 Finotto, Maurizio 161, 163 Fiore, Quentin 28, 98 Fischerspooner 189 Fischinger, Oskar 182 Fisher, Mark (artist) 214 Fisher, Mark (philosopher) 272

345

Fitch, Lizzie 248 Fitzgerald, Ella 169 Fitzgibbon, Coleen 164–5 Fleischer, Max and Dave 182 Fleshtones, The 168 Floyd, George 112 Fontana, Emi 149–50 Fontana, Lucio 10, 24–7, 32, 34, 57 Forcefield 189 Ford, Henry 47 Foster, Hal 41, 124 Foucault, Michel 1–3, 66 Franco, James 252 François, Michel 12, 273–4, 276 Frank, Peter 209 Frank, Robert 59 Fraser, Andrea 261 Freccero, Carlo 44 Fremont, Vincent 172–5 Friedlander, Lee 74, 76 Friedrich, Caspar David 264 Fripp, Robert 168 Frost, James 182 Fuentes, James 259 Fugs, The 167 Fuller, Buckminster 98 Funcke, Bettina 142 Futura 2000 177 Gabriel, Peter 63 GALA Committee, The 217 Galas, Diamanda 184 Ganahl, Rainer 119 Garcia, David 132 Garner, Eric 112 Gaudin, Antoine 183 Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) 110 Geller, Matthew 282 General Idea 160–2 Genet, Jean 204, 223, 225 Gershuny, Phyllis 97 Gerstner, Karl 56 Giacometti, Alberto 158 Gigliotti, Davidson 103 Gilbert & George 58 Gillette, Frank 64–6, 95–7, 241 Gilligan, Melanie 12, 268–70 Ginsberg, Allen 62–3, 114

346

Glass, Philip 63, 176 Glazer, Jonathan 182 Glitters, Goldie 221 Global Village 96 Godard, Jean-Luc 42, 82–4 Goddard, Trisha 237 Goeschl, Roland 79 Goldberg, Roselee 177–8, 259 Goldfrapp 185 Goldin, Nan 184 Goldstein, Jack 85 Gondry, Michel 182–3 Gordon, Douglas 121 Gordon, Kim 185 Goude, Jean-Paul 183 Gowers, Bruce 182 Graef, Roger 111 Graham, Dan 11, 68, 127, 212, 228, 241 Graham, Paul 78 Graham, Rodney 190 Gran Fury 110 Grasso, Aldo 84 Greenberg, Clement 23, 157–8 Greenwald, Dara 103 Greenwood, Wynne 190, 261 Gregorič, Alenka 284 Greschner, Ron 177 Griffin, Merv 140 Griffith, Melanie 263 Grimonprez, Johan 11, 49, 130–2 Gronlund, Melissa 268 Guattari, Félix 271 Guerrilla Girls 110, 142 Guglielmi, Angelo 83 Gun Club, The 168 Gutenberg, Johannes 27 Gygax, Raphael 202 Haacke, Hans 261 Habermas, Jürgen 41 Hager, Steven 168 Hains, Raymond 53 Hake, Caroline 273, 276 Hall & Oates 177 Hall, David 77 Hall, Jerry 178 Halleck, DeeDee 108–9, 118

INDEX

Hamilton, Richard 74, 116 Hampton, Fred 103 Hanhardt, John G. 54, 112, 172, 208 Hannaford, Susan 209 Haraway, Donna 108 Hardt, Michael 47 Haring, Keith 177–8, 209–10 Harrison, Julie 164 Harry, Debbie 75, 168, 174, 176, 178 Haus-Rucker-Co. 270 Hawkins, John 166 Hayden, Tom 103 Hefner, Hugh 169 Heidegger, Martin 10, 22–4, 34, 46, 48 Hell, Richard 208 Henderson, Linda Dalrymple 24 Herman, Pee Wee 177 Hewlett, Jamie 183 Higa, Karin 221 Hill, Annette 242 Hill, Gary 60 Hirst, Damien 155, 185, 237 Hitchcock, Alfred 132, 135 Hitler, Adolf 229 Hockney, David 176 Hoffman, Abbie 100–1, 103–4, 115, 148, 167 Hofmann, Irene 283 Hogan, Hulk 141 Holert, Tom 61 Holliday, Frank 209 Holliday, George 111–12 Holt, Nancy 70–1 Holzer, Baby Jane 171, 216 Hooper, Tobe 75 Horkheimer, Max 23 Horst, Horst P. 177 Horton, Andrew 205 Howard, Ron 198 Howland, Becky 164–5 Huffman, Kathy Rae 58, 281, 283 Hughes, Robert 159–60 Husni-Bey, Adelita 276 Huxley, Aldous 43–4, 270 Huyghe, Pierre 238, 255, 261 Information Structures 96 Ingall, Andrew 107

INDEX

Interpol 185 Isaak, Chris 187 Isou, Isidor 56 Israel, Alex 261, 263 Iveković, Sanja 11, 79, 116–17 Jackson, Janet 187 Jackson, Matthew Day 264–5 Jacobs, Marc 178 Jacoby, Roberto 207 Jaffe, Louis 97 Jagger, Bianca 176 Jameson, Fredric 10, 41–2, 63, 185 Jamie, Cameron 197 Jankowski, Christian 11, 49, 150–4, 256, 264 Januszczak, Waldemar 156 Jarman, Derek 184 Jarry, Alfred 204 Jenkins, Henry 10, 50, 203, 245, 267 Joergensen, Steffen 267 Johnson, Betsey 174, 176 Johnson, Stephen R. 183, 185 Jonas, Joan 60 Jones, Ben 202–4 Jones, Grace 178 Jones, Mick 168 Jonze, Spike 183 Joselit, David 66, 79, 100, 102–3 Juhasz, Alexandra 109–10 K8 Hardy 261, 263 Kahlen, Wolf 74 Kanda, Jesse 183 Kaprow, Allan 59, 67, 77 Karan, Donna 177 Kaufman, Andy 204, 206 Keaton, Buster 206 Kelley, Mike 12, 42, 49, 191–8, 201, 212, 214–15, 222 Kennedy, John F. 74, 124–6 Kennedy, Robert F. 96 Kentridge, William 93 Kern, Richard 184 Kessler, Jon 11, 121–4, 259 Khaled, Leila 131 King, Martin Luther 96 King, Rodney 111–12, 118

347

Kitano, Takeshi 258 Klonarides, Carole Ann 143–4 Kluge, Alexander 229 Knef, Hildegard 230 Koons, Jeff 257, 259 Korine, Harmony 198, 212 Korman, Harvey 141 Korot, Beryl 97 Kovacs, Ernie 12, 204–6, 208 Kovel, Joel 108 Kracauer, Siegfried 23 Kraftwerk 168–9 Krauss, Rosalind 11, 41, 70–1, 76, 93, 100, 229 Kriesche, Richard 79, 148 Krisma 272 Kristeva, Julia 191 Kruger, Barbara 85, 92, 110 Kupferberg, Tuli 108, 167 Kwong Chi, Tseng 209 Lacan, Jacques 46, 70 Laibach 189 Lamelas, David 12, 207–8 Land, Nick 272 Laurette, Mathieu 11, 149–50, 264 Lautner, John 220 Lawrence, Vicky 141 Lawson, Thomas 92 Lazzarato, Maurizio 10, 47–9, 84 LCD Soundsystem 185 Leary, Timothy 114 Leg, Lung 184 Lennon, John 11, 113–15, 228 Leonardo (da Vinci) 147 Leth, Jørgen 141, 177 Letterman, David 168 Levine, Cary 197 Levine, Les 67, 208 Levi-Strauss, Claude 85 Lewis, Robert Q. 136 Lindsay, Arto 168 Lindsay-Hogg, Michael 182 Linzy, Kalup 12, 42, 242, 244, 249–53 Liston, Sonny 140–1 Living Theatre 59, 62, 167 Lohan, Lindsay 220 Loichinger, Hannes 283

348

INDEX

Long, Richard 57 Longo, Robert 178, 184, 186, 208, 257 LOT-EK 270 Love, Courtney 178 Lovink, Geert 132 Lualdi, Antonella 234–6 Lucas, George 42 Lucas, Martin 118 LuckyPDF 262–4 Lueg, Konrad 74 Lumet, Sydney 238 Lunch, Lydia 184 Lurie, John 168 Lutjeans, Phylls 146 Lye, Len 182 Lynch, David 244 MacAgy, Douglas 158 Machiavelli, Niccolò 30 Madani, Tala 79 Magliozzi, Ron 209 Magnuson, Ann 42, 208–11 Maharaj Ji (Prem Rawat) 104 Maijlata, Eva 228 Mailer, Norman 95 Malina, Judith 167 Manovich, Lev 10, 49 Manson, Marilyn 263 Manzi, Alberto 32 Mapplethorpe, Robert 237 Marclay, Christian 93 Marcoci, Roxana 117 Marconi, Guglielmo 20 Margolies, John S. 65 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 10, 20, 34 Maripol 168 Marker, Chris 182 Marks, Craig 182 Marlow, Tim 156 Martin, Timothy 195 Martin, Trayvon 112 Martínez, Chus 283 Marx, Karl 29–30, 271 Masnata, Pino 20, 34 Masotta, Oscar 207 Matisse, Henri 136 Mauri, Fabio 77, 84 May Day Video Collective 96

McCarthy, Paul 191, 194–8, 212 McCarthy, Tom 132 McCormick, Carlo 259 McDermott, David 209 McKenzie, Michael 209 McLuhan, Marshall 10, 27–9, 32, 34, 36, 39, 43, 59, 62, 76, 95, 97–8, 129, 207, 210, 270 Media Access 96 Megadeath 184 Melhus, Bjørn 12, 242–3 Mellors, Nathaniel 267 Menendez, Lyle and Erik 197 Merz, Mario 58 MICA-TV 86, 143–4 Michalka, Matthias 283 Miéville, Anne-Marie 82–4 Mignot, Dorine 281 Miller, John 12, 230–2 Miller, Marc H. 281 Mines, Ashland 248 Minnelli, Liza 176 Minter, Marilyn 263 Minujín, Marta 207 Miranda, Carmen 222 Miyake, Issey 177 Moffett, Donald 110 Moholy-Nagy, László 10, 18, 34 Molesworth, Helen 110 Mondino, Jean-Baptiste 183 Monroe, Marilyn 171 Montana, Claude 176 Montano, Linda 208 Monty Python 204, 206 Moore, Alan W. 164 Moore, Henry 158 Moorman, Charlotte 11, 62–4, 142–5, 264 Moravia, Alberto 234 Moretti, Luigi 25 Mori, Ikue 168 Morin, Edgar 234 Moulton, Shana 12, 242, 244 Mulcahy, Russell 185 Munroe, Don 174 Muntadas, Antoni 82 Murakami, Takashi 185 Murata, Takeshi 202–4

INDEX

Nara, Yoshitomo 185 NASTYNASTY© 161, 163 Nauman, Bruce 11, 67–8, 241 Negri, Antonio 47 New Order 184 Newman, James 58–9 Newman, Michael Z. 56 Niccol, Andrew M. 240 Nietzsche, Friedrich 48 Nimoy, Leonard 264 Nixon, Richard 30, 62, 114 Nobuhara, Sumie 222 Nomi, Klaus 168, 209 Norton, Margot 200 Not Channel Zero 112, 118 Nyong’o, Tavia 253 O’Brien, Glenn 11, 164, 166–9, 176, 209 Ohner, Vraath 132 Ohrt, Roberto 254 O’Keeffe, Georgia 176 Okiishi, Ken 12, 279 Olin, Benjamin 167–8 Ondine (Robert Olivo) 171 Oneohtrix Point Never (Daniel Lopatin) 272 Ono, Yoko 11, 74, 113–15, 178, 228 Opie, Catherine 263 Orfeo TV 113 Orwell, George 13, 43–4, 62, 241, 270 Oursler, Tony 185, 191, 208 Owen, Michael 143–4 Owens, Craig 41, 86, 90 Pacino, Al 238 Paik, Nam June 11, 35, 54–6, 59–64, 67, 74, 84, 96, 98, 129, 142, 164, 181 Palmer, Robert 168 Paper Rad 203–4 Paper Tiger Television (PTTV) 11, 107–9, 112, 118, 164 Parker, Sarah Jessica 259 Parreno, Philippe 121 Partz, Felix 161 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 233–6 Peltomäki, Kirsi 60

349

People With AIDS (PWA) 110 People’s Video Theater 96 Perlman, Cara 164–5 Perón, Juan Domingo 208 Persky, Lester 216 Pet Shop Boys 185 Peters, Britta 283 Peterson, Sidney 158 Pettibon, Raymond 191, 195–7 Pfahler, Kembra 263 PFFR 202–4 Pflumm, Daniel 272 Phillips, Richard 12, 220 Picasso, Pablo 147, 160, 176 Picasso, Paloma 176 Pichler, Walter 270–1 Piene, Otto 57, 59, 74, 76 Pinotti, Andrea 9 Poe, Amos 168 Polanski, Roman 220 Polke, Sigmar 74–5 Pollock, Jackson 157 Pop, Iggy 168 Pope Paul VI 96 Popper, Karl R. 10, 45, 49 Portman, Natalie 220 Postman, Neil 10, 43–5, 49 Presley, Elvis 171 Prill, Sondra 187, 249 Prince, Richard 79, 85, 143, 186, 218 Psychic TV 186 Public Image Ltd. 201 Queen 182 Radul, Judy 284 Raindance Corporation 96–100, 104, 106, 108 Rainer, Yvonne 59 Ramones 178 Ratcliff, Curtis 101 Ray, Man 24, 135 Reagan, Ronald 186, 214 Reed, Lou 176 Rees, Andy 209 Reibach, Earl 64 R.E.M. 184–5 Rembrandt 147

350

Residents, The 189 Revolutionary People’s Communication Project 96 Ricci, Christina 263 Richter, Gerhard 74 Richter, Hans 182 Rimanelli, David 259 Rist, Pipilotti 187 Rivers, Larry 176–7 Robbins, David 255–8, 261 Robida, Albert 17–18 Robinson, Walter 208 Rock, Mick 182 Rodgers, Nile 168 Rogers, Ginger 181 Romanek, Mark 183 Rosefeldt, Julian 12, 218–19 Rosenberg, Harold 157 Rosenthal, Norman 156 Rosler, Martha 42, 108, 127, 129–30 Roso, Marco 265 Ross, David A. 147 Rossellini, Roberto 105 Rotella, Mimmo 53 Rouch, Jean 234 Royoux, Jean-Christophe 93–4 Rozendaal, Rafael 263 RTMark 133 Rubell, Jennifer 263 Rubell, Steve 176 Rubin, Jerry 103 Rubnitz, Tom 210–11 Rucker, Allen 104 Ryan, Paul 64, 95–8 Rybczyński, Zbigniew 183 Rykiel, Sonya 176 Saarinen, Aline 158 Saatchi, Charles 155, 259 Saltz, Jerry 259 Sandberg, Patrick 266 Saville, Jenny 155 Saylor, Ken 87 Scavullo, Francesco 177 Scharf, Kenny 177–8, 209–10 Schenck, Rocky 186 Schiaparelli, Elsa 135 Schiller, Herbert 108

INDEX

Schlingensief, Christoph 12, 229–30 Schmela, Alfred 74 Schneider, Ira 64–6, 95, 97, 241 Schneider, Steve 166 Schoenberg, Arnold 23 Schoolman, Carlota Fay 72 Schum, Gerry 11, 57–9, 65, 76, 84, 164 Schutz, Dana 112 Scott, Ridley 13 Scott-Heron, Gil 102 Scruton, Roger 156 Scully, Tom 209 Sedgwick, Edie 69–70, 140, 171, 220 Sednaoui, Stéphane 183 Seery, John 64 Segal, George 74 Self, Will 156 Senaldi, Marco 68, 139, 150, 176, 236, 258 Senatore, Marinella 256–7 Serra, Richard 11, 58, 70–3, 84 Sex, John 209–10 Seyfarth, Ludwig 254 Sgarbi, Vittorio 160 Shafrazi, Tony 178 Shakira 244 Shamberg, Michael 97–9, 104, 106, 108 Shapiro, Meyer 157 Sharp, Willoughby 164, 166 Shaviro, Steven 75 Shaw, Jim 191 Sherman, Cindy 11, 85–6, 89, 91, 142–5, 177, 185, 200, 210, 245, 257 Shields, Brooke 177 Shiraga, Kazuo 163 Shrigley, David 185 Shynola 183 Siegel, Eric 64–5 Sigismondi, Floria 183 Simmons, Laurie 143 Simmons, Richard 281 Singer, Debra 259 Sirk, Douglas 222 Skinner, Doug 214 Smith, Jack 171, 245, 249

INDEX

Smith, Kiki 164 Smith, Michael 12, 42, 177, 208, 212–15 Smith, Ralph Lee 95 Smiths, The 184, 189, 223 Smithson, Robert 58 Snyder, Stephanie 190 Soft Cell 176 Solanas, Valerie 172 Somaini, Antonio 9, 21 Sonic Youth 184 Sontag, Susan 11, 119, 222 Sparks 177 Spelling, Aaron 217 Spencer, Peter 151 Sperandio, Christopher 259 Spielberg, Steven 75, 176 Spigel, Lynn 157–8, 173, 177, 204, 206, 216 Spooner, Cally 12, 274–6 Sprouse, Stephen 174, 178 Statler, Chuck 183 Steding, Walter 168, 172, 176, 184 Stein, Chris 168, 176 Steyerl, Hito 10, 12, 14, 50–1, 277 Sting 177 Stockhausen, Karlheinz 62 Stone, Oliver 212, 263 Stupid Set, The 186 Sugar 187 Superstudio 126, 270 Sutcliffe, Jim 164 Sylvester, David 156 Tadlock, Thomas 64–5 Talking Heads 42, 185–6, 189 Tambellini, Aldo 57, 59, 64, 76 Tannenbaum, Rob 182 Taylor, Elizabeth 171 Teasdale, Parry 101, 106 Technotronic 187 Television (band) 186 Television Personalities 186 Televisionary Associates 96 Temple, Julian 183 Temporary Services 161, 163 Terkhule, Abbie 259 Testing the Limits 110–11

351

Thomas, Hank Willis 249 Thomas, Mickalene 79 Thompson, Hunter S. 95 Throbbing Gristle 189 Till, Emmett 112 Tillmans, Wolfgang 185 Tito, Josip Broz 117 Tolstoy, Leo 206 Top Value Television (or TVTV) 104 Toro, David 248 Toscani, Oliviero 110 T. R. Uthco 126 Tracy + the Plastics 190, 261 Travis, Greg 180 Trecartin, Ryan 12, 51, 242, 244–51 Trione, Vincenzo 160 Tucker, Marcia 86 Tuxedomoon 168 TVTV 11, 60, 96, 104–6 Twins, Thompson 63 Uecker, Günther 74 Ulman, Amalia 267 University Community Video 96 Valentini, Valentina 283 Van Assche, Christine 284 VanDerBeek, Stan 59 Van der Werve, Guido 79 Vaneigem, Raoul 30 Van Gogh TV 254–5 Van Gogh, Vincent 147 Vasari, Giorgio 155 Vassi, Marco 97 Vattimo, Gianni 32 Velvet Underground, The 172, 176, 184 Vertov, Dziga 10, 18–19, 21, 34, 105 Vezzoli, Francesco 12, 220, 233–6, 239 Videofreex 11, 60, 96, 99, 101–7, 109, 113 Viola, Bill 49, 60, 77, 80–1, 84 Virilio, Paul 11, 119–20 Visconti, Luchino 105 Vitale, Antonio 151 Von Trier, Lars 274 Vontobel, Carol 103

352

INDEX

Vostell, Wolf 10, 35, 53–4, 56–7, 60, 74–5 Vreeland, Diana 174, 176 Wadleigh, Michael 101 Walker, John A. 159, 182 Walker, Kara 249 Wallace, David Foster 198 Walters, Barbara 207 Ward, Frazer 146 Warhol, Andy 11, 42, 49, 69–70, 78–9, 140–2, 167–80, 184, 216, 218, 220, 227–8, 249, 263–4 Washington, Isaac 141 Waters, John 176, 222, 245, 249 Watson, Paul 236–7 Waz, Gerlinde 284 Wearing, Gillian 12, 155, 236–9 Weber, Ela 234 Weber, Samuel 4–5, 10, 15, 46–7, 49 Wegman, William 59, 177 Weibel, Peter 11, 76–8, 116, 126–8, 241–2 Weiner, Lawrence 58 Weintraub, Joe 64–5 Weir, Peter 240 Weiwei, Ai 190 Wesselmann, Tom 74 West, Don 103 West, Kanye 185 Wevers, Ursula 57–8 Whifler, Graeme 189 Whiston, Andrew “W. I. Z.” 183 White, James 168

White, Joshua 214 White Stripes, The 183 Wiley, Kehinde 259 Wilkins, Heather 237, 239 Williams, Hype 183 Williams, Matt 284 Williams, Megan 104 Williams, Michelle 220 Williams, Raymond 10, 36–7, 82 Wise, Howard 64–5, 95, 281 Wojnarowicz, David 184 Wojtowicz, John 238–9 Wolfe, Tom 95 Women’s AIDS Video Enterprise (WAVE) 110 Woods, James 75 Worth, Grant 266 Yello 189 Yes Men, The 11, 49, 130, 132–4 Yonemoto, Bruce and Norman 12, 42, 194, 220–2, 281 Young, Neil 202 Youngblood, Gene 35, 57–8, 98 Zamora, Ronny 94 Zappa, Frank 59, 177–8 Zapruder, Abraham 126 Zavattini, Cesare 105–6 Zedong, Mao 30, 108 Zeri, Federico 160 Zidane, Zinédine 121 Žižek, Slavoj 229, 239, 242 Zontal, Jorge 161

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