Arts institutions could think of their involvement in television as a commitment to media education in order to differentiate or emphasize the qualities and problems of the medium overall.
...

















...
It is a critical task to discuss the changes in television over the past thirty years: whether caused by artists' intervention, reaction to repressed broadcast standards, or the medium's introduction into the arts institution ...












...
Audiences identify with the dramatic tension or comic relief in the electronic proscenium and act, or perform, accordingly.
...










...
With the advent of cable television in the 1970s, video artists had the impression that finally, after years of work, they had found a job.
...












...
There is a vast audience for experimental television, and for works produced in the `new media,' but a method to measure reception without the required packaging isn't in place.
...










...
Artists were quick to challenge TV's simulations and pretense. TV is equally quick to interpret artists' work in video as esoteric.
...







...
The connections between `net art' and experiments in television are striking, if not alarming.
...









...
The regimes of new media technologies cannot, at this time, fulfill our expectations of what we desire most from them.
...





pics from the exhibition @ Kunsthalle Wien

Robert Riley: Yes, absolutely. If not now, when? But how do we choose to define television? There are many aspects of the medium to consider: the medium of video in modern and contemporary art, as opposed to the widespread industry of television, including broadcast and educational television (an exclusive territory set aside for public use in the 1960s). Or, the history of the medium in terms of its instrumentation: the origins of television in relation to scientific research, its evolution in terms of innovations in electrical engineering, and its application to particular industry functions. Each is worthy of exploration, and definition, by arts institutions. Arts institutions could think of their involvement in television as a commitment to media education in order to differentiate or emphasize the qualities and problems of the medium overall. The social influences, and distinctions between each form of television, are unquestionable. The forms cross-talk, but seldom communicate. Television is elusive, yet pervasive. Television is difficult, perhaps impossible, to define as there are so many branches of it in our era. The field is overgrown, congested with interrelated media. The emerging generation of digital television, and video, in the context of computational technology and image animation processes known as `new media,' covers the lot.

JD: For me, one of the chief definitions of television is that it is a central instrument of communication, information, entertainment and distraction that I can access, at will. When you refer to the need for “media education,” are you suggesting that cultural institutions provide more information about the history of television as a commercial medium, in relation to the idea of television as an artistic medium?

RR: What agency exists to interpret the use, or rhetoric, of television in the analysis of fine art images and objects? Why not think critically about the television image alone? Why not interpret television? Television as a means of delivering information to the consumer is neither fixed nor free of pernicious elements. The constantly changing environment of redress is, I think, the essential character of the medium. At the same time, television has as many uses in art and commerce, in culture and society, as we can define for it. By enlisting the arts institution in media education I mean to inspire full comprehension of the communication apparatus as a medium, an art form, and an industry, to reveal its functions, its aesthetic, and its effect on perception and behavior. Emphasis on perception of television as an artist's medium is very important. It breaks the assumption that television arrives fully formed through a hole in the wall, as if a force of nature. From my perspective, television isn't fixed. It's potent. The technology migrates to a set of applications, be they commercial, educational, or art production. It is a critical task to discuss the changes in television over the past thirty years: whether caused by artists' intervention, reaction to repressed broadcast standards, or the medium's introduction into the arts institution for educational or promotional purposes that deliver ideas or information about art to visitors. We might agree that television, generally defined, is limited as an avenue of personal vision, because the medium has been eclipsed, or conscripted, for the time being by industrial application or commercial interests.

JD: In a sense, I think it's taken for granted that we see things differently since the advent of television, but it may be difficult to quantify or qualify these perceptual shifts. How would you begin to describe this phenomenon?

RR: Have you noticed how often people behave as if in front of a camera? Television's effects are, I think, predictable. Is a natural disaster life threatening, or is it entertainment? Why is our preferred representation of the human face, and figure, one of agony and struggle? Audiences identify with the dramatic tension or comic relief in the electronic proscenium and act, or perform, accordingly. Celebrity endorsements of commercial products are, I think, related to this kind of identification. Television is a medium that migrates not only in its applications, but images wander off the screen into the memory, to become a public presence. If we agree that the definition of the medium as phenomena, the influence of television can be seen in public behavior, and it can be measured in the work of visual artists, not necessarily video artists. The fast pace of television, its value free collage of imagery, permeates memory. The engineered space of television certainly impacts perception and vision. Simulated experiences on television are experiences none the less. Many visual artists take their imaginations to the task of telling stories in video often to argue with its influence. Ilene Segalove's original series “Why I Got Into TV and Other Stories” observes the phenomena of television as itself a story. She can't imagine a way of life outside the experience defined by television. Likewise, visual artists of all kinds find a set of symbols in television through which they receive attention, or reach an audience.

JD: There was a brief moment, a few decades ago, when there was a limited opportunity for American artists involved with the evolution of video as an artists' medium, to produce work for the context of television. I am thinking specifically of the Experimental TV Workshops in Public Television. As a curator intimately involved with the development of video and related media art practices over the past twenty years, why do you believe this opportunity was so short lived?

RR: Artist-in resident and television workshops were initially established to permit the visual artist access to high-end broadcast-quality equipment through the mentoring or cooperation of the engineer. A shift in practice from the artists' interest in the exploration of the electronic image alone, to subject matter of a very personal nature, created some tensions. Not necessarily tensions in the studio or in post-production facilities, but tension in what was imagined as audience reaction. This recalls the `culture wars' of the 1980s, when public television grew increasingly antagonistic toward the broadcast of so-called experimental documentaries such as Marlon Riggs' “Tongues Untied” (an autobiography of a gay black man), or “Son of Sam, and Delilah” by Charles Atlas (a work that unleashed the terror of AIDS infection, youth and death, as a burlesque). There were arguments over the content of artists' television in mass media, and the validity of human experience over the social behavior otherwise reinforced by the culture of television, and this was regrettable. Resistance to this kind of powerful new work put significant pressure on a handful of visionary television producers, and the long-term survival of the art programs they directed. Independent producers, and artists, grew more and more interested in the mechanism of television-- the medium as both a social and an artistic force. The revolutionizing power of modern technology was again a possibility. For a period of time, a high art revolution in television, which measured change and progress from the low income, or no income, artists' life was tangible. Without workshop programs, access to television was costly. There was a collective belief that artists would transform television – and they did. (see Footnote, below)

JD: With the technology of personal video recorders, everyday people became their own newsgathering agency—everyone a documentary artist! What do you think of the often-repeated argument a few decades ago that portable video technology could – or should – have triggered the re-democratization of mainstream television to the proverbial `masses'? And now, as digital video has become increasingly mass-market, and linked to personal computers, the notion of a home-studio system for the production of television or movies destined for the Internet, for example, is a reality. But whether this does, or does not, represent a “democratization” of the medium remains unclear.

RR: With the advent of cable television in the 1970s, video artists had the impression that finally, after years of work, they had found a job. It has been delightful to see the restrictions and pallet of broadcast television exposed by the popularity of experimental drama and commissioned work on cable. Artists have taken advantage of these technological and market developments, and schools of thought, over the years for exploration and application to specific projects. The values inscribed in artists' video and ways in which work is historically contingent with the developments in -- and introduction of -- new technologies are compelling. The short-lived experiments in television represent a culture of video that established ways of thinking about art and technology that cycle. The significant difference between the initial period of artists' forays into broadcast media, and now, might be the awareness of the social changes, and the cultural issues, that the technology of television has influenced. People shoot and sell their hand-held films and videotapes to networks at high cost for broadcast in the context of the news, implicating them as workers in the industry of television. Does this development democratize, or contribute to the problem of interpretation? Or is the increasing consolidation in television of the independently produced image, packaged as product for the presumed audience, a break-through? Iconic images such as the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination, or the beating of Rodney King by the Los Angeles Police, are two examples. Many more images are shot and sold each day. It was often said, that the technology of video would grow less expensive with each generation of machine, and subsequent manufacture of equipment with the determination of its use. The mobility of the camera in a fractured society travels to the margins and looks back in. Television changes its forms and methods of address quickly. Migration and evolution, all at once. Shifts in television production are sometimes inspired by artistic response. When on-line access to video is commonplace, and numerous hours of material produced, I can only imagine the fracturing of society the image will induce.

JD: In other words, the interconnection between technological evolution and the evolution of perception, and artistic vision?

RR: Yes. This claim is substantial. Such connections are significant and not at all hypothetical. The goal of The Center for Experiments in Television at KQED, for instance, was to explore dimensions of perception in television through independent work in art and communication, or visual theory. Many believe that television is an epistemological space – the technology of television has knowledge and aesthetics in its engineering, apart from the information it carries (which is merely a superficial addition to its codes and operation).

JD: From your perspective, what factors contributed to the demise of experimental television in the United States?

RR: Experimental television and artists' independent production grew greater, not less. I see this development not specifically as the demise, but rather a shortage of systems and ability of the broadcast industry to deal with forceful, and intelligent, content. Access to the public imagination has been mediated by the information industries for a very long time. The first workshops for experimental television recognized the vitality of vision stemming from questions of perception, to larger issues of human rights and political agitation. These artists enjoyed the support of what was known as `the counter culture'– factions working for a democratic society against racism, sexism, classism. There are a number of books that offer considerable insight into the complex worlds of artists media among the more dominant forms of commercial and public television, including Deirdre Boyle's Subject to Change: Guerrilla Television Revisited (1997). This book reproduces a page from TVTV's scrapbook kept during the 1972 Presidential Election Convention called “Shooter's Guide,” a list of preparations for taking effective surveillance shots with video.

JD: By experimental television, I mean the idea of creating a niche, `a small space' inside of public television (or, in commercial television) for the cultivation of artistic practices, a relevant laboratory environment that also has an audience beyond the specialized art community...

RR: Independent producers are clamoring for commissions and opportunities in television. There is a term in use today that wasn't spoken at the time content-rich video art was withheld from broadcast television. Controversial work of almost any kind was withheld when it was assumed that the station's audience wouldn't understand it. The term used today is `market censorship'. This term suggests that the central problems of exclusion have been identified. This question of the audience haunts the potential for artists' productions in television. Popular response to new program content in cable television might refresh the mandate in public television for experimentation or innovation in the medium.

JD: How did mainstream television grow almost completely inaccessible to artists, particularly with the context of American television? And how do we account for the increased opportunities for artists within European contexts to produce work for television, such as Channel Four in England?

RR: Good question. Once artists' work was squeezed into an entertainment format of television, experiments in the electronic image evolved uneasily. Artists grew critical of the industry's genre classification, its audience projections, and consumer polls. Existing criteria for image making and time sequencing were challenged in video, redefined as an artist's medium. New work created frictions, and was considered hostile toward established production methods and storytelling, rather than innovative and seeking. There has always been the presence of visionaries and engineers. Not all programmers are visionaries, nor all engineers are artists, but the potential for it exists. The development of opportunities in Europe must be a response to conscience – to promote the production of innovation with trust and integrity. Good solutions are often the result of conflict and agitation-- Channel Four was originally set-up as an alternative to the more established BBC when artists sought control of their productions.

JD: Is there simply a fundamental, paradigmatic or existential, incompatibility between commercial television and artistic experimentation? Were the short-lived MTV “artbreaks,” or Andy Warhol's MTV show during the 1980s, the apogee of the artist-mainstream television confluence in the U.S., I ask with a bit of sarcasm...

RR: There is a vast audience for experimental television, and for works produced in the `new media,' but a method to measure reception without the required packaging isn't in place. MTV provided a context for innovations in animation and explicit content. Fast moving, accelerated product, developed in association with the success of the music recording industries was largely... for the fun of it and to stimulate sales. The Warhol `scene' TV featured the artist as a provocateur and, I think, exploited his interest to be on TV, or to be TV. Neither of these are primary examples of artists' television as I recognize it. Yet this work -- defined as art in the context of television production (but not artist produced) -- was, in fact, broadcast.

JD: So, perhaps, the tension is between the artist's intention and the opportunities for the artist to articulate “inside” of mainstream television itself?

RR: There is a story that Nam June Paik blew out the transmission tower at WGBH during a broadcast of the artists' videotape, because his color requirements exceeded its threshold. The New Television Workshop remained committed to experiments even if the artists put the station at considerable risk, technically or content-wise. There are many, many stories of audience response to artists' work on PBS from viewers who thought, perhaps, that their TV sets might be broken. Psychedelic influence in image manipulation or coloration was common. Experimental documentaries, some of the first works to explore confessional subject matter through unadorned black and white material, featured call-in numbers posted on the screen connecting to crisis centers—just in case viewers found the program disturbing; in all likelihood, this was a first for interactive television. Art programs could generally be found on the late-night schedule, broadcast during hours of reduced audience reception.

JD: How can we articulate the distinctions between Video Art produced for the context of gallery/museum presentation on the one hand, and art produced for the context of `real' television on the other? This seems to be a significant conceptual & practical difference. In other words, there is art about television (television as content) and there is art that is literally on television. And then there is the issue of a counter-cultural ideological tendency among artists during the 60s and 70s, who were seeking to reinvent the terms of mainstream TV by unpacking its political, ideological and aesthetic conditions...

RR: Videotapes, like these, say it all: Richard Serra's “Television Delivers People,” a rolling text of aphorisms, read in sequence, reveal the commercial goals of the television industry; Joan Jonas' “Vertical Role,” a work for television that engaged a reception flaw in video as a stage for performance; and Stein and Woody Vasulka's aesthetic research into television's distribution system and technical failure as poetic content. Or, Nam June Paik's 1974 manifesto for the Rockefeller Foundation “Media Planning for the Post Industrial Society,” in which the prophesy of the `information superhighway” claimed new territory for freedom-seeking artists interested to claim the epistemic space of television through exploration of its technology. Paik saw television as an elaborate clock. Multi-channel video installations for the museum kept track of time through the developments of image technologies as well as the insight that the time-based media creates its own tempo. Broadcast television follows the clock, whereas artists' video engages the perception of time for expressive effect. In fact, conservation of video art from thirty years past has introduced present day issues in the decisions to emulate conditions and image quality as a marker of time, as they might have been, with distortion and artifact irregularities maintained as part of the expressive content. Paper Tiger Television lent social commentary to the nightly news by stressing low-end technology and poor production values as an expression of economy. Many of their works lasted for the actual time duration required to read a news item as printed in the paper, with spoken commentary on its contents. The reflexivity in Paper Tiger's work, as a collective, was a meta-narrative on the news, staged in relation to the context of contemporary television, and with dramatic, often subversive readings of the medium.

JD: Yet, it's unclear to me if such art practices were even noticed by the television networks as a symbolic, let alone tangible, threat. These corporate entities had no interest in undermining their own control of news, information, and entertainment. Again, TVTV comes to mind - - using the portable video camera is a political convention to challenge the hegemony of network news, and to articulate a supposedly more democratized version of political information.

RR: Artists were quick to challenge TV's simulations and pretense. TV is equally quick to interpret artists' work in video as esoteric. Broadcast television, artists' video, and media theory touch, like fire to fire, in the work of several artists associated with experiments in television and postmodern art practice—particularly, for example, in the work of the collective TVTV (Top Value Television). TVTV invented a form of internal reporting in television as a means to identify with an informed audience and talk back to the mass media. They activated a critique of the medium in releasing groups of camera operators onto the floor or arena of large public events connected to a switcher for consolidation. The collection of many video images from a single event expressed the number of poignant human stories at any one moment, and the difference of experiences of a single event between many people. Other artists have skillfully deployed high concept and social commentary, stridently articulating, with humor, the social controls and questionable values perpetuated by television's content: for example, General Idea's media inquiries into history and identity, and Dara Birnbaum's multi-channel video installation using images drawn from the television program PM Magazine. Bill Viola made a work of art for TV broadcast, “Reverse Television,” which depicted a series of portraits of people, at home, watching television, but from the television's point of view. Viola provided a pause in broadcast with a series of nearly still images to provoke active response to the viewer's passive reception.

Alternative television can be absorbed as style much in the same way that Warhol's methods came to represent an entire era of experience and consumer behavior. Do artists shy away from broadcast in mainstream media? No. Unless a context is created for it, mainstream media resists the raw vitality of artistic production.

JD: Finally, there has been much talk, in recent years, of the experimental and `democratic' potential of the Internet and Web. Perhaps, a parallel has developed between this period and the idea of experimental television in the 1960s. Specifically, the notion that before a mainstream media is fully commercialized, there is a brief moment where artists can play, infiltrate, be critical and subversive before the entire realm is reified or commodified beyond any salvation. Do you see a parallel between the ideology of the 60s and the 70s in terms of experimental video and television-oriented practices, and the late 1990s/millenium ideology of the radical promise of internet-based art practices?

RR: The connections between `net art' and experiments in television are striking, if not alarming. At this moment, the Internet is claiming its status as educator as a way of staking-out a beneficent application to a variety of industries: e.g., remote learning, shopping for services and products, and so on. I've heard the term cyberdemocracy. Testing audiences, or users, is very much a parallel condition to the crisis in content of radio in the 1920s and 1930s; or, to the establishment of a mission for innovation in educational television in response to the perception of commercial TV as a vast wasteland compromised by sponsors' interests. Ironically, the engineering of a system of communication that wouldn't rely on a central point of information distribution - the Internet – was developed in the 1970s at the same time that artists were invited into television through the experimental programs at PBS affiliate stations. In these experimental television laboratories, a spirit of collaboration between artists and electrical engineers produced tremendous results. This is quite unlike the real-time interactive environments of the Internet, which represent a convergence of decentralized engineering with the computer game and the image/graphics of video in a system not unlike broadcast television – the site of commercial transactions. The regimes of new media technologies cannot, at this time, fulfill our expectations of what we desire most from them. Think of this as the good news, not a disappointment.

***

Footnote 1:

Within the larger system of PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, San Francisco's Center for Experiments in Television at KQED, was one of three programs established by The Rockefeller Foundation was tragically the first to close. The Center was in operation from 1968 to 1975. WGBH, Boston chartered the New Television Workshop, which operated from 1968 until 1993. Later, The Contemporary Artists Television (CAT) Fund was formed in collaboration between WBGH and the ICA, Boston in 1982, followed by the New Television series that operates today out of a PBS affiliate station in Hartford, Connecticut. These, and WNET, New York Experimental Television Laboratory (1974 – 1983), were among the first `flagship stations' to commission work for broadcast. Later, Alive from Off Center in Minneapolis, its' last incarnation Alive TV, brought artists' works into the variety show format. There were many more notable experimental television programs across Canada and in Europe: Channel Four Television was established in 1978/1980 as an alternative to BBC, RTBF in Liege, and ZDF in Germany. Historically, the following also brought attention to artists working in media, setting the stage for 30 years of experimentation: New York's Avant Garde Festivals, the exhibition “TV as a Creative Medium” at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York 1969, and the “Telephone Exhibition” that same year at the MCA, Chicago.

****

Joshua Decter is a New York-based independent curator and critic.

Robert R. Riley was the Founding Curator of Media Arts at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1987-2000), and currently works as Research Curator for New Programs at the Nevada Museum of Art.

Robert Riley in conversation with Joshua Decter.