Art vs. TV

A Brief History of Contemporary Artists' Responses to Television

Francesco Spampinato

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501370564
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica de la televisión

While highlighting the prevailing role of television in Western societies, Art vs. TV maps and condenses a comprehensive history of the relationships of art and television. With a particular focus on the link between reality and representation, Francesco Spampinato analyzes video art works, installations, performances, interventions and television programs made by contemporary artists as forms of resistance to and appropriation and parody of mainstream television. The artists discussed belong to different generations: those that emerged in the 1960s in association with art movements such as Pop Art, Fluxus and Happening; and those appearing on the scene in the 1980s, whose work aimed at deconstructing media representation in line with postmodernist theories; to 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 active in the 2010s, whose work reflects on how old media like television has definitively vaporized through the electronic highways of cyberspace. 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.

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 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.

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

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 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 Kino-Glaz (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 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 kino-eye. 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 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’ 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, 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 phi...