TV Swansong exhibition catalog, edited by Karen Guthrie and Nina Pope (London, 2002)

Internet Killed the Video Star: Art, Audience and Interaction in TV Swansong

And now we meet in an abandoned studio.We hear the playback and it seems so long ago.And you remember how the jingles used to go.

Video Killed the Radio Star, Geoff Downes, Trevor Horn & Bruce Wolley

1. Are You Being Served?

Several years ago I was living in a small college town in northern Idaho, not far from the Hayden Lake compound of a white suprematist group known as the “Aryan Nations”. A long-time resident told me a story about Richard Butler (the group’s former leader). While being interviewed by a local reporter about life at Hayden Lake Butler mentioned that Aryan Nations members, like folks everywhere, liked to sit around and watch TV in the evenings. And one of his favorites shows to watch, after a hard day defending the purity of Nordic culture, was Are You Being Served? The image of Butler and his neo-Nazi associates kicking back while Mr. Humphries and Mrs. Slocombe waltz around the ladies underwear department is both troubling and amusing. I’m not entirely sure what it says about Richard Butler, or the racial and sexual politics of Are You Being Served?, but it does tell us something about broadcast television as a great homogenizer, able to bind together the most improbable bedfellows in the warm embrace of a trans-national television “family”.

While looking over the TV Swan Song project descriptions I was struck by how often the television nostalgia of the British artists was inspired by American culture (The Partridge Family, The Brady Bunch, Andy Kaufman, Star Trek, the ’68 Elvis Comeback Special, ER, etc.). It is this sense of a mediated global sensus communis that reminded me of the Richard Butler story. What does it mean when violent racists, who dream of seceding from the United States into a fortified enclave in the Rocky Mountains, find solace in the class parables of ‘70s British television? And what does it mean when English kids, growing up in the flatlands of Lincolnshire, fantasize over the image of the American south portrayed in The Dukes of Hazzard: an image, compounded from equal parts of Erskine Caldwell, Lil’ Abner, and Smokey and the Bandit, that effectively remaps the violence of the post-Jim Crow South as a quaint comedy of bumbling sheriffs and back-woods hunks careening improbably around the dirt roads of “Hicksville” in an expensive ’69 Dodge Charger?

Britain and America, of course, have a “special relationship” in this regard. We have been foisting our second hand TV crap on each other for decades. You give us BBC costume-drama potboilers (sold to unsuspecting, or indiscriminate, American viewers as “high culture”) and endless re-runs of the execrable Benny Hill Show, and we give you wet dreams of beautiful white Californians hatched from the doddering mind of Aaron Spelling, and equally fantastic, pseudo-verite dramas about cops and doctors. Of course the ironic relationship to television history that motivated many of the TV Swansong artists was long ago assimilated into the rhetoric of TV itself, which takes mannerist self-reflexivity as one of its founding gestures. It’s currently sweeps week in the US (when audience levels, and hence ad rates, for network shows are calculated). We’ve witnessed an explosion of TV nostalgia, spurred on by the improbable ratings success (and relatively low cost) of a Carol Burnett reunion show several weeks ago. As a result we are currently being subjected to a parade of teary-eyed reunion shows and full-blown re-makes (Cheers, MASH, LA Law, etc.). The period of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s seem especially popular, perhaps because it represents some kind of idyllic pre-9.11 “age of innocence” to the crucial 18 to 35 year-old demographic.

2. Family Ties

Join Mary Tyler Moore as she hosts The Mary Tyler Moore Reunion, a CBS special celebrating the classic 1970s comedy series. Mary will reminisce with cast members Ed Asner, Valerie Harper, Gavin MacLeod, Betty White, Cloris Leachman and Georgia Engel about their seven-year relationship. . . On a more personal note, Mary will explain how the cast of the show became her family during a challenging time in her own life.

CBS Website, May 2002

Through the magic of horizontal media monopoly the nostalgia virus has also spread to the big screen, with the recent release of movie versions of Scooby Doo and Spiderman (both of which used to be TV cartoons). The nadir of this tendency was reached with the Fox network’s Celebrity Boxing shows, in which out-of-shape ‘70s TV has-beens pummeled each other in the ring for money. Of course one can adopt any number of possible attitudes to all of this: analytic detachment, disgust, gleeful abandon, stupefied immersion or sentimental identification. Rupert Murdoch, Michael Eisner and Sumner Redstone ultimately don’t care as long as you watch. Carol Burnett used to sign off at the end of her long-running TV variety show by tugging on her ear lobe (to say “hello” to her grandmother and to signal her own comforting normalcy to viewers). This gesture reminds me of the story about Boris Karloff wiggling his little finger to reassure the young actress playing the flower girl in Frankenstein that he was only a man in a monster suit. It convinces us that we are actually sharing something personal, intimate, and emotionally rewarding, through a medium that is monolithic, uni-vocal, and rampantly commercial. So why do we preserve a nostalgic attachment to forms of mass media that are so obviously depersonalized and so relentlessly banal? Why do we search for love in the very maw of corporate culture?

It wasn’t always like this. There was another vision of the TV “family” in the 1960s and ‘70s. The emergence of cable-access technology during this period fueled countless quasi-utopian predictions about “two way communication” and “viewers as producers”. Thus, “free access public TV channels,” according to a 1971 study, “have the potential to revolutionize the communication patterns of service organizations, consumer groups, and political parties, and could provide an entirely new forum for neighborhood dialogue and artistic expression."[1] And, in 1972, The Wired Nation claimed that cable TV could “break the hold of the nation's television fare now exercised by a small commercial oligarchy. Television can become far more flexible, far more democratic, far more diversified in content, and far more responsive to the full range of pressing needs in today's cities, neighborhoods, towns, and communities."[2] Artists were integral to this movement. Figures such as Jon Alpert, Skip Blumberg, Dee Dee Halleck, Chip Lord, and Michael Shamberg and collectives like Antfarm, Paper Tiger, Raindance, TVTV and Videofreex (not to mention the hundreds if not thousands of media artists who worked in local cable-access stations across the country) blurred the boundaries between art and activism and played a key role in the early development of community-based media in the United States.[3] Cable TV succeeded, of course, but not in the way these utopian visionaries imagined it would. We now have hundreds of channels niche marketed to everyone from Bass fishing enthusiasts to Born Again Christians, but the only “two way communication” to be found is through the Home Shopping Network, and it requires a credit card number.

This lascivious intermingling of art, media, and activism had to be sorted out, of course, so that a properly differentiated and curate-able entity called “video art” could come into existence. Just as commercial cable television arose, phoenix-like, from the ashes of the free access movement, so contemporary video art (embodied in the ponderous, tech-heavy installations of Gary Hill, Mary Lucier, Bill Viola, and Grahame Weinbren among others) had to jettison any associations with this embarrassing activist legacy in order to flourish in the rarefied precincts of the museum and the gallery. Martha Rosler captured this dynamic almost twenty years ago in her essay “Video: Shedding the Utopia Moment” (1985). As Rosler noted, early video artists “saw themselves as carrying out an act of profound social criticism. . . directed at the domination of groups and individuals epitomized by broadcast television and perhaps all of mainstream Western industrial and technological culture.” This critical act “was carried out through a technological medium. . . whose potential for interactive and multi-sided communication appeared boundless.”[4] With the shift towards a self-consciously defined video art the earlier dreams of dialogue and two-way communication gave way to an increasingly insular and self-referential practice concerned with “formalist arrangements of what are uncritically called the ‘capabilities’ of the medium”.[5] This approach is epitomized for Rosler by Nam June Paik’s tendency to “formalize the TV signal” and to produce works that “replicate” the “passivity” of the conventional TV viewer.[6] This museum-ified video art positions the viewer as a kind of phenomenological shell, emptied out of any prior commitments or identifications based on class, race, gender or sexuality and left to ponder pseudo-philosophical reflections on life, death, the mechanics of perception and cognition, and other “universal” experiences in the climate-controlled comfort of the gallery. There was a vestigial commitment to dialogue and exchange in some of this work, but typically the viewer was reduced to a sentient blob, triggering motion sensors, touching push-screens or wandering through some ostensibly “open” narrative of laboriously scripted story-lines or branching command pathways.

3. Keeping Up Appearances

Just as Giotto paved the way for several generations of renaissance artists, Gary Hill has lifted postmodern video installation art up to the highest reaches of the fine arts world.

“Is Gary Hill the Giotto of our Time?,” Our Postmodern Life[7]

The projects in TVSS address a monolithic, uni-directional medium (broadcast television) at least in part through a technological form (the internet) that has made its own promises of accessibility, decentralization and exchange. In fact the rise of the internet has catalyzed a set of claims that almost exactly mimic those made for public access cable television over thirty years ago. The net is presented as an anarchistic community, allowing for a free and open exchange un-hindered by the power differentials that deform everyday human interaction. According to the ubiquitous John Perry Barlow the internet is “a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. . . a world where anyone, anywhere, may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”[8] At its extreme end this view is manifested in the English artist Roy Ascott’s straight-faced description of telecommunications systems as the expression of an expanded global consciousness based on an “all embracing love”.[9]

With the arrogance typical of “new” media proponents throughout the history of modernism net artists and critics have, by and large, ignored the fact that we’ve been here before. Like American colonists escaping the disease of European history they insist that this time it will be different, better; the internet “frontier” is vast enough to absorb all possible contradictions. Hence the grandiose and often inaccurate generalizations about the history of art and culture that one frequently encounters in writing on digital and net-based art. But is there any reason to expect the fate of net art to be any different? During it’s early, chaotic phase oppositional net-based practice blurred the boundaries between art and activism, creativity and critique. Increasingly, however, this work is being winnowed and filtered; decanted into something with its own curatorial norms, canonical figures, conference circuits, standards of exhibition, archival protocols and so on. Net art will no doubt extrude its own Greenberg in due time, to define, codify and aestheticize a given “inherent” characteristic of the medium, and to further detach and abstract the operations of digital technology from their political and historical foundations. Certainly the teleological framework is already in place, through the efforts of figures like Ascott, who define the net as the manifestation of some cosmic Barney-like gemeinshaft.

Even now one can sense the creeping institutional embrace of digital and net-based work; the first awkward pas de deux with name-brand institutions like the Tate and the Walker, earnest exchanges in list serves about how one might archive and collect something called “digital art,” and so on. No less a scion of virtuality than Mark Tribe of Rhizome breezily asserts, “In terms of media art you have Bill Viola and a few others who sell large installations at an institutional level and then sell editions to small individual collectors. That just doesn’t exist yet for net-art, but I assume it will.” [10] Will RTMark become the Raindance or TVTV of ‘90s computer art? Very possibly. Museums exercise a powerful gravitational force as cultural institutions. When asked why he robbed banks, the infamous Willie Sutton supposedly responded, “because that’s where the money is.” We might say the same thing about museums, which have become increasingly important around the world as engines for urban “renewal” schemes and global tourism (exemplified in Bilbao and the aggressive expansion of the McGuggenheim and McTate franchises).

Museums are the Sport Utility Vehicles of contemporary art: resource and capital-intensive entities that need a continual supply of art “material” in order to survive. Moreover, they require a particularly high octane kind of art; an art that can’t survive outside the intensive care unit of the museum, with its highly regulated, reverence-inducing exhibition spaces and the constant supervision of a professional cadre of registrars, conservationists, educational officers, publicity teams, security officers, and curators. Museums survive precisely by taking on the power to define the new, and by effectively collapsing the difference between the new, in whatever form it might take, and their own museological protocols. What kind of work will draw crowds? What kind of work will make optimal use of the space, or attract the art press, or compliment the permanent collection? Artists, of course, are often willing accomplices in this seduction, finding the cultural cachet of the Tate, the Museum of Modern Art, or the Pompidou almost impossible to resist. Are we destined, then, to see a generation of digital artists creating computer-based equivalents of Bill Viola and Gary Hill installations? Will the “new” media art of tomorrow be defined by an increasingly symbolic commitment to collaboration and exchange, a passive, universalized model of audience, and a high modernist fascination with form?

4. The Real World

With all of our projects, it’s been really important to state all the way through that the whole of that organizational thing is part of our art-making for us. . . Sometimes it’s hard for people to understand that.

Nina Pope, Curating New Media: Third Baltic International Seminar (2002)[11]

TV Swan Song represents a messy, genuinely interactive approach to media-based art that’s less concerned with new technology as an end in itself, than as a vehicle for the creation of new forms of collaboration and exchange. This “cross-media” orientation is evident in the range of different forums and access points: webcasts from the mountains of Peru, a Farington quarry, and a Blackpool dance hall, youth video workshops in Sutton, a children’s TV show on BBC, closed-circuit broadcasts from the Royal London Hospital, and so on. Pope and Guthrie have committed themselves to a de-centralized, para-institutional approach. There is no single audience for TV Swansong, but rather, a series of interlinked viewers and participants. For Pope and Guthrie the ability to juxtapose diverse spaces and audiences in new and inventive ways is an integral part of their artistic practice, requiring skills that are as much aesthetic as they are organizational. In this regard TV Swansong builds on Conceptual art traditions initiated in the 1960s and ‘70s by figures such as Stephen Willats, John Latham and Barbara Steveni.

A Conceptualist orientation ran through a number of the TV Swansong projects. Giorgio Sadotti used the slightly tawdry glamour of ballroom dancing to create a video/performance piece that evoked the abstract beauty of a Michael Snow film. Chris Helson’s mock heroic journey to a “soon to be famous” mountain in Peru, replete with vaccination trauma and orienteering crises, provided a media saavy equivalent to artistic “walks” of Richard Long. But rather than demonstrating human creativity in harmony with nature, Helson’s arduous trek revealed a process in which complex cultural and topographic differences are flattened out by the insatiable drive of the media for simplistic spectacle. Graham Fagen’s imaginary musical journey from Scotland to Jamaica suggests another kind of global continuity, centered around the experience of migration and colonial exploitation. The projects of Zoe Walker and Neil Bromwich also explore the imaginary function of landscape. Walker attempted to re-create the innocent space of childhood creativity (embodied in The Clangers) only to find the author of that vision grown old and obsessed with intellectual property. She was forced instead to stitch together her own child-like vision, in the form of a balloon planet that managed to simultaneously evoke The Little Prince and The Prisoner. Nostalgic payoff was equally hard to come by for Neil Bromwich, who nevertheless tried to re-live his own youthful fantasy by driving through the barren landscape of Lincolnshire in a compact Ford Cortina vainly masquerading as a Mopar-era muscle car.

The artists of TV Swansong are less concerned with nostalgia per se, than with re-purposing the artifacts of their TV memories through equal parts camp citation, childhood wonder and conceptual subversion. Jordan Baseman re-wrote Paddy Chayefsky’s famous “I’m mad as hell” diatribe from the movie Network to suggest just how little has changed in the world of corporate media. And Rory Hamilton and John Rogers combined innovative computer animation and projection techniques along with a score created by former members of the BBC Radiophonic Orchestra, to evoke the ambiance of ‘70s sci fi TV shows on a massive, immersive scale. There was a similar sense of tongue-in-cheek homage in Jessica Voorsanger’s collaboration with the BBC’s SMart program. Voorsanger’s project mixed the homely simplicity of a DIY crafts show with a timely meditation on childhood celebrity worship, from the andro-masculinity of David Cassidy or Cliff Richards to ostensibly liberatory icons of female empowerment like Britney Spears and the Powerpuff Girls. She managed to honor her young collaborators while also parodying the adolescent popularity contest lurking behind the sanctity of the Turner Prize. Pope and Guthrie’s Recommended Dose deftly explored the intersection of art and situation comedy. Stumbling around the wards of the Royal London Hospital dressed as over-sized Christmas crackers, they offered the viewers of Patientline a mixture of deadpan comedy and Conceptualism reminiscent of the videos of Michael Smith or William Wegman.

Amidst the intimacy and immediacy of Voorsanger’s cast-making workshop or Sutton on TV’s exuberant performances, my own experience of TV Swansong was defined by distance and fragmentation. Writing from Southern California, I found myself trolling through jerky Quick-time clips and disjointed project excerpts, searching for the proper plug-ins and waiting for files to download. I felt a bit like an outsider, pressing my face against a cozy cottage window to gaze at revelers gathered around a roaring fire within, or listening to an early radio transmission struggling through the thick resistance of the ether. There was something there, some sense of connection and community, which was just out of reach. In his recent book On the Internet Hubert Dreyfus argues that the celebration of the virtual and the disembodied that is nearly de rigueur in recent discussions of the internet represents a technologically enhanced version of the long-standing Platonic separation of mind and body.[12] Dreyfus insists that there is something irreplaceable about the experience of human interaction defined through nuances of expression, bodily proximity, taste, smell, and touch; something that can’t be conveyed through the narrow bandwidth of ASCII code and a flat-screen monitor. Do I end my discussion, then, with another kind of nostalgia: the nostalgia for “real,” “direct,” or “unmediated” human contact? How do we acknowledge the virtues of analog experience without romanticizing it? The answer suggested by TV Swan Song lies in our capacity for improvisation and adaptation; our ability to move fluidly between each of these modes of interaction, cognizant of their potentials as well as their limitations. The projects of TV Swan Song encourage us to adopt the same critical awareness as we travel between the art world and the spaces and routines of everyday life.

NOTES