Tv Museum Contemporary Art and the Age of Television
"THERE'Due south SOME KIND OF a haunting here that I'm picking upwardly," warns Mindy, a tardily-night psychic on a faux public-access tv set prove in Phil Collins's latest moving picture, Tomorrow Is Always Also Long, 2014. "Does it make sense to ask yourself: Who have I become? . . . When did touch plow from a skin-to-skin contact into the glow of a missed FaceTime call?" Collins'south restaging of public-access spots is one of a number of artists' sympathetic explorations of television within artistic piece of work over the past xv years. Tv has emerged equally a subject field of non only formal but besides social and what might be chosen "infrastructural" investigation: Artists are considering facets ranging from Television receiver'due south relation to alive audiences and the sitcom genres and programme formats it has generated to more arcane field of study matter, including the means in which archival footage is classified and the use of alive musicians on-air. This broader formulation of TV appears, not coincidentally, at a moment when the medium is itself being redefined—as something that encompasses alive streaming on the Net, on-demand viewing, and diverse forms of two-fashion interaction, as well every bit the familiar box in the living room—making an test of "TV" either helplessly slippery or rooted in some retrospective notion of the discipline. At the same time, even alongside the new communication channels opened up past the Web, institutions accept assiduously used television equally a means to reach new publics or to meliorate engage with existing ones. This is the rich landscape surveyed by the Irish film and art historian, and Artforum contributor, Maeve Connolly in Tv set Museum: Contemporary Fine art and the Age of Television, in which she keenly analyzes the medium's particular public dimension to identify Goggle box alongside that flagship institution of the decaying public sphere: the museum.
Her argument is supported past shifts both in readings of Boob tube and in artistic practice. In the 1960s and '70s, artists such as Nam June Paik and Bruce Nauman focused on TV's structural properties in relation to their concurrent video practices; David Joselit's Feedback: Idiot box Against Commonwealth (2007) newly emphasized the political implications of such artists and media activists working with Television set during this flow. And artists today are using television ever more "in-the-circular." At the same time, contemporary art, and in particular the field of the moving image, has traditionally aligned itself with picture palace, while TV—that normalizing boob tube of passive consumption—has been taken as a subject to be opposed (think Martha Rosler or Owen State). This has been partly due to a lingering sense of artistic hierarchy, where picture palace still hovers comfortably to a higher place the medium that produced Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. In fact, as Connolly writes, it is in this contested sense of Telly every bit a "low art" that its potential lies.
Connolly'south chief claim is that TV provides a means for discussing class and social tensions: It is linked in a privileged and specific way to the public sphere. She pinpoints curator Okwui Enwezor's Documenta 11 in 2002 as the moment that TV's status changed in the gimmicky art world, with the inclusion of Black Sound Movie Collective's Handsworth Songs (1986), a documentary on race riots amidst African-Caribbean area and Southward Asian immigrants in Uk, and Stan Douglas's TV/video installation Suspiria, 2003. Seen together, she argues, they indicate the spectrum past which Tv set will be taken up past artists: as a means to address identity, in works that have moved comfortably from network broadcasts into the gallery (Handsworth Songs), and equally a marking of the television monitor equally an outdated artifact at the end of the analog age (Suspiria).
Farther, Connolly demonstrates, the involvement in Tv as a form tied to publicness is a means for curators to negotiate the public nature of the gimmicky art establishment itself. This is especially then inside museums grouped nether the "New Institutionalism" moniker, which seek not but to collect and expect after cultural objects only to engage with the social and political issues of their context. Drawing on discussions of the public sphere, a specialism of Connolly's, she writes that television shares the museums' briefs of "civic reform, education, and governmentality" and aspires to be a social space where a number of classes and interests meet. Thus, she shows, a number of institutions since the 2000s—such equally the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, Lithuania, and the Rooseum Middle for Contemporary Art in Malmö, Sweden—fix broadcasting services as means to present their activities more discursively or to communicate with wider audiences, using TV's democratic access to mirror the public aspirations of their projects. Artists, too, take used TV in identify of the traditional public outlet of the museum and even the memorial, often complicating the sense of authorisation that these terms imply. For instance, in Thomas Hirschhorn's Bataille Monument, 2002, also made for Documenta 11, a local television receiver channel circulate intermittent reports near its namesake French thinker and the housing circuitous in which Hirschhorn'southward installation was sited, turning the monument over to the public who viewed it.
Similarly, artists' engagement with the organizational setup of Television set—every bit in a recent collaboration between the London film distributor LUX, BBC Scotland, and Creative Scotland, where six artists were invited for a residency at the BBC in Glasgow—often focuses on the systems by which Tv set historically asserted itself every bit a mass-cultural form. The separation of powers inherent in public-TV programs/stations (commissioning board, presenter, fortresslike studio, comptroller, etc.) becomes a (sometimes biased) means of guaranteeing and promulgating views held in common and of conferring brownie on the work produced. Connolly skillfully notes a like loss of authority on the part of museums, which are moving away from their nineteenth-century mission of promulgating gear up notions of civilization and educational activity. TV Museum looks closely at the construction of museums as a realm of high art and TV every bit a realm of low art to testify how these statuses were in fact constantly in the process of existence negotiated and legitimated, while suggesting that these concepts are both now fully nether threat with our changing notions of the public sphere. This is the fundamental (and substantial) contribution of the study to the field.
Hinging her argument and so closely on the public sphere, still, presents sure limitations for Connolly's reading of the current artistic landscape. Collins, for example, has said that his interest in public-access TV in Tomorrow Is Always As well Long derives from a nostalgia for the fertile and creative arena of working-grade amusement. "Information technology's what perfect TV would be for me," he recently remarked of the picture. The putative reject of the dignity of the working grade is a regular British talking point, and a troublesome aspect of looking at Television every bit a cultural institution, particularly i that refracts social and class tensions, is its rather nonglobalized national character, which plays oddly against the monoculture of international contemporary art. That is, Connolly's insight, while largely accurate in Europe, doesn't translate entirely to the U.s.a., in means that assist pinpoint the ii areas' different attitudes toward both the public sphere and class in full general. As she acknowledges, even taking into business relationship PBS, the Us lacks the publicly funded broadcasters mutual to Europe, which are viewed there as national sources of pride and equally genuine repositories of collective memory. Also for museums, the shift from public funding to private philanthropy, already navigated or never fifty-fifty in the cards for U.s.a. museums, is much more of a factor in Europe, where New Institutionalism has besides taken greater hold. Accordingly, though gimmicky artists in the United states of america have also engaged with Telly more broadly, the look and experience of such work is often quite different. Alex Israel's restagings of the talk-testify TV interview in As Information technology Lays, 2012, for case, concentrate on celebrity culture, with its brilliant demonstrations of discrepancies in wealth. To view TV solely through the lens of its publicness is as well to miss the changes forced on Tv set by the Internet—the not-so-new child on the block—where, for example, the lateralizing effects (or impression) of following a celebrity on social media emphasize the strict public/private divisions embedded in analog-Television receiver production and spectatorship.
Certainly part of the recent interest in TV is owing to the reliable artistic analogousness for technological forms once they begin to go obsolete. Indeed, prepare in relief against online viewing platforms, the public associations of Telly come into sharper focus. Where Boob tube convokes a public, in the sense that a set group of viewers sit down at the same time to watch the same program, the Internet individualizes. I select my ain Twitter feed, look at my unique friend group'southward postings on Facebook, follow my own personal track of kittens falling off tables on YouTube. Information technology'south no surprise that so many current TV restagings are obsessed with the Cyberspace; Mindy in Tomorrow Is Always Besides Long rants, for instance, near our umbilical attachment to our smartphones and the mode they displace our sense of cocky. By returning to TV in its many guises, artists are returning, in a more basic sense, to a notion of stability, whether conceived in terms of fixed subject and class positions, mass audience, or programming schedules (and its domestic corollaries, nationally observed times for dinner, amusement, and bed)—every bit well every bit to a fixed economic system of attention.
As the art world moves to take in performance art in an enlarged chapters, this question of attention has become ever more important. Tate Modernistic's 2012 Tanks series "Fine art in Activity," for case, which looked at historical examples of video and performance art and expanded cinema (such every bit Aldo Tambellini'south multimedia installation Retracing Blackness, 2012, an adaptation for the space of work from the '60s), attempted to write a history for functioning art from inside the museum, at times shifting what had been alive events of a fixed elapsing into permanent installations, where they were viewed, paradoxically, by frequently more distracted visitors who entered, engaged, and passed on. In this mode, the make of participatory performances past the likes of Tino Sehgal can be seen every bit a adamant endeavour to obtain and secure the attending of the contemporary art audience, which is now fractured both by performance'due south move into the institution and by the telephone in each viewer'southward pocket. Patterns of production and consumption have radically changed beyond the board and across our proliferating screens. In retrospect, the great, normalizing behemoth of Telly, as Connolly'south investigation shows, was not all bad.
Melissa Gronlund is an editor of Afterall and a lecturer in artists' film at Oxford University.
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Source: https://www.artforum.com/print/201501/maeve-connolly-s-tv-museum-49410