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Television Art
| Article
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15219 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1989 |
2,361 Words |
| Author
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Jeremy Walsh
Jeremy Walsh is an artist and writer, a curator, and director
of Film & Video Umbrella, an agency for artists' film, video,
and television. |
An exhibition of twenty years of "video sculpture" recently mounted in Cologne reminds us that video as a contemporary art form has been with us since the heady days of the late sixties. Many of the earliest works are still possessed of an experimental urgency born out of the newness and excitement of this infant medium. This excitement is heightened by a critical edge that acknowledges the wider implications of video technology, particularly in view of the fact that it was first developed for military/surveillance applications. Early video artists exploited the use of surveillance systems as an interactive art form, one which afforded immediate pleasure to the viewer in its playful manipulation of space, time, and image.
Alternative Modes
Not long after portable video recorders were introduced, artists began to create works that used the new medium of video to talk back to, to criticize, to deconstruct, and to suggest alternative modes for television. Throughout the seventies, video art continued to develop, more or less at a distance from television. By the turn of the decade, however, the focus and shifted, and through projects like the WNET 13 TV Laboratory, video artists were beginning to work closer to, and eventually within, a television context. So, twenty years into the history of video art, it is also possible to look back over the growth of "artists' television" during those two decades.
"Art for Television" is a problematic theme that was addressed by a recent exhibition, The Arts for Television, which has been touring Europe since late 1987. The exhibition, shown at the Tate Gallery in London earlier this year, is a major international touring exhibition, originated by the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, with the collaboration of MOCA in Los Angeles and curators from Britain, Germany, Belgium, France, Austria, Switzerland, and Holland. The show is in two parts: "The Arts For Television," a survey of video productions and television programs that are, in most cases made by, rather than about, artists themselves; and "Revisions," a European survey of arts programming on television from the fifties to the present day.
The main program, supported by a well-presented and informative catalogue, is divided into six thematic sections, entitled, respectively, "Television," "Music," "Dance," "Image," "Theater," and "Literature," each of which runs approximately four hours. Whereas this stranding of the work into categories is intended to isolate and identify particular aspects of the relationship between the
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