Television: Video's Frightful Parent

f},PT o TELEVISION: VIDEO'S FRIGHTFUL PARENT PART 1 only the most obvious of which manifest DAVID ANTIN In television the source of light and the source of informa- to television, quotes, allusion, celebration, Video Art. The name is equivocal. A good name. It tion areone.' themselves directly in protest. leaves open all the questions and asks them anyway. parody and what "high-class" technology has Phila- Is this an art form, a new genre? An anthology It is not quite clear The recent ICA exhibition "Video Art" in with the rather pleasantly shabby technical stances in of valued activity conducted in a particular arena de- to do delphia provided numerous examples of these video art; nor what is the fined by display on a cathode ray tube? The kind state of contemporary works like Telethon's TV History, TVTV's Lord of the to human beings of the light source in People, of video made by a special class of people-artists- significance Universe, Richard Serra's Television Delivers representational media, though state- from the whose works are exhibited primarily in what is called two adjacent and Douglas Davis's installation piece images of this type are characteristic, and similar quotes forced to face the "the an world"-Artist's Video? And if so, is this a ments Present Tense 1, where the TV set is endlessly. And if these concerns work, class apart? Artists have been making video pieces for could be multiplied wall. If negative attitudes prevail in this video gratuitous or insufficient regarding scarcely ten years, if we disregard Nam June Paik's seem somewhat it is because the politics of the '70s has moved the hand, they often share a kind of aptness of Pop. 1963 kamikaze TV modifications, and videohas been a the work at art world away from the apparent neutrality though it is rarely clear what the detail fact of gallery life for barely five years. Yet we've of detail, even Otherwise we might now have a critical discourse the larger pattern of activity in which these works" like already had group exhibitions, panels, symposia, explains of identifying television "artists" and "art . In fact what seems most typical of magazine issues devoted to this phenomenon, for the artists are involved Walter Cronkite, Sam Ervin, Ron Ziegler, the Sid of discourse is a certain anxiety that may McCann-Erickson . very good reason that more and more artists are both types Caesar Show, Cal Worthington, clearly in a recent piece by Hollis will using video, and some of the best work being done be seen most Perhaps in time, with a similar Pop logic, there Frampton : that will do for in the art world is being done with video. Which is appear an auteur theory for television what Manny Farber, why a discourse has already arisen to greet it. Moreover it is doubly important that we try to say what Milton Berle and Sid Caesar have done for Actually two discourses : one, a kind of enthusiastic video is at present because we posit for it a privileged Andrew Sarris and Cahiers du Cinema and welcoming prose peppered with fragments of com- future . Since the birth of video art from the Jovian backside John Ford, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock munication theory and McLuhanesque media talk ; the (1 dare not say brow) of the Other Thing called television, Nicholas Ray. But even Cahiers du Cinema has pressing need for other, a rather nervous attempt to locate the 1 for one have felt a more and more abandoned Hitchcock and Ray for Dziga Vertov and film art since I extend to film, "unique properties of the medium ." Discourse 1 precise definitions of what is, the European avant-garde, on sociopolitical, esthetic as well, the hope of a privileged future? could be called "cyberscat" and Discourse 2, because grounds. So this will have to wait. an enemy, it engages the issues that pass for "formalism" in the It would be so much more convenient to develop Nevertheless, it is unwise to despise powerful, olderenemy, whohappens art world, could be called "the formalist rap." the refined discussion of the possible differences be- especially amore it is with television Though there is no necessary relation between them, tween film and video, if we could only forget the also to be your frightful parent. So consider video, because if the two discourses occasionally occur together as they Other Thing-television . Yet commercial television, that we have to begin to and technical proper- do in the talk of Frank Gillette, which offers a which controls the technology and shares the essential anything has defined the formal television convenient sample : conditions of production and viewing of everything ties of the video medium, it is the seen on the video monitor screen, has also provided industry . in the United 1) The emergence of relations between the culture you're almost all the background viewing experience of the - The history of the television industry television is essen- in and the parameters that allow you expression are fed video audience and even of the video artists. So, no States is well known. Commercial stare of the art technology World War phenomenon, and its back through a technology. It's the matter how different from television the works of in- tially a post-Second gives shape to ideas. patterned on commercial within a particular culture that dividual video artists may be, the television experi- use was, logically enough, was in the ence dominates the phenomenology of viewing and radio, since control of the new medium involved in is devising a way 2) What I'm consciously video exhibitions the way the experience of hands of the powerful radio networks=which constitute intrinsic to television . For example, what haunts that is structurally . Many video artists are aware of essentially a government-protected, private monopoly . it not film? Part of it is that you look into movies haunts all film makes taken in relation This situation determined many of the fundamental 36 the source of light, with film you look with the source of light. this, and xheir work reflects stances communication characteristics of the new medium. The most basic of these is the social relation between "sending" and "receiving," which is pro- foundly unequal and asymmetrical . Since the main potential broadcasters, the powerful radio networks, were already deeply involved with the electronics industry through complex ownership affiliation, and since they also constituted the single largest potential customer for the electronic components of television, , the components were developed entirely for theircon- venience and profit. While this may not seem surpris- ing, the result was that the acts of "picture taking" and"transmission" were made enormously expensive: cameras and transmission systems were designed and priced out of the reach of anything but corporate ownership. Moreover, government regulation set stand- ards on "picture quality" and the transmission signal, whicheffectively ensured that "taking" and "transmission" control would remain in the hands of the industry into which the federal government had already assigned the airwaves, channel by channel. The receivers alone were priced within the range of individual ownership. This fundamental ordering, es- tablishing the relations between taker-sender and the receiver, had, of course, been worked out for commercial radio. Only ham transmission-also hemmed in severely by government regulation-and special uses like ship- to-shore, pilot-to-control tower and police-band radio deal in the otherwise merely potential equalities of wireless telephony. That this was not technically inevitable, but merely an outcome of the social situation and the marketing strategies of the industry, is obvious. There is nothing necessarily more complex or expensive in the camera than there is in the receiver. It is merely that the great expense of receiver technology was defrayed by the mass production of the sets, whose multiplication multiplied the dollar exchange value of transmission time sold by the transmitter to his advertisers. So the broadcasters underwrote receiver development, because every set bought delivers its viewers as salable goods in an exchange that pays for the "expensive" technology. For television also there is a special-use domain- educational, industrial and now artistic-where the relation between the camera and receiver may be more or less equalized, but this is because transmission is not an issue and the distribution of the images is severely restricted . The economic fact re- mains: transmission is more expensive than reception. This ensures a power hierarchy: transmission dominates reception. And it follows from this asymmetry of power relations that the taker-transmitter dominates a whatever communication takes place. This is clearer when you consider the manners of telephony. A would-be transmitter asks for permission a to transmit, rings the home of a potential receiver . It's like ringing a doorbell . Or a would-be receiver rings the home of a possible transmitter, asks him/her to transmit. This formal set of relations has become even more refined with the introduction of the Answerphone and the answering service, which medi- ates between the ring-an anonymous invitation to communicate-and the response, requiring the caller to identify himself and leaving the receiver with a and is the inevitable relationship between instantaneity not to respond. In telephony on this preparation. choice of whether or propertyoftelevision unpredictability. in commercial tele- Yetwhile themost fundamental the first manners are everything, while more Any series of events that is unfolding for have a receiver is its social organization, this is manifested vision manners are nothing. If you time, or in a new way, or with unanticipated signal, clearly in its money metric, which applies to every you merely plug in to the possibility of a intensity or duration, threatens to overrun or elude the aspect of the medium, determining the tempo of its which may or may not be there, and which you can- conventions of the recording artists (the representations and the style of the performances, as framing not modify except in the trivial manner of switching and directors).

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