The
new frontier of television and art
Tacoma
Art Museum show looks at confluence of television and art 1960-65
Review by Alec Clayton published in Art
Access, February 2001
The
Kennedy years were a time of great hope, and of great hopes dashed, a time of
momentous events that were significant in their own right and of events that
were harbingers of an even more tumultuous time to follow: a time of wars, riots
and demonstrations, and a time of explosive cultural revolution that would
forever change the cultural landscape of the United States and the larger world.
And television was there, both as a witness to events as they unfolded
and as a shaper of events. For the first time in history, the events of the day were
broadcast as they happened and were seen by millions of people in their homes.
When
John F. Kennedy gave his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention
in 1960, Garry Winogrand photographed Kennedy at the podium.
His photograph showed a television set behind him, which was broadcasting
his speech live as he spoke — an emblematic image of a man who would soon be
christened by journalists as the “Television President.”
In
his acceptance speech Kennedy said, “We stand today on the edge of a New
Frontier.”
A
few years later, the promise died. At
1:40 p.m. eastern standard time, Nov. 22, 1963, CBS News interrupted their
broadcast of As the World Turns.
Walter Cronkite announced: “In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired at
President Kennedy’s motorcade in downtown Dallas.
The first reports say that President Kennedy has been seriously wounded
by this shooting.”
Americans
seeing these events live in the comfort of their living rooms in homes in
Tupelo, Miss., and Seattle, Wash., and Midland, Texas, was something that had
never before happened. Television
had arrived as a media more dominant than print, photography or film.
It would ever after shape the way we see the world in which we live.
And, as has always been the case, visual artists were the first to grasp
the importance of what was happening. Robert
Rauschenberg had already began making paintings with images derived
from popular culture and media and with techniques that emulated the
grainy look and collaged arrangement of images seen on television.
Other artists would soon began to incorporate the images and visual look
of television into their works, and still others would began to experiment with
television itself as a media for visual art.
“The
New Frontier: Art and Television 1960-65” at the Tacoma Art Museum documents
the many ways visual artists at this time worked with or were influenced by
television. John Alan Farmer, who
curated this show for the Austin Museum of Art, wisely chose a narrow focus and
a limited number of artists who chose to focus on the television-driven icons
and materials of popular culture and incorporate new media into the making of
art. The show is limited both in
the number of artists represented and in the scope of themes. Themes include the look of television imagery — including
the blurred look of early television sets, replete with static and interference;
the impact of television as instant messenger to the world; and the major events
that were broadcast live — most particularly, the assassination of John F.
Kennedy.
There
are areas of the gallery devoted to Pop Art and its precursors. Here we see silk screen prints by Rauschenberg, which were
among the first paintings in which celebrities and everyday events were combined
in collage fashion as icons of popular culture.
Rauschenberg’s Shades was
astoundingly novel when it was first shown in the early ‘60s.
Now it looks like a hybrid between a Joseph Cornell box and a television
set with its case removed to reveal its inner workings.
Shades is a lithographic object consisting of six Plexiglas panels,
and aluminum frame and a light bulb. On
each of the Plexiglas panels he printed collage images taken from newspapers and
magazines. These panels fit into
slots and are viewed in such a way that you see through them, each layer
revealing the layer beneath in complex density, setting up a dichotomy between
flatness and deep space. As such,
it can be seen as a war between the old space of Renaissance perspective with
light cast from outside and the newer, flat space with light from within.
This approach to space and light reflects television, although artists
had been approaching space and light in this manner before the advent of
television. Also reflecting the
world of television viewing, the viewer can choose the arrangement of these
layered sheets of glass, just as a television viewer can flip through channels.
Another
early Pop painting is Tom Wesselman’s Still
Life #31, which incorporates an actual playing television.
Already known for combining painting, collage and real objects in his
“Great American Nude” series, Wesselman had included collaged images of
televisions in earlier interior scenes. Then
he did a pair of interiors with actual televisions, still life objects on a
table, and portraits of Abraham Lincoln (not included in this show) and George
Washington (included here). In
these paintings the flatness of the pictorial surface merges with that of the
photographic images, which in turn merges with that of the television screen.
His intent was for the television to play a current program.
In 1963 that would have most likely been black and white programming with
grainy images. The day I saw it, it was tuned to a shopping channel.
The
poor quality of early television becomes formal content in many works in this
show. Remember that common form of
interference called snow? Wolf
Vostell uses it in his TV-de´-coll/age,
No. 1. This piece is a
wall-sized canvas with six slits cut into the surface.
Behind each slit is a television set playing snow.
A similar phenomenon was the horizontal line viewers saw when turning
early sets on and off. Before
blinking off, the screen image would condense into a single horizontal line.
Nam June Paik uses this in Zen for
TV, a portable television in a case that looks like a suitcase
(they don’t make ‘em like that any more).
The set is turned on its side and tuned to constantly play that single
line, now vertical instead of horizontal.
Among
the more fascinating images in the show are a series of photographs by Lee
Friedlander. Each is a picture of a
room with a prominent television set and no people. On the screens are closeups of faces, one with
only eyes and nose showing, and another a single eye.
These show the ominous power of the set and foreshadow images shown in
the 1980s movie Videodrome.
The
Kennedy assassination takes up a large portion of the show and is documented in
films by Andy Warhol and Bruce Conner, paintings by Warhol, and a striking
series of photographs by Dennis Hopper. Hopper
photographed the television screen while Kennedy’s funeral was being
broadcast, and the resultant images may well be a more compelling icon of the
event than was the actual broadcast.
By
today’s standards, some of these works may appear sloppy and self-indulgent.
Some are more interesting as documents of an era than as works of art.
I’m thinking particularly of photographic documents of some of the
performance pieces, which seem quaintly anarchistic now, and a particularly bad
painting by James Rosenquist. But
overall I can’t imagine any exhibition capturing a theme and a period of time
so well. This is an important show
that should be seen by all students of American art and history.