Artists' Film by David Curtis

Author:David Curtis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Published: 2021-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

105 Maurice Lemaître, Le film est déjà commencé? (Has the Film Started?), 1951

106 Wolf Vostell, TV Dé-coll/age, 1963

Television is put in its place, firmly set amid the messiness of life. When making dé-coll/ages intended to be shown on their own, outside the installation context, Vostell happily re-filmed his imagery from broadcast television before scrambling it, the mismatch between film and video technologies itself causing break-up and visible scan-lines; in other words, valued evidence of video-materiality to add to his cut-ups. Through these distortions one might just glimpse a pretty television announcer, an American Air Force pilot in his cockpit; once again, hot imagery is negated. His Electronic Dé-coll/age, Happening Room, made for the Venice Biennale of 1968, featured six television sets with their distorted imagery in the midst of a glass-strewn floor, with motors moving them and other objects – skis, a coal shovel, a fish-tank, a honey-pot – around the set, their choreography controlled by a primitive computer in response to the movements of viewers.

Nam June Paik’s early ‘sculptures’ used magnets set on top of television sets to destroy transmitted images, distorting them into abstract patterns. For his first major show, ‘Exposition of Music – Electronic Television’ (1963), at the Parnass Gallery in Wuppertal – just before Vostell’s New York show, and possibly an inspiration for it – he scattered variously adapted televisions throughout the space. More constructively, he learned from television engineers Hideo Uchida and Shuya Abe how to generate hypnotic patterns using the flow of electrons in domestic television sets, turning them into performing instruments. The Abe-Paik video synthesizer would become a creative tool responsible for the ‘look’ of much of Paik’s future work, which was to involve television programmes, his signature ‘robots’ (made of assemblages of television sets), and live performances.

The programme content of broadcast television increasingly became the focus of such anti-television interventions. David Hall’s 101 TV Sets (1972–75, made with Tony Sinden) arranged a host of domestic television sets in three ranks, one row above another, tuned to different channels or simply mis-tuned, all strenuously competing for attention while impotently submerged in an overwhelming audiovisual clamour. Like all of Hall’s works, this display both denied the broadcast message and asserted the television set or video monitor as a sculptural object, a transmitter of light and later, a medium capable of more.

News broadcasts, perhaps predictably, were often singled out for attack. In a darkly humorous metaphor, Peter Weibel’s TV News/TV Death (1970/72) has a newsreader reading old news while strenuously smoking a cigar, seated in the contained space of an empty television set.[107] His puffing fills the television with smoke to the point at which he becomes invisible – no doubt aided by offscreen smokers. In Communist states, such attacks took on a particular political significance. Sanjha Iveković’s Slatko Nasilje (Sweet Violence, 1974), crudely superimposes black bars over Zagreb television’s state-approved economic and social propaganda, her simple act of defacement alerting viewers to the ‘sweet violence’ emanating from the falsely reassuring set in the living room corner.

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