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16/6/2006

Test Transmissions

Centre for Contemporary Arts CCA, Glasgow

Exhibition

From its earliest beginnings video art has had a close relationship with television. The introduction of the Sony Porta-Pak video camera in the 1960s brought technology that was previously used in television to artists and activists. Among the first to explore the relationship between art and television were Wolf Vostell and Nam June Paik. The Korean artist, Paik, is now recognised as one of the great pioneers of the new medium of video art but his early experiments with magnets and television sets had already signalled his intentions to experiment with broadcast images. Vostell and Paik’s early works laid a template for later artists’ interaction with television: the passivity of the medium was to be challenged and the constant stream of tv images were seen as available for remixing.

By the early 1970s artists had begun to investigate the possibilities of making their own programmes or creating interventions within the formatting of mainstream television. The most celebrated of these interventions occurred in 1971 when David Hall introduced a series of unannounced ‘interruptions’ into the schedule of Scottish Television in August and September of that year. Meanwhile, in America, the emergence of cable television encouraged the development of community productions for public access channels. Video activists, infused with the utopian spirit of the times, exploited the possibilities of providing alternatives to the official sources of information. One of these activists, Michael Shamberg, described their hopes in his manifesto-like text, Guerrilla Television (1971):

With portable videotape technology, anything recorded on location is ready on location, instantly. Thus, people can control information about themselves, rather than surrender that power to outsiders. ABC, CBS, and NBC do not swim like fish among the people. They watch from the beach and thus just see the surface of the water.

Shamberg was a founder of a guerrilla television group called TVTV (Top Value Television), formed originally to cover the Democratic and Republican Conventions of 1972 for cable broadcast. This group was just one of several that began to explore the political and artistic potential of cable television. Paper Tiger, a collective in New York combined an examination of corporate ownership of information media with the aesthetics of ‘60s happenings. In 1986 they also founded Deep Dish TV, America’s first alternative satellite network.

Not all video art was politically motivated however. Andy Warhol, who had wanted to make tv programmes as far back as 1969, began to broadcast once a week from 1978, focusing primarily on interviews with celebrities from the world of music and fashion. In Britain, George Barber developed a new genre of ‘scratch video’, exploiting recent video-editing developments to stretch the aesthetics of moving image collage.

By the 1990s the relationship between video and television appeared to lose its intensity. The utopian hopes of subverting mainstream television had dissipated and video artists increasingly seemed more concerned with the aesthetics of installation rather than interactivity and revolution. More recently, however, an anarchic approach to television has resurfaced. In Vilnius, the Contemporary Art Centre has drawn on a curatorial interest in the ‘60s Fluxus Group to produce a television programme every month. And in Italy, the Telestreet movement - a pirate network of nearly 200 tv stations - has attempted to challenge the media monopoly of Silvio Berlusconi.

CCA
350 Sauchiehall Street - Glasgow

Gallery Opening times: Tuesday - Friday: 11am - 6pm, Saturday: 10am - 6pm. Closed
Sunday and Monday.

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