Radical TV//TV Radical

whoa dud3

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Research Report

Guy Weltchek

Ready Camera One

A Historical Examination of Video Art: 1960-1972

The technological history of video as a medium begins with broadcast television. In the United States (world leader in TV technology at the time), video was used to broadcast content live into viewers homes.  Early TV took most of its structural and thematic cues from radio, still the dominant mass communication format at the time of TV’s debut.  Programs were made to fit into hour or half hour timeslots and stuck to formats that had already proven viable on radio such as talk shows, sports broadcasts, dramatic fiction and game shows.  What experimentation there was in the early years of the medium was quick to dry up as television rapidly came to dominate the media landscape in the United States.  By 1960 nearly all video being produced was made by three major networks for broadcast on their TV stations and very little of it deviated from strict industry guidelines. Ten years later, Michael Shamberg assessed the structural  stranglehold placed on TV by its corporate masters in his radical media manifesto, Guerilla TV.  “There has been absolutely no exploration of the grammar of television by the men who run it, because their imprinting was in radio. Thus, they still use television as some sort of ‘radio-with-a-screen.’” (pg 33)

In his seminal essay Video: The Distinctive Features of the Medium David Antin succinctly outlines how televisions (and by extension videos) technological and aesthetic development was inexorably linked to corporate interests.

“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 their convenience and profit.  While this might not seem surprising, the results was that the facts 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 regulations set standards on ‘picture quality’ and the transmission signal, which effectively 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.  The fundamental ordering-establishing the relations between the taker-sender and the receiver- had, of course, been worked out for commercial radio…That this was not technically inevitable, but merely an outcome of the social situation and the marketing strategies of the industry, is obvious…The economic fact remains-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 dominated whatever communication takes place.”  (pg 150)

With a few notable exceptions (Ernie Kovaks, Groucho Marx, et all), things were bleak for performers or artists looking to innovate with video on TV.  Those interested in use video as a tool for creative expression were better off looking for a home in the art world.  By the end of the 50’s and into the 60’s new art movements such as Pop began to explore the culture of mass production and large scale advertising that was quickly becoming ubiquitous in tandem with television.  In addition, many artists became interested in using new technologies as well as live performance to pioneer a style of art that would eventually become known as installation.  At the time, however, it was often referred to by the catch-all term, happening.  Artist Dick Higgens describes the early years of the loosely defined happening movement in his essay “The Origin of Happening”.  “In the late 1950’s all the avant garde arts tended increasingly to fuse, as artists explored new media.  Visual artists such as Allan Kaprow made extensive collages, using machines, mirrors that reflected the spectators, and, ultimately, live performers.  Kaprow realized he needed a term to describe what was obviously developing into a new art form, and he called it a happening, because, as he later told me when I asked about it, ‘I didn’t know what else to call it, and my piece was something that was just supposed to happen naturally.’” (pg 1)

Despite the fact that the art world was conceptually ready, so to speak, for video at the turn of the 60’s, art movements of the period had not yet embraced video to the extent that they later would.  Indeed, video was poised to be the dominant tool in a nascent installation movement. For the time being, as Antin shows, artists were simply not equipped to work with the medium because of the financial barriers set-up by the television industry.  In his essay A Genealogy of Video, writer Paul Ryan outlines the landscape of proto-“video art” at the beginning of the decade.  “‘Video art’ was primarily a matter of manipulating signals within the frame of the television screen.  Magnets were applied to TV sets, internal circuitry was altered and black boxes were attached.” (pg 40)  Artists were working with video signals and cathode ray tubes on television screens as a medium, essentially breaking down the video form to its technological components and building back up again to fit their respective needs.  This was the extent to which artists could engage with video during those formative years.  They were not yet able to use video to its full potential as a tool with which to represent “reality” (or an artists conception of reality).  Video as it was commonly exhibited on TV was still out of the reach of most artists, let alone citizens.  This was all about to change.

During the mid-1960’s and into the beginning of the 1970’s the world saw an explosion of the video medium in the arts.  With the introduction of the Sony Portapak to the USA in 1968, video technology was no longer exclusively in the hands of corporate interests.  The Portapak offered a relatively inexpensive video system which shot in black and white and recorded to ½” tape.  The whole system was extremely portable by the standards of the time and in effect freed video from the studio setting.  In her profile of video artist Nam June Paik, Patricia Mellencamp notes how, once made available to artists, seamlessly video integrated itself into already existent trends in art.  “Video’s ease, simultaneity, and immateriality snugly fit with performance art and happenings, Conceptual, kinetic and Pop art.  Anyone could be (a was) a video artist.” (pg 41)  Artists, activists, normal people and anyone else interested in video now had a point of entry into the medium.  The introduction of this technological innovation marks the beginning of what is now commonly referred to as Video Art.

Legend has it that the first artist to utilize the Portapak in a fine art context (in 1964, a full four years before it back widely available to the public) was Korean-born Nam June Paik.  Paik is generally historically positioned as something of a Godfather to the video movement.  Certainly he is an early supporter of video’s potential within a fine arts context and throughout his long career he maintained a dedication to using the medium in every conceivable way, eventually staging hugely ambitious video works on a global scale.  Paik’s career can be seen as a mirror of videos trajectory in the global marketplace.  Starting as a friend and contemporary of self-styled radical artists, Paik and video as a whole eventually rose to dominance the world over.

When he got a hold of the first Portapak Paik was linked with the Fluxus art movement. Though often referred to as such in the cannon of Art History, Fluxus was actually less an art movement than a loosely connected worldwide network of artists working in different mediums and with different intentions.  It is hard to pinpoint ideological or stylistic similarities with which to link all the artists associated with Fluxus, however, one unifying factor among the diverse and far flung group was an interest in creating a system of production and distribution outside of the already established apparatuses present in the art and broadcasting worlds.  Owen Smith’s essay “Developing a Fluxable Form” (compiled in Ken Friedman’s The Fluxus Reader) outlines the Fluxus ethos with regard to production and distribution of artworks.

“Part the challenge of Fluxus was a questioning of the modes of cultural production and distribution.  The aim of Fluxus throughout the mid and later 1960’s was not only to publish the interesting things being done but to create new systems for their distribution.  Most Fluxus works were not only relatively inexpensive, but were initially distributed through alternative distribution mechanisms.  In the mid-1960’s a number of different Fluxshops were set up in the US, France and the Netherlands.  In addition to these shops, which has only limited success, several Flux Mail-order Warehouses in the US and Europe were created that were directly aimed at establishing a new means for distributing works and publications without those works themselves seeming to become profound, exclusive or valuable as a commodity.”  (pg 18)

Artist-owned distribution systems were a key tenant of the Fluxus philosophy.  Despite the fact that many individual Fluxus artists were eventually happy to accept patronage from established art institutions (not to mentioned good old fashioned global conglomerates) once their work became more widely accepted, the movement as a whole remained dedicated not only producing works on their own, but also keeping tight control of their distribution and sale in hopes that they could prevent their art from becoming another traded commodity in the marketplace.  Paik, quoted in the same Owen Smith essay, comments on Fluxus guru and oft-cited leader George Maciunas’ political ingenuity.  “Marx gave much thought about the dialectics of the production and the production medium.  He had thought rather simply that if workers (producers) OWNED the productions medium, everything would be fine.  He did not give creative room to the DISTRIBUTION system.  The problem of the art world in the 60’s and 70’s is that although the artists own the production’s medium, such as paint or brush, even sometime a printing press, they are excluded from the highly centralized DISTRIBUTION systems of the art world.  George Maciunas’ genius is the early detection of the post-Marxistic situation and he tried to seize not only the production’s medium but also the DISTRIBUTION SYSTEM of the art world.”  (pg 19)

It would seem to be this desire to reclaim the modes of production and distribution from the hands of capitalist interests that lead many Fluxus artists to the promised land of video.  Once it became widely available to the public, video offered Fluxus artists an opportunity to cheaply and quickly work with moving images as a medium.  Artists such as Yoko Ono, Dick Higgens, Wolf Vostell, Ben Vautier, John Cale and of course Paik all began experimenting with video under the Fluxus banner in the mid-60’s, calling their work Fluxfilms.  Fluxfilms were made with low grade equipment and did not require funds from the broadcast industry or the quickly growing system of art patronage available to videomakers to be produced.  Video afforded Fluxus artists the freedom to communicate directly with their audience without their ideas being mitigated by commercial interests.

Video also allowed Fluxus artists (and other video artists not associated with the movement) to offer a structural critique of broadcast television, something that had not been attempted up to that point.  By purposely violating the rules of TV (narrative stories, half hour blocks of content, integrated advertising, continuity editing, etc.) video artists sought to expose the dominance that network television had over video as a medium.  Extrapolating that concept even further, one can view Fluxfilms and other early video experiments as attempting to lay bare capitalisms dominance over society as a whole.  In the aforementioned essay Video: The Distinctive Features of the Medium David Antin describes video and video artists relation to TV.  “To a great extent the significance of all types of video art derives from its stance with respect to some aspect of television, which is itself profoundly related to the present state of our culture.  In this way video art embarks on a curiously mediated but serious critique of the culture.  And this reference to television, and through it to the culture, is not dependent on whether or not the artists sees the work in relation to television.  The relation between television and video is created by the shared technologies and conditions of viewing, in the same way the relation of movies to underground film is created by the shared conditions of cinema.  Nevertheless, an artist may exploit the relation very knowingly and may choose any aspect of the relation for attack.”  (pg 162-163)

And attack they did.  As the 1960’s progressed, an increasingly radicalized political climate began to inform many aspects of the art world.  Artists became increasingly interested in abolishing (or at least moving past) what they perceived as an oppressive system of control in society as exemplified by galleries, museums, collectors, etc.  Video artists were particularly receptive to these radical ideas because on one level, their medium was tightly controlled by and inexorably linked to broadcast television, a bastion of social control if there ever was one.  Yet, with the arrival of the Portapak, video was now entering a utopian period.  In her essay Subject to Change: Guerrilla Television Revisited Deirdre Boyle describes the social climate in a world where, a full decade after its debut on television, video had suddenly been made available to the public.  “It was the sixties, and Sony’s introduction of the half-inch video Portapak in the United States was like a media version of the Land Grant Act, inspiring a heterogeneous mass of America hippies, avant-garde artists, student-intellectuals, lost souls, budding feminists, militant blacks, flower children, and jaded journalists to take to the streets, if not the road, Portapak in hand, to stake out the new territory of alternative television.”  (pg 228) Artists felt that they could restructure the mass media, using their newfound access to video technology as a way to change the existing social order to something more inclusive of minority views, marginal groups and weird colors.

In addition, video art in the late 60’s was not the established genre it would later become. As such, a system for its distribution and exhibition was not yet codified into the gallery/museum structure used to commodify its counterparts such as painting and film.  Video therefore simultaneously represented the most tightly controlled and open-ended medium in the 1960’s.  This combination of repressive reality and the promise of freedom around the bend created an overall climate of idealism in the 60’s, and the video realm was no expection.  Michael Shamberg’s Guerrilla Television is a perfect example of the highly utopian rhetoric of the period.  “Fortunately techno-evolution had spawned new video modes like portable video tape, cable television and vide cassettes which promise to restore a media-ecological balance to TV.”  (pg 9) One can see that videomakers at the time had almost absolute faith in video’s ability to deliver them from the clutches of the system the deemed so oppressive and outdated.  Because of these convergent factors, video artists embraced radical politics and by the end of the decade video had become the medium du jour for artists interested in repositioning art as a product made by and for the proletariat, not a bourgeois product on the market.

As Boyle illustrates, self proclaimed “artists” were not the only people making self proclaimed “art” with video.  Many radical political groups at the time recognized video’s potential to disseminate their political ideology (which, despite the diversity of groups who used video, was almost always hostile towards the dominant power structure) quickly and without compromise.  Suddenly the line between radical artists and artsy radicals was severally blurred.  Again, Boyle elaborates in Guerrilla Television Revisited: “In video’s early years, guerrilla television embraced art as documentary and stressed innovation, alternative approaches, and a critical relationship to Television.”  (pg 228) Art works were incorporating more self consciously political content and videos made by radicals took many of their stylistic cues from work being produced by video artists and avant-garde filmmakers.  Despite that fact that these two camps would eventually diverge, they enjoyed a brief crossover period in which both borrowed liberally from one another.

Groups such as the Newsreel collective, TVTV (Top Value Television) and the Raindance Corporation endeavored to “cover” major political events in the United States, such as the 1968 Democratic National Convention, using video.  The shot in a new modern style, paying specific attention to aesthetics and technique.  The resulting tapes had much in common with Fluxfilms, Andy Warhol’s experiments with TV and the concurrent cinema verite movement.  Both violated the conventions of standard TV news reporting by allowing events to unfold in (relatively) real time, working with interview subjects to portray them more accurately and acknowledging their bias upfront instead of striving for a standard of journalistic objectivity that was fast proving itself a myth in the late-60’s.

In his examination of the radical art world of the 1960’s, David Joselit outlines how TVTV and their contemporaries in the movement felt they were using new video technology to empower those left without a voice in the corporate media at the time.  “[The] phrase, informationally disenfranchised, encompasses the kernel of yippie media theory:  that forms of disenfranchisement that have been at stake in revolutionary struggles throughout history-namely economic and political oppression-are refigured during the 1960’s as an informational poverty within a media economy.”  (pg 67) Media radicals from the period saw themselves as advocates either for the lower class, the revolution, or both and video as a way to get their views out to the public.  In his book, Revolution for the Hell of It, Abbie Hoffman, leading 60’s radical and masterful media manipulator, described his video tactics as “commercials for the revolution.”

“The commercial is information.  The program is rhetoric.  The commercial is the figure.  The program is the ground.  What happens at the end of the program?  Do you think any one of the millions of pople watching the show switched from a being a liberal to a conservative or vice versa?  I doubt it.  One thing is certain though…a lot of people are going to buy that fuckin’ soap or whatever else they were pushing in the commercial.

What would happen is a whole hour were filled with a soap commercial?  That’s a very interesting question and I will speculate that it would now work as well, which means that not as much soap would be sold.  It’s only when you establish a figure-ground relationship that you can convey information.  It is the only perceptual dynamic that involves the spectator.

Our actions in Chicago established a brilliant figure-ground relationship.  The rhetoric of the [Democratic National] Convention was allotted the fifty minutes of the hour, we were given the ten or less usually reserved for commercials.  We were an advertisement for the revolution.”  (pg 64)

While Hoffman was interested in infiltrating big time TV to “advertise” for his cause, other radical groups went a step further and “scooped” much larger TV networks, getting the news of the day faster and with more insight.  Because of the Portapak’s sleek, consumer-friendly design, it was actually much more effective for capturing news in the field (albeit onto lower quality tape stock) than the technology used by major news networks.  This, coupled with the fact that some video collectives had already established a modicum of trust within the radical community, allowed practitioners of guerrilla TV to effectively beat the news at its own game.

The problem with doing that, advertising too effectively for the revolution, is that sooner than later someone is going to notice.  It wasn’t long after TV radicals started making a fuss about changing the rules of the game that larger TV networks began to became interested in what they were up to.  Not because they had any fears of being usurped or overthrown (their hubris and self-importance was far too central to their core value system for that), but because they saw that guerrilla TV was speaking more effectively to a new and explosive youth culture than regular TV ever had.  Eager to indoctrinate that culture into the ranks of the consumer masses and even more excited to have some of their all important aura (as Walter Benjamin would say) of hipness rub off onto some of the products being pitched on TV, big networks began scouting out talent from within the radical ranks.  By the end of the decade many groups had made a deal with devil and began developing content for standard broadcast television, complete with commercials (for soap, not the revolution).  Even Hoffman himself appeared on the Dick Cavett show.

In Deirdre Boyle’s essay Subject to Change: Guerrilla Television Revisited, she outlines the process through which TVTV, a prominent radical TV group, decided to try and integrate into the system which they had so vehemently apposed.  “TVTV won the Dupont-Columbia Journalism Award for Lord of the Universe and, not long after, a lucrative contract with PBS to produce a series of documentaries for the TV Lab.  Gerald Ford’s America, In Hiding: Abbie Hoffman, The Good Times Are Killing Us, Superbowl, and TVTV Looks at the Oscars were made in the next two years.  Some where equal to the TVTV name…but other showed a decline as the diverse group of video freaks who had once convereged to make TVTV a reality-all donating time, equipment, and talent to make a program that would show the world what guerrilla television could do-began to stray in their own direction,  no longer willing to be subsumed in an egalitarian mass, no longer able to support themselves on good cheer and beer.  With the broadcast of Lord of the Universe some of the best minds in guerrilla television unwittingly abandoned their utopian dream of creating an alternative to network television.”  (pg 231) Though Boyle frames TVTV’s fate as an unfortunate scenario (and indeed it was), their leap the broadcast television fared better than some of their contemporaries.  In Paul Ryan’s essay A Genealogy of Video, the writer relates the story of a much less successful attempt to bridge the gap between insurrection and entertainment.  “With the assistance of Don West [then assistant to the president of CBS], Cort and Teasdale [key figures in the Videofreex organization], along with Curtis Ratcliff, organized the Videofreex to produce a portapak-style pilot tape for the broadcast on CBS.  The program was to render the Woodstock experience and the values of the counterculture.  The pilot was played through Eric Seigel’s color synthesizer for a group of CBS executives including Michael Dann and Fred Silverman.  At the end of the showing, Michael Dann thanked the Videofreex for their efforts and said it would be a long time before such programming found its way onto the air.  The next day CBS dismantled the project and fired Don West.”  (pg 43) The history of guerrilla TV ends fairly shortly after the 60’s did.  Some individuals in the movement (for example Michael Shamberg) went on the have successful careers as media makers, but their worked ceased to be “guerrilla” after fumbled attempts to cross over either failed outright or sapped their radical energy till it faded out of what they produced.

That said, the end of the 60’s certainly did not mark the end of video’s tenure as a dynamic medium.  For from it.  Looking backward a few years and returning to video art, as opposed to guerrilla TV (art with a specific political goal), we can see that that permutation of video experimentation integrated into the system much better than its radical sibling.  In fact, video art had had a presence in the mainstream art world for its entire existence.  Boston’s WGBH-TV was broadcasting short experimental visualizations of jazz music as far back as 1964, inaugurating its first artists in residence program in 1967 (the same year that affluent Rockefeller Foundation awarded its first video fellowship).  Galleries were showing video work by the mid-60’s and around the same time collectors began showing interest in figuring out a way to purchase this new form.  Antin’s Video: The Distinctive Features of the Medium mentions videos rapid ascent in the art world in its introduction.  “Artists have been making video pieces for scarcely ten years-if we disregard one or two flimsy studio jobs and Nam June Paik’s 1963 kamikaze TV modifications-and video has been a fact of gallery life for barely fire years.  Yet we’ve already had group exhibitions, panels, symposia, magazine issues devoted to this phenomenon, for the very good reasons that more and more artists are using video and some of the best work being in the art world is being done with video.”  (pg 147)

This is not to say that these works being produced within the art system negate the radicalism or validity of their independent counter parts, far from it.  Indeed, for every member of groups such as TVTV or Fluxus who was repulsed by the idea of videos being made for corporate profit, there was always a Warhol to prove that worthwhile and timeless art could be made within the constraints of capitalism.  As videos first decade came to a close one can conclude that any artists who used the medium to convey true emotion rather than crass commercialism, in any context, had it right.

Did video art have staying power?  In 2009 the question needn’t even be asked.  Video is the medium with which to disseminate information on the internet in contemporary culture.  From youtube videos of dancing teenagers to Saddam Hussein’s execution, one cannot escape video.  Programs such as Jitter and other video manipulation tools can find their antecedents in early modular video synthesizers, painstakingly and expensively assembled at a select colleges and research centers.  Even early videos sense of utopianism and impending freedom from corporate restriction is back.  Questions about who is going to have the power to control the distribution and exhibition of video that so informed and divided groups like the Fluxus collective are rendered moot (or at least dramatically altered) by the availability of the internet.  Now that anyone and everyone can not only be a video artists but immediately make their work available to the world, the game is irrevocably changed.  It still remains to be seen how this new media frontier will ultimately manifest itself, but its safe to say that video’s possibilities for radicalism, experimentation and systemic change are as real and immediate now as they ever were.

As far as my personal study agenda it is influenced by video art to say the least.  I am extremely interested in the Fluxus concept of reclaiming media distribution as well as their slow, patient aesthetics.  I am interested in working with Jitter (almost to the exclusion of all else) because I feel that is truly what is going to move the video medium forward in this day and age.  I am wary of television and want to focus my energy on something without commercials, narratives, laugh tracks or timeslots.