‘Television Delivers People’
Chris Meigh-Andrews, A History of Video Art
Bloomsbury, 408pp, £22.99, ISBN 9780857851789
reviewed by Hazel Dowling
‘You pay the money to allow someone else to make the choice, you are consumed, you are the product of television. Television delivers people’ - Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Shoolman, ‘Television Delivers People’, 1973
Emerging from the very particular set of social and political circumstances of 1960s America, the trajectory of the medium of video, traced by Chris Meigh-Andrews in his second edition of A History of Video Art, draws upon a multiplicity of events in the history of western politics; from black liberation, anti-war protest and feminist movements and their inherent ties to the radical progression of video media technology. Alongside the adoption of video as a medium for a new avantgarde, we see the domination of television as a form of entertainment that created an entirely new viewer. Alienated and occupying an entirely private realm of spectatorship, it is this audience that becomes the ‘target’ for critical works such as Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman’s video series ‘Television Delivers People’.
Meigh-Andrews pulls together diverse strands of the mediums roots, through an emphatic analysis of the ties between technological innovation and aesthetic developments, to survey the emergence of video art from a marginalised practice attached to a predominantly underground culture, to its current evolved position as the technology dominating artistic production. Placing a particular weight on the revolutions within electronic and digital imaging over the past 50 years, Meigh-Andrews identifies video as the catalyst for the emergence of more pluralistic practices, such as those embodied by Fluxus and conceptual art.
The book is divided into three sections, each following an overarching thread of technical innovation. Within the first section we are given the historical and cultural context of video art's emergence from the dominance of broadcasting media; categorised through countries and their relevant contributions with a parallel discussion of experimental music. This section stresses the global influence of early American video work and its critical relationship to broadcast television; discussing works that both inhabit the visual language of this medium and occupy its space quite literally, such as Berlin Based broadcast productions from ‘Land Art’, whose work functioned as an intervention in television broadcasting, disrupting the normal programming structure to show art works by Richard Long and Robert Smithson. Artists such as Sue Hall are also discussed as advocates of television as a new ‘venue’, with the inherent potential for producing a brand new audience.
Meigh-Andrews makes frequent references to the tradition within artists' film and video, of a critical relationship to the medium and of its agency as an alternative narrative to the prescribed roles of commercial media and advertising. This is not a direction which Meigh Andrews follows with much commitment, and it is left somewhat subsumed in the general structure of technology/aesthetic relations. However, one point which offers a particularly illuminating subtext is a discussion of the United States’ investment in industrial and military technological research during the 1960s and the subsequent initiation of airborne surveillance operations in Vietnam, described by Meigh-Andrews as the foremost motivation for the development, accessibility and mass production of portable video recording technology:
In this brief interlude, Meigh-Andrews draws attention to the distinct line that can be traced from relatively domestic or everyday objects to the operations of military violence. It is within this context that the formation of media collectives such as the New York based Rain Dance Corporation is discussed. The active engagement of artists with video in opposition to the ‘official employment’ of video technology by military and government forces is not an inherent agenda within Meigh-Andrews discussion, but treated categorically as one event within the medium’s history. Rain Dance dominates this avenue of discussion. Outlining their agenda in 1970 they stated:
Section two deals with case studies of specific artists. Technological developments are discussed through the material conditions of exhibitions and modes of dissemination and collaboration between writers, musicians and artists. Through this expanded discussion it quickly becomes apparent that the history of video art is one of interdisciplinary collaboration and the formation of new and radical ties between artists, broadcasting institutions and technicians, provoking the emergence of new collective bodies such as Rain Dance Corporation and the UK research institutions TVX and the New Arts Lab. These cooperative groups established a critical and theoretical framework around the production of new video works and conceived of an expanded idea of the artist. Through Meigh-Andrews' discussion of the work of TVX, in particular, we see how artists sought to create new ‘interfaces’ with ‘mainstream organizations’ and initiate research projects into the potential of non-broadcasting television as a communication tool within local community development.
Through his sustained discussion of the new organisation that grew around the emergence of video art, Meigh-Andrews examines a previously neglected area of its development: the relationship between the development of artists' engagement with the medium and the concurrent development of accessibility to video imaging technology. He details how artists pooled equipment and sought to increase audience accessibility and engagement through the establishment of dedicated editing screening facilities, such as The Fantasy Factory.
The book’s third section considers technological changes in the light of modernist and postmodernist theory. Surprisingly, Meigh-Andrews only devotes a few paragraphs to Walter Benjamin's seminal essay, ‘The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. In line with the general ‘textbook’ style of Meigh-Andrews' address, we see Benjamin slotted in alongside Rosalind Krauss, Roland Barthes, Judith Butler and Jacques Lacan, whose theories are summarised without any real attachment of their ideas to Meigh-Andrews' thesis, or any integration within the discussion and analysis of individual works. This seems to do a disservice to the theoretical engagement of many artists employing the medium of video art.
The pertinence of Benjamin’s text is particularly resonant throughout the book; his critique of the art object, with its emphasis on the radical purpose of art, is clearly integral to Meigh-Andrews' examination of video art’s radical break with the homogeneity of the art object. However, for Benjamin the ultimate ‘aim’ of the new possibilities opened up by this event or radical break (located for Benjamin in the emergence of the printing press and the new potential for mass reproduction) within artistic production, was the replacement of the ritualised experience of art as a pseudo-religious experience - in both its production and exhibition - with a politicised art; an agenda glaringly absent from Meigh-Andrews' text. The avantgarde is equally neglected within Meigh-Andrews' schematic approach, and we find no mention of the work of Yvonne Rainer or Marther Rosler; the latter only present as a voice of critique, in relation to adoption of communication theory as a formal device employed by many video artists in the late 1960s.
Meigh-Andrews' focus on technological advances feels, at times, like a refusal to engage with the radical political agenda of early video artists; his discussion is often marked by the absence of a new political subject, itself seen as produced by the revolution in technology the first Portapak made possible. In a sense the technological events he discusses are not mirrored in the instances of artists and works he chooses. The book’s dominant focus is on works that follow the concerns of structuralist film (pointing at the apparatus of image production), and in his fidelity to this tradition Meigh-Andrews leaves little space for those who sought to actively change those apparatuses, as Brecht put it, ‘to the maximum extent possible in the direction of socialism’.
Emerging from the very particular set of social and political circumstances of 1960s America, the trajectory of the medium of video, traced by Chris Meigh-Andrews in his second edition of A History of Video Art, draws upon a multiplicity of events in the history of western politics; from black liberation, anti-war protest and feminist movements and their inherent ties to the radical progression of video media technology. Alongside the adoption of video as a medium for a new avantgarde, we see the domination of television as a form of entertainment that created an entirely new viewer. Alienated and occupying an entirely private realm of spectatorship, it is this audience that becomes the ‘target’ for critical works such as Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman’s video series ‘Television Delivers People’.
Meigh-Andrews pulls together diverse strands of the mediums roots, through an emphatic analysis of the ties between technological innovation and aesthetic developments, to survey the emergence of video art from a marginalised practice attached to a predominantly underground culture, to its current evolved position as the technology dominating artistic production. Placing a particular weight on the revolutions within electronic and digital imaging over the past 50 years, Meigh-Andrews identifies video as the catalyst for the emergence of more pluralistic practices, such as those embodied by Fluxus and conceptual art.
The book is divided into three sections, each following an overarching thread of technical innovation. Within the first section we are given the historical and cultural context of video art's emergence from the dominance of broadcasting media; categorised through countries and their relevant contributions with a parallel discussion of experimental music. This section stresses the global influence of early American video work and its critical relationship to broadcast television; discussing works that both inhabit the visual language of this medium and occupy its space quite literally, such as Berlin Based broadcast productions from ‘Land Art’, whose work functioned as an intervention in television broadcasting, disrupting the normal programming structure to show art works by Richard Long and Robert Smithson. Artists such as Sue Hall are also discussed as advocates of television as a new ‘venue’, with the inherent potential for producing a brand new audience.
Meigh-Andrews makes frequent references to the tradition within artists' film and video, of a critical relationship to the medium and of its agency as an alternative narrative to the prescribed roles of commercial media and advertising. This is not a direction which Meigh Andrews follows with much commitment, and it is left somewhat subsumed in the general structure of technology/aesthetic relations. However, one point which offers a particularly illuminating subtext is a discussion of the United States’ investment in industrial and military technological research during the 1960s and the subsequent initiation of airborne surveillance operations in Vietnam, described by Meigh-Andrews as the foremost motivation for the development, accessibility and mass production of portable video recording technology:
The first PortaPaks were entirely in the hands of the military and they were basically to check where their Napalm or bomb had gone.
In this brief interlude, Meigh-Andrews draws attention to the distinct line that can be traced from relatively domestic or everyday objects to the operations of military violence. It is within this context that the formation of media collectives such as the New York based Rain Dance Corporation is discussed. The active engagement of artists with video in opposition to the ‘official employment’ of video technology by military and government forces is not an inherent agenda within Meigh-Andrews discussion, but treated categorically as one event within the medium’s history. Rain Dance dominates this avenue of discussion. Outlining their agenda in 1970 they stated:
Unless we design and implement alternate information structures which transcend and reconfigure the existing ones, our alternate systems and lifestyles will be no more than products of the existing process.
Section two deals with case studies of specific artists. Technological developments are discussed through the material conditions of exhibitions and modes of dissemination and collaboration between writers, musicians and artists. Through this expanded discussion it quickly becomes apparent that the history of video art is one of interdisciplinary collaboration and the formation of new and radical ties between artists, broadcasting institutions and technicians, provoking the emergence of new collective bodies such as Rain Dance Corporation and the UK research institutions TVX and the New Arts Lab. These cooperative groups established a critical and theoretical framework around the production of new video works and conceived of an expanded idea of the artist. Through Meigh-Andrews' discussion of the work of TVX, in particular, we see how artists sought to create new ‘interfaces’ with ‘mainstream organizations’ and initiate research projects into the potential of non-broadcasting television as a communication tool within local community development.
Through his sustained discussion of the new organisation that grew around the emergence of video art, Meigh-Andrews examines a previously neglected area of its development: the relationship between the development of artists' engagement with the medium and the concurrent development of accessibility to video imaging technology. He details how artists pooled equipment and sought to increase audience accessibility and engagement through the establishment of dedicated editing screening facilities, such as The Fantasy Factory.
The book’s third section considers technological changes in the light of modernist and postmodernist theory. Surprisingly, Meigh-Andrews only devotes a few paragraphs to Walter Benjamin's seminal essay, ‘The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. In line with the general ‘textbook’ style of Meigh-Andrews' address, we see Benjamin slotted in alongside Rosalind Krauss, Roland Barthes, Judith Butler and Jacques Lacan, whose theories are summarised without any real attachment of their ideas to Meigh-Andrews' thesis, or any integration within the discussion and analysis of individual works. This seems to do a disservice to the theoretical engagement of many artists employing the medium of video art.
The pertinence of Benjamin’s text is particularly resonant throughout the book; his critique of the art object, with its emphasis on the radical purpose of art, is clearly integral to Meigh-Andrews' examination of video art’s radical break with the homogeneity of the art object. However, for Benjamin the ultimate ‘aim’ of the new possibilities opened up by this event or radical break (located for Benjamin in the emergence of the printing press and the new potential for mass reproduction) within artistic production, was the replacement of the ritualised experience of art as a pseudo-religious experience - in both its production and exhibition - with a politicised art; an agenda glaringly absent from Meigh-Andrews' text. The avantgarde is equally neglected within Meigh-Andrews' schematic approach, and we find no mention of the work of Yvonne Rainer or Marther Rosler; the latter only present as a voice of critique, in relation to adoption of communication theory as a formal device employed by many video artists in the late 1960s.
Meigh-Andrews' focus on technological advances feels, at times, like a refusal to engage with the radical political agenda of early video artists; his discussion is often marked by the absence of a new political subject, itself seen as produced by the revolution in technology the first Portapak made possible. In a sense the technological events he discusses are not mirrored in the instances of artists and works he chooses. The book’s dominant focus is on works that follow the concerns of structuralist film (pointing at the apparatus of image production), and in his fidelity to this tradition Meigh-Andrews leaves little space for those who sought to actively change those apparatuses, as Brecht put it, ‘to the maximum extent possible in the direction of socialism’.