Since the late nineteenth century, avant-garde artists have
engaged
with the most advanced imaging technologies of their respective eras,
including photography, film, television, and, most recently, the
computer. The establishment of television in the late 1950s and early
1960s as the dominant mass medium in the United States occurred
during a
period in which artists who were dissatisfied with the postwar triumph
of abstract painting began to rediscover the avant-gardes of the 1910s
and 1920s especially Dada and
Constructivism. In their attempt to bridge what they perceived to be
the gap between art and life, many
so-called Neo-Dada artists began to engage as critically with
television
as their predecessors had with
photography and film.
This exhibition will be the first ever to
examine
the impact of television on the visual
arts in the United States and Europe at a crucial period in the
development of both media. The origins of the
media world we now inhabit in which images have come to mediate our
experience of reality to an
unprecedented extent can be traced back to this historic period.
Television emerged as the dominant mass medium in the United
States during the era that President John F. Kennedy termed the New
Frontier
in 1960. Although television would soon be decried as a vast
wasteland by President Kennedys controversial FCC Commissioner
Newton
Minow, artists began to creatively engage with the medium for the
first
time not just as an object to be pictured, but as a system that
demanded
a rethinking of the relationship between the realms of art and life.
Not only was television becoming the primary technology through which
images were produced, circulated, and consumed, but it was
transforming
the very nature of how we perceived images. The dominance of the
photographic and filmic image as a material manifestation of the real
was giving way to another model: the image as the phosphorescence of
electric power, a metaphor for social power. Indeed, the major
television spectacles of the period, ranging from the Nixon-Kennedy
debates of 1960 to the Four Dark Days of the Kennedy
assassination and
its aftermath in November 1963, exemplified the extent to which
television was becoming a system comprised of a vast network of
consumers and producers linked electronically via images through which
fluid structures of power were continuously shaped and reshaped. The
power of television resided largely in its capacity to usurp the
authority of the real and to deploy this new reality to legitimate the
structures of power it put in place.
Although isolated artists in the United States and Western Europe
began to engage with television after World War II, this number
expanded
greatly during the New Frontier era. Most lived or worked in New
York
or Los Angeles: the two most important centers of art and television
production. They include Wallace Berman, Lee Friedlander, K.O. Götz,
Ray Johnson, Edward Kienholz, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Robert
Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Wolf Vostell, Andy Warhol, and Tom
Wesselmann, among others. These artists often watched television
voraciously, worked in their studios with one or more sets turned on,
and even appeared on television to enhance their celebrity status. In
their paintings, sculptures, installations, and happenings, they
engaged
with the perceptual, technological, and social changes catalyzed in
part
by the emergence of television as the dominant mass medium.
The exhibition contains work which can be divided into four loose
categories: Screens, Circuits, Programs, and Television World.
Screens, to include paintings, collages, and assemblages by
artists such as Wallace Berman, Edward Kienholz, Robert
Rauschenberg, Wolf Vostell, and Tom Wesselmann, will explore how
artists began to develop pictorial spaces that seemed to become
extensions of televisual spaceNULLseamless flows of dematerialized
images drawn from the pages of popular magazines and newspapers,
transformed in a manner evocative of the special effects employed
in television programs and commercials, and seemingly invested
with
the potential for motion. It will also examine the use of actual
television sets as works of art.
Circuits will feature Nam June PaikNULLs prepared television sets
(ordinary sets altered to produce distorted images) and
photographic documentation of the historic 1963 exhibition in
which
he premiered them; it will explore how artists began to
examine the
psychological and social implications of the practice of watching
television by producing works that demanded active viewer
participation and consequently contested the naturalization of
the
state of passive distraction that television fostered.
Programs will extend this exploration by examining how artists
such as Wolf Vostell and others associated with the movement
known
as Fluxus began to acknowledge the effects of conventional
television programming by developing sophisticated, yet engaging,
alternatives in happenings and performances.
Television World, including Andy Warhols silkscreen paintings
of Jacqueline Kennedy after the assassination of President
Kennedy,
Bruce Conners film inspired by this tragic event, and Dennis
Hoppers Kennedy Funeral photographs, will explore how the
practice
of watching television had begun to reconfigure the individuals
relationship to the real a harbinger of the media world that
would emerge in full force in the 1970s and 1980s.
Programs for The New Frontier will be announced at a later date.
Additional support for The New Frontier has been provided by
Arthur Frakes and by Joyce Christian and
Rudolph H. Green.
The Austin Museum of Art is funded in part by the City of Austin
under the auspices of the Austin Arts Commission, and by the
Texas
Commission on the Arts. American Airlines is the official
airline
of the Austin Museum of Art. The Driskill is the official
hotel of
the Austin Museum of Art. Additional support has been
provided by
the Austin Museum of Art Guild and Museum Members. Promotional
sponsors for the Austin Museum of Art are 107.1 KGSR, the Austin
American-Statesman, The Austin Chronicle, CitySearch, and
Pentagram
Design.
IMAGE:
Nam June Paik
Zen for TV, 1963/2000
Prepared television set
Collection of the
Austin Museum of Art
Photo: Jeff Rowe,
Austin Prints for Publication
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