<p><span>Screen from Wojciech Bruszewski, "The Space Transmission", 1974. Copyright: Małgorzata Kamińska-Bruszewska and Balbina Bruszewska.</span></p>
<p><span>Screen from Wojciech Bruszewski, "The Space Transmission", 1974. Copyright: Małgorzata Kamińska-Bruszewska and Balbina Bruszewska.</span></p>

No. 27: Formatting of Late Television

Managing editor: Łukasz Zaremba

Screen from Wojciech Bruszewski, "The Space Transmission", 1974. Copyright: Małgorzata Kamińska-Bruszewska and Balbina Bruszewska.

This issue was supported by the Film School in Łódź, Polish Studies Department of the University of Warsaw, the Polish Minister of Science and Higher Education, from the funds of the program "Support of academic journals" in 2019-2020, and by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage, from the Fund for the Promotion of Culture.

Table of Contents

Introduction

  1. The Formatting of Late Television

    ”The Formatting of Late Television”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 27 (2020), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2020.27.2264

    Introductory notes to the 27th issue of View.

    keywords: television; media; television format; seeing

Close-Up

  1. Becoming a Lady: Learning to be “Classy” in Polish Adaptations of Reality Shows

    Monika Borys
    Monika Borys, ”Becoming a Lady”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 27 (2020), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2020.27.2236

    Given the lineup across much of our current television landscape, we could be forgiven for thinking that the medium is utterly obsessed with class struggle. One of the most popular TV genres to exploit class difference for dramatic purpose is the reality show. This essay examines Polish adaptations of three foreign reality show formats that rely on “clash of two worlds”-type tropes to drive their narratives. The shows in question are: Projekt Lady (prod. TVN, first aired in 2016), Damy i wieśniaczki (prod. TTV, first aired in 2016), and Rolnik szuka żony (prod. TVP, first aired in 2014). Drawing on sociological concepts of class as the embodiment of a specific collection of attributes and habits (Pierre Bourdieu), the author treats the shows in question as a particular sub-type of image designed to impart lessons in class. Calling on scholarship interpreting reality show programming as a neoliberal formula that gives weight to the middle-class habitus (Beverley Skeggs, Helen Wood), this analysis considers the specific nature of the Polish social structure, and interprets the relationship between class and gender in the analyzed programs. The inquiry elucidates what could be called the Polish strain of upward mobility, which compels reality show contestants to blend attributes associated with both the lower (“peasants”) and middle classes (“ladies”).

    keywords: reality show; television; class struggle; upward mobility

  2. Telefutures: 1970s Television Through the Prism of Its Expanded Potential

    Juliette Bessette
    Juliette Bessette, ”Telefutures”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 27 (2020), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2020.27.2218

    The article traces the approach to television at work in the major exhibition Video Art (1975, USA). Starting from the texts of art and media theorists Jack Burnham and John McHale for the catalog of the exhibition, the aim is to understand their cultural conception of television as a “continuum” between (mass) media and the artistic (medium). The difficulty therefore consists in applying distinct standards of judgment to one or other of these types of production, standards out of step with what was circulating in the cultural practices of contemporary daily life. The article then focuses on the potential future developments in television as they were imagined at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s – before the generalization of the personal computer and the “digital revolution” – notably in terms of the knowledge economy in this Information Age.

    keywords: television; new media art; video art; expanded cinema; pop culture theory; media theory; knowledge economy

  3. Parasites on Waves: The Political Potential of Radio Transmission in the Works of Katarzyna Krakowiak

    Marta Wódz
    Marta Wódz, ”Parasites on Waves”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 27 (2020), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2020.27.2237

    Radio, as it was argued by Friedrich Kittler, already in its early history was regarded as a tool allowing for making politics. Although nowadays it may seem to be an example of dated technology, overturned by other, newer media, the question of how the political potential recognized in radio in the early 20th century translates into contemporary reality, is still worth asking. Perhaps some general qualities of that medium can be described by observing how radio is used by contemporary artists. By placing wireless broadcast in the center of interest, transmission art – the term coined at the end of 1990s – allows to embrace a wide spectrum of artistic practices presenting the issue of transmission as political at its core. On the examples of radio-based projects by Katarzyna Krakowiak: parasitic Free Radio Jaffa and Reconstruction of the Shipyard’s Broadcasting Centre set against the historical background of Krzysztof Wodiczko’s works I am going to pose the question if the transmission art projects can nowadays fulfill the subversive potential recognized in radio almost 100 years earlier.

    keywords: art; parasite; radio; Katarzyna Krakowiak; Free Radio Jaffa; Palestine; borrowing frequencies; human antenna; political

  4. Schlingensief's Peep-Show: Post-Cinematic Spectacles and the Public Space of History

    Richard Langston
    Richard Langston, ”Schlingensief's Peep-Show”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 27 (2020), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2020.27.2259

    Richard Langston analyses Christoph Schlingensief's action in 2000 during Wiener Festwochen. In the combination of the reality TV format and classical media, Schlingensief saw a political potential and an opportunity to disrupt the mechanisms of the public sphere.

    Translation of a chapter from the collection After the Avant-Garde. Contemporary German and Austrian Experimental Film (ed. R. Halle, R. Steingröver), Camden House, Rochester, New York 2008.

    keywords: public sphere; media; television; reality tv; immigration; Christoph Schlingensief

Panorama

  1. Transition and abortion. A Genealogy of the 'abortion compromise'

    Marcin Kościelniak
    Marcin Kościelniak, ”Transition and abortion.”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 27 (2020), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2020.27.2247

    The text is a cultural analysis of the events surrounding the "Draft law on the legal protection of the conceived child", brought to the parliment on 28 February 1989. This bill started a debate on the ban on abortion, which ended with the 'abortion compromise' of 7 January 1993. The fact that this debate began before the June 1989 elections is used by the author against commonly known history of Polish transition. The author asks about the attitude of the main political forces to the first draft of the anti-abortion law, analysing the media discourse (headed by "Gazeta Wyborcza"), reaching for historical analyses, SB materials, records of the Round Table talks. At the same time, he reaches back to the end of the 1970s, asking how the Catholic discourse at that time, together with the prohibition of abortion proposed by the Church, was included in the discourse of the democratic opposition and ruling party. The author formulates his analysis as a project of a feminist and secular archive of Polish transformation and understands it as an 'underground' archive which verifies and bursts out the 'official' archive established in hegemonic historical narratives - and with it our understanding of the past and our present. Proposing that the ban on abortion should be seen as the central event of the transformation, crucial for the understanding of the then negotiated Polish symbolic universe, the author, on the basis of his analyses, proves that the exclusion of women and their rights is a pre-legislative and fundamental principle of Polish democracy. The text is the first part of a larger project that will include a narrative about the identity of contemporary feminist movements, covering the history of the demonstrations of April and May 1989 and an analysis of the discourse of protests for maintaining legal abortion.

    keywords: abortion; feminism; transition; Catholic Church; Solidarity; archives

  2. Silent Presence of Things. Representation of the Experience of Migration in Contemporary Art

    Rita Müller
    Rita Müller, ”Silent Presence of Things”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 27 (2020), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2020.27.2202

    The author describes strategies used in contemporary art to narrate about refugees’ experience. She analyzes two installations that refer to migration from Africa to Europe through Lampedusa Island. Sislej Xhafa's Barka and Christoph Büchel's Barca Nostra are examples of the contemporary artists' tendency to use objects as witnesses of history. Damaged items testify their owners' past and allow viewers to interact with them affectively. However, things don't tell the whole story. The author shows that their silent presence can lead to reproduction by viewers of the assumptions arising from their privileged position.

    keywords: refugees; migrants; Lampedusa; visual arts; readymades; performative turn; agency of things; Venice Biennial

  3. Global People's History and the Problem of Slavery in Old Poland

    Kacper Pobłocki
    Kacper Pobłocki, ”Global People's History and the Problem of Slavery in Old Poland ”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 27 (2020), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2020.27.2239

    The article is a critique of a stance dominant in Polish historiography, which treats history as a discipline pertaining to describe reality "as it really was." The author examines the historical sources of the project, locating it in the work of Leopold von Ranke. According to the author, von Ranke's vision of history negates contemporaneity's influence on our vision of history, as a result negating also the historicity of our own moment. Drawing on the philosophy of Walter Benjamin, the article proposes an alternative way of examining the past. Unlike von Ranke's project, which was conceived with the intent of securing the interests of those in power, the grasroots projects of a people's history is a history of opposition. It allows us to account for the past in a more exhaustive manner.

    keywords: slavery; people's history; historiography

Viewpoint

  1. Translations

    Wojciech Bruszewski
    Wojciech Bruszewski, ”Translations”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 27 (2020), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2020.27.2254

    Presentation of Wojciech Bruszewski's work related to radio and television broadcasting.

    keywords: Wojciech Bruszewski; television; transmission; video art

  2. Wojciech Bruszewski: Aberrations in Transmission

    Filip Gabriel Pudło
    Filip Gabriel Pudło, ”Wojciech Bruszewski: Aberrations in Transmission”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 27 (2020), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2020.27.2253

    A commentary to the work of Wojciech Bruszewski

    keywords: televison; transmission; Wojciech Bruszewski; new media; art; sabotage

  3. White Noise

    Grzegorz Królikiewicz
    Grzegorz Królikiewicz, ”White Noise”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 27 (2020), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2020.27.2229

    The translation of Grzegorz Królikiewicz's article Biały szum. The article was first published in Polish 1981 in the monthly journal Kino [Cinema] (issue 1).

    keywords: image theory; white noise; television; video

  4. Grzegorz Królikiewicz: “Holds in the Climbing Wall”

    Paulina Kwiatkowska
    Paulina Kwiatkowska, ”Grzegorz Królikiewicz: “Holds in the Climbing Wall””, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 27 (2020), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2020.27.2211

    A critical commentary on Grzegorz Królikiewicz text White Noise.

    keywords: Grzegorz Królikiewicz; image theory; white noise; television; video

Snapshots

  1. Finding Our Stories in Elana Levine’s "Her Stories: Daytime Soap Opera and US Television History"

    Madeline Ullrich
    Madeline Ullrich, ”Finding Our Stories ”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 27 (2020), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2020.27.2215

    A review of Elana Levine's book Her Stories: Daytime Soap Opera and US Television History (Duke University Press, 2020).

    keywords: television; American television industry; soap opera; feminism; audience

  2. Neither Lenin nor Lennon

    Xawery Stańczyk
    Xawery Stańczyk, ”Neither Lenin nor Lennon”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 27 (2020), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2020.27.2232

    The article is a review of Andrea F. Bohlman’s monograph Musical Solidarities: Political Action and Music in Late Twentieth-Century Poland. The author discusses Bohlman’s book, reframing its subject within the concept of the long 1980s and contextualizes the question of solidarity and “Solidarity” against the background of popular and youth cultures. An emphasis has been put on such issues anti-communism, anti-Semitism, and normativity both inside the “Solidarity” movement and the dominant culture in Poland in the 1970s and 1980s.

    keywords: Solidarity; music; long 1980; nationalism; youth culture; social movement

  3. Wschodnia. A Biography of a Gallery

    Piotr Kosiewski
    Piotr Kosiewski, ”Wschodnia. A Biography of a Gallery ”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 27 (2020), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2020.27.2243

    Critical review of a book entitled "Galeria Wschodnia. Dokumenty 1984-2017 / Documents 1984-2017" eds.  Daniel Muzyczuk, Tomek Załuski.

    keywords: Wschodnia; gallery; artists' avant-garde; Łódź

  4. Performance TV in Centrum Sztuki Współczesnej Zamek Ujazdowski

    Aleksander Kmak
    Aleksander Kmak, ”Performance TV in Centrum Sztuki Współczesnej Zamek Ujazdowski”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 27 (2020), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2020.27.2245

    The review of the Performance TV, an experimental performative program in the form television studio, organized in Zamek Ujazdowski in Warsaw.

    keywords: performance; television; contemporary art