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

“If one were to announce to a group of art historians that television is one of the inevitable and logical successors to a thousand years of the Western Art Tradition the statement would be greeted with incomprehension, benign amusement, or angry denial.”¹ In this tirade from his essay “Sacrament and Television,” in the catalog of a major video art exhibition presented in the United States in 1975, the American art theorist Jack Burnham immediately seizes on an obvious ambiguity: what distinguishes video art from television? This article focuses on a period-specific understanding of a “continuum” between mass media and a specific artistic medium, as embodied in television. If television could be put forward as a new medium with the birth of video art, the argument here, on the contrary, consists of questioning the aesthetic efficiency of television in symbolic (video icons) and cybernetic (environmental vision) terms in the 1970s. At the time, the dissolution of the television “medium” in artistic practices was the corollary of an attempt to dissolve the border between “high” and “low” culture, which was subsequently seized on by cultural studies.² This historical perspective fosters a current of reflection that lives on in both the fields of television studies and video art. I will first deal with the connections, distinctions, and hierarchies established between television and video art from different points of view in the 1960s and 1970s. I will then proceed to evoke the “inclusive theory” of media proposed in the catalog of the Video Art exhibition, which tries to be more in line with the reality of contemporaneous cultural practices. Following this, I will go back in time to the roots of this non-hierarchic cultural theory, which finds its origins in the thinking of English pop art in the 1950s and its approach to popular cultural practices such as television and other mass media. Finally, I will look at the conception of the future of television as envisaged in the 1960s and 1970s, in relation to theories on the future of art and the role of the artist in the new information technology environment.

Media rescue

Materially speaking, the distinction between television and video art is sometimes tenuous: one or more televisions, an electronic signal.³ The differences, however, are immediately operative on the cultural level (aim, production, distribution, consumption), where the truism of the demarcation between art and mass culture appears very quickly. But to draw a distinction is also, in a way, to invite a comparison. This is one of the questions explicitly posed by the Video Art exhibition,⁴ which presented the works, installations, and videos of various contemporary artists (Douglas Davis, Lisa Steele, Andy Warhol, etc.) [fig. 1], but also, as if to provide grist for the mill in this comparison, a selection of
22 commercials broadcast on television in Germany, Japan, Spain, and the United States between 1948 and 1973. In the 1970s in the United States, video art was connected to experimental cinema, but also partly built its cultural identity based on – or even as an antithesis to – television and its commercial output.⁵ However, the criteria of judgment deployed to examine these artistic works are often closer to those of television than painting or sculpture.⁶

This predicament actually comes from the ambivalence of the binary differentiation which essentially suggests that video art, an artistic medium, is an evolved form of television, a mass media. In the Video Art exhibition catalog, Jack Burnham’s text is elaborated on by another art theorist, artist, and sociologist, John McHale. McHale’s research is oriented toward the topic of the future, in particular toward future developments in cultural consumption.⁷ In his text, entitled “The Future of Television: Some Theoretical Considerations,” he regrets the dichotomous and hierarchical vision that assigns avant-garde video art the ambition “to rescue the medium from ‘the wasteland’.” The rescue plan criticized by McHale attempts to appropriate an assumed agency specific to the medium, positively valorized, and transfer it into the artistic sphere. Television would then try to compete with more traditional works of art.⁸ Once part of this sphere, solely due to its originality as a medium, television could produce something new and interesting. For McHale, this attachment to the novelty of the medium is a total misreading in artistic terms. Without generalizing about the varied contemporaneous output or calling into question the interest of certain initiatives, video art must find its specificity in relation to what has already been proposed in the history of art. Yet, “much of its output so far has been somewhat conventional. In all too many cases, the actual products tend to be mere animated versions of what has already been prefigured in abstract painting, kinetic sculpture, light shows and films.”⁹ Video art cannot claim to be relevant as contemporary art simply for its technical novelty, an aspect that McHale considers secondary to the aesthetic experience.

The Korean artist Nam June Paik, one of the pioneers of the use of television “in art,” referred to the television screen as the artist’s new canvas:

As collage technique replaced oil paint, the cathode ray tube will replace the canvas. Someday artists will work with capacitors, resistors, and semiconductors as they work today with brushes, violins and junk. There are 4,000,000 dots per second on one television screen, just think of the variety of images you can get. It’s so cool. It’s like going to the moon.¹⁰

But his enthusiasm is about television as a communication media rather than a medium. Paik’s work unfolds within the conceptual framework of Marshall McLuhan’s “Global village,” in which television is conceived as the media element most likely to stimulate movement toward the constitution of a world tribe.¹¹ In the exhibition Video Art, Paik presented his “work” Global Groove (1973), which is in fact a program broadcast by an American television channel¹² [fig. 2]. Video sequences of various kinds are frenetically superimposed within it: extracts from other television programs, videos made by the artist, contributions from other artists, documentary sequences, dance videos, etc. Paik thinks of Global Groove as a global music festival that reflects a future where all cable TV broadcasts can be linked to one another. He announces in the credits: “This is a glimpse of a video landscape of tomorrow when you will be able to switch on any TV station on the earth and TV guides will be as fat as the Manhattan telephone book.” Any dividing line between consumers of mass media and those of avant-garde video art is blurred. “If we could compile a weekly TV festival made up of music and dance from every county, and distributed it free-of-charge round the world via the proposed common video market, it would have a phenomenal effect on education and entertainment.

“Cultural smorgasbord”

Nam June Paik’s artistic production, situated within the framework of the everyday social and cultural practices of his potential viewers,¹³ seems like an exemplary response to the theoretical approach defended by John McHale in the Video Art catalog. McHale calls for an “inclusive theory” as a common tool for understanding all of the works shown in the exhibition – a theory responding to actual practices in which art and popular culture come into contact. For example, such exchanges were recently shown in the exhibition Revolution of the Eye – Modern Art and the Birth of American Television (2015), which traced the impact of contemporaneous artistic production on television in the post-WWII era and up to the mid-1970s.¹⁴ Since then, sociologists have rendered these exchanges even more explicit. Éric Maigret in particular took note of the presumed contradiction between the experience of mass communication and artistic work, the contradiction itself collateral damage of the “hierarchy of values” still determining culture, while stressing that “this Manicheism does not hold up for long against the analysis of the history of ideas nor against the study of program content and viewer practices.”¹⁵

Thus, as interesting as avant-garde video art experiments may be, John McHale regrets the strong tendency to place them “on a higher plane than ordinary programming. What is particularly apparent in such overvaluation is a denial of the larger symbolic and ritualistic functions of both the manifest and latent ‘content’ of television – as even extending to the commercial break.”¹⁶ Here, McHale highlights the very specific perception of airtime in television consumption, divided between commercial breaks. These breaks are themselves traditionally viewed by television itself as not being of equal interest to the rest of the programs broadcast.¹⁷

The Video Art exhibition, as has been mentioned, featured advertisements. One of them was Andy Warhol’s Underground Sundae (1968), produced for the Schrafft diner chain [fig. 3]. As one would expect for a frozen dessert ironically described by Warhol as “underground” (i.e. uninterested in commercial circuits), the work plays with the codes of advertising rather than reproducing them – the soundtrack records the film being shot, color test bars are visible in the background. In the exhibition catalog, this “artist’s advertisement” enjoys a special status in comparison to other ads: the catalog gives relatively detailed information (format, sponsor, lender) in the same arrangement as for other videos or installations shown in the exhibition. The “anonymous” ads, on the other hand, are ostracized and crammed into a generic “Commercials” section, designated on the basis of rudimentary information (title and date only). One of these ads, Help Unsell The War (1972) [fig. 4], may provide a perfect example of what John McHale is interested in in these advertising works, an interest relative to the symbolic significance of metaphors produced by television within society.

This is an anti-Vietnam War public service announcement, sponsored by organizations dedicated to ending the conflict. We see Uncle Sam distributing portions of apple pie to characters personifying categories of American citizens (a child, an elderly man, an African American, a worker, etc.). “When they divided the pie in Washington, did you even wonder who got the biggest slice?” the voiceover enquires, as a cigar-smoking general frantically gobbles up almost all the pie in front of the other, aggrieved characters. Your tax dollars go toward war, and this “buys you bombs instead of schools.”¹⁸

The ad is an incarnation of what John McHale calls “video ikons”: “Secular by definition but mythopoetic in function, the video ikons afford both the recurrent stability and ritualized predictability of the standard format series and the changing topicality
(and fantasy) of the ‘specials’, the news, and other shows.”¹⁹ From a more anthropological standpoint, he underlines the affinity of these icons with the plasticity of the information environment – constantly changing – and therefore the possibilities, offered by television, of processing socio-cultural upheavals in progress. McHale reverses the focus by reassessing television in terms of its popular use as a producer of symbolic content in a society, a role traditionally assigned to the fine arts. “The collective symbols of the society are to be found here rather than exclusively in the fine arts.”²⁰ He approaches popular television productions according to their own qualities, without any cultural value judgment about either their content or mode of consumption.

For him, such judgments can only lead to pitfalls: reproaching popular television productions for being ephemeral, for mass audiences, etc., is actually tacking the canons of video art onto television. Being derived from the canonical moral standards of “high culture,” these canons cannot be valid, in McHale’s eyes, for judging contemporary cultural consumption. Conversely, judging video art with the use of the canons of television, it is criticized for being boring. If one were to get rid of these obsolete criteria, it would be possible to consider this medium in an open and non-exclusive way: “In terms of the future of art or the future of television, or indeed the future of culture, we are patently moving towards the cafeteria style of a cultural smorgasbord rather than the formal stages of an eight course dinner!”²¹

Vidiots

This conception of cultural consumption as a widely varied buffet, which ignores the crude divide between art and mass culture, was born in the 1950s in London. At the time, McHale was part of a group of artists, architects, and theorists known as the Independent Group. Together, they elaborated the cultural theories of English pop art. For them, art had to be taken out of its ivory tower through the acceptance of the aesthetic significance (in the broad sense) of everyday life and the environment.²² Their cultural theory was based on the notion of a “continuum,” that is to say, on the absence of exclusivity and hierarchization between “high culture” and “popular culture,” in particular within American culture, on which they were primarily focused for socio-historical reasons (including the Cold War alliance between Great Britain and the USA, as well as a shared language).²³ Television, alongside display advertisements, Hollywood films, industrial design, pop music, and other outputs of contemporary cultural industries, was the object and place of sharing popular mass-cultural experiences of which Independent Group members claimed to have been happy consumers before being theorists.
As Reyner Banham – another member of the Independent Group – noted in a pop index compiled in the early 1960s, they admitted to being “vidiots”: “formerly a term of pejoration, now purely descriptive – one trained in the use of the mass media, originally TV (Video in US usage).”²⁴ This portmanteau word first referred to television as a privileged popular cultural instrument; then, by specifying that the word became “purely descriptive,” Banham ironically moved TV consumers from an old status (being considered idiots) to a new one: trained, educated consumers, i.e. smart consumers. In his colorful writing style, Banham detailed the evolution of this “training” toward what he caustically qualified with the oxymoron of “pop connoisseurship”:

At first it meant “trained” in the Pavlovian sense of “equipped with reliably conditioned reflexes” – people who developed uncontrollable leg-actions whenever a commercial said “… don’t walk, Run, NOW to your dealer for giant family sized pack”. Then followed a subtle change of meaning to pick up the sense of “one so conditioned to the medium that she can eat, knit, smoke, talk and read a book, all at the same time as watching the screen”. From this only a further shift of emphasis was required to make “trained” carry the sense of “one skilled in the use of the medium” and thus, by extension to anyone trained to extract every subtlety, marginal meaning, overtone or technical nicety from any of the mass media.
A Pop Art connoisseur.²⁵

Besides being happy TV consumers, some of the Independent Group’s members also created for the medium. John McHale made commercials for English television in the 1950s, among them one for a shampoo and another for EMI Records.²⁶ In his artistic works of the period, principally collages, television also played a key role. For the collage Machine Made, America (1956) [fig. 5], the television became the heart of his humanoid robot, which was made up of different elements of contemporary mass culture.

A television set also appeared in the background of the famous collage Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing? (1956) [fig. 6], conceived together with the famous pop artist Richard Hamilton, who was also part of the Independent Group. The collage used images considered to be indicative of the contemporaneous social issues concentrated within it: “Man, Woman, Humanity, History, Food, Newspapers, Cinema, TV, Telephone, Comics (picture information), Words (textural information), Tape recording (aural information), Cars, Domestic appliances, Space.”²⁷ For Independent Group members, television was an exemplary pop medium, on the one hand for what it represented in popular cultural consumption, and on the other hand for its communicational role in the new Information Age, which was an important focus of the group’s theoretical considerations on pop culture. Finally, it interested them on the technological level. In the late 1950s, in his lecture, “Glorious Technicolor, Breathtaking Cinemascope and Stereophonic Sound,” Hamilton analyzed the impact of the technological developments of the time on entertainment industries.²⁸ He then evoked some of the latest experimentation undertaken with the medium of television, such as the multi-screen device that designers Charles and Ray Eames had just developed for the Moscow World’s Fair of 1959, displaying a montage of nearly 2,000 images reflecting the experience of contemporary daily life in the United States²⁹ [fig. 7].

Charles and Ray Eames sat within a canonical pop approach – that of the pleasure of technology, visual communication, and the ephemeral, as detailed by Justus Nieland in his recent book, Happiness by Design.³⁰ As early as the 1950s, the Eames’s work with television embodied a new media conception of the extension of sensory experience, and the understanding of media as a global environment. In the same vein, in the 1960s, a number of artists using this medium did not consider their practice within the closed category of video art but in undefined uses, installations, performances, etc. During this period, John McHale reflected on the topic of the new context of the information society and the hypertechnologized environment in which it operated. Free of technical determinism, he envisaged a shift in cultural and artistic experience: from now on, human beings would have an informational relationship with their environment. What consequences would this have for art? In an entirely cybernetic conception (what matters is the flow of information), he described the overflowing of the work into its environment based on the different uses of television:

As the apparatus of cultural diffusion becomes increasingly technological, its “products” became less viewable as discrete, individual events, but rather more as related elements in a continuous contextual flow, i.e., the book-novel as compared to t.v. The artwork, as for example, in Rauschenberg-type “Combines,” moves toward a continuous format, juxtaposing “still” images with live radio and t.v. sets in the same piece, which characteristically spill out of the frame into the general environment.³¹

Taking the Combines series by neo-Dada artist Robert Rauschenberg as a reference –which, as its name suggests, merges several mediums – McHale described the dynamics of the overflowing of art into practical life via a “continuum” between different mediums, artistic or otherwise.³² This is what theorist Dick Higgins would soon call “intermedia.”³³ Intermedia environments became common in American artistic production as early as the 1960s.³⁴

Telefutures: the informational aesthetic experience³⁵

John McHale, who, as mentioned, focused his sociological research on the theme of the future, imagines a total implosion of the notion of medium in that future:

The future of art seems no longer to lie with the creation of enduring masterworks but with defining alternative cultural strategies, though series of communicative gestures in multi-media forms. As art and non-art become interchangeable, and the master work may only be a reel of punched or magnetized tape, the artist defines art less through any intrinsic value of art object than by furnishing new conceptualities of lifestyle and orientation.³⁶

In this broadened conception of the aesthetic experience, artistic agency goes through the actuation of the information itself, via its media (the punched card is the first input-output system of computing; magnetic tape refers to analogue or digital recording). Television will therefore only be meaningful as a carrier of information, and not due to the medium research with which certain video artists are engaged. McHale in fact rejects the visual, even sensorial integrity of the artistic experience – taking it a step further, he proposes a complete detachment from all materiality, to settle on the particular concept of “lifestyle”: “The boundaries between the art work and life become permeable. The painting on the wall is not the important thing, it’s the total environment, the range of experiences.”³⁷

Jack Burnham, who opened his text in the Video Art catalog with a sarcastic remark about television’s inevitable succession in the linear sequence of Western art, was a close friend of John McHale’s and also worked with this concept of “lifestyle” in the sense of a detachment from materiality, toward the invisible, the dominant paradigm of the information society. He developed his theory of “systems aesthetics” in the late 1960s from this same cybernetic basis. This was at a time when machines, in the broad sense of hardware, were being overtaken by dematerialization due to technological upheavals, notably advances in electronics in the information technology sector. As a consequence, many artists showed a growing interest in the system and in software.³⁸ From this approach, more conceptual initiatives emerged, along with the happening – artistic forms expressing certain cultural and social transformations of the 1960s, as has been very well spotlighted by art historian Edward A. Shanken.³⁹ Burnham’s reasoning is as follows: since it is the system of art that is used to produce information, and information is sufficient to make art, it suffices that an artist continues to support the idea of art (even without an object) for art to exist, and attention can then shift from the artwork to the experience of living in the everyday environment.⁴⁰ “Avant garde art during the past ten years has, in part, rejected inert objects for the ‘living’ presence of artists, and by that I am referring to Conceptual Art, Performance Art, and Video Art. In the case of such artists […] art and life activities have become deliberately fused, so that the artist’s output is, in the largest sense, life-style.”⁴¹

With this conception in mind, it is easier to understand Jack Burnham’s sarcasm: for him, the return to the question of the medium is actually deeply dull. It amounts to limiting reasoning to the confines of a so-called “art sphere,” even though the shift within this sphere causes the production in question to lose the ingredient necessary for its artistic effectiveness: spontaneity. At first glance, he explains, one might think that the post-formalist medium of television/video art preserves, more than others, a form of spontaneity in the process of reception, which is, in a certain respect, in line with that of human perception. “Without too much difficulty, it is easy to envision television as a kind of human eye attached to a purposeful brain. The electron beam scanning the phosphor on the inside of a video tube has all the ephemerality that we ordinarily associate with the ever shifting light falling on the mosaic of receptors in the human eye.” Yet, in reality, “Are not these images on videotape just as destructive to true spontaneity and creativity as the miles and miles of masterpieces seen in museums?”⁴²
It is precisely by ignoring the horizon of expectation associated with artistic production that television can escape this pitfall of neutralization due to a lack of spontaneity. As Burnham writes elsewhere, “The most important artist best succeeds by liquidating his position as artist vis à vis society.”⁴³

In the mass-market cybernetic system of the 1970s, television was still considered the privileged tool for establishing the global village: the personal computer was not yet widely used, the digital revolution not fully underway. Consequently, the question of television’s uses was not (or not solely) presented in technical or mediumistic terms, but also in terms of the knowledge and information economy.⁴⁴ This was particularly the case in future-oriented research circles. With utopian accents comparable to those of Nam June Paik’s Global Groove, John McHale was interested in the implications of television as an “open network” beginning in the mid-1960s, and its potential prospective uses in creating a future virtual planetary society.⁴⁵ He saw television as one of the key tools for the circulation of knowledge on a worldwide scale, between university centers.⁴⁶ These centers would become the heart of international scientific cooperation and, more generally, of social activity, in the service of the establishment of a “global ‘consciousness’.” McHale died in the late 1970s without witnessing subsequent changes in the use of this medium. His television media theory remained rooted in the pre-internet utopia of planetary communication and the knowledge economy, in a US period in search of a new global ideology.⁴⁷