Art Rage artworks for television 1997 -

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Art Raire is as the .auhti e. tell us, a series of anwo 1u1 maae f"or elevls o . lfere I wou13 o.brie ytcons!�r thedM,,r�nafHI f � this, firstly invqlves a To ion of JUS 'Wliat 1S the medium e o he tf!e:m'll eJPffik'RC8 p e We 'Wft1y, o 0st«illf1a

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�iid:siflml�«flton' Television is a little bit younger than I am, as is video art. I was one of the first

children to grow up with tv as a datly ritual occurrence in the home. Tv and I are old friends. Like a child-parent I believe tv to have all the answers, all the previews to my experience. I am constantly and paradoxically trying to keep abreast of its new teachings, its new familiarities.

Television has always had a close but rather problematic

relationship to film. Something similar to the high art versus kitsch or the art versus craft debates of modernism. "Television ruinec:l conventional camera composition. It could not record the tonal gradation of 31Smm stock.

Its picture was grainy, often wavy - and there was essentially no depth of field..

Thus the television surface became opaque. lronicall� enough this became its first advantage. One had to learn to read badly cropped images ... the screen became a kind of topological plane, a map, ...a diagram of cues...'" Then of course, when television developed as an advertising medium, air time had to be broken down into smaller and smaller units and the tv viewer had to learn to sustain interruption.

Television is a postmodern

medium - by its nature fragmented, hy brid, plural, decentred, and so on. It intrinsically uses the postmodern strategies of deconstruction which we have thought so sophisticated within conventional art practices. What then is the possible role of and strategies for art within televisual discourse?

Television blurs the boundary between representation and life. It is the real, the everyday, the homespun truths of daily living. So much so that Baudrillard can declare, "There is no longer any

(television) medium in the literal sense: it is now tangible, diffuse and diffracted in the real, and it can no longer even be said that the latter is distorted by it... the dissolution of life into TV - an indiscernible chemical solution".•

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Television thus becomes our unconscious daily touchstone to the

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real, putting us in touch with ourselves in the familiar privacy of our homes. The television screen becomes a membrane which stretches its opacity organically over our lives, marking and mapping the limits of subjective experience. In this Art Rage compilation, there appears the recurring motif of the human head or face. Television both fills and contains our heads, performing a kind of acupuncture of the mind. We feel the comfort of reciprocation, the reflexive bantering of its and our mutual mimicries. It has been said that television is a medium of recognition rather than Identification.• Tv dramas are like predictable pattern games, the characters do not change over time and each episode is like a variation on a basic pattern. The fun lies in predicting the already known outcomes. Film, on the other hand, requires identification with main characters, that develop and change, and thus the viewer is drawn into the movement of the plot. Perhaps, with the vast and recent spate of feature films based on television soaps 20 (rhe Brady Bunch, Lost in Space) or even cartoons (The Flintstones, Madeleine), we are witnessing the victory of television over film and over the real. We feel romantic filmic nostalgia fo r cartoons from our childhood as if they were our own private memories.

Television is a superficial discourse, but one which remains highly

complex in its struggle for survival . for maintaining those audience ratings and interest levels, As a deconstructive discourse what kind of meaning is communicated to the viewer?

Certainly not narrative meaning. Surely it must be the pattern itself, the joy of our own televisual literacies with the program. Television is a series of fragments, but it is the programming which entertains us and creates its intimacy. Television drops into our lounge rooms like a familiar friend, requiring no special attention, perfectly at home, and we can surf through the most amazing range of topics and switch off whenever we want.

Television is our social architecture, the map and framework we

use to navigate our physical environments, particularly the city. The city is designed to be

experienced through a car windscreen, like a television containing and framing not just our minds but also our bodies. Television is a holistic experience. In this Art Rage series the other dominant motif is the city.

The city, like television, is also a basic patterning which varies from country to country, culture to culture, but which binds us all in an eclectic, heterogeneous embrace.

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II

Television has also extended its program culture into the personal

computer, which has become the 'ffipside' public face of the workplace to the private home. The computer has become the new management tool and structure of the workplace, as we now begin to work in smaller and smaller 'self-managing' teams.

And now, of course, television and the computer have extended themselves into the on-line networks of the Internet. Television has become our personal avatar furthering its promise of interactivity, where we are collaborators in the art of programming.

Programming, after all, is an extension of marketing and the Internet is a tool where we can market our selves, creating networks of identities and experience.

Art l'or television will be all this and possibly more. Like television, art is both public and private, is fragmented yet meaningful, is defamiliarising yet intimate, is known and felt. Perhaps art for television achieves some of the most ecstatic vibrations of this collective membrane.

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the raft ned ,uld ,ck, This will depend, of course, on the conditions of circumstance a.nd which surround the chance audience encounter. Programming !Id .. is all. Whether seen embedded within a screening of rock clips �all} on television or in an art gallery, a classroom, streamed d tc virtually onto your desktop, with mends, in your home, or a: a reer be� to select. �rarr 1peo 1ken �we, • Norman M. Klein, Audience Culture and the :ion Video Screen, Illuminating Video: an essential guide to video art, New York: Aperture in association with the Bay Area Video Coalition, 1990, p.378. I am indebted to this in-depth and forward-thinking article.

'Jean Baudrillard, The Precession of Slmulacra, Simulations (trans. P. Foss and P. Patton), New York: Semiotext(e). 1983, p.54.

'Klein, op.dt., p.382. Klein describes the won< and theoty of child psychologist Grant Noble.

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' the only machines © Retarded Eye

1998

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1998