Yesterday was my last day in Barcelona, which I spent going to MACBA for the second time, to see Are you Ready for TV, a show of moving image works about television. The suspicion that the rise of net-worked technology dates the theme a little is echoed in the press release which states (complains?): “just when it seems that television as we have know it is over, we are asked if we are ready for more”. Its an attempt to “deceive the senses in order to escape the emitter-receptor duality”, a description seemingly more fitting for the internet than for TV, in this age of fan art, prosumers and content creators.
The exhibition implicitly acknowledges the self-directed mentality of the internet through its design, which encourages a twitchy, distracted mode of attention. Consisting of 10 sections (or “episodes”)- each with at least two interactive screens, with an average of 3 works to choose from, many with lavish running times, plus numerous large screen scattered about- meant that watching even a fraction of the works on offer took two visits. Like a night spent flitting through UBUweb, the viewer becomes curator, necessarily making a cut and hoping for the best; the emitter-receptor duality is certainly breached, with the viewer/ receptor being burdened with the responsibility (freedom?) of making their own choices. It is unclear whether this completist approach is a curatorial strategy or a result of technological advances, with a similar format for viewing video used at MOVE at the Hayward, and at CCCB in Barcelona; the encyclopedic scope is dazzling, but is the viewer willing to put the hours in?
Despite these quibbles, the show provided a good opportunity to catch ‘classics’ of the genre in the same space. In the ‘Site-Specific TV’ section, dealing with the sculptural and material properties of the TV set, was David Halls’ This Is a TV Receiver, whereby a TV presenter making a statement about the appearance and function of the TV box deteriorates over repeated re-screenings, emphasising the objecthood of ‘the box’ through dry description. While the technology described is now obsolete, the anti-illusionist sentiment of the line “this is NOT a man’s voice” remains true regardless of the particular apparatus used, unlike for some of the other work. Peter Weibel’s TV Aquarium casts the TV as a fish-filled aquarium, being drained of water; Jan Dibbets’s video TV as a fireplace does just that, and so on. These suffer a little from their reincarnation in a flat screen world, where boxiness and depth are almost forgotten, not to mention 4:3 formats; when works depend on the frame of the video matching the frame of the TV, awkward black strips ruin the illusion.
Some works lose their site-specific punch through their re-constitution as single screen works in a gallery setting, as opposed to unannounced TV inserts, a practice which seems amazingly radical by today’s standards. David Hall’s TV interruptions, a series of 7 inserts, cut into the smooth fabric of TV with no titles or explanations, catching the viewer unawares. Similarly, Bill Viola’s Reverse Television consists of 15 seconds inserts of people sat in their living rooms, staring, presumably, at their tellies in an echo of the viewer at home. Situated in the same room as Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman’s TV Delivers People on the big screen, the two works seem to be in conversation, with the protagonists of Viola’s video having the unvarnished truth about the machinations of TV explained to them. The lines of vaguely threatening, accusatory, and still spot-on observations about TV, like “ The product is the audience”, “You are the end product delivered en masse to the advertiser” seemed to be directly addressing them in their silent, private stupors.
Collective experience as simultaneous private experiences distributed across the field of media culture, as Seth Price puts it. Maybe, despite the added interactivity, not that much has changed from the shift from TV to internet- and we are still being ‘delivered en masse’ to the advertisers, more accurately thanks to profiling and consumer feedback loops than the scattergun approach of TV.
