All of the works brought together for the group show On Television at Carriage Trade are not working to defend television as a medium, but rather to understand how the specific qualities of TV impact society. Works by Ant Farm, Gretchen Bender, Skip Blumberg, Eli Copland, Stan Douglas, Barbara Ess, Harun Farocki, Lee Friedlander, Takeshi Murata, Muntadas and Reese, Radical Software, Aldo Tambellini, and Not Channel Zero come together to recognize that television is both a screen and a shared social lens that keeps society heterogeneous by transmitting information in the form of news and sitcoms that mold the same cultural landscape it depicts. Ant Farm, in particular, communicated that they were deeply critical of mass media’s pervasive grip on the American people in the ephemera and documentation left behind from their 1975 performance Media Burn. The video of Media Burn, screening in the black-box in the back of the gallery, begins with a directive telling American viewers to “put their foot in their TVs” right before a “dummy artist” drives into a pyramid of televisions. The “dummy artist” sets the televisions ablaze when he crashes into them with his car, making an image so iconic he hopes it causes people to question the influence television might have over themselves, even if just for a brief moment. Before the crash, one of the members of Ant Farm says that “the world might never understand what happened here today, but the image will not be forgotten.”
Ant Farm played with the rules of spectacle by seeking out to engage with a public audience through a captivating, contrived performance that allows representation to dominate reality. The goal of Media Burn was not to tell a story, but rather to create an artificial and skillfully arranged message for the media. By crafting and circulating an image of a car crashing into a small mountain of televisions, the collective hoped they could connect with the general American audience to have them think critically about their relationship to TV. In line with the spectacle, Media Burn is not just a visual phenomenon, it is a form of commentary on a totalizing system that influences every aspect of life while it plays into the fact that people relate to the world through images and commodities rather than direct and authentic relationships. Ant Farm wanted people to ask themselves why they were watching those specific programs on their TVs and how absorbing that information impacted their vision of the world.
Television channels have their own sense of site-specificity, as each network acts as a regionally licensed gatekeeper, imposing their own technical standards and policies. Gretchen Bender’s TV Text & Image (1989) recognizes the influence choosing a particular channel has in shaping what one believes. Because of this, the gallerist who presents this video-based wall-work decides the exact channels used for each television. Bender, like Ant Farm, isn’t criticizing how media circulates or the corporations that own particular channels, but instead how people fall prey to the information they consume as viewers by passively looking rather than actively seeing. While looking falls back on perception, seeing is a challenge to move beyond “looking” that involves a sense of recognition. One of the four bulky, wall-mounted CRT monitors used for TV Text & Image lining the black wall that faces the gallery’s front window is inscribed with the phrase “DREAM NATION” in matte-black vinyl. Looking too closely at the text obscures the glowing footage of the ongoing genocide happening in Gaza that is being broadcast live on WLIW on this television. This distressing footage becomes content that’s truly hard to see because of the sardonic relationship it has with the words floating above it.
The broadcast era of television is over. In the 2020s, television, as we once knew it, has been phased out and we are now living in the afterglow of its effects. Artists like Bender and Ant Farm, who worked in the 1970s and ‘80s, respectively, made an effort to confront this once-new technology when it had the tightest grip over culture. Now, cable subscriptions are rapidly declining as television is working with changing content landscapes and taking on a new meaning as it becomes a platform for streaming.
The youngest artist in the show, Eli Copland, made a screen that has been stripped of its functionality. Copland’s hanging wall sculpture, Landscape (2022), is smooth and slightly shiny; however, walking around it reveals cracks frozen in the liquid crystal pressed between two layers of polarizing filters. Dust and debris are caught on a sticky residue mattifying the back of this object, that was once fused to the face of a flatscreen TV. You can see exactly where the artist struggled to separate the thin layers of film in the jagged edges lining the top and bottom of the work. Coplan’s Landscape is a monument to the realities that broadcast TV once helped build as a transmission technology that delivers moving images to an audience, and in turn shapes shared cultures. As useless as this deconstructed TV might be, you can still see your own reflection in its subtle shine—a reminder that television is a way of seeing ourselves within images while safely sitting behind the barrier of a screen. It’s clear that consuming media is no substitute for lived experience.
On Television is on view through December 15 at carriage trade.
