10-11-2004
Exhibition Text TV Today
by Dominique Busch
Otto Berchem (US), Candice Breitz (ZA), Peter Dombrowe (DE), Daniel Pflumm (CH), Matthieu Laurette (FR), Bernhard Martin (DE), Bjørn Melhus (DE), eddie d (NL), Christelle Lheureux (FR)


Let it flow
Television seems to be a 20th century dinosaur: too old, too slow and not interactive. World-wide, however, it is still the pre-eminent means of mass communication. No other medium has shaped our understanding of the world and fed our collective memory as television has.
A continuous stream of information flows through this great 'magnet', and everyone knows how difficult it is sometimes to extract yourself from the spell of television.The artist Barbara Kruger describes the relation to television in this way: 'You never forget how to use TV because you never have to learn how. Like any other relationship, it seems you just sort of 'get along' with this chatty appliance; you 'do' it, it 'does' you. We 'do' TV by letting its juices flow. Not flesh-and-blood juices, of course, but continuously acrid signals, impulses that flow from its artificial circuitry to our own...' (1) Such an intimate relationship is, of course, not without its consequences. News broadcasts, feature films, talk shows, advertising and soaps are not just informative and/or amusing, but implicitly they create and alter identities. In this sense, everyone is a child of television.

At present, everybody is famous for 15 minutes (2)
Over the past decade it has become clear that reality is playing an increasingly important role in ordinary television broadcasts. With programs like 'The Real World', 'Big Brother', 'Robinson Island' and the most recent 'Make Me Beautiful' show, Andy Warhol's prediction has become fact. He foresaw that in a television society everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes.
It is striking that television shows are becoming ever more extreme in the way they show people to a large and anonymous audience. Ever more is being demanded of the participants because, the program makers insist, the viewer always wants to see new and spectacular things. As a result, private life is increasingly played out in the media, so that the boundary between reality and mediated reality becomes increasingly blurred.
The fact that so many people are eager to be on television in order to tell their story, to marry, or to have themselves transformed by plastic surgery calls to mind the book The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord (3). In this book he describes social relationships in modern society as being driven by the thirst for the spectacular. The media - and particularly television - are more than happy to pick up on this tendency, so that they function as a mirror for contemporary society.

Kill your TV?
'Video art commences with the symbolic or concrete destruction of conventional television.' (Wulf Herzogenrath) (4)
In the 1960s and '70s many artists occupied themselves with both the technical aspects and content of the then still new medium of television. Brimming over with ideals and optimism, they began to make television themselves, both to parody television and critique it, and to deconstruct television.
A famous example of this is Wolf Vostell, who was one of the first artists to integrate television sets into his work. Television sets were shot at and buried in his 'TV-decollages'. Another artist who also used television from the time it first appeared on the market was Nam June Paik. With the aid of a magnet he transformed television images into abstract 'disturbance images'.
For many other artists it was a matter of stoutly resisting the introduction of a medium that from the very first was hotly controversial because of its commercial and manipulative character. Paik's 1973 battle cry, 'Television has attacked us for a lifetime - now we strike back!' (5) is certainly typical of the attitude of countless artists of his generation. A half century later it doesn't appear that much is left of the ideals and fanaticism of that era.

TV Today
To what extent do contemporary artists still have an interest in the medium of television and its influence on social processes? Do they employ another visual language and a different approach than the artists did in the early years of the medium?
In the exhibition TV Today nine artists who grew up with television, the 'second TV generation', show us the social impact of television on contemporary culture. The artists in TV Today have integrated their own experience with television in their work, problematized the communication structures of the medium, and created new television images. They focus particularly on programs that color the current television landscape, such as soaps, talk shows and reality TV.

Who can forget the jingle of 'Dallas' - the mother of all soaps - or the images of Southfork Ranch and the oil wells that went with it? Candice Breitz resurrects these old times in her video installation Diorama. This work was created during her stay at the ArtPace Foundation in San Antonio, Texas, and for TV Today Breitz has made a new version of Diorama: Diorama (Amsterdam Version, 2004).
On nine television screens we see the recognizable faces and hear the voices of J.R. Ewing, Pamela and other members of the Ewing clan. The source materials for this installation come from cliffhangers, from the series 'Dallas' which was broadcast every week on prime time for fourteen years beginning in 1978 by the American network CBS. Breitz has edited the visual and text fragments in such a way that Bobby, Pam, Lucy, Sue Ellen and little Christopher get hung up in their sentences and thus seem to be imprisoned in their roles. The repetitions, which reel on like mantras against an anticipated threat, fill the space. In this disturbing installation Breitz places the social predictability of the characters, which is typical of soaps in general, in a different context: 'I think it's possible to be a glued-to-the-telly pop-guzzling fan and a pop-hacker at the same time…. I guess I'm obsessed with pop culture… but if you're being forced to ingest this stuff, you should have some right to chew it up and throw it back out.' (6)

The German artist Bjørn Melhus also works with audio material from famous television series and films, which he re-edits. After the editing, the only thing still to be heard are short sentences and the repetition of certain words. With this, he both offers a critical reflection on the use of language, and creates a new story: 'I want to tell stories…they are stories which on one hand have something to do with me, but on the other hand they are of course about society and are connected to the individual - which I am - to the products of media culture and what floats through me, that is a re-contextualization takes place and through this also a new story..' (7)
Melhus plays all his characters himself, often more than one in a situation, enabling them to communicate with one another at various levels of reality. His work is always about the analysis of one's own identity as opposed to the temptation to identify with the stereotypes that television offers.
In the video Zauberglas (1991) Melhus uses the voices from the German dubbed version of the American Western 'Broken Arrow' in a tragi-comic, but also moving dialogue with his female alter-ego, who appears before him on the screen: 'The German dub-language is a very artificial language, nobody talks like that - with incredible emphasis. It's easy to give an image, a character to this artificiality. To give a body to this voice. In the voice lies the personality and when this personality mediates and we hear the voice for the first time, then for me a process of identification takes place and I want to embody this voice. And I have done this with much pleasure in front of the camera.' (8)
Bjørn Melhus often creates a virtual environment in which his characters are placed, giving rise to a strong sense of incongruity, as in the work The Oral Thing (2001). Here he uses original voices from a popular American talk show, the 'Maury Povitch Show', where the talk show host takes the most painful confessions from his guests in front of an audience of millions. A virtual TV studio is to be seen in the video, in which Melhus simultaneously plays the presenter and the two guests, complete with a stair for star entries and a recurring TV logo that simulates the advertising breaks. The presenter is like a priest elevated above all moral uncertainty, and the guests a victim and perpetrator, but during the show the roles change. In addition, the audience - represented by cloned characters - play an important role in the sanctimonious discussion about good and evil.

The Swiss artist Daniel Pflumm works across a broad artistic field. Pflumm demonstrates that he is totally at ease communicating through the language of advertising, television, music, logos and design, and is equally at home in both the deejay/veejay club circuit and the art world. In his work he strips media of its original message and transforms media products into media art. In the video CNN - In Hope for the Best (1999) Pflumm shows us manipulated images of people from the audience of various talk shows on CNN International while they are applauding. This rhythm is reinforced with the addition of electronic beats, creating an infectious rhythm and endless applause, which, it would seem, is intended for nothing and no one.

In his work Blink (1999) eddie d likewise focuses on the audience in the television studio. He zooms in on television images of talk show audiences he has collected, that are generally only used as backdrops for the talk shows. We see endless rows of people who all have a lifeless, empty and emotionless expression. Every now and then some blink their eyes. This slow movement is at the same time the montage rhythm of this work. The faces are part of a television audience which appears to be looking at nothing. The absence of sound seems to multiply this emptiness. In contrast to Daniel Pflumm, who makes a sort of music clip of it, in blink we have an intimate portrait of people on television.

For the video bingo show (2003), the French artist Christelle Lheureux filmed a number of presenters on the set of their game shows during the several minutes preceding a live broadcast. In the studio people are busy with the final preparations for the program; various spotlights are switched on and off, the test card appears on a large screen, and a mist machine creates a soft light for the stage. The only sound is a soft murmur that reminds one of a current of air. Everyone stands around waiting. Sometimes they look tense, and then the tension disappears from their face again, and it appears they are becoming bored. One of the presenters fiddles with her hair, while another checks to see if her shimmering evening gown isn't showing too much décolleté. No one has put on their television face yet. Not a word is spoken, and in the long minutes time seems to stand still:
(F.T.V. Sarajevo, same as 'France Television' in France.
The TV stage of the National Lottery.
The compeers are ready, waiting for the live broadcast.
The black light stage is coming to life.
Time and lottery balls are hanging up.
Wind, smokes, crunching halogens.
The laser beams of tracking lights are looking for their trajectory.
The space station and its inhabitants are waiting for their transmission.
These presenters without voices and smiles are out of time.
They are floating in a program without schedule.) (9)

With his photographs Peter Dombrowe reveals to us the make-believe world of entertainment television. The photo series Studios (1998-2002) and Fernsehwohnungen (1997) show famous sets from German talk shows, quiz programs and television series. The photographs are taken in such a way that the studios around the sets are visible. This deconstructs not only the television spaces, but also the illusion of what happens there. 'As a consequence of these images, a notion or even the certainty of a sort of double reality emerges spontaneously in the head of the viewer, of a constant clash of different levels of reality, of several truths which exclude each other, of different times, even of differently layered spaces merging into one another, of which one can't say anymore exactly which is the real, true one and which is the artificially produced one…' (10)

Matthieu Laurette appeared on television for the first time in 1993 as one of the contestants on the French show 'Tournez Manege' (The Dating Game). Before his appearance he had sent out invitations in the art world with the title of the show and the time of the broadcast. When the presenter introduced him to the audience and asked what plans he had for his life, he answered that he wanted to become an artist. In answer to the question of what media he wanted to work in, whether painting or sculpture, Laurette answered 'Multimedia'. She couldn't come up with a response, but only said in surprise, 'Multimedia! Beautiful answer!' Since his appearance in this television show Laurette has used television both as his workplace and an instrument, because this medium has the capacity to bring together the means of production, distribution channels and the audience simultaneously. Since 1993 he has appeared many more times on TV as an active participant in various television shows, or just as a walk-on character. The work Apparitions (1993-95, selection) is based on these broadcasts. 'I never decided 'Oh yes great, tomorrow let's work with media and TV or legal fields!' They are surrounding us, we are part of it, so it seems clear to me that I have to deal with them. I'm just trying to find the best 'spots' to develop activities that often interact with different audiences. I'm trying to 'hack' or 'hijack' contexts, media, audiences, budgets etc., to produce disjunctures. Disjunctures often generate their own tools, which one can in turn appropriate and use.' (11)
Almost every television broadcast is interrupted by advertising spots that are focused on a certain target audience. The packaging of some products in stores will have the words 'As seen on TV!' printed on it, which means that the article has been flogged in such spots, or on an advertising broadcast. Laurette has had T-shirts printed with this slogan, and he returns the money to buyers of his shirts if they appear in the shirt on a TV program, and provide him with a VHS tape of their appearance. If these people succeed on getting onto TV with their shirt, they themselves become products on the television, while at the same time being the producers and distributors of their own performance.

'Good morning, Otto, first I would like to introduce myself. My Name is Henriette and I work for a television production company, John de Mol productions in The Netherlands. One of the programs that we make at this company is 'Geld voor je leven' [Money for your life]. This program registrates the lives of 'interesting people'. I thought it would be interesting to follow the works and whereabouts of a modern artist. This is the reason of this e-mail…' (12)
Otto Berchem responded to this e-mail from a colleague of John de Mol, and shortly afterwards he was invited for a casting session. In the end he was not chosen, and the only proof which is left from that day in the Endemol Studio is a number of pictures that one of Berchem's friends made during the casting, because when the artist phoned up the next day to ask if he could have the recording of his session, he was told the tape had already been reused, and Berchem had again disappeared from the producer's annals. In his work Geen Geld voor mijn Leven (No money for my life, 2000) the e-mail correspondence between Berchem and the Endemol staffer is documented, and the slide from the day of his casting session is to be seen.
For the photo series My Mother's Afternoons (2000) Berchem asked his mother, a retired teacher, to make photographs of the television broadcasts she watches during the course of the day. The snapshots of talk shows, lifestyle and other programs which came out of this afford an overview of the typical afternoon programming of American television, and at the same time offer an image of the afternoons of the artist's mother.
Hotel Redux (2003) is an animated film that Otto Berchem made on the basis of the successful docu-soap from the BBC, 'Hotel'. It revolves around the ordinary life of staff working at the famous and illustrious Hotel Adelphi in the heart of Liverpool. In Hotel Redux the two-dimensionality that is characteristic of the depiction of characters in this series is visualized by transferring it to the fictional level of the animation.

The works of Bernhard Martin are humorous reflections on popular culture. He makes paintings, collages, drawings and objects, and his style is just as varied as his choice of materials. Trendy photographs from fashionable magazines and television images are combined with images from his private life. In this, the complexity of contemporary visual culture comes strongly to the fore in his work. By recycling and mixing this material the artist creates surprising new images in which idiosyncratic narrative connections arise.
His objects, beams, are shown in TV Today. The faces of well-known presenters of talk shows are 'projected' on screens next to these video projectors made from leather and fabric. By tacking down these images with needle and thread the faces appear to project from the canvass. This 3D illusion contrasts with the frozen portrait, causing the facial expressions to form strange grimaces.

Artist's websites:
http://www.melhus.de/
http://www.danielpflumm.com/
http://www.eddied.nu/
http://christelle.lheureux.free.fr/
http://www.laurette.net/
http://www.edbprojects.nl/artists/otto_berchem_info.html

NOTES
1 Barbara Kruger, TV Guides, in: Remote Control: Power, cultures, and the world of Appearance, Cambridge/London 1993, pagina 47
2 Andy Warhol: 'In the future everybody will be world-famous for 15 minutes', in: Warhol, Joenig, ed., Andy Warhol, 1968
3 Guy Debord, The society of the spectacle, 1967, http://www.voxfux.com/features/situationists/sos/sos.html
4 Wulf Herzogenrath, in: Peter Zorn, Von Film zu Video: Von den Anfängen bis zum Ende der 70-er Jahre, Goethe-Institute, online, http://www.goethe.de/kug/kue/mdk/thm/de86712.htm
5 Nam June Paik, 1973, in: Peter Zorn, Von Film zu Video: Von den Anfängen bis zum Ende der 70-er Jahre, Goethe-Institute, online, http://www.goethe.de/kug/kue/mdk/thm/de86712.htm
6 Candice Breitz, in: Niru Ratnam, On the verge, The Observer, http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,11913,1027836,00.html
7 Bjørn Melhus, in: Cécile Schortmann, Hessischer Rundfunk online, http://www.hronline.de/website/rubriken/kultur/index.jsp?rubrik=2047
8 Bjørn Melhus, in: Cécile Schortmann, Hessischer Rundfunk online, http://www.hr-online.de/website/rubriken/kultur/index.jsp?rubrik=2047
9 Christelle Lheureux, in : http://christelle.lheureux.free.fr/ANGLAIS/BingoShowEnglish/BongoShowTexte.html
10 Peter Friese: Modellwelten als Weltmodelle, in: Peter Dombrowe, Katalog zur Ausstellung Peter Dombrowe / Christopher Muller, Kunstpreis der Stadt Nordhorn 2000, Städtische Galerie Nordhorn
11 Matthieu Laurette in an interview with Cristina Ricupero, Jens Haaning and Aleksandra Mir, in: Publicness exhibition guide, Institute of Contemporary Art, London, January 2003, http://www.aleksandramir.info/texts/ricupero.html
12 Henriette de M., in an email to Otto Berchem on February 4, 2000.