The Channeled Image: Art and Media Politics after Television

By Erica Levin

A fascinating look at artistic experiments with televisual forms.

Following the integration of television into the fabric of American life in the 1950s, experimental artists of the 1960s began to appropriate this novel medium toward new aesthetic and political ends. As Erica Levin details in The Channeled Image, groundbreaking artists like Carolee Schneemann, Bruce Conner, Stan VanDerBeek, and Aldo Tambellini developed a new formal language that foregrounded television’s mediation of a social order defined by the interests of the state, capital, and cultural elites. The resulting works introduced immersive projection environments, live screening events, videographic distortion, and televised happenings, among other forms. For Levin, “the channeled image” names a constellation of practices that mimic, simulate, or disrupt the appearance of televised images. This formal experimentation influenced new modes of installation, which took shape as multi-channel displays and mobile or split-screen projections, or in some cases, experimental work produced for broadcast. Above all, this book asks how artistic experimentation with televisual forms was shaped by events that challenged television broadcasters’ claims to authority, events that set the stage for struggles over how access to the airwaves would be negotiated in the future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Nov 23, 2022
• ISBN: 9780226821924

Book preview

Cover Page for The Channeled Image

The Channeled Image

The Channeled Image

Art and Media Politics after Television

Erica Levin

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2022 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2022

Printed in the United States of America

31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82191-7 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82195-5 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82192-4 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226821924.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Levin, Erica, author.

Title: The channeled image : art and media politics after television / Erica Levin.

Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022009987 | ISBN 9780226821917 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226821955 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226821924 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Television and art. | Television and politics.

Classification: LCC N72.T47 L48 2022 | DDC 791.45—dc23/eng/20220324

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022009987

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

for my grandmothers

Contents

Introduction: Tuning In

1  Network Media/TV Nation

2  Movement Media/War on Television

3  We Interrupt This Program . . .

4  Public Television/Nervous System

Conclusion: TV Now?

Color Gallery

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Introduction

Tuning In

In 1967 the artist Aldo Tambellini appeared on television in a short interview recorded at the Black Gate Theater, a venue dedicated to electromedia, a mode of performance involving projectors, televisions, transformers, and lights.¹ As the segment begins, Tambellini leans over a bulky reel-to-reel videotape machine sitting on a table next to a stack of television receivers. His Black Video 1 (1966) appears on one of the monitors, white light pulsing across a dark screen.² During the interview, Tambellini describes television as an image made out of light which travels in time and space. His work, he explains, reveals this light as a constantly moving and ever-changing form. He calls for creative people to get involved with this idea of energy, rather than the idea of making pictures for certain people, concluding, When artists begin to say, we are making forms for everybody, we are exploring possibilities for everybody, then we will come to some creative aspect which will not belong to one particular class or another particular class but will be new exploration which is for everybody.³

Tambellini’s account of the televisual image points toward a technical description of analog broadcasting. In the simplest terms, television cameras transform light and sound into pulses of electricity that are transmitted by way of electromagnetic carrier waves at a specific frequency, enabling any television receiver within range to pick up and convert the signal back into sounds and images. Elsewhere, however, Tambellini suggests that the technology of broadcasting only partially accounts for television’s potency and potential as a medium: I never had television at home, because I thought it was disturbing, too powerful. But I used to analyze television, in a bar, or outside.⁴ In his view, television presaged a future in which art would be entirely subsumed by media.

The editing process of our culture takes place continuously every night in front of the TV screen—bits of information we call news . . . images and words we call information. In the regeneration of old icons, the making of new ones—in a digested format, the world is defined. We connect for a moment over the air in isolated spheres we call homes. Years from now we will remember that art was swallowed by media—that media was the language of communication—that interactive media brings the process to a live response.⁵

How would artists navigate this radical transformation of art? What would making forms for everybody look like under these conditions? How might this process dismantle, rather than consolidate, existing social divisions and exclusions? In 1966 Tambellini purchased the video camera and the reel-to-reel recorder that he used to make Black Video 1 and began regularly recording broadcast material. After watching television critically for years, he was finally able, in his words, to take control of images previously unavailable to him as an artist.⁶

This book asks how artists in the 1960s engaged with television as a site of image production in order to participate in larger struggles set within and against the televisual public sphere.⁷ Already a popular source of entertainment, television garnered prestige and sharp criticism for its coverage of the political violence that defined the period—assassinations, war, police brutality, as well as the uprisings and protests sparked by these events. The Channeled Image considers how artists manipulated and imaginatively transformed broadcast images in the wake of political turmoil that tested television’s capacity to mediate a nation in crisis. It focuses on artists’ efforts to critically exploit the tensions that structured the alliance between television networks and the state. The interesting and significant experimentation that resulted invites us to revisit events that threw television broadcasters’ claims to authority into relief and set the stage for struggles over how access to the airwaves would be negotiated going forward.

The electromedia environments, film installations, and live kinetic theater performances discussed in the pages that follow sit uneasily within what David James calls the single, transhistoric, self-regulating avant-garde tradition. In Allegories of Cinema, his seminal study of American film in the 1960s, James rejects the orthodoxy of this tradition, situating avant-garde and underground films within a spectrum of alternative practices which develop and decay with historically specific needs and possibilities.⁸ Expanding upon this approach, The Channeled Image analyzes experiments by artists strongly identified with avant-garde filmmaking alongside work by radical filmmakers, video collectives, and members of the media underground who were similarly concerned with questions of televisual authority and access. The establishment of public television in 1967 provided an occasion for members of these groups working at the margins of television to participate in the creation of new experimental programming. Describing the film industry in ways that pertain to the televisual engagements at issue here, James observes, Far from being categorically defined against a monolithic, uncontradictory industry, these alternatives emerge from (and in certain circumstances merge with) a similar plurality of practices constructed in the margins of industry or even as mutations within it.⁹ Shared concerns and conditions placed artists in close proximity with other media producers as television came to play an increasingly important role in American political life. This book asks where their interests and practices intersected, while also clarifying the distinct political stakes of works that share a vocabulary of forms borrowed from the broadcast image.

What Is a Channeled Image?

The term moving image refers to the motion that animates an image. In the case of analog cinema, discrete frames are recorded on a strip of film, which passes through a projector. As it advances, a shutter obstructs the light being shone through the filmstrip while the strip moves forward and is briefly held in the gate. The coordination between the motion that advances the film and the intermittent shutter gives rise to the illusion of continuous motion on the screen. I use the term channeled image to describe a different kind of movement, akin to Tambellini’s account of the transmission of light as energy over the airwaves.

The channeled image names a constellation of practices concerned with the way images are mobilized and tuned-in as signals, practices that developed during a fertile period of experimentation and dissent in the 1960s. Attention to the way images are channeled through broadcast networks yielded a variety of experimental formats and modes of exhibition, including immersive multiscreen environments, gallery-based film and video installations, live performances incorporating multiple and mobile projections, and artists’ videos and happenings produced for television. Channeled images in these works often mimic or simulate the appearance of televised images without actually accessing the airwaves, for example by capturing visual noise produced by filming the television screen, combining broadcast audio with appropriated film footage, or using exhibition formats such as split-screen projection or multichannel display that reference the simultaneous presence of multiple broadcast frequencies.¹⁰ While a number of the examples I address were produced without access to a television studio, in a few important instances artists and filmmakers, including Tambellini, were able to briefly take hold of the means of televisual production and reimagine the medium from within. These opportunities provided new possibilities for staging disruption through videographic layering and distortion or program formats developed for simultaneous multichannel broadcasts on different frequencies.

Although video technology plays a role in the development of these practices, television’s mediation of politically significant events, both planned and unplanned, provides an important and rarely examined impetus for much of this experimentation. As such, visual signs of channeling in these works function as critical engagements with television’s production of authority and social meaning, rather than as recursive operations interrogating the distinctive features of video as a medium or television’s technical and material substrate.¹¹ The experimental works I discuss often restage scenes of political crisis, moments in which the authority maintained by television is unsettled or revealed as open to contestation.

The artistic and political media practices that are the focus of this book developed during what William Uricchio identifies as the era of dial television. Between 1950 and 1975, he writes, television was defined as a medium by its association with transmission and broadcasting. During this period, viewers accessed programming by way of a dial interface; television was oriented toward national audiences; and the airwaves were administered by state-run agencies, in the case of the United States, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Content, broadcast in real time, was programmer-dominated. A limited number of broadcasters operated on a scarcity model of production designed to ensure the consolidation of mass audiences.¹² These characteristics are not, Uricchio argues, essential aspects of television as a medium but, rather, historically contingent qualities or conditions. According to his schema, the dial period gives way around 1975 to a remote control period, during which new devices allow for viewer-controlled programming. Broadcasting is replaced by narrowcasting. Television is defined by its association with technologies and platforms (cable, satellite, VCR) that deliver increased amounts of content and enable greater time-shifting. These technologies also allow television to address transnational audiences. The shift from TiVo to YouTube defines a third, ongoing period, beginning in 1999, which Uricchio identifies with slivercasting, user-produced global media, on-demand streaming, unlimited content, metadata and algorithmic filters, and niche audiences.¹³

While the conclusion will briefly consider how artists have engaged the twenty-first-century televisual conditions Uricchio describes, this book focuses primarily on works produced during the dial period, between the late 1950s and 1975. In the decades following World War II, television established itself as a legitimate source of news but also drew criticism for its coverage of the Vietnam War and the antiwar movement. At the same time, ongoing racial discrimination fueled uprisings across the nation. The formal establishment of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 1967 came at a time when the question of how television should participate in mediating political turmoil in the United States was urgently felt. For a brief period, public broadcasters developed new experimental program initiatives intended to promote greater democratic representation and access to the airwaves, but these efforts also prompted further conflict over how to manage dissent and mediate participation among members of diverse audiences.

Many of the questions about television’s role in American society that preoccupied public broadcasters in the late 1960s were also taken up by postwar social theorists and critics. In an essay entitled How to Look at Television, published in 1954, Theodor Adorno investigates the ideological presuppositions that inform the total pattern of the socio-psychological stimuli typical of televised material. Adorno is concerned with the way television encourages viewers to identify with the status quo, a process he describes as the tendency to channelize audience reaction.¹⁴ Here, the term channelize describes recurring cultural patterns that forge corresponding patterns of response, constraining and directing audience reactions that might otherwise upend these mutually reinforcing relationships. Adorno’s idiosyncratic use of the term recalls Steven Connor’s observation that before channel was used to describe banded portions of the airwaves, it more commonly referred to water features in the landscape. A trickle of water, Connor observes, can over time deepen into a groove and eventually into a watercourse, canal, or channel.¹⁵ Adorno argues that patterns dimly perceptible in early novels have become congealed and standardized in popular television dramas. He models a mode of psychosocial analysis that highlights the relationship and interaction between what he calls the overt and hidden message, focusing primarily on elements of character and plot in fictional dramas. Adorno addresses these concerns to the general nature of present-day television and its imagery rather than to any particular show or program. Television, in his view, is part of the larger complex of the culture industry, which is characterized by rigid institutionalization that threatens to transform modern mass culture into a medium of undreamed-of psychological control.¹⁶

Like Adorno, Raymond Williams sought to identify patterns or structures characteristic of the normal experience of broadcasting.¹⁷ His seminal study Television: Technology and Cultural Form, published in 1974, shifts focus away from the discrete narrative elements analyzed by Adorno, toward the central television experience, understood as a planned flow.¹⁸ The concept of flow links a technological account of broadcasting as a continuous signal to both institutional practices of programming and television’s organization as a cultural text. Despite the arrival of a new generation of communications technology offering a more viewer-centered experience of television, Williams warns of an unfinished struggle and argument over the institutions and control of sound and image broadcasting.¹⁹ He criticizes formalist approaches to media analysis that confuse a technical possibility such as the fact of instant transmission with a social fact. Televisual transmissions, he insists, are always selected and controlled by existing social authorities.²⁰ Scholars who embrace technical abstractions fail to register the existence of these institutions but also, crucially (and in distinction to Adorno), the possibility of challenging their authority.²¹ Williams argues that effects often attributed to the medium or technology of television itself are better understood as the effects of a particular social order.²² Although television produces certain intended effects, corresponding to certain explicit intentions, he notes that it also creates unforeseen effects. Members of the young radical underground, he observes approvingly, have already seized upon the importance of these unintended outcomes with an eager sense of experiment and practice.²³

During the period bookended by these two important critiques of television’s cultural patterns and forms, artists and filmmakers were engaged in a parallel mode of critical analysis. However, instead of examining the normal experience of broadcasting, some of the most noteworthy experiments targeted unusual and unplanned moments of disruption, and in doing so emphasized the technological contingencies exposed by the suspension of regularly scheduled programming. Returning to Tambellini, we can see how these concerns took shape by tracing the development of a piece entitled Black TV (1969), which he began in 1966 and showed in a variety of different formats and contexts before premiering it as a single-channel split-screen film in 1969. My approach here, and in the chapters that follow, begins by examining the borrowed images that appear in works of art and other political media, identifying their sources and their broader social significance. I analyze the transformations involved in the formal re-presentation of these images and, whenever relevant, the significance of changes that take place over the course of a work’s development. Reconstructing the development of Black TV reveals the artist’s attention to the televisual mediation of an era-defining event—the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy—and his close analysis of the way it violently upended the planned flow that Williams identifies as the central television experience.

In an interview published in 1968, Tambellini told the critic Lil Picard, I am looking for the many. I am looking for the multitude. I am looking for the simultaneous. Black TV conjures this multitude as a concatenation of unsettling images, including news footage of Senator Kennedy’s assassination. Tambellini produced the work with the same Sony CV-2000 tabletop, reel-to-reel video recorder that he used to create Black Video 1 in 1966. That year he began regularly taping the broadcast material that appears in Black TV. To make the 16 mm film version of Black TV, he played these video recordings back on a monitor and filmed the screen directly with a Bolex film camera (fig. 0.1). This process allowed him to capture videographic distortions produced by way of overexposure, slow motion, and frames thrown out of focus, visual effects that he amplified through rapid cutting and the addition of a discordant soundtrack.

0.1 Aldo Tambellini, Black TV, 1969 (film stills), 16 mm, b/w, sound, 10 minutes. Courtesy Aldo Tambellini Archive, Aldo Tambellini Art Foundation, and Harvard Film Archive.

Tambellini exhibited Black TV in multiple versions and formats, adding and reediting material as he went. In March 1968 he presented the work as an electromedia environment at the Black Gate Theater. Between 1965 and 1968 he had staged a number of frenetic electromedia performances at venues across New York City. These programs of live poetry, music, and dance often featured the projection of films and painted glass slides, which the artist called Lumagrams.²⁴ Compared to these complexly staged performances, the presentation of Black TV was relatively spare. This early iteration of the work took the form of multiple television monitors stacked on a three-inch wooden platform painted black and lined with black cushions, where people could recline as they took in video images from many screens at once.²⁵ In March 1969 Tambellini premiered the split-screen film version of Black TV at the Oberhausen International Film Festival, where it played in a conventional theatrical setting and was awarded the Grand Prix.

In the interval between Black TV’s debut as an electromedia environment at the Black Gate and its premiere as a split-screen film at Oberhausen, Tambellini also incorporated an early two-screen version of the 16 mm film into Black Gate Cologne (1968–1969), a televised happening he produced with the artist Otto Piene in the studios of WDR-TV (West German Broadcasting Cologne), now recognized as the first full scale television artwork.²⁶ Two separate performances of Black Gate Cologne were recorded in late August 1968. An edited mix that combined both performances aired on January 26, 1969. During the taping of the event, the artists invited members of the audience to interact with translucent inflatable sculptures in an environment dominated by Piene’s globelike light sculpture and Tambellini’s array of multimedia materials, including his hand-painted slides and the projection of Black TV. The broadcast version of Black Gate Cologne layered recordings of both events into a single-channel video, such that images of people watching or participating in the event often appear superimposed with other audiovisual elements of the performance.²⁷

Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated on June 5, 1968. Between the staging of Black TV as a media environment in March and the production of Black Gate Cologne in August of that year, news of the event became a focal point in the work. Reports of the shooting punctuate the distorted broadcast material from Black TV that Tambellini incorporated into Black Gate Cologne, which he projected in a televisual environment throbbing with other flashing lights and flickering monitors. On the soundtrack, Andrew West, a reporter at the chaotic scene of the event, exclaims, Senator Kennedy has been shot. In Black Gate Cologne, this audio clip is calmly introduced by Harry Reasoner, the CBS news anchor and host of a special report, The Shooting of Senator Kennedy. West’s distressed reaction, recorded in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, returns in the single-screen version of Black TV that premiered at Oberhausen just a few months later, but without the authoritative commentary by Reasoner that frames the audio in Black Gate Cologne. Instead, Tambellini intensifies the affective impact of West’s live report by pairing it with sounds of people shouting in the aftermath of the event, wailing sirens, and high-pitched waves of static.

Tambellini’s use of a split screen in the 16 mm film version of Black TV that premiered in 1969 emphasizes the simultaneity and disjunction explored in earlier versions of the work. The camera moves constantly in relation to the television monitor it records, throwing a barrage of broadcast images in and out of focus: Walter Cronkite, the CBS News logo, Kennedy alive at the podium, then lifeless on the floor. In Tambellini’s hands, television becomes an instrument for tuning affective intensity rather than conveying information. The shock of Kennedy’s assassination is redoubled by a series of searing images, including blown-out, overexposed shots of combat in Vietnam, malnourished children from the CBS news special Hunger in America, broadcast in May 1968, and staccato glimpses of police violence against protesters in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) that August. In place of a memorial tribute dedicated to Kennedy’s accomplishments in office, Black TV emphasizes the traumatic repercussions of a political life suddenly cut short. In April 1967 Kennedy had embarked on a highly publicized tour of the Mississippi Delta intended to bring national attention to the issue of chronic malnutrition in America.²⁸ On the campaign trail, he promised to end the Vietnam War and reprioritize the unfinished War on Poverty that had languished under President Johnson. After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968, many Americans saw Kennedy as central to sustaining the civil rights struggle as it entered a new phase dedicated to economic justice.²⁹ Police violence against protesters at the DNC in Chicago signified a hard turn away from this political project after the deaths of King and Kennedy and, for many Americans, a deepening crisis of faith in the political establishment. Liberated from their original contexts, politically resonant images in Black TV are made visible as broadcast signals on the verge of dissolving into pure light or breaking up amid waves of audiovisual noise, as if no longer able to bear the full affective weight of a violently forfeited future.

In Black TV, black functions as a deliberately overburdened signifier, allowing Tambellini to link expanded consciousness in a new technological age to Black liberation, anarchy, outer space, and the womb as a site of new beginnings. These associations proliferate not only in Black TV but throughout many other works Tambellini produced in the late 1960s. Black Gate Cologne ends with an audio recording of the Black poet Calvin C. Hernton reading his poem Jitterbugging in the Streets, written on the occasion of the 1964 riots in Harlem, but resonant with the uprisings that followed the assassination of King. As Nadja Millner-Larsen observes, Tambellini’s use of electromedia to explode the referentiality of black through and beyond abstraction reaches its limit with the incorporation into his electromedia performances of Hernton’s poetry, which she reads as the grounding force of the work. She observes that the poet’s signifying power comes to bear the ‘burden of representation’ invoked by Fanon and, before him, W. E. B. Dubois.³⁰ However, in the final film version of Black TV, Tambellini eliminates Hernton’s poem, as he does the voice of Harry Reasoner. The distorted and overexposed images alone are made to bear the burden previously borne by the voice and body of the Black poet and mediated by the authority of the white newscaster.

Tracing the development of Black TV between 1966 and 1969, from its initial staging as an electromedia environment, to its role as an element in an experimental broadcast, to its premiere as a stand-alone split-screen film, allows us to see how Tambellini’s analysis of television takes shape in practice, and how the work comes to figure television, not only as a means for disseminating images electronically but as a site for the production of affect and institutional authority. The earliest iteration of the work treats the pervasive presence of broadcast signals as an immersive environment. In the later versions, Tambellini selectively includes bits of specific broadcasts to intervene in the memorializing operations employed by television newscasters to mediate the event of Robert Kennedy’s assassination. The process of recording broadcast material on video and refilming it from a monitor with a 16 mm film camera visually disrupts the smooth transmission of the image as a signal. Tambellini yokes this formal disruption to the rhetorical force of Hernton’s poetry (only to undo the link in the later split-screen version of the work). In doing so, he reworks the process of selection and control enacted, as Williams observes, by existing social authorities. In Black TV, televisual effects point to the workings of a particular social order, and to new forms of mediated collectivity, rather than referring back to the medium itself.³¹

In an interview, Tambellini described Black TV to Gene Youngblood as a work about the future, the contemporary American, the media, the injustice, the witnessing of events, and the expansion of the senses.³² Youngblood, author of the influential book Expanded Cinema (1970), reads Tambellini’s work as an exploration of perception in the intermedia network. In his words, Black TV

generates a pervasive atmosphere of the process-level perception by which most of us experience the contemporary environment. Since it involves the use of multiple monitors and various levels of video distortion, there is a sense of the massive simultaneity inherent in the nature of electronic media communication. Black TV is one of the first aesthetic statements on the subject of the intermedia network as nature, possibly the only such statement in film form.

Youngblood collapses the earliest iteration of Black TV, staged as an