Book Review: Art vs. TV: A Brief History of Contemporary Artists’ Responses to Television (Bloomsbury Publishing,New York-London-Dublin,2022,pp. 352),by Francesco Spampinato

Within the visual arts, is it possible to trace a historical path starting from the conflict between artists and television? Conceding that the latter is a means of mass communication that, throughout the second half of the 20th century, occupied a pre-eminent position in people’s daily lives, to what extent has contemporary art been able to challenge the unidirectional nature of the messages broadcast to viewers? That is, have artists, through their works, been able to break this power relation by establishing a reciprocal space of response, for example along the lines advocated by Jean Baudrillard in his essay Requiem for the Media (1972)? Many artworks allow us to reflect upon a political dimension of television: have the demands germinated from this artistic production found a response? Have historical contingencies and technological evolution impacted on this at all? It is through these questions that Francesco Spampinato in Art vs. TV, a book that explores video art works and installations by over two hundred artists, moves to provide a brief historical overview of the tension between the art world and the medium of television.

The book discusses, in various facets, both a range of artworks and the artists themselves. The former is understood as forms of opposition to hegemonic televisual structures – from genres, to formats, to speech – and driven by a dual utopian desire to bring an alternative cultural production to the general public, yet also to reveal the coercive nature of the televisual medium. The latter, on the other hand, are understood as prosumers, for example, contemporaneously both producers and consumers of images. Such a term is fruitful in identifying a significant shift which occurred in the 1960s, when portable video devices became available on the market. Those technologies were important because they allowed artists to develop their own programmes and productions autonomously, and, moreover, reaching ever-closer to the quality of the mainstream television image.

A red thread running through the study is the thesis that the artistic forms of resistance, appropriation and parody of television have indeed contributed to a gradual yet effective process of demystification and deconstruction of its visual regime. This ought not be traced back to a straightforward destruction of the television screen (e.g., the renowned 1984 Apple commercial in which Big Brother’s screen is smashed by a sledgehammer, which Spampinato cites as the symbol of the gravitation towards the universe of personal computers). Instead, as the analysis of the works builds a case for, it is an artistic process whose outcome is the revelation of the split between reality and representation. In other words, of that feeling of displacement between the real body and the virtual body produced by television. Unmasking this mechanism of separation proper to the medium of television constitutes the political dimension contained in the works discussed, as it renders visible the intrinsic and hidden functioning of the apparatus.

Methodologically, the study is structured through a broad selection of works from the 1950s to the 2010s. Except in a few cases, these are American and European experiences. The author chose to highlight the predominant role of television in Western societies, especially in the United States where he conducted a large portion of his research (p. 4). In support of this, it is rightly noted that television had come to cultural dominance earlier in the North American context than in others, and therefore the reflections of US artists tended to be the first to emerge and spread. Despite this, it must be said that today we are becoming aware of the fact that much more has been done in contexts beyond the Global North – consider, for example, the recent volume by Elena Shtromberg and Glenn Phillips (eds.), Encounters in Video Art in Latin America (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2023).

Also, from a methodological perspective (apart from Andy Warhol’s and a few others) the works are treated within a thematic discourse enunciated in individual paragraphs, employing them as subjects of study in order to bolster and help develop the arguments.

The book’s structure is divided into six chapters. The first, “Historical and Theoretical Frameworks,” chronologically analyses the theories that have accompanied the evolution of artistic production with respect to television decade by decade, nearly from the pre-history of the medium in the 1920s to its inter-medial mutation in the internet age.

The second, “TV as a Mirror: Manipulations and Re-Presentations,” explores the ways in which artists have used television as a kind of reflector, a practice that has also been reinforced by a proficient use of closed-circuit operational strategies. Those techniques were widely used in the 1960s–1970s by artists such as Nam June Paik, Les Levine, Bruce Nauman, Frank Gillette and Ira Schneider, or of telepresence as in the case of Allan Kaprow. The mirror metaphor is also used, for example, by Dara Birnbaum, Richard Serra, Gretchen Bender or the Pictures Generation for an exploration of the self, not only as subjectivity but also as a product of the cultural hegemony circulating within the medium of television.

“Breaking News: Television Between Art and Activism,” the third chapter, delves into the militant forms of use of portable video and television technologies, which have enabled the emergence of practices such as Guerrilla Television, Community Video and Community Television; but also the legacies these have left, both in the world of mainstream television and in the dissemination of forms of community dissent on issues that have impacted the United States, from the AIDS crisis to the Gulf War.

The fourth chapter, “Artists as Media Stars,” highlights how the televisual image has been used by certain artists, from Salvador Dalí to John Cage, from Cindy Sherman to Andy Warhol – to whom an entire section is dedicated (pp. 169–180) – to manipulate the media dimension of their representations. By others, however, it has been used as a pretext to disseminate disruptive artistic content to the general public (the cases of Chris Burden and Christian Jankowski being demonstrative).

The title of the fifth chapter, “Disentertainment: Music, Kids, Fun, and Soap Operas,” instantly draws attention to the artistic appropriation of certain consumer television formats and how these have been used to deconstruct symbologies and narratives from within. It is a chapter that foreshadows the following sixth and final chapter, “The Age of Prosumers: Reality TV and the Internet,” because it focuses on the artistic response to the new forms of televisual content that have emerged since the 1990s. Specifically, it concentrates on programs such as reality TV (the works of Phil Collins, Ryan Trecartin and Francesco Vezzoli are representative of this sphere), and the new hybridization due to the omnipresence of digital technologies, including the Internet.

At the end of the book, there is an extensive appendix indexing exhibitions, works covered in the study and a bibliography classified by theme and artist.

In conclusion, Art vs. TV can be appreciated as a thematic compendium of works treated according to their complex relationship to television. This is something that, not only film and new media studies, but also art history studies, requires, because it allows us to view works not through an atomised chronology of artists, but within the contextualized history of conflict – thus a political history – between artistic innovation and mass communication, in this case specifically with television. An accentuated argument is that this conflict, contrary to what one might think, does not take place head-on with an intransigent rejection of the televisual medium. On the contrary, it expresses itself in the form of a continuous questioning, throughout the decades under discussion, of television’s hegemony through a set of tactics with which artists appropriate or re-appropriate content broadcast over the airwaves or via cable, transforming it into raw material in the creation of works of art.

The final appendices of the book are particularly useful because they allow the reader to potentially rethink the relationships identified by Spampinato, positing alternative forms of thematic interactions. Furthermore, the list of works cited and grouped by artist helps bring to the reader’s attention the fact that only about one-sixth are women, raising glaring issues about gender inequality within the artistic context. It is a topic that, for example, a book like Laura Leuzzi, Elaine Shemilt and Stephen Partridge (eds.), EWVA: European Women’s Video Art in the 70s and 80s (London: John Libbey, 2019) already addressed but, evidently, without focusing on the more recent decades. Moreover, although the predominantly Western provenance of the works (United States and Europe) issues from a choice consistent with the methodological premises highlighted earlier, questions about what may have transpired within other contexts with respect to the same topic of study are unavoidable, as well as an interrogation upon the reasons behind their scarce dissemination in both academic and museum contexts. Since this is a highly effective book in its intentions, this last reservation relating to its geographical scope is volunteered as a suggest for future much needed work upon the lines of Art vs. TV, yet with a more diverse purview, unconfined to North America and the Global North more generally.