Abstract
Keywords
Francesco Spampinato’s Art vs. TV, A Brief History of Contemporary Artists’ Responses to Television is a compendium examining the artistic uses of television in the Western world over the half-century during which this technology has maintained its position as the mass-medium par excellence. It surveys a wide range of examples, meticulously examined with an abundance of sources, including interviews with many prominent figures of the contemporary art scene. The book’s main premise is the recent loss of television’s cultural and social prominence in favor of the Internet, an issue that the author interprets through a resolutely critical lens. For Spampinato, the lasting impact of television in the contemporary digital world should be understood as that of a technology that bridges the modern disciplinary societies described by Michel Foucault in the 1970s to the contemporary and neoliberal control societies analyzed by Gilles Deleuze in the 1990s. This idea, introduced in the first pages of the book, establishes the confrontational stance through which the numerous artistic explorations of television are later examined.
Echoing some of the major themes of critical thought, such as those of phantasmagoria, theatricality, or the collapse of distance facilitated by the emergence of telecommunication technologies, Spampinato describes television viewing as an irremediable form of “physical indoctrination” (p. 2). Following this logic, for him “every artistic commentary on television” is a challenge to the “coercive nature” (p. 4) of the medium, a resistance to its power through appropriation or parody. The primary focus of this compendium is therefore artworks from a wide range of media that share the same decidedly critical perspective on television’s “genres, languages, [or] format” (p. 4). These works are described as having a “reactionary power” against the “status quo” set by the television, a medium that offers an “illusionistic travel in space in exchange for our docile immobility” (p. 15).
This compendium stands out above all for its meticulous examination of a subject that is too often conflated in art historical discourses with that of video art, even though, as Spampinato convincingly argues, “it is the body, more than video [itself], that is used by video artists as a proper medium” (p. 8). This perspective leads to a refreshing treatment of television in the arts, covering topics such as artworks that dealt with television before the technology was accessible to artists, or the alternative television collectives of the 1970s. The latter topic is explored in the book’s third chapter which focuses on TV news and offers a particularly interesting brief history of Guerrilla TV. The critical framework chosen by Spampinato is however not without raising several questions. By the time one reaches the final chapters, one is left wondering whether the confrontational stance adopted in the introduction and the first chapters is applicable to all the artworks covered in the book. This is particularly true in chapter four, which examines the role of contemporary artists on television in the age of celebrity culture. It includes interesting discussions of Glenn O’Brien’s avant-garde talk show TV Party (1978–1982), as well as Andy Warhol’s 1980s TV programs. Here, Warhol’s ambivalent attitude toward television is perhaps interpreted a little too hastily in light of the book’s main argument when, from a contemporary perspective, it could easily be described as the source of a phenomenon that Spampinato himself attributes to TV-related art projects produced in the 2000s and 2010s, through which art has increasingly gone “hand in hand with entertainment,” and to the extent that it has become “more and more difficult to grasp the critical dimension of some of the TV-related artists-centered projects” (p. 264).
One of the book’s methodological challenges lies precisely in the way this recurrent ambiguity of contemporary art is interpreted. On this matter, the coherence of the book’s main critical argument naturally calls for an autonomist conception of a TV art that can be easily distinguishable from entertainment. Spampinato thus argues that the difference between television itself and its artistic explorations lies in the latter’s development of “a certain metalinguistic impulse” (p. 261), or in the fact that art is set in a particular context. The value of these semiotic and institutional (à la Danto and Dickie) ideas for the analysis of some of the recent works discussed in the book proves problematic. The irony that Spampinato describes as characteristic of artistic uses of television is, by all appearances, now part of the vernacular of social media. The decontextualizing nature of digital media has also created a disregard for context among viewers, a platform agnosticism that somewhat complicates attempts to distinguish art and entertainment according to contextual criteria. The ambition to frame all historical phases of television through critical theories of the 1960s and 1970s encounters certain limitations here. One is tempted to note that while there is obviously no such thing as an obsolescence of critical discourses, the era of media convergence from which Spampinato takes a retrospective look at the history of art and television has given rise to new problems that may have rendered certain critical themes such as the question of art-non-art, somewhat secondary problematic in the analysis of digital media.
Francesco Spampinato’s Art vs. TV contributes to contemporary art history, media studies and television studies with a socio-cultural approach to its topic, focusing primarily on television content (programs, shows. . .). One might regret that this choice tends to overlook the entire history of experimentation with telecommunication technologies, from manipulations of the television image to the telematic art of the 1970s and 1980s. The book’s core theme is the analysis of artists’ interactions with the television industry rather than the history of art and television per se. This choice gives the book many of its strengths. It leads to interesting critical parallels between past and present media, highlighting the recurrence of certain news themes and viral images, and to pertinent discussions of television in the age of the prosumer. In this context, the author considers certain overlaps that reveal the porosity of the frontier between the digital and the televisual at the level of content and discourse. These themes, together with the dense historical apparatus that structures the book, contribute to making Art vs. TV a bibliographical reference of very high scholarly value.
