Television and Spectatorship

Television and Spectatorship

“You pay the money to allow someone else to make the choice.

You are consumed.

You are the product of television.

Television delivers people.”

—Richard Serra and Carlotta Fay Schoolman, Television Delivers People

In the 1970s to 1980s, some creatives sought to dismantle the capitalistic and hypnotic effects of mass media television using video art. Bill Viola’s and Richard Serra’s pieces Reverse Television and Television Delivers People exemplify this endeavor in action; they use the medium of television itself to make viewers more aware of their spectatorship. The medium’s characteristic self-referentiality and reflective feedback loops disrupt the narcissistic role of the viewer, subverting the commodity fetishism of art. 

Part 1: Commodity Fetishism

Art has long been a form of capital, but artists really started to pay attention to the fetishization of artwork in the late twentieth century, creating works to resist the far reach of capitalism. According to theorist Timothy Murray in his text “De-commodification of Artworks: Networked Fantasy of the Open,” in the 1970s, the “collector, gallery, and museum” (Murray, 226) nexus positioned artworks as objects holding exchange value to be bought and sold. Art was essentially seen as fetishistic commodities in the Marxist sense—tokens that were believed to have intrinsic value which enabled the trade between collectors and investors. This capitalistic usage of art overshadowed the spiritual or philosophical values (use value) of these artworks. Within the nexus that Murray speaks of, commodity fetish obscured the social relationships surrounding art creation and exchange. The market used speculation to see “art as capital, but not necessarily as thought” (Murray, 226). This prevalent fetishism caused a disconnection and alienation between the agents involved in this relationship of labor. However, early video art is an intrinsically process-centric and self-referential genre, which disrupts the necessary conditions that allow the fetish to exist. Artists, therefore, made use of these properties to create pieces that explicitly challenged the status quo of art-as-exchange-value. 

Early video art embraced the spontaneity of analog video technology, which makes explicit the labor process in the final artwork. Since televisions utilized cathode ray tubes, any subtle disturbances in the environment could cause the video to look drastically different. The artworks created during this era often don’t shy away from the instability of the technology, instead using it as a tool. Artists often intentionally used warps from electronics and other techniques to achieve visual effects on top of the transmitted images. For example, Nam June Paik and Shuya Abe created video synthesizers using colorizers; Steve Rutt and Bill Etra retimed images to their signals, while Stephen Beck was even more extreme, using no input camera and only electronic disturbances to create colors and textures (CDM). The resulting videos, unlike those made with modern digital video technology, are reminders of the procedures that went into their creation. For instance, Beck’s Video Weavings (1973) uses his synthesizer to generate fabric-like images with ripples and ridges to be broadcast in public settings such as sports games. The colorful images are not generated with full control by the artist, instead, they are the results of chance and fluctuations of the machine itself. The piece does not attempt to conceal the creation process, instead accentuating it.

This process-centric approach to video art renders it difficult to fetishize as fetishization is predicated on the disconnect of the object from the labor process. This is true with art too. Margaret Morse says that “an object that can be completely freed from the act of its production… becomes displaceable and freely exchangeable, that is, commodifiable” (Murray, 229). Traditional artworks often became divorced from their creators’ labor, becoming independent objects whose value seemed to exist intrinsically within the commodity. Yet in early analog video art, the act of production is evident and even highlighted in the actual video presented as a finished product, maintaining the artwork’s social relations. It is not an independently existing work with “no origins” as Marx says, and therefore not easily commodifiable. 

Additionally, video art disrupts commodity fetishism with its self-aware nature that draws attention to the act of watching itself, making explicit the issue of spectatorship that viewers often gloss over. Speaking about a Dan Graham piece in which cameras were placed in shopping mall windows to display live video feedback of the shoppers, Morse explains that video can reverse the roles of consumer-product, soliciting “the viewers to position themselves as the subjects of desire and consumption” (Murray, 230). Here, Graham was able to use the feedback loops that are characteristic of video in the world of consumerism to cast light upon the very system within which it is situated. This occurs by using reflection to skewer the viewer’s narcissistic relation to video, creating a “process of continuous learning and also the subjective sense of an unfixed extendible present time in flux” (Murray, 231). The simultaneous boomeranging of the self-image here is used to bring the viewer into the media network itself, instead of allowing them to assume a detached state as with the spectatorship of traditional artwork. This inclusion of the viewer forces them to pay attention to the issue of spectatorship and see themselves in this differential reflection. Summarizing the power of video works that utilize the viewers’ own images, Graham states that the “desiring machines of the medial process deconstruct the ontology of a designerly product that is capable of separating itself from process for the fetishistic purpose of commodification” (Murray, 232). 

In the next part, I will explore two video works from the 1970s to 1980s that both utilize the relationship between viewer and television to spotlight spectatorship. One is Bill Viola’s Reverse Television, which consists of pre-recorded videos of an audience that maps onto the real audience watching the piece. The other is Richard Serra and Carlotta Fay Schoolman’s Television Delivers People—which unlike the former, does not use visual representations of real spectators—that mimics the look of a scrolling text infomercial to criticize television itself. Both seek to bring awareness to and impugn the fetishistic capitalism of TV viewing. 

Part 2: Spectatorship as Tool to Disrupt Television’s Fetishism

Reverse Television (1983) Bill Viola

Five times every day, 30-second-long videos with no titles or explanations at the beginning appeared mysteriously on the TV screens of Boston-area viewers in between other programs. In one, a bearded old man sits cross-legged on a couch, smoking a cigarette. He is in a living room complete with a large desk lamp emanating warm yellow light on top of a table, a corded telephone, two large windows, a small cat, and potted plants. The man watches the camera intently as if he is well-entertained. He takes drags from his cigarette every once in a while. After a while, the cat hops off the couch onto the floor and runs away. He looks as if he is watching a TV program, but the only sounds present in the video are the white noise of the city outside his window and his occasional sighs. In another, a middle-aged woman dressed in a cerulean blue blouse and a grey skirt sits upright in a wooden chair. She is in an opulent room with hanging wall lights and massive bouquets of yellow flowers. The floor is carpeted, while the walls are filled with mirrors. She sits much stiller than the red-sweatered man, remaining in the same tense position throughout her thirty seconds.   

These videos are the same aspect ratio as any regular TV program, fitting perfectly onto the TV screen. The accompanying soundtrack is a low humming noise that remains constant throughout. There are a total of 42 of these videos featuring 42 people pretending to watch TV; all were broadcast during the 1980s on WGBH-TV.

Reverse Television is in fact the only piece Viola specifically designed for broadcast. He is intimately familiar with the modes of viewing of television consumers, and he exploited them in this artwork to make his message powerful. In an interview with Raymond Bellour, he explains that the short clips were played during publicity breaks. During this time, American public TV did not run commercials for other products, so these breaks were used to advertise other programs set for the day. They were meticulously timed, breaking up the segments of real programs at a rhythm. Viola cites this structure as creating a “figure/ground relationship,” telling the viewer what to pay attention to and what can be consumed passively. This circadian rhythm of the TV tells the viewer what to expect at certain times, preconfiguring their mode of focus. This effect gets exploited in Reverse Television, as the TV watcher expects publicity advertising another program during this downtime break, but instead is confronted with these reverse portrait clips. This surprise element, combined with the lack of titles on these clips, breaks the rhythm of the channel. Viola had originally wanted the clips to be a minute each interspersed between                                             regular programming, but the suggestion was denied by the station director who wanted to preserve the regular structure. Viola reasoned with him and finally was granted 30-second increments for the project. This decision was essential to the success of the piece, as the viewer’s expectation of a talking actor is replaced with a completely silent one staring at the camera, leading them to think there is something wrong. The long stretch of silence breaks from “normal” television, disrupting the time segmentation of both TV and capitalism. Viola’s typical move of subverting patterns of expectation using time is once again on display. 

Bill Viola himself says the clips are difficult to watch because the viewing experience is “a sort of confrontation” (Bellour and Viola). The videos mimic the viewer’s act of watching TV. A symmetry forms: in their living room, the actor stares at the camera, which in the “real world” translates into the TV screen watched by the viewer in their own living room. The videos appear as differential projections of the viewers themselves, cross-temporally and cross-spatially staring back at them like Pepper’s ghost.

This experience reflects Paul Ryan’s analogy of video as a Moebius strip. Reverse Television forms a strange quasi-mirror, giving the audience the “power to take in [their] own outside” (Ryan). They watch projections of their on-screen counterparts mimic their actions while mimicking them in return by simply watching the screen. The piece demonstrates the power of “infolding,” or a “continuity between self-observation and communal awareness” (Treske) which one develops through watching videos that represent oneself. 

However, these clips are not simple reflections of the viewers in front of their TVs. This distinction is crucial: an alienation effect is necessary for the piece to be successful. The viewers must not fully identify with the TV watchers represented in Reverse Television, as this spatial-temporal-personal distance from the actors in the video clips helps viewers discern their own role as the victims of the mass media institution. The actors in the short clips occupy different spaces (their own homes), are of different ages, and were filmed during different times of the day. All these aspects help differentiate them from the viewers sitting at home watching them. This results in a Brechtian reminder that the actors are different people, alienating the viewers from the familiar conditions under which they themselves consume TV. Only by taking this metaphorical step back can the viewers get the “true picture” of what TV does to pacify people like themselves. 

Additionally, Viola’s piece reverses the primary concern of television. Philosopher Stanley Cavell says that “TV viewing is about monitoring.” Since it is “live,” viewers use the screen as a sort of telescope to monitor what is going on in the world. It is an outward expansion from the living room into the geographical distance, allowing individuals to follow events. Reverse Television subverts that function of TV by turning it on itself. It mimics the look of a sitcom: the actors sitting on their couches, pretending to watch TV. It uses the medium itself to deconstruct the experience of watching a television program, exposing the hidden grammar of commercial broadcasting. The audience is forced to examine the medium itself instead of outwards, suddenly becoming aware of their spectatorship that seemed naturally invisible when they watch others. Viola’s video art exerts forces opposite to those of television: whereas TV formats time, the piece unformats it; whereas TV viewing is absorption, the piece reflects instead. The piece interrupts the flow of TV, dismantling it from the inside. 

Television Delivers People (1973) by Richard Serra and Carlotta Fay Schoolman 

Television Delivers People is a short video art piece created by Richard Serra and Carlotta Fay Schoolman to be broadcast on television in 1973. Like Reverse Television, it also brings the issue of spectatorship to the forefront to deconstruct TV viewership. The short 7-minute video features scrolling yellow text against a blue background, evocative of infomercials. The text outlines in straightforward language the role of a TV-watcher in the broadcasting industry—a consumer who is consumed. The text (which was a collage of bits and pieces appropriated from academic papers) appears on the screen sentence by sentence slowly, each sentence a succinct statement on how one sells their affective labor by watching TV: “In commercial broadcasting the viewer pays for the privilege of having himself sold,” “You are delivered to the advertiser who is the consumer,” “You are the product of television,” and gradually transitioning to all-caps, announcing that “TELEVISION DELIVERS PEOPLE.” The piece narrates that 20 million people get “delivered” a minute to advertisers, all of whom get indoctrinated into commercialism. It states that there is a “NEW MEDIA STATE” controlling people from all strata of society and encouraging materialistic consumption. Evoking the pessimistic words of Neil Postman a decade later, the piece proclaims that television is a tool for propaganda in the form of entertainment. This ominous message is juxtaposed with the light jazz soundtrack, mimicking the cheerful elevator music used in TV programs to help make raw text more entertaining to viewers. The text itself scrolls at a comfortable pace good for reading, and the colors of the text and background were chosen in consultation with the station to ensure maximum readability. These choices make the message easy to be understood and accepted somewhat passively, reminiscent of the sci-fi depictions of dystopian brainwashing techniques in Orwellian novels.

Although Serra claims that he never aimed for his piece to be “self-reflexive,” it certainly is self-aware. The piece uses the medium of a TV broadcast to critique itself. Like the Viola piece, Television Delivers People was also broadcast on television to unsuspecting viewers as a late night sign-off. In an interview with Annette Michaelson, Serra explains his choice to make a broadcast video: “If you want people to see work, you have to contend with those structures of control; and those structures of control are predicated on the capitalistic status quo. I simply decided to make that explicit.” Just like the Viola piece, Serra’s video also used the medium itself to spread his message far and wide, as well as to simultaneously exemplify and critique its subject. It uses the same exact mechanism that advertisers use to deliver people to them, literally brainwashing people into accepting the message of the piece. This tactic showcases the terrifying power of mass media indoctrination. 

Similar to Reverse Television, Television Delivers People also breaks the norms of TV consumption. Viola’s work may still retain the visual “look” of normal programming, but Serra’s completely abandons the visual aesthetics of commercial TV. Instead, he chooses to use text rather than video recordings to construct his piece. Viewers must read the sentences as they appear on the screen, instead of listening to audio narrations of the transcript or watching visual representations of the content. As William Kaizen says in his book Against Immediacy, Serra made a “primarily iconic medium” into a “symbolic one” (Kaizen, 4). The iconic norm of television—where the signifier resembles the signified (where the image of a child running represents exactly that)—gives way to the denotative mode of language. The implication of this choice is that the audience must switch to a different mode of perception to watch the clip on live TV. The choice converts “distracted television” to “textual contemplation” (Kaizen, 4). The piece’s format interrupts the hypnotic effect of television, accomplishing its goal of waking up the audience from mass media-induced complacency. 

Walter Benjamin’s main criticism of “realistic” forms of media such as film is that they encourage passive viewing. The viewer is absent-minded and accepts whatever is fed to them. Only by deconstructing the medium’s many mechanisms—in the case of film, analyzing how it creates narrative and configures space—can viewers not be ignorantly bewitched by the medium. Here Serra singles out the social and economic implications of watching TV and thrusts that in front of the viewers’ faces, forcing them to confront the hidden structures of the broadcasting industry. This move unlocks their potential to escape from the stranglehold of a medium encouraging them to entertain themselves into passivity. 

However, the canned Muzak music restores part of the aesthetic of TV: the unstimulating electronic music is a key component of any random infomercial or advertisement. This choice makes sure that the piece is still situated within the framework of broadcast television, while adding a layer of irony to the contradictory visual aesthetics. The piece occupies the limbo between “regular” TV and drab academic talk, offering viewers “a jolt of critical analysis before bed” (Kaizen). 

Part 3: Conclusion

Jozef Robakowski says in his text “Video Art: A Chance to Approach Reality” that video art as a movement serves to undercut the institution of broadcast television. It accomplishes this by illuminating its mechanisms of manipulation that “tells people how to live” in a consumerist society. These artists discussed above tried to turn the norm of the medium on itself, effectively turning spectatorship on itself. They made works critiquing TV, using television as a channel for dissemination and self-referential exemplification. Viewers see themselves in these works made differential by video, allowing them to become aware of the hypnotism of mass media. These works attack the overt commodity fetishism of TV’s advertisement-centric culture, restoring the social relations between art and people. 

It is worth noting that both Reverse Television and Television Delivers People use the medium of TV to critique itself. They perform the exact mode of information dissemination that they condemn in order to show that the subject is condemnable. Kaizen comments on this approach to critique in Against Immediacy, explaining that video artists were reluctant to completely do without the institution of TV and the broadcasting industry, instead, they attempted to simply use these existing structures in different ways to produce “contemplative, aesthetic experiences.” They work within the system to dismantle it from the inside. This approach parallels the ubiquitous critique of capitalism by avenues of capitalism. 

Serra’s and Viola’s work exemplify this general trend of self-aware criticism, showing that perhaps the structure must be used to critique itself as no alternative lens works sufficiently well. As the audience is mesmerized by the easy entertainment of broadcast TV, the criticism cannot take the form of more “focused” modes of communication (such as text) which requires concentrated inspection. Perhaps, the most effective way to reach the audiences who need to be enlightened about the insidiousness of TV is through the very medium they consume the most.

Part 4: Where do we go from here?

Reverse Television and Television Delivers People succeed at jabbing at the “hierarchical one-way flow of TV content to the masses” (Meigh-Andrews), as well as the institution of commodity fetishism. However, it is only a preliminary awareness of the implications of the hypnagogic media consumption that saturates society during this time. Is the mere “disruption” of commodity fetishism through the “lulling effect” of mass media enough? How can this new technology be reimagined to suit a better purpose?

There are artists who, unlike Serra and Viola, consider working within the medium of broadcast television to be ineffective, instead opting for a more revolutionary approach. For example, Nam June Paik sees his own video synthesizer as a powerful tool for engaging the public and transforming television. He envisioned people using this tool like a musical synthesizer (like the Moog) to create warped and remixed videos from their own homes. This would allow them to “participate in television production” and make “groovy TV”  (Kaizen). This inclusion of viewer participation disrupts the mode of passive TV-watching that people are used to. It also satisfies viewers’ need for the social connections that TV currently provides. Paik believes that this creative outlet would “creatively liberate [the television generation] from the bondage of… commercial programming” and that the synthesizer would give the public the opportunity to use it for “imaginative purposes, whether for avant-garde anti-communication or for ecstatic technological communion.” Such fantasies of the possibilities certainly are not rare. McLuhan, too, saw the potential of the new technology. He wanted to create new channels of “social communion” that gets rid of social alienation (Kaizen, 25). These radical artists dream of an interconnected future facilitated by machines—a far step from the calculated moves of Viola and Serra.

Murray closes his essay with examples of systems of fantasy that resist commodification. He imagines an “open-source” future where artistic activism using digital tools can resist the fetishism of capitalism. Collectively, artists can use the web of technology to bring about a “new creative potential for human discourse” (Vasulka).

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