University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Art on television: 1967-1976

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Art on television: 1967-1976

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Content ART ON TELEVISION: 1967-1976

by
SARAH HOLLENBERG

A DISSERTATION Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ART HISTORY)

December 2012

Copyright 2012 Sarah Hollenberg
ii
Acknowledgements

Like the objects that it investigates, this dissertation would never have existed
without the contributions of many minds, voices, and institutions. I cannot begin to give
appropriate credit, acknowledgement and gratitude here to everyone who has played a
part in its realization (though the errors and elisions are all mine). To throw a wide net, I
offer a deep and sincere thank-you to the many teachers, friends, and family members
who have offered me their support, and to the artists, art historians and scholars who have
provided me with inspiration and purpose.
More specifically, I owe a great deal to Richard Meyer for his guidance as
committee chair of this project, and for the unfailing light offered by the rigor,
intelligence and relevance of his work as an art historian. Karen Lang and Anne
Friedberg both played important roles in the initial stages of this project. Karen’s
guidance and encouragement of my investigations into the disciplinary forms and
narratives of art history helped to shape my own relationship to the discipline; her
relocation to the University of Warwick is a loss for California, but sometimes America
has to share. Anne, on the other hand, helped me to stretch beyond my disciplinary limits
with exceptional grace and good humor; her untimely death was a terrible loss to
everyone who knew her, or her work. Stepping in at the eleventh hour to take Karen and
Anne’s places on my committee, Kate Flint and Steven Ross offered exceptional insight
and enormously helpful suggestions in the final stages of the project.
The art history department at USC has offered ongoing support of various types.
From the intellectual generosity of professors and peers to the patience and exceptional
organizational skills of the department staff, the department has been a great support. As
iii
well, the financial support of the department in the forms of the Borchard Foundation
Award, the Jewel Gala Fellowship Fund and a variety of travel grants has been very
generous. I am grateful as well to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
of Canada for the Doctoral Award that paid for the delicious year I spent in my archives.
I have already mentioned my peers in the program—who, contrary to all of the
scary bed-time stories about American graduate students that I heard growing up, were
always kind, generous, supportive, and awe-inspiring in their creative thinking and
scholarly rigor—but a few require special mention. Virginia Solomon and Kristine
Tanton were a community for me from day one, and I don’t know what I would have
done without them. Both provided much needed reality checks, emotional support, and
conversation about research that was as fun as it was critical (also, rides). Leta Ming,
Jason Goldman, Aleca Le Blanc and Kristine, were a marvelous writing group.
I am grateful as well to the Getty Research Institute for providing me with the
best workspace even possibly imaginable in the world, and to the archivists at the
beautifully maintained archives at WGBH-TV, at the Pacific Film Archive and the
Berkeley Museum of Fine Arts, at Electronic Arts Intermix, and at WNET-TV in New
York City. Without their work, all of this would have been lost. Also, it should have cost
me more money than I had to watch the many, many hours of videotape that I did.
Somehow, the bills always came out a couple of zeros shorter than they should have.
First and last of all the institutions that shaped and helped me, the Nova Scotia College of
Art and Design made me an art historian, and I owe a great debt to that community.
Boundless gratitude and love to my colleagues as an undergraduate, who taught me how
to think about art; the professors I studied with there, especially Jayne Wark, who first
iv
taught me to think about its history; and finally my students there who were a constant
source of intellectual and emotional sustenance while I worked on my PhD.
There are a few other people who I need to name, who helped in ways that no one
else could have. I am grateful to Fred Barzyk, Russell Connor and Loren Sears for their
time, insight and memories. Craig Rodmore helped illuminate the value of those things
no one else had noticed, and contributed a great deal to the early stages of the project.
Anna, Goody-B and Aaron helped make LA home, and Rebecca and Greg keep giving
me a happy place to stay in NYC. Most of all and everyone, my mother, Vicki
Hollenberg, has been an unwavering source of support, love, and emergency
proofreading/telephone hysteria soothing/and motherly declarations of my awesomeness.
She is the best.
v

Table of Contents

Aknowledgements .............................................................................................................. ii

List of Figures.....................................................................................................................vi

Abstract...............................................................................................................................xi

Introduction .........................................................................................................................1
Figures to the Introduction.....................................................................................32

Chapter One: From Art on Television to the Art of Television ........................................34
Figures to Chapter One..........................................................................................73

Chapter Two: Authorship and Institutional Form .............................................................77
Figures to Chapter Two .......................................................................................116

Chapter Three: Abstraction and Instrumentality .............................................................127
Figures to Chapter Three .....................................................................................182

Chapter Four: Hybrid Objects .........................................................................................191
Figures to Chapter Four.......................................................................................236

Conclusion .......................................................................................................................241

Bibliography ....................................................................................................................259

vi
List of Figures

Figure 1. Video Commune: The Beatles From Beginning to End, 1970, video still,
WGBH-TV. .......................................................................................................................33

Figure 2. Video Commune: The Beatles From Beginning to End, 1970, video still,
WGBH-TV. .......................................................................................................................33

Figure 3. Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman, Television Delivers People, 1973,
video still,
Video Data Bank (http://www.vdb.org/titles/television-delivers-people).........................34

Figure 4. Dangerman, Pilot Episode, 1960, video still, Incorporated Television Company.74

Figure 5. Dangerman, Pilot Episode, 1960, video still, Incorporated Television Company.74

Figure 6. Dangerman, Pilot Episode, 1960, video stills, Incorporated Television
Company............................................................................................................................75

Figure 7. Dangerman, Pilot Episode, 1960, video stills, Incorporated Television
Company............................................................................................................................75

Figure 8. WGBH, The Very First On-The-Air Half-Inch Video Festival Ever, 1972, video still,
WGBH-TV. ......................................................................................................................75

Figure 9. WGBH, The Very First On-The-Air Half-Inch Video Festival Ever, 1972, video still,
WGBH-TV. .......................................................................................................................76

Figure 10. Newsweek, March 6, 1967, cover.....................................................................76

Figure 11. Woody Allen, Annie Hall, 1977, film still, MGM. ..........................................77

Figure 12. William Wegman, Man Ray Man Ray, 1978, video still, WGBH-TV. .........117

Figure 13. William Wegman, Man Ray Man Ray, 1978, video still, WGBH-TV. .........117

Figure 14. William Wegman, Man Ray Man Ray, 1978, video still, WGBH-TV. .........118

Figure 15. William Wegman, Man Ray Man Ray, 1978, video still, WGBH-TV. .........118

Figure 16. William Wegman, Man Ray Man Ray, 1978, video still, WGBH-TV. .........119

Figure 17. William Wegman, Man Ray Man Ray, 1978, video still, WGBH-TV. .........119

Figure 18. William Wegman, Man Ray Man Ray, 1978, video still, WGBH-TV. .........119
vii

Figure 19. William Wegman, Man Ray Man Ray, 1978, video still, WGBH-TV. .........120

Figure 20. Allan Kaprow, Hello, in The Medium is the Medium, 1969, video still,
WGBH-TV. .....................................................................................................................120

Figure 21. Allan Kaprow, Hello, in The Medium is the Medium, 1969, video still,
WGBH-TV. ....................................................................................................................121

Figure 22. Allan Kaprow, Hello, in The Medium is the Medium, 1969, video still,
WGBH-TV. ....................................................................................................................121

Figure 23. Allan Kaprow, Hello, in The Medium is the Medium, 1969, video still,
WGBH-TV. .....................................................................................................................122

Figure 24. James and Mimi Seawright, Capriccio, in The Medium is the Medium, 1969,
video still, WGBH-TV. ...................................................................................................122

Figure 25. James and Mimi Seawright, Capriccio, in The Medium is the Medium, 1969,
video still, WGBH-TV. ...................................................................................................122

Figure 26. Nam June Paik, Video Opera #1, in The Medium is the Medium, 1969,
video still, WGBH-TV. ...................................................................................................123

Figure 27. Nam June Paik, Video Opera #1, in The Medium is the Medium, 1969,
video still, WGBH-TV. ...................................................................................................123

Figure 28. Nam June Paik, Video Variations 1972, video still, WGBH-TV...................123

Figure 29. Nam June Paik, Video Variations 1972, video still, WGBH-TV...................124

Figure 30. Publicity Still from an early episode of “Museum Open House” WGBH-TV
c. 1960-63. .......................................................................................................................124

Figure 31. Nam June Paik, Merce By Merce By Paik, 1978, video stills, WGBH-TV. ..125

Figure 32. Nam June Paik, Merce By Merce By Paik, 1978, video stills, WGBH-TV. ..125

Figure 33. Nam June Paik, Merce By Merce By Paik, 1978, video stills, WGBH-TV ...125

Figure 34. Nam June Paik, Merce By Merce By Paik, 1978, video stills, WGBH-TV. ..125

Figure 35. Nam June Paik, Merce By Merce By Paik, 1978, video stills, WGBH-TV ...125

Figure 36. Nam June Paik, Merce By Merce By Paik, 1978, video stills, WGBH-TV. ..125
viii

Figure 37. Russell Connor, Art Talker, 1980, video still, WGBH-TV............................126

Figure 38. Russell Connor, Art Talker, 1980, video still, WGBH-TV............................126

Figure 39. Bruce Nauman and William Allen, Flour Arrangements, 1967, video still,
Pacific
Film Archive....................................................................................................................126

Figure 40. Bruce Nauman and William Allen, Flour Arrangements, 1967, video still,
Pacific
Film Archive....................................................................................................................127

Figure 41. Bruce Nauman and William Allen, Flour Arrangements, 1967, video still,
Pacific
Film Archive....................................................................................................................127

Figure 42. Bruce Nauman and William Allen, Flour Arrangements, 1967, video still,
Pacific
Film Archive....................................................................................................................127

Figure 43. Robert Zagone, Stephen Beck, et. al., Ecotopia: A Visual Essay, 1975, video
still,
Pacific Film Archive....................................................................................................... 183

Figure 44. NCET Page, Radical Software, (Vol. 2, No. 30),
(http://www.radicalsoftware.org/e/volume2nr3.html) 46................................................184

Figure 45. Nam June Paik, 9/23, 1969, video still, WGBH-TV..................................... 185

Figure 46. Brice Howard, Video Notebook, 1972, video still, Pacific Film
Archive. ...........................................................................................................................185

Figure 47. Loren Sears, Richard Felciano, Joanne Kyger, Slip Back Into the Shining Sea,
1967,
video still, Pacific Film Archive......................................................................................186

Figure 48. Loren Sears, Richard Felciano, Joanne Kyger, Slip Back Into the Shining Sea,
1967,
video still, Pacific Film Archive......................................................................................186

Figure 49. Loren Sears, Richard Felciano, Joanne Kyger, Slip Back Into the Shining Sea,
1967,
video still, Pacific Film Archive......................................................................................187

ix
Figure 50. Piet Mondrian, Composition with Red, Blue, Black, Yellow, and Gray, 1921,
oil paint on canvas, 76 x 52.4 cm, MoMA. .................................................................... 187

Figure 51. Jackson Pollock, Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist), 1950, oil, enamel and
aluminum
on canvas, 221 x 299.7 cm, National Gallery of Art. ......................................................188

Figure 52. Radical Software: Video City, Philip Getzen, ed., San Francisco, 1972,1-3
(http://www.radicalsoftware.org/e/volume2nr3.html).....................................................188

Figure 53. Willard Rosenquist, Lostine, 1973, video stills, Pacific Film Archive. .........189

Figure 54. Willard Rosenquist, Lostine, 1973, video stills, Pacific Film Archive. .........189

Figure 55. Willard Rosenquist, Lostine, 1973, video stills, Pacific Film Archive. .........189

Figure 56. Bill Gwin, Irving Bridge, c. 1972, video still, Pacific Film Archive. ............190

Figure 57. Bill Gwin, Irving Bridge, c. 1972, video still, Pacific Film Archive. ............190

Figure 58. Steven Beck, Synthesis, 1971-4 made using the Beck Direct Video
Synthesizer,
video still, Pacific Film Archive......................................................................................191

Figure 59. Steven Beck, Synthesis, 1971-4 made using the Beck Direct Video
Synthesizer,
video still, Pacific Film Archive......................................................................................191

Figure 60. David Silver, “Interview Between David Silver and Mel Lyman,” Avatar
(Boston, February 16, 1968)............................................................................................237

Figure 61. Russell Connor, Art Talker, 1980/c.1965, video still, WGBH-TV................237

Figure 62. Robert Zagone, West Pole, 1968, video still, re-released in Go Ride the Music,
Eagle Vision Records, 2008. ...........................................................................................238

Figure 63. Robert Zagone, West Pole, 1968, video still, re-released in Go Ride the Music,
Eagle Vision Records, 2008. ...........................................................................................238

Figure 64. Robert Zagone, West Pole, 1968, video still, re-released in Go Ride the Music,
Eagle Vision Records, 2008. ...........................................................................................239

Figure 65. Robert Zagone, West Pole, 1968, video still, re-released in Go Ride the Music,
Eagle Vision Records, 2008. ...........................................................................................239

x
Figure 66. Robert Zagone, West Pole, 1968, video still, re-released in Go Ride the Music,
Eagle Vision Records, 2008. ...........................................................................................240

Figure 67. Robert Zagone, West Pole, 1968, video still, re-released in Go Ride the Music,
Eagle Vision Records, 2008. ...........................................................................................240

Figure 68. Paul Foster, Tom O’Horgan, !Heimskringla! ! or The Stoned Angels, 1969,
241
video still, Pacific Film Archive......................................................................................241

Figure 69. Paul Foster, Tom O’Horgan, !Heimskringla! ! or The Stoned Angels, 1969,
video still, Pacific Film Archive......................................................................................241

Figure 70. Paul Foster, Tom O’Horgan, !Heimskringla! ! or The Stoned Angels, 1969,
video still, Pacific Film Archive......................................................................................241

xi
Abstract
This dissertation provides an account of artists’ residency programs at two
American public television stations in the earliest years of video art, arguing that the
institutional context of the television station demands a reorientation of video art history.
The collaboration between artists and television professionals in an historical moment of
rapid change in public media, visual arts, and social ideals illustrates the importance of
institutional histories and dialogue between artistic and extra-artistic cultural spheres in
post-war American art.
The residency programs at WGBH-TV in Boston and KQED-TV in San
Francisco, both initiated in 1967, were very similar on the surface, but the differences
between the two offer insight into the history of post-war modernism and the emergence
of post-modern practices. At WGBH-TV in Boston, artists and television professionals
collaborated closely to produce a number of artworks for broadcast. These works often
undermined the ideals of individuality and autonomy that are treated as foundations of
visual art production by openly exploring the ways in which the collaborative
environment of the television station and the conventions of public broadcasting shaped
the practices of participating artists. At KQED-TV in San Francisco, on the other hand,
artists tried to retreat from the television world even as they inhabited it, by eschewing
broadcast and embracing modernist ideals of medium specificity. Despite a desire for
autonomy, however, artists at KQED found their practices instrumentalized, as the
television studio became a creative laboratory that merged the cold-war culture of
collaborative research and development and the contemporaneous lionization of
expressive abstraction. These residency programs had an effect beyond the boundaries of
xii
the art world and the new genre of video art. In a number of television shows produced at
WGBH, KQED and WNET-TV in New York, art practices spilled over into regular
programming. As art galleries began to buy television monitors on which to display video
art, a handful of television shows introduced the strategies and techniques of video art as
a bridge to the counterculture, in order to connect with the increasingly powerful baby-
boomer demographic. These television shows are not categorized as artworks, but they
show significant points of overlap with those products of the residencies that have been,
existing as genuine hybrids of art and television. The activities and works documented in
this dissertation demonstrate a clear point of overlap and entanglement between cultural
spheres that are often kept at arms length from one another.
1
Introduction

Viewers of Boston’s local public television station, WGBH-TV, who tuned in late
at night on August 1, 1970, were met by a scantily clad woman, dancing alone to the pop
song “I Need You,” by The Beatles. The dancer’s movements were amplified and
sometimes obscured by manipulation of the video signal: flashes of bright light and halos
of unnatural magenta and acid green swirled around her, while “tracers” or ghosts of her
flailing limbs fluttered across the screen. The voice of Russell Connor—familiar to
viewers of the weekly WGBH/Boston Museum of Fine Arts program Museum Open
House, which he had hosted since the early 1960s—rose over the music, to deliver the
following instructions:
Dear audience. This is participation TV. Your TV set is not there just to be
watched, but to be played with, actively. First, if you have a color set, turn
the color knob up, to the right, to the extreme, so that you can have the
brightest color. Second, you can turn the brightness control to the left.
Third, play with the tint knob, which turns your picture red, blue or green.
Play with it freely so that you can have your own color. Play with all the
knobs including the horizontal and vertical, so that you can ‘talk back’ to
the synthesizer, symbolically. If you have a black and white set, this
program might not be too interesting, since we are mostly color
experiments. In that case, you might distort your picture with a strong
magnet.
1

These instructions were offered in the middle of an improvisational, live-to-air,
interruption-free “four-hour-long blockbuster program.”
2
This program, Video Commune

1
Nam June Paik, Fred Barzyk, et al. Video Commune (Beatles From Beginning to End).
WGBH-TV, aired August 1, 1970, (Videocassette, WGBH Media Library and Archives),
240 min. Unless otherwise noted, all transcription and description of video tapes are by
the author.

2
Johanna Gill, Video: State of the Art, (Rockefeller Foundation, June 1976), 17.

2
(The Beatles from Beginning to End) was produced collaboratively by a group of artists
and television personnel.
3
They used a machine created by artist Nam June Paik and
engineer Shuya Abe to manipulate, colorize, mix and generate video signal in
unconventional ways. In this program, which was composed of video signal shot,
processed and broadcast live from the studio, footage from previous experiments, and
frequent interjections of programming from Japanese television—such as the dance
number pictured in Figure 1—the only existing plan appears to have been that video
would be produced to accompany The Beatles’ entire recorded oeuvre-to-date.
The loose, improvisational and frequently abstract imagery of Video Commune—
seen in the painterly forms captured in Figure 2—signaled a new approach to television
content. Connor’s invitation to viewers to “participate” in the manipulation of the
imagery was a call for the public to establish a new relationship to the consumption of
culture. The new apparatus, collaborative procedure and unconventional means of
distribution presented an entirely new way to make and disseminate visual art. Anarchic,

3
The program has no author, director or producer listed in the WGBH archives, and,
notably, there is no copyright attribution. The WGBH Program Guide for August 1970
includes an announcement for the upcoming broadcast which lists the authors as
“synthesizer inventor Paik, Channel 2 producer Fred Barzyk... and noted New England
artists invited to come to WGBH and provide their own interpretations.” The same
announcement presents the following invitation to viewers: “If you would like to see the
synthesizer in person and be photographed by it, Paik suggests that you write to him for
tickets.” As the program opened, Connor’s voice-over introduced the broadcast with the
following words: “This music program contains some Japanese commercials which will
be left in for sociological and artistic reasons….There will be six New England artists
collaborating, working with the Paik Video Synthesizer. Russell Connor of the NYCA,
David Silver of WNET, Anne Talbert of Brandeis University, WGBH’s John Fulsome,
Charles Norton and Jack Gill; Nat Johnson will play the audio synthesizer…. Please, do
your own thing, and treat it like electronic wallpaper, or like a light show. It has no
beginning, no end. You may tune in, you can come in and go out. We’ll be here for four
hours.”

3
playful, and unconcerned with distinctions between high art and popular culture, these
four hours of television raise questions about the cultural role of public broadcasters; the
possibilities of video as an art form; and the identity of the artist as a special type of
cultural producer, inoculated against the pressures of mass production and entertainment.
4

How did a young artist, new to the United States and a known trouble-maker
(Paik and his collaborator Charlotte Moorman made headlines in 1967 when she was
arrested on obscenity charges during a performance of his Opera Sextronique in New
York) gain access to four untrammeled hours of airtime on Boston’s PBS station?
5

Where did the funding come from to build the Paik-Abe Synthesizer, a complicated and
highly idiosyncratic machine that served primarily to break the celebrated verism of the
television signal? Why would Russell Connor, an established personality in the world of
educational television, surrender the museum-affiliated authority of his role as art-expert

4
For the purposes of this dissertation, the term “video art” will be used to refer
exclusively to pre-digital video, whether closed-circuit, live broadcast, or recorded on
magnetic tape. Video, in this context refers to electronic signals relayed to a cathode-tube
monitor from a camera, mixer or synthesizer. “Portapak,” another frequently used term, is
a brand name for the Sony Portapak which was quickly adopted to refer to all portable
video cameras. In many cases it is unclear whether the equipment referred to is Sony or
some other brand (Sanyo, Akai, Nivico, or Ampex). The distinction between television
and video has come retrospectively, and is somewhat problematic in the context of this
study. For the most part, the term video is used to describe non-broadcast recordings or
signal produced with cheaper, portable cameras than those used in television production.
However, this distinction, which is based on technology, fails to recognize the role that
cultural designations play in distinguishing video from television. Many of the products
discussed in this study are referred to as “video” when they are discussed in the histories
of video art, even though, technologically, they are “television.” This will be discussed in
more detail in Chapter 1.

5
Benjamin Piekut, Experimentalism: Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its
Limits, (Berkeley; University of California Press, 2011), 166-170.

4
to participate in an exercise in chaos, confusion and, ultimately, destruction?
6
In order to
answer these questions, we must consider the broadcast in the larger institutional context
of its production. This program was not the isolated case or exception that one might
imagine. Rather, it was part of an ambitious program established in 1967 at WGBH-TV
to bring artists into the television station and put the products of their efforts on the air.
This program was paralleled, though in markedly different ways, by a similar initiative at
KQED-TV in San Francisco, both of them funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, with
supplementary support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Corporation
for Public Broadcasting.
Together, the artists-in-residence programs at these two public television stations
offer insight into a peculiar and unpredictable moment in the history of television
broadcasting in the United States, and suggest an alternative set of priorities to those
celebrated in the existing histories of video art. The materials produced in these
residency programs constitute important objects in the development of a new cultural
form, a new kind of art. This new art, as it emerged, between 1967 and the mid-1970s,
was one without rules, history, or a clear place in art-world institutions. This story is one
that illustrates the openness and contingency of video art in its earliest years, and expands
on the accepted narrative accounts that document the medium’s emergence as a form of
visual art. It also asks what effect the strategies used to legitimate video as a gallery-and-

6
According to Barzyk, the use of the colorizer on the Paik-Abe Synthesizer blew the
color filters in the broadcast array. In an interview, he explained that, “... the next day the
head engineer informed me that because the chromo level was so high, coming out of the
synthesizer, that we had blown out the transmitter at around twelve, midnight, and that
the parts had to be replaced and that it was going to be expensive.” Fred Barzyk,
interview by Selena Colburn, part one. WGBH Oral History Project. (Boston: WGBH
Archive, August 25, 1998), 32.
5
museum-bound art form might have had on our understanding of its possibilities, as well
as its origins.
In her 1988 essay “Paradox in the Evolution of an Art Form: Great Expectations
and the Making of a History,” Marita Sturken points out that the history of video art has
been dominated by stories of technological development and the innovations of
individual artists, but has often been blind to institutional effects.
7
A case in point is
David Joselit’s study of the relationship between early video art and television,
Feedback: Television Against Democracy. Joselit mentions one work in the body of his
text that was made for, and aired on television: Richard Serra and Carlota Fay
Schoolman’s polemical 1973 videotape, Television Delivers People (Fig. 3).
8
Joselit
describes the content of the work, which is about TV, but he never mentions that it was

7
Marita Sturken “Paradox in the Evolution of an Art Form: Great Expectations and the
Making of a History” in Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art, eds. Doug
Hall and Sally Jo Fifer (New York: Aperture Press, 1990), 101-121. Sturken is one of the
few writers to address video art in these terms; in particular she has looked closely at the
influence of individuals such as Howard Klein at the Rockefeller Foundation and gallerist
Howard Wise. Neither of these men were artists, but they both had a significant influence
on the development of video as an art form. A central and consistent element of Sturken’s
argument is that, while figures and institutions such as these have played an important
role in the production of art throughout the modern era, their influence in video was
especially pronounced, because of the combined factors of the cost of video equipment,
and the lack of any market support in its early years. Without figures like Klein and Wise,
or institutions like the Rockefeller Foundation and Electronic Arts Intermix, she has
argued, it would have been much more difficult for artists to access production facilities
or distribution of their works.

8
David Joselit, Feedback: Television Against Democracy, (Cambridge, MA. and London,
England: MIT Press, 2007), 105.

6
made in a television station, that it was aired on TV, or that the artists considered the
process of gaining access to broadcast airwaves a part of the work.
9

9
In a 1979 interview, Serra describes the process of making and airing Television
Delivers People: “There had been a meeting in New York of people from NYU,
Columbia, National Broadcasting, and they all presented papers. The papers were printed
in various journals and I cut them up and put them together to form a script. Then I went
with Carlota Schoolman to Channel 13 where we got a character generator. I figured how
much space I would want between each sentence. I asked the people at Channel 13 what
color would be most effective for a readout, and they said yellow and blue…..When I
first went on the air—it was put on briefly as a sign-off in Amarillo Texas—the reaction
to it prompted me to send it to the government for censorship verification. It was passed
for television under an anti-advertisement provision. That means that if there are
advertisements, there can be anti-advertisements: equal time. And this year it was shown
in Chicago….on WTTW….There was an idealistic notion that there would be home
video transmitters and alternative stations, but the fact of the matter is that it’s controlled
by the government. 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 capitalist status
quo. I simply decided to make that explicit.” Annette Michaelson, Richard Serra and
Clara Weyergraf, “The Films of Richard Serra: An Interview” October, Vol. 10 (Autumn,
1979): 84.
Joselit was not alone in reading Television Delivers People as an object of the gallery at
the expense of its historical and material connection with broadcast television. This
treatment of the work recurs in Catherine Elwes, Video Art, A Guided Tour, (New York
and London: I.B. Tauris, 2005) 98; John G. Hanhardt, New American Video Art: A
Historical Survey, 1967-1987, (Linz and Camerino; Ars Electronica, 1988), ARS
Electronica Catalogue Archive, ARS Electronica Catalogue Archive.
http://90.146.8.18/en/archives/festival_archive/festival_catalogs/festival_artikel.asp?iProj
ectID=9086#. Accessed March 30, 2012; Peggy Gale “Video Has Captured Our
Imagination” in Video re/View, Peggy Gale and Lisa Steele, eds. (Toronto; Art Metropole
and V tape, 1996),114; Rob Perrée, Into Video Art: The Characteristics of a Medium,
(Rotterdam and Amsterdam: CON Rumore, 1988), 3; Karen Henry, “Television
Interference,” Vanguards, vol. 13, #4, (May 1984):
http://www.ccca.ca/c/writing/h/henry/hen001t.html. Accessed March 31, 2012. Recently,
the Artforum website posted the video, calling it a “short film,” a semantic error which,
under other circumstances, would be of limited importance, but given the production and
history of this work, is worth noting. http://artforum.com/video/mode=large&id=23036.
Accessed March 31, 2012.

7
In a book about the relationship between video art and television, this is a curious
omission. Although he acknowledges the history of video art production at television
stations in an endnote, Joselit forgoes a discussion of these sites. He claims that their
institutional nature and failure to “challenge or undermine the television system or
apparatus as a whole,” facilitates the entry of video art into “the traditional role of the
artwork,” which runs counter to his preference for “guerrilla efforts.”
10
Joselit’s decision
to jettison institutional history is in keeping with accepted approaches to the history of
video art, which typically ignore discussions of production, display and dissemination in
favor of a concentration on technical innovations, formal qualities or narrative content.
11

This study sets out to demonstrate that the investigation of institutional histories is
essential to any comprehensive understanding of the origins of video art, as well as—
more generally—the development of art and the role of the artist in the United States in
the post-war period. It is the under-examined entry of video into “the traditional role of
the artwork,” that demands investigation, and on which I hope to shed light through this
study of early video art made in public television stations, and often disseminated through
television broadcast.
Benjamin Buchloh, writing about Television Delivers People in 1985, did
acknowledge the importance of broadcast to the work, arguing that “This tape not only
referred to the ideological affiliation of the technology but also explicitly addressed a

10
David Joselit, Feedback, 182.

11
Given video’s rapidly diversifying forms of production, display and dissemination in
the first decades of the twenty-first century, a retrospective attention to these phenomena
in early video seems especially timely.

8
non-high-art audience, since it was intended for broadcast television and it ‘spoke’ to the
television public rather than to the museum or gallery public.”
12
One of the rare critical
investigations of the potential of artists’ television, Benjamin Buchloh’s article “From
Gadget Video to Agit Video: Some Notes on Four Recent Video Works,” opens with a
discussion of the utopian project of putting artists’ video on television in the late 1960s
and early 1970’s. Buchloh’s comments on these initiatives are pointed, melancholy and
deeply pessimistic; his exploration of the problem of artists’ video on television is
insightful, but the assumptions on which it is based are limiting. The way that artists
make use of video technology has changed since the sixties, he tells us, video art having
failed in its early intention to “lead the way out of the vicious circle of gallery and
museum institution straight into the mythical public sphere of broadcast television,” and
in its goal of “opening and broadening audience, addressing very specific audiences at the
site and the moment of their conditions and needs.”
13
The radical potential of video art
failed because it did not adequately undermine the elitist art world or the “totalitarian”
mass culture industry. Buchloh argues that this failure was the result of a lack of critical
focus on the part of artists and the fact that the institutions of both elite and mass culture
are far too powerful for any artist to ever successfully intervene in them.
Buchloh’s analysis of video art on television points to its great, unfulfilled
ideological potential to bring about a “...transformation both of the traditional fetishistic

12
Benjamin Buchloh, “From Gadget Video to Agit-Video: Some Notes on Four Recent
Video Works,” Art Journal, Vol. 45, No. 3, Video: The Reflexive Medium. (Autumn,
1985), 217.

13
Buchloh, “From Gadget Video to Agit-Video” 217.

9
production and reception apparatus of the high-art institution and of the quasi-totalitarian
conditions of the consciousness industry,” while making it clear that such a
transformation is ultimately impossible.
14
He pays limited attention to the early broadcast
projects themselves, grounded as his argument is in the conviction that the endeavor was
doomed from the start. By reducing this complex and lively (if short-lived) interaction
between the avant-garde and the culture industry to one of tragic predestination, Buchloh
passes over an important and unrepeated moment in American culture—a moment in
which the ideals and institutions of the avant-garde and of popular media made direct and
visceral contact, struggling to transform themselves and each other, to win control of
audiences and ideological positions.
15
A close examination of these developments—
rather than a focus on their success or failure in fulfilling a particular ideological
agenda—reveals unexpected incongruities and emergences often ignored in art historical
narratives. These are the kinds of phenomena that ideology and mythology work so hard

14
Buchloh, “From Gadget Video to Agit-Video” 217.

15
While the terms “mass communication” or “mass entertainment” require relatively little
unpacking in this context, I feel that I should clarify my use of the term “avant-garde.”
Following Peter Bürger, I identify as avant-garde those art practices which seek to refute
the autonomy of the artist and the isolation of the viewing experience, working to end the
separation of art from the “praxis of life,” not for the purpose of inserting art into the
existing praxis of life, but for the purpose of transforming society through the integration
of art into life. See Peter Bürger “On the Problem of the Autonomy of Art in Bourgeois
Society” 1974, reprinted in Art in Modern Culture: an Anthology of Critical Texts,
Frascina, F. and Harris, J. eds. (London, 1992). While Bürger’s articulation of the
relationship of the avant-garde to the “praxis of life” is central to my thesis, I am inclined
to side with Hal Foster in the belief that Bürger’s understanding of the avant-garde as a
phenomenon exclusive to early twentieth-century European art movements is excessively
pessimistic. See Hal Foster “Who’s Afraid of Neo-Avant Garde,” in The Return of the
Real: Art and Theory at the End of the Century, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 1-
32.

10
to erase, and which, on a certain level, art requires if it is to be more than an illustration
of the reigning theoretical paradigm.
The initiative to use the video camera as an artistic tool has consistently been
placed in the hands of individual artists.
16
The idea that the television studio could be
used as an art studio, however, was proposed and championed by television professionals
dissatisfied with existing televisual forms. This dissatisfaction was not simply that of a
few upstart instigators; rather, they represented a growing population that included
professionals in the field, policy-makers, educators, and viewers who were concerned
about the quality of broadcast material, particularly that coming out of the major
networks. The criticisms of commercial television, and the anxieties about the future of
American culture that many of them expressed, had been crystallized and publicly
expressed in 1961 by then newly-appointed chairman of the Federal Communications
Commission, Newton Minow. In his speech “Television and the Public Interest,”
delivered on May 9, at the 39
th
Annual Convention of the National Association of
Broadcasters, held in Washington, D.C., Minow made his opinion about the
responsibility of public broadcasters clear. Most commonly known as the “Vast

16
Andy Warhol and Nam June Paik are consistently named as the first artists to employ
this tool (I am not including pre-video recording works using television sets as part of
sculptural or installation works). See David Ross, “A Provisional Overview of Artists’
Television in the U.S.” in New Artists Video: A Critical Anthology, (New York: Dutton,
1978), 142; Richard Lorber, “Epistemological TV,” in New Artists Video: A Critical
Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock, (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1978), 95; Catherine Elwes,
“The Modernist Inheritance: Tampering with Technology and Other Interferences” in
Video Art, A Guided Tour, 21-36; Chris Meigh-Andrews, A History of Video Art: The
Development of Form and Function, (Oxford and New York, 2006), 5-19. David
Joselit’s Feedback, while not an overview of the history of video, opens with works by
Nam June Paik and Andy Warhol, 7-14.
11
Wasteland Speech,” Minow declared the current state of affairs in commercial
broadcasting untenable.
Anyone who is in the broadcasting business has a tough row to hoe. You
earn your bread using public property. When you work in broadcasting
you volunteer for public service, public pressure, and public regulation.
You must compete with other attractions and other investments, and the
only way you can do it is to prove to us every three years that you should
have been in business in the first place.... Your license lets you use the
public’s airways as trustees for 180 million Americans. The public is your
beneficiary. If you want to stay on as trustees, you must deliver a decent
return to the public—not only to your stockholders.
17

Commercial broadcasting, Minow pointed out, was in excellent financial health,
and as such was meeting the needs of its shareholders. It was not, however, meeting the
needs of the American public. In a time of global social upheaval, he told his audience of
commercial broadcasters, “the old complacent, unbalanced fare of action-adventure and
situation comedies is simply not good enough.”
18
Minow told his audience to go home
and watch a full day of programming on their own network, and he challenged them to
get through that day without suffering, among other ills, profound boredom.
19
Minow
called for television programming that was challenging, creative, and informative. He
pledged to support broadcasters that worked to provide programming of high quality, and
to do all he could to “help educational television” declaring that “If there is not a nation-

17
Newton Minow, “The Vast Wasteland: Address to the 39
th
Annual Convention of the
National Association of Broadcasters, Washington, D.C., May 9, 1961,” in Equal Time:
The Private Broadcaster and the Public Interest, ed. Lawrence Laurent, (New York:
Atheneum, 1964), 48-49.

18
Minow, “Vast Wasteland,” 51.

19
Minow, “Vast Wasteland,” 52.

12
wide educational television system in this country, it will not be the fault of the FCC.”
20

Minow’s clear statement of a general sense of dissatisfaction with the “vast wasteland” of
commercial television was shared by enough people that his goal of establishing a
national educational television system was met by the end of the decade, and this new
system was full of young professionals who saw challenging old models and pushing the
limits of television programming as a part of their job. One of the strategies they used
was to bring artists into their studios, in the hopes that they might expand, transform and
re-imagine television.
The first artists-in-residence programs at American television stations, programs
that invited artists to use station equipment as tools for the production of visual art, were
initiated in 1967 at WGBH-TV in Boston and KQED-TV in San Francisco—both non-
profit, public stations with an educational mandate. These were sites of creative
production shaped in large part by the ways in which their respective program directors
(men who identified not as artists but as television producers and directors) engaged with
the idea of television-as-art. While the artists who participated in the residency programs
benefited from greater autonomy than the average producer of a television program, the
work that emerged from each residency program makes it clear that something in the
culture of each station had enough power to result in two bodies of work that can be
clearly distinguished from one another.
In Boston, a program developed that encouraged artists to use not only the
technology, but also the culture of television broadcasting in their work. In San
Francisco, participants rejected the televisual vernacular that showed up in much of the

20
Minow, “Vast Wasteland,” 56-57.
13
work made in Boston, in order to better explore the untapped creative potential of
television’s technological apparatuses. The broad, unpredictable potential of video art in
its earliest days can be seen in the fundamental differences between the output of the two
stations, despite similar institutional and economic circumstances. An examination and
comparison of these two programs and the works associated with them offers unique
access to the complex discursive space that existed where video (a new visual art form)
overlapped with television (a slightly less-new vehicle of mass culture) in the brief period
before they began to diverge. These projects offer us a vision of the possibilities
imagined for television in its early decades, and suggests alternative approaches to
television and art that have a real resonance with our contemporary moment—one in
which the promiscuous platform of the internet opens itself equally to television’s
popular entertainments and to media art.
While our first instinct in reading this overlap between art video and broadcast
television may be to direct our attention to the canonical works of art that resulted
directly from it, or to the careers of those participating artists who would go on to play
seminal roles in the development of video as an art form (such as Nam June Paik and
William Wegman), I would like to suggest that there is something more important—and
more difficult to pin down—to be found in a study of the artists’ residencies at KQED
and WGBH. The histories of video art have been (like most histories), written in
reverse—rewound from the narrative denouement of the author’s present. Predictably, the
narrative structures thus unspooled have been consistent with the needs and expectations
of the moments that produced them. In the decades that saw video established as a
legitimate art form with a place in commercial galleries, museums, biennials and
14
university curricula, further investigation and investment in video’s association with
television was not high on the priority list.
21

In his ambitious and eccentric study of media history, Deep Time of the Media:
Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means, Siegfried Zielinski
argues that we need to reconsider the way that histories are written, and subjects valued.
Seeking to undermine the teleological approach that dominates the writing of media
histories (and, I would argue, art histories), Zielinski directs cultural historians to take
heed of the work of paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who replaced the linear concept of
progress through time, “from lower to higher, from simple to complex” with an ideal of
diversification. In this model, the contemporary, instead of being the ultimate result of
development to a point of greater perfection and complexity, is simply “a tiny accident,”

21
Art historian and critic Rosalind Krauss’ early study of the inherent qualities and
general tendencies of video art can help to clarify the anxiety about video’s connection to
television. Krauss’s essay “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” published in the first
issue of October, is problematic in a number of ways, especially in that it draws general
conclusions from a very limited selection of works, but her influence, and that of her
arguments was significant. She begins by pointing out that video artists are “surely
conditioned by the attitudes of pop art,” (50) and goes on to write of “…a narcissism so
endemic to works of video that I find myself wanting to generalize it as the condition of
the entire genre.” (50). Most of the essay is devoted to her analysis of specific works,
which confirm her reading of the “narcissism” in video, evidenced by artists’ use of the
medium as a sort of mirror. She then goes on to connect the technological manifestation
of “mirroring” with “the specific inner workings of the present art market.” She says,
“…I do wish to make one connection here. And that is between the institution of a self
formed by video feedback and the real situation that exists in the art world from which
the makers of video come. In the last fifteen years that world has been deeply and
disastrously affected by its relation to mass media.” (59) For Krauss, the video camera is
too close to the television camera, and she is compelled to dwell on works that, to her,
speak of video’s inseparable connection to the world of mass culture, celebrity, and
excessive self-regard. Rosalind Krauss, “Video: the Aesthetics of Narcissism,” October,
Vol. 1. (Spring, 1976): 50-64.

15
within a field of enormous diversity.
22
Zielinski, following Gould, sets out to present
media history not by drawing a genetic line from one development to the next, from stone
tablets to papyrus scrolls to illuminated manuscripts to printing presses to radio to
computers to glass tablets, in a progress of inevitable improvement and increased
efficiency. Instead, he writes a history that explores those moments that do not fit easily
into a linear narrative from then to now, those moments and developments and objects
that are, for the most part, left out of historical accounts, because they fail to contribute to
our sense of a clear, structured, teleological progress toward the present. In doing so, he
hopes to
…reveal great diversity, which either has been lost because of the
genealogical way of looking at things or was ignored by this view. Instead
of looking for obligatory trends, master media, or imperative vanishing
points, one should be able to discover individual variations. Possibly, one
will discover fractures or turning points in historical master plans that
provide useful ideas for navigating the labyrinth of what is currently
firmly established.
23

Historians of video art have, for the most part, worked with a shared set of
priorities that emerged out of a perceived need to legitimate video as an art form. Based
on existing histories, it appears that this validation was gained by a combination of the
following strategies: the separation of video art from its bloated, trashy, cousin Television

22
Siegfried Zielinski, The Deep Time of the Media: Towards and Archaeology of
Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 6. I am
grateful to Anne Friedberg for introducing me to Zielinski’s work at an early point in my
research.

23
Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media, 7.

16
and from its better-liked-but-still-different cousin Activist Documentary;
24
a focus on the
entry of video into the institutions of art;
25
an emphasis on the video artist as lone
gunman/guerrilla militia, separated and/or liberated from mass culture by the portable
video recorder;
26
and finally by an aggressive abjection of video seen to be regressive in
its formalism or guilty of “techno-fetishism” and a simultaneous sanctification of
practices that could be more easily aligned with those practices of the late 1960s and
early 1970s that have received the greatest critical approbation: minimalism,
conceptualism, installation and performance art.
27
These strategies, deployed in the

24
See Carol Zemel, "Women and Video." Artscanada, (October 1973): 31; Allan Kaprow
“Video Art: Old Wine, New Bottle” in The New Television, 94-95; Kelly Anderson and
Annie Goldson, “Alternating Currents: Alternative Television inside and outside of the
Academy,” Social Text, no. 35, (Summer 1993): 56-71; and Paul Ryan, “A Genealogy of
Video,” Leonardo, vol. 21, no. 1, (1988): 39-44.

25
See Lucinda Furlong “Tracking Video Art: “Image Processing” as a Genre,” Art
Journal, vol. 45, no. 3, Video: The Reflexive Medium. (Autumn, 1985): 233-237; David
Ross “Video and the Future of the Museum” in The New Television, 112-117; Harald
Szeeman “Video, Myths, and the Museum” in The New Television, 130-137; Robert
Stefanotty “Kissing the Unique Object Good-Bye” in New Artists Video, 166-168.

26
While the strong presence of video collectives, such as Top Value Television (TVTV),
Ant Farm, Raindance, Videofreex and others undermines the cult of the individual in art
production, their consitently and aggressively counter-cultural stance helped to maintain
the myth of the video artist as outlaw or outsider. See Deirdre Boyle, Subject to Change:
Guerrilla Television Reivsited, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Parry D.
Teasdale, Videofreex: America’s First Pirate TV Station (Hensonville, NY: Black Dome
Press, 1999); Shigeko Kubota “Women’s Video in the U.S. and Japan” in The New
Television, 96-101; Martha Rosler “Video: Shedding the Utopian Moment” in
Illuminating Video, 31-50.

27
A number of these strategies are in use in the opening paragraphs of Buchloh’s “From
Gadget Video to Agit Video,” 217. On the entry of video into the institutions of art
Buchloh states “...video artists have generally maintained an uneasy relationship with the
institutions of reception and distriution of the high-art avant-garde—the museum and the
gallery...” We can see the denigration of excessive medium specificity in his reference to
“... the technocratic idealists who fostered the cult of the gadget...” and his association of
17
narration of video art’s history, have done a good job of ensuring its reception as a
legitimate, canon-viable, and even—eventually—marketable, art form (a reception
which, as we will see in Chapter One, was perhaps less in need of such support than we
have been led to believe). They have also paved over many “individual variations” in the
history of video—the residency programs at WGBH and KQED among them.
It is in the spirit of Zeilinski’s study that I have approached my own research. I do
not believe that the artists’ residencies discussed here, or the works that emerged from
them, are important primarily as the genetic origins or predecessors of what has come to
be a dominant medium in the field of contemporary art. Rather, I present them as
variations, roads not followed, possible futures that never happened, or did happen—but
in unexpected, difficult-to-classify ways. As such, I believe, this history has the potential
to offer “useful ideas,” alternative understandings to those which have encircled and
bound the history of video as a medium, at a moment when its possibilities seem to be,
once again, boundless.

the emergence of video with a select group of critically approved artists in the claim that,
“As in the first instances of the usages of film technology by artists...video technology
was originally employed by artists parallel to their continuing work in painting and
sculpture or conceptual practices (for example, such major video artists of the sixties as
Vito Acconci, Dan Graham, Bruce Nauman, and Lawrence Weiner.)” (217) He goes on
to argue that “only those artists who, like Dan Graham, Bruce Nauman, and Richard
Serra,” (and what three artists could more successfully typify the sanctified critical
practices of the late sixties?) “were explicitly involved in a phenomenological analysis of
the viewers’ relationship to the sculptural construct and to the surrounding architectural
container were successful in employing video technology in its most essential and
specific capacities...”—capacities which, Buchloh notes, did not include broadcast. (118)
Many of the same operations are carried out in Rosler’s “Video: Shedding the Utopian
Moment,” in Illuminating Video, 31-50.

18
This history is one that takes institutional structures and professional identities as
central to the development of art forms. Rather than focusing exclusively on artists as
privileged producers, I will be looking at the role played by various parties in shaping a
new form of art.
28
Instead of taking the release of the portable video camera (with its
connotations of freedom from institutional structures) as the technologically determining
central event in the development of video art, I am focusing on television—as a complex
structure that encompasses technological developments, economic drives, professional
identities and cultural forms—in my view of video-art history. The institutions and
technologies of production and display are not neutral providers, they shape art and our
experience of it in complex ways that this case study seeks to make explicit.
Television was still a relatively new medium in the 1960s, and public television
was just beginning to gain a degree of economic stability and institutional confidence
when the residencies under consideration were established. “Chapter 1: From Art on
Television to the Art of Television,” begins by sketching the emergence of public
television in the United States, and the hopes that it would be a resource for education,
cultural enrichment, and social connectedness. Visual art, as a cultural form that received
little airtime on the commercial networks, played an important role in the complex of

28
In this approach I am indebted to the work that Marita Sturken has done on early video
history. More generally, the sociological approach of Howard S. Becker in Art Worlds
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), has been helpful in developing my
thinking about the relationship between art practices and institutional and professional
milieu. Despite a tendency to indulge in a romantic view of artistic identity—especially
in his discussion of the visual arts—Becker’s argument that the figure identified as the
artist is only one of many professionals and interested individuals on whom the
production and distribution of most art works depend is clearly demonstrated in the cases
I will be investigating here.

19
expectations underpinning public television.
29
Changes in vanguard art practices in the
1960s coincided with changes in the ideals and expectations of public culture and public
television in ways that were quickly picked up and supported by funding agencies.
Funding for the residency programs, which came primarily from the Corporation for
Public Broadcasting, the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment for the
Arts, presents a valuable field of information about the ways in which the hopes for a
public culture in the United States met with corporate and state interests. Alongside these
institutional histories, Chapter One also sets out to explore and clarify the semantic and
technological distinctions between television and video that undergird video’s
historicization as an art form.
At WGBH-TV in Boston, there was a very high level of collaboration between the
artists-in-residence and station staff, and a growing interest on the part of participating
artists in the vernacular of public television. “Chapter 2: Authorship and Institutional
Form,” focuses primarily on these works and relationships, exploring the ways in which
the collaborative environment at the station shaped the artworks made there.
Collaborations between station staff and artists challenged the modernist ideal of the
artist as an autonomous and independent cultural producer. As well, the conventions and
requirements of broadcast television—which differ in significant ways from those of the
gallery or museum—played a role in shaping the works made at the station. These
conventions and requirements may have acted at first as a procrustean bed, forcing
artworks to adopt television-friendly forms, but over time, they became content, as artists

29
For a history of the visual arts and commercial television, see Lynn Spigel, Television
by Design (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
20
engaged actively with the limits of television, and began to play with its conventions in
creative and critical ways.
Eschewing the playfully post-modern approach taken by participants in the
program at WGBH, the artists and administrators who formed the residency program at
San Francisco’s KQED-TV worked to separate video from television in order to better
discover its essential qualities as a medium. “Chapter 3: Abstraction and Instrumentality”
argues that production at the station was the result of an unusual amalgam of a modernist
formalism preoccupied with problems of medium-specificity, a highly instrumentalized
technological research program, and the Bay Area’s emerging counterculture. As at
WGBH, the specific direction taken by the program at KQED was shaped in large part by
the particular attitude of participating television professionals toward the possibilities of
television and the nature of art. Despite very similar structures at both stations, the
significant differences in the ways in which the overlap between art and television (even
the fundamental nature of art and television in isolation) was understood, resulted in
notably different products emerging from the two programs. These differences may help
us to understand the broad diversity of approaches to video art in its early years, an
understanding that may also open up our reading of video history as a whole.
The fruits of these residency programs are not only to be found in the video
artworks that have subsequently been collected by museums and media collectives, and
presented in video-art compilations and exhibitions. As well as artworks, these residency
programs resulted in a body of difficult-to-classify material: television programs that
absorbed, appropriated, or actively participated with the experiments being carried out by
artists in residence at the stations. “Chapter 4: Hybrid Objects” investigates a selection of
21
these TV shows, concentrating on those which shared many of the innovations of the
artist-in-residence initiatives, using them to develop material that would appeal in
particular to the newly powerful baby-boomer demographic. These programs, directed at
a young audience impatient with traditional forms, are less pedagogical in approach than
much of the other cultural material produced for public television, and present a
remarkable meeting point of popular culture, avant-garde art, and non-commercial
cultural initiatives. These were made at both KQED and WGBH, as well as at WNET-
TV, a station in New York which began a similar residency program in 1971,
collaborating extensively with WGBH on a number of the programs discussed.
30
Many of
these programs are, unfortunately, non-circulating. One of the primary goals of Chapter 4
is to draw this material far enough out of obscurity that it may begin to play a role in the
discourse around video art, and interactions between visual art, popular culture, and
public media. Instead of taking art as objects to be presented to the public, or television as
a forum through which to educate the public about art, these programs ignored the

30
The residency program at WNET was developed with the support of a number of
participants in the WGBH program, including Nam June Paik, Russell Connor, Jackie
Cassen and Fred Barzyk; its director, David Loxton, was a close friend of Barzyk’s. As
well, many of the same artists participated in residencies there. As such, the residencies at
WNET did not present a distinctive enough program to merit its own chapter in this
dissertation. The development of documentary practices associated with the artist-in-
residence program at WNET in the mid-1970s, however, does present a particularly
promising avenue for further study. These documentaries, including Nam June Paik’s A
Tribute to John Cage (1973/76) and Merce by Merce by Paik, (1978); Arthur Ginsberg
and Video Free America’s The Continuing Story of Carel and Ferd (1970-75); TVTV’s
coverage of the 1974 Republican and Democratic National Conventions, Four More
Years and The World’s Largest TV Studio as well as The Lord of the Universe (1974);
among others, compose a significant and varied body of work, which could constitute the
subject of a major research project on their own.

22
cultural boundaries between television and vanguard art practices, using the possibilities
of each cultural sphere to undermine or escape the limitations of the other.
Those limits, as they existed in the art world, can best be understood through a
discussion of those activities in the latter half of the 1960s and the first years of the 1970s
which sought to challenge them. The wild proliferation of art practices in the 1960s
makes it difficult to offer anything resembling an overview or survey, but the very
conditions of that proliferation are informative. By 1975, one could argue, the art world
had become a lawless frontier, a world where anything goes, with video mixed and
mashed in amongst an array of practices that were anything but painting and sculpture:
primary objects, installation art, performance and body art, earth works, anti-form,
conceptual art, happenings, multiples, assemblage, etc. Art was made by individuals, and,
increasingly, by members of organized groups and collectives: Fluxus, the Art Worker’s
Coalition (AWC), Ant Farm, TVTV, Guerrilla Art Action Group (GAAG), and the
Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT) group, among others.
31
While some artists
maintained the individualist ideals of the previous decades, many began to question the
putatively universal ideals of modernism, and to identify themselves and their works with
specific cultural and political positions, resulting in feminist art, Black art, gay art, anti-

31
On the emergence of collective practices in the 1960s see Blake Stimson and Gregory
Sholette, eds. Collectivism after Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination After 1945,
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); Julia Bryan-Wilson, “From Artists
to Art Workers” in Art Workers, 13-40; Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner eds, “Part 1.
Communal Encounters” in West of Center, 3-73.

23
war art, and other practices identified as much with their political discourse as with their
author(s).
32

Ideas about what kinds of objects and actions might be categorized as art began to
change in the 1960s, as did attitudes toward the existing power dynamics in the art world.
Exhibitions such as “Primary Structures” at the Jewish Museum in 1966 featured the
works of artists now identified as minimalist (Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris,
etc) who aggressively “blurred the boundary between painting and sculpture,” and
thumbed their noses at traditional expectations. Reviewer Grace Glueck quoted the
exhibition’s curator, “’It’s really anti-collector, anti-museum art,’ [Kynaston] McShine
said, smilingly. ‘In it there’s implied social criticism. Most of it is designed for indoor use
but who could house works of this scale? Some of it may in fact provoke hostility in the
viewer.’”
33
This “anti-collector, anti-museum” stance would soon take (or abandon) form
in practices frequently referred to in relation to a process of “dematerialization.”
Dematerialization, presented as a shared aspect of emerging conceptual art
practices in Lucy Lippard’s Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from

32
On the emergence of identity-based or politically-driven practices see Lucy Lippard,
The Pink Glass Swan: Selected Essays on Feminist Art (New Press, 1995); Norma
Broude and Mary D. Garrard, The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the
1970s, History and Impact, (Harry N. Abrams, 1996); Amelia Jones, Body Art:
Performing the Subject, (University of Minnesota Press, 1998); Jayne Wark, Radical
Gestures: Feminism and Performance art in North America, (McGill-Queens University
Press, 2006); Francis Frascina, “Meyer Schapiro’s Choice: My Lai, Guernica, MoMA
and the Art Left” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 30, No. 3 (July, 1995): 481-
511; “The Artist and Politics: A Symposium” Artforum 9, no. 1 (September 1970), 35-39;
Adrian Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight, (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1996).

33
Grace Glueck, “Anti-Collector, Anti-Museum” New York Times (April 24, 1966).
Reprinted in The New York Times: Guide to the Arts of the 20
th
Century, Volume 3 1960-
1979, (Chicago and London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2002), 1820.

24
1966-1972…., was driven by the desire to escape “the sacrosanct ivory walls and heroic,
patriarchal mythologies with which the 1960s opened. Unfettered by object status,
Conceptual Artists were free to let their imaginations run rampant.”
34
Lippard described
conceptual art as that in which the “idea is paramount and the material form is
lightweight, ephemeral, cheap, unpretentious and/or ‘dematerialized;’”
35
this is without a
doubt an intellectual and creative world in which video fit comfortably, even if
television—understood by many as a “vast wasteland” of corporate kitsch—did not.
36

While it is easy to oversimplify Lippard’s project (she makes it clear that the book is
meant to expose chaos rather than organize it), there is an underlying political ideal at
play in her presentation of the collection of work that constitutes Six Years, which she
asserts most clearly when she says that “[t]he artists who are trying to do non-object art
are introducing a drastic solution to the problem of artists being bought and sold so
easily, along with their art.”
37
This aspect of the dematerialization of art—its function as a
means of escape from the pressures of the market—has been downplayed since the scraps
and ephemera left over from these projects have increasingly become collectors’ items.
Nonetheless, Lippard’s collection, analysis and presentation of these works was based on
close attention to both artists’ intentions and the subsequent circulation of the work, and
offers genuine insight into the period and what has come to be known as the Conceptual

34
Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972….
(University of California Press; London, 1997), vii.

35
Lippard, Six Years, vii.

36
Minow, “Vast Wasteland.”

37
Lippard, Six Years, 8.
25
Art movement. Despite this anti-commercial ethos, however, the development of a
“dematerialized” aesthetic had important extra-artistic parallels in mass culture.
It is no accident that dematerialized art practices emerged as the products of mass
culture were increasingly subject to the same procedure—reduction to a state of pure
information. The first major exhibitions of conceptual art were held in 1970 in New
York: “Information” at the Museum of Modern Art and “Software: Information
Technology—Its New Meaning for Art” at the Jewish Museum. Both exhibitions
emphasized the increasingly important role of information in contemporary culture—
information as culture and as commodity. As the most prized forum in mass culture
became one of ephemeral sounds and pictures projected through the air, then received
and displayed by domestic technologies, so artists increasingly thought of themselves as
creative workers who sent ideas out into the world, where they would be manifest at the
point of reception. In 1968 conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner wrote the following
statement:
1. The artist may construct the piece.
2. The piece may be fabricated.
3. The piece need not be built.
Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist, the decision
as to condition rests with the receiver upon the occasion of receivership.”
38

While I do not believe that Weiner was referencing television in his use of “reception” to
describe the process of distribution and consumption of his work, the idea that the
artwork is not a thing in the world that exists in one place, but rather something that can
be manifest anywhere, if the receiver chooses to activate it, is one that emerged in a

38
Lucy Lippard, Six Years, 73-74.

26
historical moment that saw information and culture dematerialize on a massive scale, and
Weiner’s practice can be read as a part of this larger movement.
Institutional critique, developing out of the innovations of conceptual art,
emerged, like video, in the late 1960s. Like video, it began to make its appearances in
museums and galleries in the early-to-mid 1970s. In 1967, Robert Smithson wrote
Visiting a museum is a matter of going from void to void. Hallways lead
the viewer to things once called “pictures” and “statues.” Anachronisms
hang and protrude from every angle. Themes without meaning press on
the eye. Multifarious nothings permute into false windows (frames) that
open up into a variety of blanks.
39

This critique of the museum, harking back to Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto” of 1909,
would come to be part of a growing field of discontent and vigorous critique of the
gallery and museum system, which came as often in the form of artworks as texts.
40
Hans
Haacke’s MoMA Poll in 1970, Daniel Buren’s passive-aggressive attempt to intervene in
the sightlines of the Guggenheim Museum with his Visible Recto-Verso Painting in 1970,
Michael Asher’s deadpan deconstruction of commercial galleries in Milan (Galleria
Toselli) in 1973 and Los Angeles (Claire Copley Gallery) in 1974; and other similar

39
Robert Smithson, “Some Void Thoughts on Museums,” in Robert Smithson: The
Collected Writings, ed. Jack D. Flam, 41-42. Berkeley, University of California Press,
1996. First published in Arts Magazine, (February, 1967).

40
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism” in Art in
Theory: 1900-1990, eds. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, 145-149 (Oxford, UK;
Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993). Marinetti, after declaring “We will destroy the
museums, libraries, academies of every kind....” goes on to state “Museums:
cemeteries!.... Identical, surely in the sinister promiscuity of so many bodies unknown to
one another. Museums: public dormitories where one lies forever beside hated or
unknown beings. Museums: absurd abattoirs of painters and sculptors ferociously
slaughtering each other with colour-blows and line-blows, the length of the fought-over
walls!” 147-148.
27
projects set out to expose the ideological function of the artifice of neutrality in the art
gallery and museum.
A number of artists worked outside the museum—Smithson, for instance,
building great, purposeless structures in America’s most desolate regions. Others looked
for ways of bringing their art and messages to the public that weren’t determined and
limited by the traditional institutions of art. In his Following Piece of 1969, Vito Acconci
dogged strangers in the street until they entered a private space or confronted him. In the
Catalysis works of 1970 and 1971, Adrian Piper went out into the streets of New York in
a variety of disconcerting conditions (covered in wet paint, riding the bus with a towel
stuffed in her mouth, shopping with a purse full of ketchup), setting out to act as a
catalyst for social consciousness. Artists like Lawrence Wiener and Sol Lewitt presented
practices that relied on audiences (or “receivers”) to construct (physically or
imaginatively) the works themselves, based on instructions provided by the artists.
Many of the artists participating in these new, experimental practices used video
as they did a still camera, to document their work. Other artists began to explore the
sculptural potential of video as in Nam June Paik’s Zen for TV (1963) and Magnet TV
(1965), or the ways in which it engaged with time and movement, seen in Bruce
Nauman’s Video Corridors, produced in the early 1970s. Artists made posters, sent
postcards, produced magazine spreads, actions, and instructions. Making TV, in this
context, doesn’t seem terribly far out. Artists working with television, however, were
faced with institutional structures unlike those which they were accustomed to dealing
with in the art world.
28
Acknowledging the institution as a structuring force in the production, as well as
the distribution and consumption of art, it is important that I clarify my own relationship
to the field of institutional critique. Identified with figures such as Hans Haacke, Marcel
Broodthaers, Andrea Fraser and Fred Wilson, institutional critique has itself become one
of the most clearly defined and comprehensively theorized institutions of post-modern art
production. While it can be traced back to Marcel Duchamp’s early interventions in the
institutions of authorship and exhibition with his readymades—most spectacularly the
Fountain of 1917—institutional critique as a genre entered the museum alongside video
in the early-mid 1970s. The investigations of these artists and the many critics and art
historians who have responded to and participated in their projects have, without doubt,
influenced the direction of my own research. As described above, their work has
effectively stripped the false neutrality of museum, gallery, art magazine, and university,
revealing the ideological and economic systems that lie beneath. The Institution, in this
field, is often understood as a site of duplicity, social manipulation, and ideological
control.
This study draws on institutional critique’s interrogation of the myth of the
singular author, and its recognition of the controlling share that institutions often hold in
cultural production and reception. That said, I will avoid setting the institution apart from
individuals, from communities, or from some mythic sense of the “real world.”
Institutions, as recognized here, are neither wholly benevolent paternalistic caretakers,
nor are they malicious corporate fraternities actively seeking to undermine authentic
cultural production. Rather, they are collections of people working toward (relatively)
29
common goals.
41
These people act under the influence of a variety of potentially
contradictory (and often unidentifiable) forces, including personal belief systems or
needs, political and social motivations, the demands of funding bodies, the desires of a
diverse public, technological limitations and capabilities, and internecine conflicts and
allegiances—to name just a few.
This study brings to light works which have as yet been largely unnoticed in both
art and television histories, while at the same time offering a new framework within
which to consider those more familiar works which have been addressed independently
of their televisual pedigree. Doing so, I ask the reader to reconsider the motivations
behind, and effects of, the aggressive separation of video art from television—and thus
from any substantial participation in what we call mass culture—in the decades that
intervened between the invention of video as an art form, and the recent transformations
of the digital era. I am writing in a moment when the hegemony of the corporate culture
industry is being challenged by the proliferating D.I.Y. culture of the internet, and the
lines between fine art and unclassified independent cultural production are blurring. I see
remarkable parallels between our present cultural moment and the ambitions of early
video producers—both independent producers and those who tried to open or access the
closed world of the television airways of the late 1960s.

41
Please note that in this formulation, institutions play an influential and productive as
well as sometimes limiting role, but I am not trying to frame them as authors in and of
themselves. For a discussion of corporate authorship see Jerome Christensen, “Studio
Authorship, Corporate Art” in Auteurs and Authorship: A Film Reader, ed. Barry Keith
Grant (Malden MA; Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2008), 167-179. Christensen’s argument is
based on examples of far more developed corporate entities (major film studios), and
relies on the acceptance, on cultural—as well as legal and economic—terms, of the
definition of corporations as “persons.”
30
The idea that mass media should come from, as well as go to the masses was not
born in the 1960s—this idea emerged much earlier in the twentieth century. As Steven J.
Ross points out in Working Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in
America, in the earliest years of production, film in the United States was produced by “a
wide variety of groups.... such as the Women’s Political Union, the U.S. Department of
the Interior, the American Banker’s Association, and the American Federation of
Labor.”
42
The idea that new media technologies could play a role in developing open
discourse—particularly on issues of class—was clearly articulated by Bertolt Brecht in
his 1932 essay, “Radio as an Apparatus of Communication,” in which he argued that
radio was being used to serve those in power, by maintaining a top-down system of
distribution. This was not the result of any limitations on the part of the technology, he
pointed out, but was a result of corporate and/or state control. Radio, as a technology with
the capacity to facilitate two-way communication, could play a role in improving society,
rather than merely entertaining or indoctrinating. If consumers could be turned into
producers, he said, everyone could be an educator and a student.
43
The ideals expressed
by Brecht were revived in the 1960s, by the first television generation, who, like Brecht
and his compatriots, struggled to open the airwaves.
44
The experiments investigated here

42
Steven J. Ross, Working Class Hollywood: Silent Film and the Shaping of Class in
America, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 35.

43
Bertolt Brecht, “The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication,” in Video Culture, ed.
Hanhardt, J. (Rochester; Gibbs Smith,1986) 53-55.

44
See Hans Magnus Enzensberger “Constituents of a Theory of the Media” in The New
Media Reader, eds. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort (Cambridge, MA; London,
UK: MIT Press, 2003), 259-276. Richard DeCordova, “Cable Technology and the
Utopian Subject,” On Film, no. 21 (Spring, 1984): 23-27, discusses the ways in which
31
were tied in numerous ways to the desire to wrest mass communications from the hands
of commercial interests, and open them to a more diverse and challenging field of
production. The difficulties they faced, which were economic, technological and
institutional, have been largely overcome by the ease of access provided by the internet
and increasingly affordable means of digital media production. As cultural producers,
artists, activists and citizens begin to participate more and more in the rapidly
diversifying productive field of transmissive media, it is important that they have access
to the histories that inform their production and action, rather than imagining that the idea
of experimental intervention into mass media is an invention of the digital age. It is my
hope that this dissertation will provide access to a piece of that history which has been
largely forgotten—its relevance, perhaps, only really visible in the light of the historical
constellation brought into alignment by our present moment.

cable technology was expected to provide greater interactivity and democratize the
media.
32
Figures to the Introduction

Figure 1. Video Commune: The Beatles From Beginning to End, 1970, video still,
WGBH-TV.

Figure 2. Video Commune: The Beatles From Beginning to End, 1970, video still,
WGBH-TV.

33

Figure 3. Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman, Television Delivers People, 1973,
video still, Video Data Bank (http://www.vdb.org/titles/television-delivers-people).
34
Chapter One: From Art on Television to the Art of Television

In order to grasp the implications of the artists’ residency programs at WGBH and
KQED, it is important to get a sense of the context in which these projects took place.
This chapter gives an overview of the economic, institutional and cultural developments
that created a space where artists could make TV. However, to begin my discussion of
the context in which an art of television was able to emerge in a world that has generally
only had room for art on television, I would like to present some examples of the ways in
which art and television have come together in the television world and in the art world.
The first two examples are episodes of television shows which display relatively
normative relationships between art and television—the art on television model. My third
and fourth examples are events which brought together artists, television professionals
and others in order to explore the ramifications of art in the world of television and
television in the world of art—the possibilities of television as art.
Art on television usually moves or sits still, it explains or it is explained. By
which I mean that in dramatic programming it operates as a plot mover and source of
psychological insight into a character, or, in documentary or educational programming, it
sits in front of the camera, where it is explained to the viewer by an authority figure. The
pilot of a dramatic television show, Danger Man, made in Britain in 1960 and aired in the
United States in 1962 offers an excellent example of art that moves. The contemporary
PBS documentary series, Art 21 is an example of art that sits still—here, an episode
featuring painter Laylah Ali will serve as an example. There is a great deal of distance—
time, geography, genre—between these two programs. One is commercial and the other
is a product of public television, one is British and the other American, one is drama and
35
the other documentary. But in both, art is a thing at which the camera points. Whether it
is being explained to the viewer, or used to move a plot, in both programs, art is a thing in
the world that is represented by television rather than made of it. As such, it occupies a
cultural sphere that is clearly separate from the living rooms into which it is delivered.
In the pilot episode of Dangerman, CIA agent John Drake (played by Patrick
McGoohan), is sent to Rome to find five million dollars worth of American gold stolen
from NATO. Amidst a series of false leads, false identities, and encounters with women
of questionable morals, Drake finds his culprit by following a series of pictorial clues. He
begins with a drawing of a street artist, which he believes to have been made by the
unidentified woman he must find in order to solve the mystery (Fig. 4). Clutching the
rolled-up drawing in his hand through the next few scenes, he happens upon a painting
with the same signature (Fig.5). He proceeds through the rest of the investigation with
painting in hand. He examines it for location clues, finds the romantic seaside village that
it depicts, then drives through the village holding up the painting to various views until he
finds the place from which the image was painted (Figs. 6 and 7), and thus, the woman
who painted it (and, of course, the gold).
45

Dangerman is fairly typical commercial entertainment. It has a cool and
resourceful hero, beautiful locations, seductive women, and some gunplay. While
Drake’s investigation is built around a drawing and a painting, none of it is actually about
art. The art in Dangerman serves two functions: it moves the plot forward by providing

45
“View From the Villa” pilot episode of Dangerman, directed by Brian Clemens (1960,
ITC Entertainment Group Limited; Umbrella Entertainment: AV Channel, 2005), DVD. I
am grateful to Aaron Brewer for introducing me to Dangerman.

36
clues, and it demonstrates Drake’s keen eye, his connoisseur’s ability to recognize an
artist’s hand with the same unfailing accuracy with which he throws a punch. As in the
contemporary television series White Collar, which pairs an FBI agent with an art forger,
art objects are at the center of the plot, but viewers are not expected to know or learn
anything about art.
46
In these television programs art represents wealth, sophistication,
and talent, and it moves plots. The style and content of the artworks in question are only
ever important as clues, sources of information which are attended to rarely, if ever, for
their own sakes.
During the question period after a 2012 lecture at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts,
Laylah Ali spoke about her experience as featured artist on the PBS program Art 21. This
award-winning series of documentaries features contemporary artists, giving viewers
intimate access to their studios and work processes. Art 21 teaches viewers about art and
art practices, making the artist the authoritative guide to the artworks. When the
filmmakers came into her studio to record her at work, Ali recalled, they told her to just
proceed as she would normally. She turned on the stereo, music providing important
relief to a normally solitary and static practice (Ali, who makes small, meticulous
paintings and drawings, spends many hours a day hunched over a desk, alone in her
studio), but was asked to turn it off by the filmmakers, who she said wanted to be able to
hear the “scratch scratch” of her pen.
47
It was a small deceit, knowledge of which does
little to undermine the informative nature of the documentary. Art 21 surely had no

46
White Collar first aired in 2009, is produced by Fox Studios and airs on USA Network.

47
Laylah Ali, (Artists’s Talk, Art & Art History Carmen Morton Christensen Visiting
Artist Lecture Series, Utah Museum of Fine Arts, April 11, 2012).

37
intention of misleading the public. And ultimately, who cares if it is usually silent in an
artist’s studio or noisy?
Art 21 does an extraordinary job of bringing a diverse array of often challenging
and cutting-edge international contemporary art practices to a wide audience. It does so in
a way that is traditional, familiar, and comfortable to most viewers—it is for the artworks
represented to challenge and excite viewers, not the documentary itself.
48
In the Art 21
documentaries, as Ali’s experience demonstrates, the sounds made by the meeting of the
artist’s body and materials is essential to the sense of intimacy and access provided, as
the program erases the boundaries between spaces of production and those of reception.
The artist, the process and the final product are all on display. Television, in this kind of
program, expands the boundaries of the museum or gallery in its presentation of art by
foregrounding personality and process. Ultimately however, Art 21 continues the display
culture of the museum, using the television as a display case, not as a canvas. In both Art
21 and Dangerman, as in most television programming that features visual art in one way
or another, art is objectified, re-presented by the camera, not made with it.
Just as television has specific strategies for presenting art, the institutions of art
quickly developed ways to manage the effects of television as its technology began to
enter the art world. In 1974, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City held
“Open Circuits: An International Conference on the Future of Television.” Attended by
“artists, critics, scholars, and television producers” the conference was held at a turning

48
Susan Sollins, “Power: Layla Ali,” episode of Art:21. Season 5. (Alexandria, Virginia:
PBS, 2009), http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/laylah-ali.
38
point in the early history of video art.
49
“Open Circuits,” marks an important moment in
the attenuation of the vigorous collaboration between artists and public television stations
initiated in 1967, and signals the entry of video into the officially sanctioned space of the
art museum.
50
This was the first time that the MoMA had given substantial recognition to
video art in its programming, and it signaled the cautious acceptance of video into the
institutions of art. The conference had four organizers: artist and critic Douglas Davis;
Gerald O’Grady, a professor in the Department of English at S.U.N.Y. Buffalo;
filmmaker and photographer Willard Van Dyke; and television producer Fred Barzyk.
The fact that not only artists, critics and scholars were involved in this event, but
also television producers like Barzyk, suggests that our current understanding of video art
as the exclusive (and esoteric) property of the art world had not yet fully taken hold. A
closer investigation of the proceedings demonstrates, in fact, that this annexing of video
to the arena of fine art was actively taking place at events such as the “Open Circuits”
conference. In 1977 the proceedings of the conference were published as a book, The
New Television: A Public/Private Art, and the preface to the volume celebrates—and
gives the conference credit for—the absorption of video into the institutions of art, stating
that conference participants
…acted upon what they saw and heard…. Now there are video collections
and exhibitions in almost all the major museums of contemporary art in

49
Davis and Simmons, The New Television, vi.

50
Speakers at the conference included Gregory Battcock, Hollis Frampton, Nam June
Paik, Stephen Beck, Ed Emshwiller, Stan Vanderbeek, Frank Gillette, Robert Pincus-
Witten, Joan Jonas, Vito Acconci, Allan Kaprow, Shigeko Kubota, Richard Serra, John
Baldessari, among others, making it a veritable who’s who of the video world at the time.
Davis and Simmons, The New Television.

39
Europe and the United States. Galleries and public workshops involved
with video have multiplied, and universities and art schools include video
as an expected part of their curricula.
51

If “Open Circuits” signaled the definitive introduction of video into the
institutions of art, that introduction was not untroubled, and during the conference
proceedings many voices expressed anxiety about the place of video in relation to mass,
avant-garde and elite cultural spheres. Many participants in “Open Circuits”
demonstrated a need to define video art against—rather than in dialogue with—other
forms of experimental video (such as activist documentary) or mainstream television,
instead aligning video with more traditional forms of art.
52
For the most part, the future
was defined as one in which video art belonged in the museum and gallery, not on
television.
David Loxton, the director of programming at the recently opened experimental
video center (then called the TV Lab) at New York City’s WNET-TV, attended Open
Circuits, and he took a critical position toward this wholesale rush into the safety of the
museum. In the August 1974 edition of Vision News, the TV Lab newsletter, Loxton
reported on the conference and questioned the excitement of participants at the museum’s
decision to welcome video art into its programming:
It was for many an important event, seeming to signal, by way of its very
existence, a coming of age of video art. But does it seem so extraordinary
that a major museum would be instrumental in extending this formal
recognition to the new electronic art form? Video art is a form of very

51
Davis and Simmons, The New Television, vi.

52
In particular see Allan Kaprow, “Video Art: Old Wine, New Bottle,” 94-95; and John
Baldessari “TV (1) Is Like a Pencil and (2) Won’t Bit Your Leg,” 108-111; The New
Television.

40
personal expression by the artist, and museums have been the traditional
form of exhibition for artists’ works for centuries. What would have been
more extraordinary about Open Circuits would be to have seen this same
formal recognition extended to broadcast television as an art form. I found
that despite the event’s subtitle. “The Future of Television,” the “future”
was defined exclusively and consistently by the solitary artist in terms of
museum-oriented video. With the exception of the European participants
… there seemed to be no real discussion of broadcast television and its
place in the artistic community.
53

Loxton’s criticisms, published in an in-house newsletter at a public television
station, never reached an audience comparable to that which The New Television—
published by MIT Press and present in most university and museum libraries—was able
to. His suggestion that it would have been “more extraordinary… to have seen this same
formal recognition extended to broadcast television as an art form” has rarely been taken
up by critics or scholars. While media scholars have investigated the development and
aesthetics of the broadcast medium, and art historians have studied the history of video as
it has transpired within the institutions of art, Loxton’s suggestion that they share a
critical space has not, until quite recently, been acted upon.
54

Open Circuits would appear to have been the ideal forum for such an
investigation, but instead of working to maintain the open and discursive exchange
between public broadcast television, activist video, and art video that existed between
1967 and 1974—when the conference took place—its participants focused their attention
on shoring up the emerging boundaries between these areas of production. Despite its

53
David Loxton, “Report on ‘Open Circuits’ Conference” Vision News, vol. 2, no. 1,
(New York: WNET-TV Archives, August, 1974): 2.

54
Lynn Spigel’s Television by Design and (to a lesser degree) Joselit’s Feedback:
Television Against Democracy have begun the project of addressing this lacuna.

41
title, “Open Circuits: An International Conference on the Future of Television,” was an
event that marked the separation of video art from television, and its definitive
installation in the more traditional spaces of the art world. This separation, ironically,
marked the relegation of video art to display within a closed-circuit system, “a system of
radio or television whereby the signal is transmitted by wire to the receiver and not
broadcast for general reception.”
55
While there continued to be isolated incidents of artists
buying or begging their way onto television, and a rich and varied set of practices that
developed—especially in the late 1970s and 1980s—on public-access stations, art video
would not have access to such “open circuits” again until the internet became a forum for
the distribution of video art in the early 21
st
Century.
56

Another event, which took place in Boston two years earlier, offered a notably
different approach to the relationship between open-circuit (broadcast) and closed-circuit
(non-broadcast) video. The Very First On-The-Air Half-Inch Video Festival Ever, hosted
in 1972 by WGBH television personality Russell Connor, invited artists, activists, and
various other users of portable video equipment, to take part in a live, on-air “festival” at
WGBH-TV. The Half-Inch Video Festival, held in the station parking lot, invited

55
Oxford English Dictionary, “Closed.”
http://dictionary.oed.com.libproxy.usc.edu/cgi/entry/50041849/50041849se5?single=1&q
uery_type=word&queryword=closed-
circuit&first=1&max_to_show=10&hilite=50041849se5. Accessed 26 September 2010.

56
The best-known examples are those of Chris Burden and Richard Serra. Burden,
between1973 and 1975, purchased four commercial spots on network television and aired
short performance videos. See Nick Stillman “Do You Believe in Television? Chris
Burden and TV” East of Borneo (October 10, 2010. Accessed May 3, 2012). Serra’s 1973
Television Delivers People was aired on a station in Amarillo, Texas and in Chicago on
WTTW, both in 1973. For a discussion of art and public-access cable television (which
became widespread after 1972), in particular Paper Tiger Television, see William Boddy,
“Alternative Television in the United States, Screen, 31:1 (Spring, 1990): 91-101.
42
participants to present their half-inch video tapes to the television audience, to talk about
their practices, and even to chat with viewers at home, who were encouraged to call in
with questions (See Figure 8). There had been artists-in-residence working in the WGBH
studios for five years at the time of the Half-Inch Video Festival, and among those
involved with experimental activities at the station there was a growing interest in the
work being done with half-inch portable video. The distinctions that would be established
later, at events such as “Open Circuits”—between art, activism, and plain-old
television—were nascent at this event. It is possible to see signs of their future
emergence, certainly, but there were also suggestions of other, possible, promises for the
medium.
Recognizing the technological difference between half-inch video and that used in
broadcast television is necessary to understand the significance of the event. Until the
release of the time base corrector in 1973, half-inch video tape—used in the portable
cameras that had entered the American commercial market in 1967—could not be
broadcast on television. Half-inch video tape was, by its physical nature, a closed-circuit
medium. The people who used these cameras could play back their tapes in galleries,
domestic settings, classrooms, etc, but because the signal was incompatible, they could
not broadcast them. As Russell Connor circulated through the space, interviewing artists
(including a very young Bill Viola), students, engineer-tinkerers, social workers,
educators and activists, one of the cameras that followed him—the expensive, broadcast
standard, dollied cameras used in the WGBH studios (one of which is partially visible on
far left of figure 8)—zoomed in on the monitors that each participant had set up to play
back their half-inch tape. This method, of using a broadcast-standard camera to record the
43
images on a monitor playing back half-inch tape, was the most efficient means by which
to take half-inch material out of the closed-circuit system and broadcast it. The technical
distinction between broadcast-quality tape and that used in portable video recorders was
revealed, at the festival, to be tied to an equally important cultural distinction.
The cameramen behind the live broadcast cameras—station professionals—were
able to respond quickly to the improvisational nature of the event, moving smoothly from
interviews to monitor displays. On at least one occasion, the camera operator echoed the
handling of the camera in the work he was taping with his own movement, demonstrating
an easy facility with the technology and its capacities.
57
In contrast, the vast majority of
the participants—visitors to the station who were accustomed to being behind their own,
smaller, cameras—showed some awkwardness when they were put in front of the large,
formal, rolling cameras. This was demonstrated by Russell Connor’s ongoing need to
move people into place, to poke and prod them into line, as he spoke with them about
their projects.
The technical differences between broadcast-standard and portable cameras
extended to a different set of skills, a different relationship to video equipment and its
visual products, a different culture on the part of their users. The Very First On-The-Air
Half-Inch Video Festival Ever brought together people who were trained to use expensive
equipment in ways which fulfilled the technological and cultural requirements of

57
The use of masculine pronouns is not intended to indicate a universal, but a probability.
While I do not have the names of the specific camera operators who worked this event,
the technicians who worked in the studio were, overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, male.
While there were women employed at WGBH as secretaries, writers, even producers, I
have not found any indication that there were any women operating cameras or other
equipment at this time. There were, however, a number of women present as participants,
who confidently operated the portable video equipment.
44
television with those who had been experimenting with portable equipment for a few
years with little to no training or institutional standards. As such, it was an attempt to
expand the more intimate and extended collaborations between television professionals
and artists that had been taking place at the station since 1967, to broaden the field of
voices and visions that could make television. The differences between television
professionals and video-makers were treated by a few at the Half-Inch Video Festival as a
point of contention, but for the most part the program sought to celebrate the emergence
of a rich and diverse video culture.
Art historians have written the story of closed-circuit practices such as those
presented at the festival or celebrated at Open Circuits, and television historians have told
the story of open-circuit broadcast television. But little attention has been paid,
historically, to their points of overlap. At WGBH and KQED, from 1967 to around 1974,
artists worked collaboratively with station professionals to expand the possibilities of
television as a medium, and the possibilities of art within the world of mass culture.
Instead of art instrumentalized as part of a plot, or delivered to viewers as images of
objects that belong in a museum or gallery, television itself became the medium out of
which art was made, and, often, delivered into the homes of television viewers.

This dissertation seeks to enter into the discussion that David Loxton called for in
1974 and to reconsider the spaces of cultural production suggested by The Very First On-
The-Air Half-Inch Video Festival Ever. While Loxton’s statement does not make clear
whether he intended to distinguish between major studio broadcasts and the experimental
production taking place in public television stations such as WNET, WGBH and KQED
45
when he speaks of television as art, I will, for the purpose of this study, concentrate on
production that took place at the brief point of overlap between broadcast television and
experimental video, a period in which video art was integrated into an open-circuit
system. Contrary to the popular mythology, video was not necessarily the embattled
outsider of a medium that it has so often been made out to be. Rather, it was, arguably,
the first modern artistic medium to emerge into a world that already had institutional and
economic structures in place to support and nurture it. This privileged entry into the
cultural milieu of the United States in the 1960s was the result of a confluence of
developments that took place primarily between 1965 and 1967, of which four stand out
as particularly important.
First, the money came in. In 1965 the Congress of the United States of America,
under Lyndon B. Johnson, created the National Endowment for the Arts, which was the
first official and consistent source of government funding for the arts.
58
Then, in 1967, the
passage of the Public Broadcasting Act directed a significant increase in funding toward
National Educational Television, allowing the existing network of public television
stations to move—for the first time—beyond the limits of their earlier, instructional,
mandate.
59
These actions on the part of the federal government were mirrored by the

58
Mark Bauerlein and Ellen Grantham, eds., National Endowment for the Arts: A History,
1965-2008, (Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts, 2008) 1.

59
For a history of the emergence of public television from the existing structures of
educational television, see Robert J. Blakely, The People’s Instrument: A Philosophy of
Programming For Public Television, (Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press, 1971);
Chapter Four of Erik Barnouw, Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television, 2
nd

revised edition, (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). Laurie Ouellette’s
Viewers Like You? How Public TV Failed the People, (New York: Columbia University
46
establishment of an arts section in the Rockefeller Foundation, which directed substantial
support to new media practices. There was a lot of new money for new media, but most
of it was distributed through existing organizations—such as public television stations—
rather than provided directly to artists.
Second, Marshal McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man,
published in 1964, had, by 1966—together with the author’s active presence in popular
magazines, television news and talk shows, radio appearances, etc—made him a popular
figure in the mainstream media. McLuhan’s rhetoric had a powerful effect on the
American public, encouraging individuals and institutions to pay attention to existing and
emerging forms of media, to contemplate their effects, and, in many cases to seek
positions of active agency in relation to the diversifying media environment.
Third, the portable, half-inch video recorder began to trickle into the American
commercial market in 1965. By 1967, it was widely available, and it became relatively
commonplace by the end of the decade. This new tool transformed the relationship
between individual producers and the top-heavy centers of production out of which most
broadcast television emerged.
Finally, as discussed in my introduction, there were profound transformations in
the art world at this time that made video a sought-after tool, as artists moved away from
traditional media and institutions to explore alternative methodologies and venues. Video
offered one possible avenue of escape to artists who wanted to move away from the
production of art objects as luxury or investment commodities, and for those who had

Press, 2002) offers a critical account of the ways in which public television was shaped
by class-specific assumptions about value and quality in cultural programming.
47
begun to question the ethical and moral integrity of the institution of the museum. Tied
to—and complicating this turn—was a swelling interest in the arts in the United States,
and a growing awareness of the need for greater geographic and cultural diversity in the
arts and in mass media.
In the following pages I will give an overview of these developments, beginning
with the history of public television and arts funding as they relate to my project, the
emergence of video technology, and closing with a short discussion of Marshall
McLuhan’s effect on popular ideas about media.
I joined educational television ten years ago and soon found myself drawn
into a fascinating web of ideologies and contradictions. Hot confrontations
between managers and producers, elitists and populists, localists and
centralists, moral idealists and economic determinists, moved like an
annual lava flow from one second-rate hotel to another…. Today, the
same debates go on, but the quality of the hotels has significantly
improved. (Paul Kaufman, 1972)
60

The rapid growth and diversity of opinion that Paul Kaufman describes as typical
of the world of educational television throughout the 1960s was an essential prerequisite
to the opening of that world to experimental video-art practices. In order to better
understand the motivations behind, and priorities of the program to introduce artists into
the television studio, it would help to look briefly at the history of non-profit television in
the United States. The period in which the activities documented here took place—
primarily between 1967 and 1974—known for social and political unrest in the United

60
Paul Kaufman, Reflections on Values in Public Television and their Relationship to
Political and Organizational Life, PFA Archives, B1F9: Publications, 1970-73 (San
Francsico, CA: NCET, c. 1972), 1.

48
States and elsewhere, was one of rapid change in commercial television programming,
but the moment was even more pivotal for public television.
61

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) announced standards for
television broadcast in 1941, but mass-production of television sets did not start until
after the Second World War. Ownership of the new commodity spread rapidly, and by
“November 1953, it was estimated that nearly 27,500,000 television receivers were in use
in […. the United States], and about half of all the families owned at least one set.”
62
The
integration of the television into American homes was an essential aspect of the re-
imagining of the American family in the post-war period.
63
In 1951, the FCC announced
that it would reserve 244 channels for non-commercial applications, and that the
assignment of those channels would be reconsidered a year later, based on use levels.
64
In
its announcement of these non-commercial channels, the FCC stated that
…noncommercial educational broadcast stations will be licensed only to
nonprofit educational organizations upon a showing that the proposed
stations will be used primarily to serve the educational needs of the

61
According to television historian Eric Barnouw, “the ‘top ten’ [network] series of
1973-1974 included not a single holdover from the 1968-69 list of leaders. The
replacements were almost all new offerings.” Barnouw, Tube of Plenty, 430.

62
C.V. Newsome, “Radio and Television.” The Scientific Monthly, vol. 79, no. 4 (Oct.,
1954): 248.

63
This is discussed by Lynn Spigel in Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and
Postwar Suburbs, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); Matthew Geller’s From
Receiver to Remote Control: The TV Set, (New York: New Museum,1990) also explored
the phenomenon of the domestication of the television in post-war America.

64
Blakely, The People’s Instrument, x. This book was the outcome of the Conference on
Public Television Programming, held in June 1969, in Racine, Wisconsin.

49
community; for the advancement of educational programs; and to furnish a
nonprofit and noncommercial television broadcast service.
65

Although educators and community groups failed to find the resources needed to make
use of all 242 channels in the time given, by 1966—when the Carnegie Commission on
Educational Television submitted its watershed report and recommendations to
Congress—there were one-hundred and twenty-four non-commercial television stations
broadcasting in the United States.
66

Between the inception of public educational television in the United States, and
the publishing of the Carnegie report, there were important changes in attitudes toward
public television and its purpose, changes that speak to the specificities of the historical
moment under investigation here. The earliest theorists of non-commercial television in
the United States shared the desire of those who followed to bring cultural and
educational material not included in commercial broadcasts to a broad array of viewers,
but earlier supporters tended to champion the potential for educational television to act as
a means of cultural unification, a priority that gave way to a celebration of diversity in the
later 1960s.
Robert L. Hilliard, in his 1958 essay “Television and Education,” argued that the
most important goal of education “is to develop well-informed citizens by imparting a
common body of knowledge to the community at large,” and that this could be most

65
Quoted in Newsome, “Radio and Television,” 248.

66
Carnegie Commission, Public Television: A Program for Action: The Report and
Recommendation of the Carnegie Commission on Educational Television, (New York:
Harper & Row, 1967), 20.

50
effectively carried out by television.
67
He quoted the 1948 report of the President’s
Commission on Higher Education, which argued that college education too often
produces individuals who “lack a body of common experience and common knowledge”
resulting in a “society without a fundamental culture;” one that “tends to disintegrate into
a mere aggregation of individuals.”
68
Hilliard, like many others at the time, saw social
fragmentation as a problem that the education system needed to address—a job for which
television was particularly well suited. While this understanding of non-commercial
television as a supplement to the education system changed in the 1960s, along with the
emphasis on a unified culture, the sense that non-commercial television had an important
role to play in shaping American communities remained.
69

A shift in attitude toward the function of public educational television is clearly
visible in the Carnegie report, which was based on investigations carried out between
1964 and 1966, and published in 1967. The Report, which led to the passing of the Public

67
Robert L. Hilliard, “Television and Education,” The Journal of Higher Education, vol.
29, vol. 8 (Nov., 1958): 431.

68
Hilliard, “Television and Education,” 432.

69
The initial annexing of non-commercial television to a supplementary role in the
existing education system was the result of specific historical circumstances. The
combination of the post-war baby boom, increased migration from rural to urban centers,
and a drop in the number of people entering education as a career led to a crisis in the
classroom in the mid-1950s. Many saw television as an ideal tool to deal with
overcrowded classrooms and overstretched teachers. See Harvey Zorbaugh,
“Television—Technological Revolution in Education,” Journal of Educational
Sociology, vol. 31, no. 9, issue on Television and College Teaching (May, 1958): 337-
345; and Ralph Steetle, “The Changing Status of Educational Television,” Journal of
Educational Sociology, vol. 32, no. 9, issue on Television in America’s Schools (May,
1959): 427-433. Both argued that television could easily take over the role of transmitting
facts or information to students, while teachers concentrated on facilitating and
supporting the learning process.

51
Broadcasting Act in 1967, was the first ambitiously funded and comprehensive study of
the state of non-commercial broadcasting in the United States. The Report identified two
kinds of non-commercial broadcasting: instructional television and public television.
70

Instructional television was meant to be used by educational institutions as part of their
planned curricula, or to be aired on television for the purpose of continuing or adult
education in specific fields. Public television, to which the Report directed the greater
part of its attention, “includes all that is of human interest and importance which is not at
the moment appropriate or available for support by advertising, and which is not arranged
for formal instruction.”
71
Along with a series of recommendations, including one advising
Congress to authorize a “federally chartered, nonprofit, nongovernmental corporation, to
be known as the ‘Corporation for Public Television’,”
72
the Report gave a thorough
documentation of existing systems, and it took a clear position on the broader purpose of
public television. The report emphasized the importance of serving many small
audiences, rather than one large, homogeneous public, stating that “We have come to see
that since the technology of television lends itself readily to uses that increase the
pressure toward uniformity, there must be created means of resisting that pressure, and of
enlisting television in the service of diversity.”
73
Thus, the idea that public television had
a role to play in building and strengthening communities survived into the 1960s, but

70
Carnegie Commission, Public Television, 1.

71
Carnegie Commission, Public Television, 1.

72
Carnegie Commission, Public Television, 5.

73
Carnegie Commission, Public Television, 14.

52
instead of functioning as a homogenizing force, non-commercial television increasingly
eschewed the mass audience in order to service as diverse a collection of communities as
possible.
In 1969, the central recommendation of the Carnegie Commission was followed
as public television stations across the nation came together to form the Public
Broadcasting Service (PBS), which increased collaboration and the distribution of
material amongst member stations.
74
The same year, a Conference on Public Television
Programming was held in Racine, Wisconsin, which Robert J. Blakely documented in
The People’s Instrument: A Philosophy of Programming for Public Television.
Blakeley’s book, following the tone of the Carnegie Commission, emphasized the
potential for commercial television to contribute to the subordination of “the individual
and the minority to the mass at the very time when individuality of a person and group is
already in danger of being overwhelmed by the mass…” A process which would
strengthen “the current toward mindless standardization instead of aiding in the creation
of authentic identities and communities of diversity.”
75
For Blakeley, the need to serve
diversity was neither a nod to political correctness nor left-wing radicalism, but a means
to balance the need for social stability with support for a variety of individual and group
identities.

74
Ted Libbey, “Media Arts,” in National Endowment for the Arts: A History, 1965-2008,
eds. Mark Bauerlein and Ellen Grantham (Washington, DC: National Endowment for the
Arts, 2008), 197-208.

75
Blakeley, The People’s Instrument, 19.

53
Like many of his contemporaries, Blakeley was concerned about the fractiousness
of American society in the late 1960s, and he thought it imperative that different
communities have the ability to represent themselves, for the sense of cultural
empowerment that such self-representation might bring, but also so that members of
different communities could understand each other better.
76
He saw the increasing state of
conflict in the United States as something that would more likely be solved by improved
communication than by greater state authority. Public television would help this to come
about, he claimed, by focusing on three objectives: “to renew a sense of community, to
renew the social contract, and to improve the people’s internal environment.”
77
It is the
third of these objectives that is most relevant to this study.
“Improving the people’s internal environment” means cultural programming.
Blakely saw a problem with the elitist associations raised by the term “cultural
programming” and argued that cultural television must be accessible and interesting to
audiences beyond those that had, until then, been supplied with more traditional and
familiar fare. He said that it should draw upon
….“pop” art, advertising, posters, display, design of all kinds, tapes, films
and photography, science and mathematics and technology as creations of
the artistic spirit, as well as literature, drama, music, dance, painting,
sculpturing and architecture….poetry recited in bars and coffee houses,
paintings on sidewalks and walls, theater on little byways and above
grocery stores and in the streets and playgrounds, “Happenings” wherever
they may be, not just the arts in “centers,” concert halls and museums.
78

76
Blakeley, The People’s Instrument, 55.

77
Blakeley, The People’s Instrument, 55.

78
Blakeley, The People’s Instrument, 60-61.

54
Blakely’s call for diversification from the arts of concert halls and museums
echoed the desires of many young professionals working in public television stations. It
also suggested a potential venue for artists whose work was failing to find a home in
more traditional sites, despite the presence of a growing audience for this new cultural
material. This new audience was young, often well educated, and disaffected. And they
were turning off their television sets. Erik Barnouw notes in his history of American
television, Tube of Plenty, that “throughout the rise of the Vietnam war and the military
atmosphere it involved, many Americans were turning from commercial television and
responding to new media.
”79
The decision on the part of public television programmers
and producers to support diversified and non-traditional programming came just as a
large audience seeking more challenging fare emerged.
As well as diversification of audiences, and a drive to open up the field of cultural
programming, the Carnegie Commission emphasized the importance of supporting
experimentation in both the content and technical production of non-commercial
television. The Commission’s seventh recommendation advocated for the creation of at
least one center, associated with and supported by the Corporation for Public
Broadcasting, that would be “explicitly designed to create experimental programming,
and free of other responsibilities.”
80
The experimental projects at KQED and WGBH
initially shared space and equipment with other productions, but in every other way, they
fulfilled this directive. They also worked to fulfill the eighth recommendation of the

79
Barnouw, Tube of Plenty, 391.

80
Blakeley, The People’s Instrument, 59.

55
commission, which was that the Corporation support technical experimentation. At both
stations the artists-in-residence programs invested a great deal of time and energy
developing technologies that would expand the formal vocabulary of television.
81

In summary, there were a series of developments in public television that were
instrumental in making a space for art on television. On the recommendation of the
Carnegie Commission in 1967, a number of existing tendencies became policies. The
release of public television from the strictly instructional mandate that had dominated
National Educational Television allowed the development of arts programming for its
own sake. The ideal of a shared, homogeneous culture was replaced with the ideal of
cultural and geographical diversity, which resulted in arts funding being redirected from
traditional to less established art practices. Finally, the Carnegie Report institutionalized
an ethos of formal and technological experimentation. The recommendations of the
Commission were not decided in a vacuum, however. The report was responding not
only to the activities they witnessed in public television stations, but to changing
audiences as well. The growing disenfranchisement of American youth drew attention to
a lacunae in television content that artists were particularly well-positioned to address.
82

So, as this brief overview of the history of public programming should make
clear, video emerged into an institution that was actively building a system with which to
present, disseminate, and educate the public about the arts. From television about art,

81
This work, and the motivations behind it will be discussed in more detail in Chapter
Three, which looks at the intersection of formalist ideals and a focus on technological
innovation in art-on-television initiatives, and considers the utilization of artistic practice
for the furthering technological capabilities in television stations.

82
This is a development that will be considered in some detail in Chapter Four.

56
which was introduced in the 1950s, to art on television, was not as long, or as difficult, a
transition as one might imagine. Especially with the support of funding institutions such
as the Rockefeller Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts.

The shape and direction of video art’s accelerated growth, since virtual
non-existence in the mid-‘60s up to the present, has been influenced
primarily by the priorities of major funders—the New York State Council
on the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the
Arts, among others.
(Marita Sturken, 1984)
83

Marita Sturken documented the role of the Rockefeller Foundation in the
development of early video art in her 1987 essay “Private Money and Personal Influence:
Howard Klein and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Funding of the Media Arts.” In this
essay, Sturken looks closely at the relationship between Howard Klein, who was hired as
assistant to the director of arts programming at the Rockefeller Foundation in 1967 and
named director of arts in 1973, and video artist Nam June Paik, and the effect of that
relationship on funding for video art. The Rockefeller Foundation began to offer arts
funding in 1963, and to focus on media arts by the mid 1960s. It was at that time that
Klein and Paik became friends, and Klein began to rely on Paik’s advice as to what to
fund and how to fund it. According to Sturken, Klein’s interest in public television was
largely the result of Paik’s influence.
84

83
Marita Sturken, “TV as a Creative Medium: Howard Wise and Video Art,” Afterimage,
(May 1984): 5.

84
This claim was corroborated by Barzyk. Fred Barzyk, in discussion with the author,
Boston, MA, March 30, 2009.

57
In the beginning, the stated priorities of the Rockefeller Foundation were public
health and food supply, and scientists and organizations whose research was believed to
contribute to these ends received funding. The Foundation did not establish a program for
funding the arts until 1963.
85
Almost immediately, it began to direct funds toward media
art, a move which, Sturken argues, was essential to the development of the costly
medium in the absence of market support.
86
In 1967, the Rockefeller Foundation
provided WGBH with a three-year grant of $275,000 to fund the Rockefeller Artists-in-
Television program, “which invited many artists from different fields and for different
lengths of time to join the station staff members in collaborative work to extend the
artistic expressiveness of television.”
87
KQED received $150,000, also in 1967, for a
similar, one-year program called the Experimental Project.
88

At this early stage, Klein had carte blanche over media arts funding decisions. In
the late 1960s video had virtually no presence in the institutions of art, which meant that
the standard sources of qualitative judgments on an artwork, artist’s oeuvre, or the value
of an initiative were non-existent. There was no cannon. Without existing standards, how
did Klein make his decisions? How did he decide where to direct Rockefeller funds?
There are two factors that were particularly important to Klein’s decision-making

85
The Rockefeller Foundation, President’s Ten-Year Review & Annual Report, (New
York: Rockefeller Foundation, 1971), 5-6.

86
Sturken “Private Money and Personal Influence,” 2.

87
Rockefeller Artists-in-Television Project Press Release, 1971. WGBH Archives.

88
Daniel Joyce, “A Descriptive Analytical Study of the National Center for Experiments
in Television,” (master’s thesis, University of Oregon, December 1972), 18.

58
process: the emphasis on research and development that was a part of the culture of the
Rockefeller Foundation, and his social connections in the fields of art and television.
The Rockefeller Foundation did not set out to solve the problem of world hunger
or disease by shipping food and doctors into impoverished communities. Rather, they
focused on research—into improved food production, disease prevention, and so forth.
Rather than simply giving money away, the Foundation used it to develop technologies—
agricultural, medical, or otherwise—that could solve problems. Following this doctrine,
Klein framed his support and expectations of artists’ work on television in terms of
research benefits.
89
The emphasis on technological and industrial development, in the late
1960s, was furthered by a national enthusiasm for the newly minted celebrity of science
and technology in the space age.
While the focus on research and development would take greatest hold at KQED,
it was Klein’s social relationship with figures at WGBH that would provide direction to
the Rockefeller program. Interviewed by Marita Sturken, Klein stated that he consulted
very closely with “people like Nam June Paik, Russell Connor and Fred Barzyk” (all
deeply involved with the development of artists’ television at WGBH) in his development
of media arts funding programs.
90
The activities and ideas of these figures offered
positive indications that the introduction of artists to the television station and
programming line-up could influence the future of television as a form. Which is to say
that decisions about how the Rockefeller Foundation would fund video art were based on

89
Sturken, “Private Money and Personal Influence,” 6.

90
Sturken “Private Money and Personal Influence,” 9.

59
the industrial, scientific, R&D approach that it applied to its other programs and on a
small group of individuals affiliated with WGBH: a director/producer (Barzyk), an artist
(Paik), and a television host (Connor). Klein’s irreplaceable role in the growth of video as
an art form offers an excellent example of the meeting of individual and institutional
drives, and the potential productivity of such a meeting. We see here a challenging of the
impersonal ideal of the institution as individuals successfully funneled corporate
objectives toward matters of personal interest.

The National Endowment for the Arts is similar to most government
agencies. We prepare budgets, we review applications, we have mounds
and mounds of paperwork, we have Xeroxes working overtime. Where we
differ is that we also have art, because that is our business, and we also
have the instruments of art: a piano, a camera, a projector, a radio – and
yes, even a television set. (Nancy Hanks, Chairman, National Endowment
for the Arts, 1971)
91

The National Arts and Cultural Development Act was signed into law on 3
September 1964.
92
From the date of its first meeting, the Committee of the National
Council on the Arts—the administrative arm of the National Endowment for the Arts
(NEA)—recognized television as an essential tool in the dissemination of the arts to the
American public. They included in their initial recommendations the suggestion that
“additional legislation be passed to assist educational television stations to carry out

91
Nancy Hanks, “Address to the Northeast Area Conference, American Women in Radio
and Television” Cooperstown, New York, October 15, 1971. Copied into a WGBH
document prepared for the NEA. WGBH Archives, (Boston: WGBH, 1971), 8.

92
National Endowment for the Arts, Annual Report: 1964-65, (Washington, DC: NEA,
1965), 10. The National Council on the Arts was initially “authorized to receive an
appropriation of $150,000 per annum for its operation.” 13

60
significant programming in the Arts”—a recommendation that would become particularly
important in 1967, with the passing of the National Broadcasting Act.
93
In 1971 the NEA
directed a one million dollar grant toward film, radio and TV. Program director Chloe
Aaron stated that the Endowment recognized that “film, TV and radio are arts in
themselves, as well as transmitters of traditional arts such as dance, poetry, music and
theater.”
94

The funding that the NEA provided to experimental television programming
would appear to be out of keeping with its early tendencies, which, Donna Binkiewicz
argues in Federalizing the Muse, were initially directed toward relatively established
practices. From 1967—the year of the NEA’s first grants—to 1975, Binkiewicz claims,
the majority of artists who received funding were painters or sculptors who worked in an
abstract expressionist, post-painterly or minimalist abstract idiom.
95
The NEA support of

93
National Endowment for the Arts, Annual Report: 1964-65, 16.

94
Chloe Aaron, quoted in “Art For the Masses” Broadcasting, (October 25, 1971).
WGBH Archives. It is worth noting that Ted Libbey, in his recent history of NEA
support for media art, focuses entirely on the presentation of the performing arts on
television, rather than the development of television as a medium in its own right.
Libbey, “Media Arts,” 197-208.

95
Donna Binkiewicz, Federalizing the Muse: United States Arts Policy and the National
Endowment for the Arts, 1965-1980, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina
Press, 2004), 137. Binkiewicz’s statistical research into the NEA is a valuable
investigation of the social-historical aspects of the NEA and American art in the 1960s
and 1970s. However, her conflation of Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, for
instance, or her un-nuanced presentation of Philip Guston as the paragon of modernist
formalism—among other questionable characterizations of visual art practices of the
period—do raise some questions about validity of her broader argument about the biases
of the NEA.

61
video art, then, was atypical for this early period. This anomaly was the result of the
NEA’s focus on distribution and the development of new audiences.
Despite Aaron’s belief that television was an art in itself, the actual distribution of
funds suggests that the NEA investment in television was not initially guided by a view
of television as a medium of production, but rather by faith in its value as a means of
distribution—its ability to act as an extension of the museum or lecture hall that would
bring art into the homes of the people. The mandate of the NEA was twofold: first, to
support the production of art, and second, to facilitate access to art by the greatest
possible number of Americans.
96
The NEA initially treated television as a means to
facilitate the second of its missions, rather than the first. They moved relatively quickly,
however, to provide support to the artists’ residencies at public television stations when
they were first initiated.
97
These funds—delivered to television stations, were meant to
support the development of a new, barely defined art medium: video.
The term “video art” would seem to designate a clearly delineated body of
material—especially in the period before the shift to digital media. Unlike other
categories of art that emerged in the same period, such as performance or installation art,

96
United States Congress, House Committee on Education and Labor, National Arts and
Cultural Development Act of 1964, (Washington, DC: 1964) 2; Binkiewicz, 97.

97
Fred Barzyk, a producer at WGBH attributes this as much to happenstance and
personal connections as to policy change. According to Barzyk, Brian O’Doherty, the
first host of the WGBH program Museum Open House—which presented and discussed
works at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, later took a post as the head of the visual arts
program at the NEA. When artists first began to experiment with video as an art form,
O’Doherty often went to Barzyk as an advisor. So, based on Barzyk’s account, the move
to support video art at the NEA was a result of direct contact between the organization
and the experimental activities taking place at public television stations. Fred Barzyk in
discussion with the author, Boston, MA, March 30, 2009.

62
or preceding genres such as Pop or Minimalism, video art did not designate a set of ideas
or practices that could be activated through an extensive range of materials and actions.
Unlike many other art practices of the period, video art relied on a very specific
technological array.
Art historians have frequently reduced that technology to its most widely
available components: the camera and the video/television monitor.
98
Television monitors
had been a well-established part of American domestic life since the mid-1950s, but the
public did not have access to portable video recording equipment until the release of the
Sony Portapak c.1968.
99
It was the first widely distributed, relatively inexpensive and
portable camera for the electronic recording of moving images. It differed from film
cameras in a number of ways, but three essential qualities had an immediate and
pragmatic effect on artists’ uses of the medium: first, the cost of video tape was far less
than that of film; second, unlike film, which had to be sent away to be developed—a
costly and time consuming process—the images captured electronically were available
for immediate—even simultaneous—playback and manipulation; finally, video—

98
See William Boddy, “Alternative Television in the United States,” Screen 31:1,
(Spring, 1990): 92.

99
Michael Shamberg, Guerrilla Television: Official Manual, (New York, Chicago, San
Francisco: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 5. While Shamberg dates the official
release to 1968, other scholars have presented different dates. John G. Hanhardt, in New
American Video Art: A Historical Survey, 1967-1987, (Linz and Camerino: Ars
Electronica, 1988), states that “video became more accessible to artists and activists in
1965 when the Sony Corporation introduced its portable videotape recorder into the New
York market.” While it is true that a few select artists (Nam June Paik and Andy Warhol)
had access to portable video recorders in 1965, they were not made available on the open
market for a few more years. Jesse Drew also dates the wide availability of the portable
video camera to the 1968 release of the Sony Portapak, in Drew, “The Collective
Camcorder” as does William Body in “Alternative Television,” 92.

63
especially that recorded on the inexpensive and unstable half-inch tape used in portable
cameras, editing caused significant degradation of the signal. Unlike film, however, with
video it was possible to layer or switch between multiple cameras during the recording
process.
100
These three qualities enabled (and sometimes forced) artists to transform the
language of the moving image as it had developed in association with artists’ film
practices.
The Portapak itself had two parts: the camera, which translated visual information
(light) into electronic data, and the tape deck, which recorded that electronic data onto
reels of half-inch tape. Users could play back these black-and-white recordings on a
video monitor or standard television set to which a few modifications had been made.
101

It was also possible to connect the camera directly to the monitor to produce a live-action
image, bypassing the tape-recording process. For the first time, artists could experiment
inexpensively with the moving image, and the affordability, and relative portability and
manageability of the equipment meant that one person could use it alone, anywhere.
102

100
For a clear and concise discussion of the formal, technological and historical
differences between film and video, see Robert Arn “Form and Sense of Video,”
Artscanada, Video Issue, (October 1973): 15-22.

101
For instructions on how to access and transform early video hardware, see Shamberg,
Guerrilla Television, 22-26; and various issues of Radical Software.

102
Eric Siegel, “Eric Siegel’s Video Report” Radical Software, vol. 1, no. 5, (1972): 109-
115. Siegel priced editing decks at between $845 and $5,000. The cost of video cassettes
ranged depending on numbers bought, but averaged $5 each when purchased in batches
of 25 or more. Siegel encouraged readers to purchase Portapaks from Hong Kong, where
they could be found for $500-$830, before shipping and duty. In 1971, Michael
Shamberg quoted a cost of $1,495 for portable video recording equipment. Shamberg,
Guerrilla Television: Official Manual, 5. In his 1970 essay “Video Cassette Image
Publishing,” in the inaugural issue of Radical Software, Gene Youngblood provides the
64
As the first widely available and portable video camera, the Sony Portapak was a
tool central to the development of video art; it had limitations, however—namely its
unstable, grainy, black-and-white image that was not compatible with broadcast systems
or amenable to post-production editing. As well, although writers addressing early video
often mention the portability of the “light-weight” Portapak, users of contemporary
portable video cameras would likely be surprised by the bulkiness of the older
equipment—in 1972, a Sony Portapak weighed 21 pounds.
103
In a talk given at the “Open
Circuits” conference, video artist Shigeko Kubota described the experience of travelling
with her Portapak: “I like video because it is heavy. With a Portapak I travelled all over
Europe, Japan, and Navajo territory with no male accompaniment. The Portapak tore
down my shoulder, backbone and waist. I felt like a Soviet woman railroad worker.”
104
It
was possible for an artist to use the Portapak alone, under a variety of circumstances, but
socialist romanticism aside, it was not a particularly easy tool to use.
For many, the limitations of the Portapak have become its defining qualities. We
often think of early video art exclusively in terms of the Portapak aesthetic: its grainy
black and white image, poor sound quality and in-camera edits. Some also saw the
display limitations of portable cameras as one of video’s essential qualities. In 1970 Paul

following information about the cost of video equipment: Color TV camera, color VTR
unit and color display monitor cost between $11,000 (Sony) and $50,000 (Ampex).

103
Eric Siegel, “Eric Siegel’s Video Report,” Radical Software, vol. 1, no. 5, (1972): 109.
For context, imagine lugging around four or five average 2010 laptop computers.

104
Shigeko Kubota “Women’s Video in the U.S. and Japan” in The New Television: A
Public/Private Art, D. Davis and A. Simmons eds. (MIT Press; Cambridge,
Massachusetts and London, England, 1977), 96.

65
Ryan articulated the difference between video (video tape, or VT) and television (TV) as
one based in the transmissive capabilities of television, capabilities that the half-inch tape
used in portable cameras lacked.
VT is not TV. Videotape is TV flipped into itself. Television, as the root
of the word implies, has to do with transmitting information over distance.
Videotape has to do with infolding information. Instant replay offers a
living feedback that creates a topology of awareness other than the tic-tac-
toe grid.
105

This distinction was not a common one at the time. In fact, many people involved with
the early development of video art used the terms video and television interchangeably
until the mid to late-1970s, when institutional structures and designations began to
solidify for the decade-old art form.
106
Despite this, Ryan’s approach, one that identifies
video in terms of its structural capacity for simultaneous playback, came to dominate
historical and critical accounts of video.
107
While works made in this vein certainly
constitute an important oeuvre in the history of video, even a cursory examination of the
field shows that the live and closed-circuit works described by Ryan, which could not be
physically manifest as long-distance transmission or recording, make up only a portion of
the cannon of historical video art.

105
Paul Ryan, quoted in Russell Connor, Vision and Television, (Waltham MA: Rose Art
Museum, 1970), 7.

106
For example, at the 1974 “Open Circuits” conference, organizers, speakers and
attendees frequently treated the terms television and video interchangeably. David Ross,
one of the earliest supporters of video in the museum, initially held the title of deputy
director for television/film at the Long Beach Museum of Art. It is only retrospectively
that a clear line has been drawn with the renaming of artists’ television as video art.

107
See, for example, Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism.”
66
The dominance of the Portapak in the historical mythology of video art offers a
rich avenue for exploration, but for the purposes of this study, I will concentrate on what
has not been closely considered, rather than venture an explanation of the power of the
Portapak. Because of its dominance, another world of video technology is frequently
glossed over in histories of video as an art medium. Long before the wide release of the
Portapack, television producers harnessed the base material of video—the electron—to
make moving images. Television was video. Television stations employed a different
kind of camera and a larger gauge of tape than that most often used by artists, activists
and amateurs, but the substance was essentially the same. The terms video and television
refer to separate cultural and professional spheres, and often to different delivery systems,
but not to different media.
The semantic separation of video from television has played out in profound ways
in the histories of video art, as demonstrated by the privileging of Portapak video over a
significant body of work produced with other equipment. I am referring to work made
with the more complex and sophisticated equipment available in television stations, but
also to “process video” generally which was made using video synthesizers, mixers, or a
combination of the two. Artists often constructed or jury-rigged synthesizers from
existing equipment, following the theoretical model of sound synthesizers such as the
Moog or Buchla. Artists used these synthesizers for editing and postproduction, and they
sometimes replaced the camera entirely in the generation of video signal.
108
Stephen

108
For a detailed history of process video see Furlong, “Tracking Video Art” and Meigh-
Andrews, A History of Video Art.

67
Beck, who made one of the first synthesizers, the Beck Direct Video Synthesizer
explains:
Television has been employed for most of its history as a vehicle for
images which originate outside of itself. Direct video synthesis is an
electronic means of evoking images from within the television system.
109

Mixers, rather than generating signal as synthesizers did, had the capacity to
combine footage in highly complex and specific ways. For example, the mixer could read
one range of footage, “selecting” all regions of a particular value, and replace those zones
with imagery from another tape, another live camera, or from a synthesizer. This
technique, “keying” is most familiar in the blue-screen technology frequently used by
newscasters, but artists used it extensively when they first encountered mixing
equipment. Artists in residence, such as Beck at KQED, or Nam June Paik at WGBH,
developed technology that combined the capacities of mixers and synthesizers.
There is a profound difference between the categories of cultural production
known as television and video art. However, a comprehensive historical engagement with
video requires a détente, a reconciling of two supposedly ideologically divided spheres,
not only order to enable the re-entry of artists’ television into the current discourse on the
history of video, but to attain a more nuanced and fully-fleshed understanding of the
ways in which public media facilitated the production and distribution of cultural material
most often associated with the museum or art gallery. While David Joselit and Lynn
Spigel have begun this process, neither have looked closely at the conjunction of art on
television and television as art represented by the cases studied here.

109
Stephen Beck, Direct Video: Electronic Artform for Color Television, (San Francisco,
AC: NCET, c.1972), NCET Files, PFA, B1F2: Publications, 1970-1973.
68
The space that opened up, however briefly, for a collaboration between the
cultural spheres of television and visual art was, arguably, strongly influenced—if
not enabled—by the emergence of Marshall McLuhan’s media theory into public
discourse. This emergence is narrated in Tom Wolfe’s 2004 profile of McLuhan,
an early contender in a recent flood of material on the theorist.
110
Immediately after
the 1964 publication of Understanding Media, Wolfe recounts, McLuhan—a
previously obscure professor of English Literature at the University of Toronto—
began to receive invitations to speak from major American corporations such as
General Electric and IBM. The following year, through the efforts of advertising
authority Howard Gossage, American advertising and press industries became
aware of McLuhan, and “Magazine articles, newspaper stories, and television
appearances were generated at an astonishing rate.”
111
In 1966, Wolfe asserts, “the
number [of media appearances] grew to more than 120, in just about every

110
Tom Wolfe, “McLuhan’s New World” The Wilson Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Spring,
2004): 18-25. Books about McLuhan published in the last ten years (2001-2011) include:
Janine Marchessault, Marshall McLuhan: Cosmic Media, (London, Thousand Oaks, CA:
Sage, 2005); Donald F. Theall, The Virtual Marshall McLuhan, (Montreal: McGill-
Queen’s University Press, 2001); Robert K. Logan, Understanding New Media:
Extending Marshall McLuhan, (New York: Peter Lang, 2010); Judith Fitzgerald,
Marshall McLuhan: Wise Guy, (Montreal: XYZ Pub, 2001); Douglas Coupland,
Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!, (New York: Atlas & Co., 2010);
John George Moss and Linda M. Morra, At the Speed of Light there is Only Illumination:
A Reappraisal of Marshall McLuhan, (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2004);
Richard Cavell, McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography, (University of Toronto Press:
Toronto, 2003); W. Terrence Gordon, McLuhan: A Guide for the Perplexed, (Continuum,
2010); and this list doesn’t even begin to cover the ink (or pixels) spilled in the form of
journal articles or doctoral dissertations.

111
Wolfe, “McLuhan’s New World,” 23.

69
important publication in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain.”
112
When
the residency programs I am discussing here were established, Marshall McLuhan
was the foremost public intellectual in North America. In 1967 he was on the
cover of Newsweek (Fig. 10), and a decade later had a cameo appearance in
Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (Fig. 11).
What was it about McLuhan’s message (or its mediation) that provoked so
much public interest? McLuhan offered formalism without elitism; no medium
was “higher” or better than any other. Literature, TV ads, Hollywood
blockbusters, light bulbs, roads, clothing, newspapers, clocks, money—all are
media, he posited, and the different ways in which they communicate their
messages may determine our relationship to and understanding of the world and
each other. Media were not new in the 1960s, according to McLuhan, but they
were changing in important ways. The “extensions of man,” which had previously
been mechanical—ploughs, horses, trains, binoculars, cars, etc—were increasingly
being joined or replaced by electronic media, which, instead of acting as
extensions of the body, he claimed, acted as extensions of the mind.
113

Tied to these changes in the types of media that shaped modern experience,
McLuhan extrapolated, were changes in human psychology and social relations. In the
era of the printing press, he argued in 1962 in The Gutenberg Galaxy, thinking and social

112
Wolfe, “McLuhan’s New World,” 23-24.
113
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, (New York:
Signet, 1964),19.

70
structures became more linear and ordered—like words lined up on a page. With the
advent of electronic media, however, social relationships would change, become
decentralized, multi-directional, less hierarchical.
114
The industrial-mechanistic tendency
to use technology to extend the body and to fragment experience was being replaced by
an extension of the mind, which held the potential for a utopian connectedness,
wholeness and increased empathy. For young people especially, who were growing
increasingly critical of nationalism, top-down culture, and cultural hierarchies,
McLuhan’s theories of an interconnected “global village” were attractive.
In Understanding Media, McLuhan introduced, as the title to the book’s first
chapter, the oft quoted phrase “the medium is the message,” a concept he explained with
the claim that “...the personal and social consequences of any medium—that is, of any
extension of ourselves—results from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by
each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.”
115
This argument spoke directly
to common experiences of social change in the face of an expanding mass media and an
increasingly technologized world.
For example, the railroad did not introduce movement to human society, but it
changed the scale and pace of movement—and this happened regardless of how or where
it was used.
116
The form of the medium was more important than its content because it
had the power to change the way that people experienced and conceptualized the world.

114
Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1962).

115
McLuhan, Understanding Media, 23.

116
McLuhan, Understanding Media, 24.

71
“The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts” McLuhan
argued, “but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any
resistance.”
117
This description of a dispersed, untraceable kind of power held special
appeal to those who had lost faith in capital-P Politics, who sought instead to encourage
social change through changes in the fabric of daily life. For the “turn on, tune in and
drop out” crowd, McLuhan’s message offered a sensible and accessible framework in
their approach to the broader culture, encouraging them to begin to engage with new
media as producers, instead of consumers. McLuhan identified artists especially as
individuals with a singular ability to understand the forms of new media, and therefore
their potential effects.
In 1967, when the Rockefeller Foundation first offered grants to fund artists’
residency programs at KQED-TV in San Francisco and WGBH-TV in Boston, it was
directing funds toward an area that could expect further support from a variety of sources.
The increased funding for and reorganization of public broadcasters in the United States
produced an institutional space in which cultural diversity, experimentation and new art
forms were encouraged. The newly established National Endowment for the Arts, with
its concern for the accessibility of the arts to a broad public, was attentive to television—
public television in particular—from its inception. The baby-boomers, coming of age,
turned up their noses at both network television and the traditional high culture of
educational television, and provided an eager new audience for experimental fare. The
emergence of the portable video camera gave a growing number of individuals a sense of
agency in relation to the forms of the mass media, and the theories of Marshall McLuhan

117
McLuhan, Understanding Media, 33.
72
told them why they should grasp that agency. The mid-1960s saw a call for a new kind
of art, and a new kind of television—and a confluence of public and private interests,
media stars and avant-gardists, private practices and mass media emerged, if only briefly,
to meet those calls.
The ways in which art and television engage with one another have not changed a
great deal since the 1960s. For the most part, television still uses art to move plots or it
takes on the pedagogical responsibility of teaching people about objects that exist
elsewhere. Museums have found ways to distinguish video from television, supporting
the presentation of closed-circuit video, and increasingly presenting video through
projections—transforming the electronic signal into a moving mural, removing it from
the familiar casing of the television set. For a little while however, at a moment of
upheaval in American culture, a set of new possibilities emerged, as art and television
abandoned the divisions that have otherwise defined them.

73
Figures to Chapter One

Figure 4. Dangerman, Pilot Episode, 1960, video still, Incorporated Television Company.

Figure 5. Dangerman, Pilot Episode, 1960, video still, Incorporated Television Company.

.

74

Figures 6 and 7. Dangerman, Pilot Episode, 1960, video stills, Incorporated Television
Company.

Figure 8. WGBH, The Very First On-The-Air Half-Inch Video Festival Ever, 1972, video still,
WGBH-TV.

75

Figure 9. WGBH, The Very First On-The-Air Half-Inch Video Festival Ever, 1972, video still,
WGBH-TV.

Figure 10. Newsweek, March 6, 1967, cover.

76

Figure 11. Woody Allen, Annie Hall, 1977, film still, MGM.

77
Chapter Two: Authorship and Institutional Form
Boston area viewers tuned in to WGBH in 1978, waiting to watch the news, or to
get the facts on boeuf bourguignon from Julia Child on the French Chef, might have
happened upon a five-minute-and-twenty-second documentary about the French surrealist
artist Man Ray, one of a series of shorts by artists, about artists, made at the station that
year. Man Ray Man Ray, by William Wegman, filled the empty space between programs
which, on network television, would have been occupied by commercials. Like Nam June
Paik’s Video Commune: The Beatles from Beginning to End (which was also featured in
this series, in very condensed form), Man Ray Man Ray featured Russell Connor, host of
the educational program Museum Open House, which had aired through the 1960s.
Connor, who had provided the voice-over for Video Commune, explaining the project to
viewers, and instructing them on how to tune their sets, was also narrator of the more
recent video, in which he sat in the studio, facing the camera, once again the authority on
visual art, telling the story of Man Ray’s life, while photographs, short pieces of video,
and images of artworks punctuated the narrative. What follows is the story of Man Ray’s
life as related by Connor.
Man Ray was born in Philadelphia in 1980, but when he was seven
he had to move to New York. He loved it. He was constantly painting and
drawing. High school was painful, except for his art classes, and he was
also interested in architecture. When he was nine months, he was forced to
attend a strict obedience school in Santa Monica, California. And that was
really important, to learn the fundamentals of behavior, because the beach
was two main streets away. At the Francesco Ferrara Social Center, where
he attended night classes, Man Ray was allowed greater freedom. His
closest friends, besides Bill and Gail, at the time, were Picabia and Marcel
Duchamp, Jim and Judy, Terry, Teddy, perhaps Ralph.
The controversial Armory Show of 1913, which introduced avant-
garde European art to America, encouraged Man Ray. It confirmed the
general direction he had already undertaken. To break away from his
78
home life, in order to work without disturbances, with the older painter
Samuel Halpert, Man Ray found a house with a large number of rooms in
Ridgefield, New Jersey. He loved it. He was constantly painting and
drawing. The trip across country was really pretty boring, except for the
Grand Canyon. There he met, and a year later, married, Donna Lacroix. It
was perfect, while it lasted.
In 1975, Man Ray moved back to New York, to a studio on Crosby
Street. They were building the Lexington Avenue Subway opposite Grand
Central, beneath his new studio. This was a time of intense Dada activity
in New York by the French expatriates. In 1916, Duchamp entered a
urinal.

Intermission

So, on July 14, 1921, Man Ray left for Paris. Marcel Duchamp was
waiting for him at the station. Exactly three years before, Tristan Tzara
had read the first Dada manifesto, in Zurich. Dada was coming to an end,
and Surrealism—crystallizing under the poets Breton, Aragon and Eluard
and the artists Arp, Duchamp and Max Ernst—would commence with
Breton’s manifesto, three years later. Were it not for the Nazi occupation
in 1940 Man Ray would have never left France. While Duchamp, Ernst,
Tanguy, Dali, and other artists in the same predicament as he found refuge
in New York, Man Ray sought out a new frontier: Hollywood. Typically,
everything went his way. Quoting from his autobiography, “I had a
wonderful time. I had a woman, a studio, a car. I was born again. I’ve
almost as many lives as a cat.”

Epilogue

When he returned to Paris, in 1951, Man Ray received a warm welcome
from his friends Picasso, and Max Ernst. Teddy was bitten by a rattlesnake
and later died. Folly passed away. Man Ray passed away in Paris, in
1976. Marcel Duchamp was waiting for him at the station.

With the exception of the odd comment at the beginning about obedience school;
the occasional, slightly incongruous, references to Bill, Gail and Teddy; and Duchamp’s
oddly abridged entry, the biography offered here seems ordinary enough, and, presented
as it was by Connor (Fig. 12), it might have seemed, at least for a few moments, to be a
legitimate documentary about a well-known Surrealist. The visual images that
accompanied Connor’s presentation, however, quickly began to disrupt the narrative. A
79
series of photographic self-portraits by Man Ray were followed by black-and-white video
footage, as Connor arrived at the obedience-school reference, of Wegman’s dog, also
named Man Ray. Man Ray the dog stood in an empty room, while a figure off-camera
tugged on a piece of string tied to his rear-right leg, causing it to lift up off the ground.
The following passages, about the Armory show, and the house in New Jersey, were
standard, cutting between Connor and images of Man Ray the artist’s work, including a
surrealist drawing and a photograph of The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse (1920). But then,
as Connor came to Man Ray’s marriage to “Donna Lacroix,” (a mash-up of the two
names his wife was known by: Adon Lacroix and Donna Lacoeur), she was represented
by footage of a weimaraner in a feathered headdress (Fig. 13).
Following a two-second “Intermission,” Man Ray’s arrival in Paris, where
“Duchamp was waiting for him at the station,” was depicted with a generic ink-wash
illustration from an unnamed source, with an arrow drawn in with red marker, pointing to
the back of “Duchamp’s” head as he waited (Fig. 14). The English-language portion of
the “Dada manifesto” purportedly read by Tristan Tzara (Fig. 15), reads “SELECTED
WORKS: REEL 7/ William Wegman.” When Connor reeled off the names of poets and
writers associated with Surrealism, the camera moved rapidly over a series of standard
headshots of American men, such as Lt. Col. Charles H. Anderson—presented as the poet
Paul Éluard (Fig. 16)—or Allen J. Morgan, as Max Ernst (Fig. 17).
This use of found images to stand in for well-known art-world figures was carried
out with enough speed and authority on Connor’s part that a casual viewer might accept
the information as valid. Following this passage, however, with a photograph of a dog, on
which cat ears and whiskers had been drawn (Fig. 18), while William Wegman’s voice
80
dopily asked “Where are the cats? Where are the cats?” undermined Connor’s performed
authority in an appropriately Dada fashion. In the Epilogue, the photograph depicting
Man Ray’s return to Paris (Fig. 19) (in which we see Picasso, second from the right), red
arrows point to a man and a dog—both Man Rays, together in Paris.

Man Ray Man Ray, in its suturing of fact and fiction, education and entertainment,
high art and television, is as much a product of the culture of WGBH as it is a work by
William Wegman. Man Ray Man Ray spoofs the format of the PBS educational television
program, seamlessly combining the biographies of the surrealist artist Man Ray and
William Wegman’s dog of the same name into the story of one life. Connor’s presence as
host and his provision of the voice-over meant that members of the television audience
who were familiar with art programming on WGBH would recognize that voice as an
authority on the history and interpretation of art, and fans of experimental video
programming such as Video Commune would associate him with that history as well.
This self-reflexive approach to video-on-television, which not only ceded to, but also
actively embraced the conventions of public broadcasting was the result of over a decade
of collaboration between artists and television professionals WGBH.

Those who were involved in production in the sixties seem to have been
unaware that video technology required and generated its own syntax and
vocabulary and that the practices of mass-cultural institutions and high-
cultural conventions were not so easily integrated. (Buchloh, 1985)
118

118
Buchloh, “From Gadget Video to Agit Video,” 118.

81
The artists residency programs under consideration in this study were
environments created for the express purpose of facilitating an integration of “the
practices of mass-cultural institutions and high-cultural conventions” that Buchloh refers
to above. Especially at WGBH, the artists and the television professionals involved
worked not only to find common ground, but also to redefine their own territories by
eliminating existing boundaries between art and television. This new, shared environment
demanded that all participants be prepared to question their assumptions about the
cultural practices with which they aligned, and the results suggested new ways of making
and consuming both art and TV. The invitation extended to artists to enter the WGBH
studios resulted from the meeting, earlier in the sixties, of particular personalities and
programming traditions.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s there were two weekly cultural programs made
at WGBH that would later play important roles in the development of experimental
programming and the emergence of video-art practices at the station. One was Museum
Open House and the other was The Boston Symphony Orchestra. Museum Open House,
hosted first by Brian O’Doherty and then by Russell Connor, presented a body of works
selected from the collection of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts each week, usually
focusing on an individual artist or period. When WGBH began to broadcast works
produced by artists-in-residence in the late 1960s, they used aspects of Museum Open
House to negotiate the cultural divide between museum and television-set, to help
audiences feel comfortable with a situation in which, instead of bringing art from the
museum into their home, the television signal instead became the artwork. The weekly
broadcasts of performances by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, on the other hand, acted
82
as a catalyst for change rather than a means to make that change less startling. Fred
Barzyk, the young director and producer at WGBH who introduced artists to the station,
did so in part because of his boredom with the model exemplified by the Boston
Symphony Orchestra broadcasts. He expressed frustration with the way that the
Symphony was televised, stating: “When the trombones played you cut to the trombones.
When the harp took its little trill, you cut to the harp. I kept saying there must be another
way, maybe a more romantic way, a more abstract way.”
119
He wanted to know why
cameras couldn’t be used to “paint pictures” rather than focus on this or that member of
the orchestra.
120
His response to this problem, guided by contemporary currents in art and
popular culture, led to the first experiments with television at WGBH.
An interviewer once asked Barzyk how it was that that his career spanned
conventional dramatic forms and experimental projects. He explained that he wanted to
tell a story, while at the same time “to try to be influenced by the media that [he was]
actually dealing with.”
121
Relating to Marshall McLuhan’s claim that the content of new
media is always old media, Barzyk wanted to jettison the existing “old-media” formulae
of filmic drama, news magazine or theatrical variety show popular at the time, in favor of
television content shaped by an awareness of the specific qualities of the medium.
122
This

119
Fred Barzyk, interview by Selena Colburn, part two. WGBH Oral History Project,
(Boston, MA: WGBH Archive, February 10, 1999), 1.

120
Fred Barzyk in discussion with the author, Boston, MA, March 30, 2009.

121
Fred Barzyk interview by Selena Colburn, part one. WGBH Oral History Project,
(Boston, MA: WGBH Archive, August 25, 1998), 4.

122
While Barzyk credits McLuhan as an important influence in his approach to
experimental projects, there may be a retroactive application of McLuhan’s ideas to these
83
desire to move past the traditions of film and theater presented a challenge, however, and
the earliest attempt initiated by Barzyk, Jazz Images, demonstrates the difficulty of
escaping “old media” conventions.
One night in 1964, Barzyk and a small group of “engineers and cameramen [that]
was not finding enough of an outlet for its creative energies in regularly-scheduled series
production” stayed in the studio late to produce Jazz Images.
123
They made a series of
five short black-and-white works.
124
Although the project was inspired by Barzyk’s desire
to offer an alternative to the existing form of Boston Symphony Orchestra broadcasts, the
works were set to jazz rather than concert music, Barzyk says, because it was easier to

early experiments. The ideas that Barzyk cites as important to his own thinking were first
presented in published form in 1964 in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.
Given that McLuhan didn’t emerge as a public figure immediately, it likely (though not
certain) that Barzyk encountered his ideas after this initial project. Discourses of medium
specificity, however, were well established in the American art world by the early 1960s.
The history of the discourse of medium specificity is a long one, dominated primarily by
two canonical texts: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s 1766 Laocoön: or, The Limits of Poetry
and Painting, trans. E. Frothingham (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1887), and by the mid-
twentieth century writing of Clement Greenberg, beginning with his 1940 essay “Toward
a Newer Laocoon,” Clement Greenberg, Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and
Criticism, volume 1, ed. John O’Brian, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 23-
38. For an overview, see Noël Carroll, “The Specificity of Media in the Arts” Journal of
Aesthetic Education, vol. 19, no. 4 (Winter, 1985): 5-20. More recently, Rosalind Krauss,
in “’Specific’ Objects” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 46, Polemical Objects
(Autumn, 2004), 221-224; brings the ahistorical, morphological reading of medium
typical of modernist criticism into dialogue with an understanding of medium as a
socialised, historical carrier of conventional meaning.

123
“Rockefeller Artists-in-Television Project Press Releases 1968-70.” Though labelled
with the dates 1968-1970, this document, which gives an overview of Rockefeller funded
projects and their precedents at WGBH and announces new initiatives, includes
discussion of projects initiated in 1971, and contains clear indications that it was
published in that year. Unpaginated document in the WGBH Archives.

124
WGBH didn’t get its first color cameras until 1967.

84
find short jazz works. Three of the five videos, including one made by Barzyk, were
abstract works that played with light, movement and texture. One of these television
artworks, Midnight Sleigh-ride, directed by Mark Stephens, used a kaleidoscope to
produce its abstract images; another used extreme close-ups to render familiar objects
abstract; and the third, made by Barzyk, used a series of meshed grids of various
materials and densities, which the camera moved through by shifting depth-of-field
settings.
A press release describing the project as an important precursor to the later
experiments by artists at the station explained that the initiative ended because “In 1965,
WGBH moved to new facilities. Production was stepped up, and availability of
equipment for experimentation was sharply reduced.”
125
While the increased productivity
of the station explains the loss of time and space for experimental activities, it should also
be noted that the purpose of the project—to develop ways to use television that engaged
its specificities as a medium, rather than repeating the conventions of traditional media—
failed. None of the strategies used in this work were specific to television; rather, they
repeated the conventions of experimental film—by which I mean that all of the works
could have been shot on film, without any notable differences in outcome.
126
These works

125
“Rockefeller Artists-in-Television Project Press Releases 1968-70,” c. 1971, WGBH
Archives.

126
This attachment to the conventions of an earlier form does not mean that this project
was without some broader influence in the world of video. Don Hallock, who was
employed at WBGH at the time that this project took place would go on to produce the
Videola 1973 while in residence at the National Center for Experiments in Broadcasting,
after its split with KQED. The Videola, a video sculpture, inverts Stephens’ use of the
kaleidoscope, surrounding a television screen with reflective surfaces that make the
85
fell into the trap described by Buchloh when he complained that often the early “results
of artists' involvement with the technique of video were rather peculiar hybrids that could
just as easily have been produced with traditional film equipment.”
127
In conversation
with the author, Barzyk agreed with this assessment of these early works, and pointed
toward television comedian Ernie Kovacs as an example of a more successful
engagement with the specificities of the televisual medium.
128
The combination of the
early experimentation of Jazz Images with the example set by Kovacs, however, pointed
toward new possibilities for cultural programming on television. Barzyk and his
colleagues determined that the most promising ways to break through the more
conventional approach that had weighed down the early experiment of Jazz Images was
to invite artists from outside the industry into the television studio.
“You have to remember,” Barzyk says, “that TV was like a closed society. No
one had TV cameras except TV stations. The small format TV camera had not yet been
invented. We were like a fortress surrounded by a moat, and no outside artist was allowed
to cross over. So we, those on the inside, had to put a break in the structure.”
129
Using his
Jazz Images as an example of alternative approaches to the presentation of music on

screen the center of the kaleidoscope—transforming any television broadcast into an
abstract moving image—rather than the carrier of a recorded kaleidoscopic image.

127
Buchloh, “From Gadget Video to Agit Video,” 18.

128
Fred Barzyk in discussion with the author, Boston, MA, March 30, 2009. Kovaks
employed technologies such as chroma-key insertions, a technique specific to the
television/video apparatus, and impossible with film. The Ernie Kovacs Show was
broadcast on ABC in 1961 and 1962.

129
Fred Barzyk, “Paik and the Video Synthesizer,” in Fred Barzyk: The Search for a
Personal Vision in Broadcast Television (Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Patrick and Beatrice
Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University, 2001), 74.
86
television (a project that would be realized in the program Video Variations, in 1972, four
years after the initiation of the artists-in-television program), Barzyk began to openly
seek support for his project of bringing artists into the studio. The Rockefeller foundation
was the program’s most generous supporter, prompting further financing from the public
television industry and state and federal funding bodies.
This early example of experimentation with television as a new medium with still-
untapped potential is a clear indicator of the degree to which the initiative of a group of
creative producers in the television world would contribute to the development of video
as an art form. In order to better understand the cross-disciplinary nature of these early
developments in video, I will focus this chapter on the intersection of the cultural and
professional fields of visual art and public television.
In the history examined here, both of the artist-in-residence programs initiated in
1967—both institutionalized projects to make art out of television, to make television
into a tool for the dissemination of art and to transform television through the
interventions of artists—operated under the leadership of an experienced television
producer (rather than that of a curator, gallerist, art critic or visual artist). These were
Fred Barzyk at WGBH in Boston and Brice Howard at KQED San Francisco. Both
programs also relied on the services of the professional crew at the studio. The
complexities of hierarchy, expertise, and labor negotiation that exist in the professional
site of the television studio all played a role in how art was made in the residency
programs. As well, the conversion of television studio to art studio resulted in the
reshaping of existing professional categories. Artists expanded their practices when they
entered the television studio; they learned to work with new technologies and to think
87
about their audiences in new ways. At the same time, the entry of artists into the
television studio transformed the operations of that institution, and the responsibilities
and practices of those that worked there.
In some cases, these transformations were the result of individual initiative, such
as Fred Barzyk’s adoption of a collaborative role in the production of some artists’
works, or his experiments in handing over his own authorial control as director of
television programs to technicians or non-professional visitors to the station. Sometimes,
the host institution initiated these transformations, as was the case with a professional
internship program at KQED that trained staff from public television stations around the
country in the methodologies developed by artists in residence. In other cases, these
changes occurred organically and unpredictably, as we will see happening in the evolving
role of television show host Russell Connor. This chapter focuses specifically on these
developments as they are manifest in works of art produced at the stations. In the
following pages, I will concentrate primarily on activities at WGBH, where the
connections between television and video art can frequently be located in the form and
content of works produced by artists in residence. At KQED, as we will see, artists were
encouraged to downplay the connections between television and art video as fields of
cultural production after the first year of experimental programming.

It became relatively common for artists in the 1960s to collaborate with non-artist
experts to produce works that demanded highly specialized skills or fabrication
88
facilities.
130
Many of the artists associated with minimalism, for example, employed
industrial fabrication facilities to produce their work, and most artists producing
lithographs in the 1960s worked with master printmakers.
131
At WGBH, however, the
amount of creative input and control exercised by station staff—who were expected to
provide support to the artists in residence—appears to have been unusually high by the
standards of visual art production in the 1960s.
132
It stands to reason that the highly
collaborative structure of television production would present challenges as well as
opportunities to artists accustomed to more autonomous approaches to making art.
Fred Barzyk offers the most obvious examples of the blurring of categorical and
professional distinctions. In a statement of support for a grant application to the National
Endowment for the Arts, Nam June Paik wrote:

130
A practice that was often frowned upon or studiously ignored in the modern period.
See R. Krauss “The Originality of the Avant-Garde” and “Sincerely Yours” in The
Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1986), 151-194; or Carolyn Jones Machine in the Studio:Constructing the Postwar
American Artist (University of Chicago Press; Chicago, 1998).

131
In 1957, Universal Limited Art Editions, a printmaking studio, opened on Long Island.
Universal Limited Art Editions provided artists with access to facilities and master
printers, and was followed by the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles in
1960, at which point, print production in America entered a period of vigorous growth.
See University of New Mexico Art Museum, Catalogue Raisonne: Tamarind
Lithography Workshop, Inc., 1960-1970, (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico
Art Museum, 1989); Leah Rosenblatt Lehmbeck, Proof: The Rise of Printmaking in
Southern California, (Los Angeles: Getty Publications and Norton Simon Museum,
2011).

132
The exception to this offered by Andy Warhol, who made a show of his collaborative
practice, is discussed in detail in Caroline Jones, Machine in the Studio. While many
conceptual artists suggested collaboration in their proffering of instructions that could be
carried out by anyone, their maintenance of control at the level of the work’s fundamental
idea or concept presents a very different set of problems to a discussion of collaboration
and authorship.

89
In 1967/68, 69 and 70, I created following artworks in WGBH BOSTON
1. Medium is Medium
2. Boston Sinfonie [sic] Experiment
3. 9/23 Experiments
4. Videosynthesizer and Video Commune,
These pieces have been already established as the the [sic] video classics
and have been played repeatedly at WHITNEY Museum, Guggenheim,
MoMA, pompidou [sic] Center and Ludwig museum Cologne….

If I may confess now, these masterpiece have been not by me, but by Fred
Barzyk and me the ratio of artistic input has been about 70-30, in Fred’s
favour, often Olivia Tappan and David Atwood helped also—But the …
Dynamic of Fred’s personality played the crucial role.
133

While Paik, a provocateur and close friend of Barzyk’s, may have enjoyed the
gesture of sharing authorship of his work with a television producer, in other cases, the
authorial role played by Barzyk and other technical staff was not acknowledged so
openly. In 1969, WGBH aired its first full-length program of video art, The Medium is
the Medium, featuring works by Nam June Paik, Allan Kaprow, and James and Mimi
Seawright, among others. To produce this program, artists were invited to work with the
support of station technicians to realize works that employed more sophisticated editing
and processing effects than any artists working with portable cameras had access to—
works that would be aired nationally on PBS affiliates. This project offers some
particularly telling examples of disruption in the traditional identities of visual artist and
television professional. Allan Kaprow and James and Mimi Seawright’s contributions to

133
Nam June Paik, “I support Barzyk NEA Project 100-130%” in Fred Barzyk: The
Search for a Personal Vision in Broadcast Television, (Milwaukee, Wisconsin: Patrick
and Beatrice Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University, 2001), 9-10. This three-
page handwritten note is reproduced in full in the catalogue of an exhibition celebrating
Barzyk’s career in television.

90
The Medium is the Medium were arguably produced in full collaboration with, rather than
merely with the assistance of, station staff.
134

Allan Kaprow’s work for The Medium is the Medium, titled Hello, was conceived
as a happening that used the technology of television, rather than as videotape per se.
Gene Youngblood describes an arrangement of “direct closed-circuit inputs from a
number of locations in the Boston-Cambridge area: a line to M.I.T., another to a hospital,
another to an educational videotape library, and a fourth to Boston Airport. These were
interconnected with five TV cameras and twenty-seven monitors.”
135
(Fig. 20) Kaprow
had people at each location watching the live feeds from the other locations, and
requested that they wave, and say “hello” or “I see you” whenever they saw someone
they knew, or an image of themselves, while he controlled the switchboard for the camera
feeds.
Having completed the happening and recorded an hour of tape, Kaprow walked
away from the project, leaving station staff with the task of transforming sixty minutes of
unedited tape into an artwork six minutes long and suitable for presentation on public
television.
136
Barzyk took on the project, and the result was a videotape that carried
Kaprow’s name and Barzyk’s editorial decisions. These decisions went beyond choosing
sections of tape and organizing them—though that in itself was important, with quick

134
For a comprehensive description and discussion of each of the works presented in The
Medium is the Medium see James A. Nadeau “The Medium is the Medium: The
Convergence of Video, Art and Television at WGBH,” (masters thesis, MIT, 2006).

135
Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, (New York: Dutton, 1970), 343.

136
Nadeau, “The Medium is the Medium,” 53.

91
cuts and repetition giving the work rhythm, emphasizing a sense of barely controlled and
ebullient chaos. In fact, they extended to the superimposition of text; temporal
manipulation (parts of the footage are sped up, slowed down, and reversed); and the
introduction of footage not included in the original taping, as well as color in select areas.
The difficulty encountered in addressing Barzyk’s authorial involvement is
revealed by a brief consideration of the published discussions of the work. Gene
Youngblood discusses The Medium is the Medium on pages 298-314 of his book
Expanded Cinema, but his discussion of Kaprow’s contribution is offered later, on pages
343-344, and he addresses the work exclusively in terms of the happening, not the edited
version used in the broadcast.
137
Paul Ryan’s 1988 essay “A Genealogy of Video”
differentiates Kaprow’s contribution from the rest by stating that the artist “...broadcasted
randomly switched signals from a system of cameras and monitors set up around
Boston,” implying (misleadingly) that, unlike the other works in the program, Kaprow’s
work was broadcast live. Although Ryan was correct in stating that the other works,
unlike Kaprow’s, “relied heavily on processing the image on the surface of the screen,”
his presentation of Hello erases the substantial role of post-production in its making.
138

James Nadeau, describing an important passage from Hello, offers an interpretation of
Kaprow’s meaning that is initially unproblematic, but then begins to break down as the
effects of post-production insert themselves into his reading:
Toward the end of the video, there is a shot on one of the monitors of the
Earth as seen from Apollo 8. The Apollo 8 mission was the first manned

137
Youngblood, Expanded Cinema.

138
Paul Ryan, “A Genealogy of Video,” Leonardo, vol. 21, no. 1, (1988): 40.

92
spacecraft to leave Earth’s gravity and orbit the moon. The mission took
place from December 21
st
to the 27
th
1968. Was it inserted here to imply
that Kaprow desired to make Hello a global event? [….] The penultimate
shot of Hello was of the moon. The whole moon was off to the right of the
screen as the text “Hello” is spelled out with the final “o” overlapping the
moon.
139

It is probable that the inclusion of the lunar image on one of the monitors during
the happening was the result of a decision made by Kaprow. However, the decision to
include this image in the final edit, to draw attention to it by the superimposition of text,
(Fig. 21) and then to colorize the screen displaying the moon blue (in an otherwise black
and white tape), was Barzyk's. In the final shot of Hello, a full color close-up of a video
monitor playing footage from the original taping pans out to reveal a portable camera and
tape-reel next to the monitor (Fig. 22). This footage was, as Nadeau pointed out, “added
in post-production.”
Nadeau reads the emphasis on technology at the end of the video—the Apollo
image and the video camera—as an attempt on Kaprow’s part to create “a conceptual link
between technology, communication and personal empowerment.”
140
Although Nadeau
states only a few pages earlier that Kaprow had nothing at all to do with the editing
process, he does not question the attribution of meaning in these decisions to Kaprow.
141

As the tape included in The Medium is the Medium that made the most extensive use of

139
Nadeau, “The Medium is the Medium,” 60-61.

140
Nadeau, “The Medium is the Medium,” 62.

141
On page 85 Nadeau writes: “Barzyk edited the broadcast version down from the hour
long ‘performance’ or ‘tele-happening’ to just six minutes. Kaprow was not involved
with the editing and called it a ‘video tape digest,’ with no relation to the piece itself.”

93
the station’s editing facilities, the structure and meaning of Hello was unquestionably
shaped in post-production, but has been treated in existing accounts as if the uncut
footage contained the roadmap to and essence of the final work—or, in some cases, as if
it were the final work. This treatment is the result of an assumption that places absolute
authorial power in one pair of hands. This assumption is based in the modern art-world
myth of the artist as a solitary producer—a myth that has no space in which to place the
collaborative quality of television production.
While Paik celebrated Barzyk’s active collaborative role, it appears that the
television producer’s role in making Hello was problematic for Kaprow. The artist’s
virtual disowning of the work is one indication of this. In addition, an exchange between
Fred Barzyk and John Minkowsky, in a 2006 interview, reveals some anxiety about the
issue of authorship and collaborations between artists and station staff:
Fred Barzyk: Yeah. But our attitude was that, you know, they’re the
artists, they’re in charge, we don’t…
John Minkowsky: I understand….
FB: …. politically speaking it was very important, because usually in
television, we’re responsible for the final content, the final look. This one
was really handing over of everything…. So I was the buffer, I looked like
I was in charge, but actually the artists were in charge.
JM: And that was in black and white now….
FB: The Kaprow? Yeah, there was no way to do color with those kind of
cameras.
142

This exchange is fragmented, and a little confusing, but we can take two things
from it. First, it was very important to Barzyk to emphasize the control that artists had
over their own work, calling himself a “buffer.” Second, the oblique reference to the

142
Fred Barzyk and John Minkowsky, “Fred Barzyk Interviewed by John Minkowsky”
WGBH Oral History Project (Boston, March 8, 2006), 35.

94
introduction of color into Kaprow’s tape shows both an awareness of the role of post-
production, and a desire to avoid any engagement with its potential ramifications. In a
recent interview, Barzyk reiterated his emphatic claim that his role was that of facilitator,
repeatedly calling himself a “midwife” who helped in the “birth” of the works made at
the station, and studiously avoiding any discussion about the conceptual effect of his edit
of the Kaprow tape. When pressed at a later point, however, he did concede that “yes, the
midwife can be an artist.”
143
I focus on this because I believe that it is important to
recognize how ambiguous the roles of technicians, producers and artists became at
WGBH, and how ambivalent some participants were about that ambiguity.
While Barzyk was very comfortable adopting a creative, and in some cases
authorial role, he was clearly uneasy about the adoption of the identity “artist” in a
context where the institution expected him to maintain a facilitating role. Barzyk, as a
television producer, was concerned first and foremost with challenging the conventions
of television. Openly challenging the conventions of the art world was not a priority. The
fact that he was so staunch in his claims that the artists were “in charge” shows that he
understood what was expected of artists, and did his best to allow them to maintain at
least the appearance of traditional authorial control, although he had introduced them into
a collaborative context where such absolute control was difficult, if not impossible, to
maintain. Ultimately, he left it up to artists to embrace or reject the shift in authorial
identity produced by the collaborative environment; regardless of any individual artists’
self image, however, many of the works produced at WGBH show clear evidence of the
collaborative process.

143
Fred Barzyk, Interview with the author, March 30, 2009.
95
Another video from The Medium is the Medium that was a work of conceptual
and aesthetic as well as technical collaboration was James and Mimi Seawright’s tape
Capriccio. In this tape Mimi Seawright, a professional modern dancer, and one of her
colleagues, Virginia Laidlaw, danced for the cameras, wearing monochrome bodysuits.
The work’s interest and its innovation are not in the dance primarily, but in the technical
means deployed to transform the dancers into abstract visual forms and patterns. Through
the use of a layered time-delay, the dancers multiply and overlap, they are reversed in
space to produce a symmetrical, Rorschach-like image, and they are extensively
colorized, each iteration of the dancer’s bodies appearing in a different broadcast color
(red, green or blue), with reversals back and forth from natural to polarized tonal
relationships.
In a 2006 interview, Barzyk remembers the origins of the technique used in this
work:
Now, this one, I think, was our most successful experiment. A production
assistant came to me and said, “You know, because you have a three-tube
camera—red, green, blue – did you ever think about taking each one of
those images from each one of tubes and putting it into a separate
videotape, then playing each one of those tapes back at a slightly off….
And you’d have a different kind of look?”
144

In the same interview he goes on to describe the development of Capriccio almost
exclusively in terms of the work of the station’s engineers in fulfilling the imagined
potential of the technology available. While the only question about the work’s
authorship on record is tied to the inclusion of Mimi Seawright as one of the work’s
authors (in older materials, she is not, while in more recent references to the work she is
fairly consistently listed as author along with her husband, James Seawright), it is clear

144
Fred Barzyk, interview by John Minkowsky, WGBH Oral History Project, (Boston:
WGBH Archive, March 8, 2006), 35-36.
96
that this work could not have been conceived, let alone made, without the involvement of
(often nameless) station staff.
Nam June Paik’s Video Opera #1, an amalgam of abstract process video, layered
shots of three unnamed young men, and footage of a dancer, with a voiceover by Paik,
appears to have used the same innovation. The closing moments of his tape feature a
topless dancer, gyrating on a pedestal, shot from three-color cameras, one of which was
set exclusively to its blue tube, and another to red. (Figs. 26 and 27). The primary
distinction between Paik’s strategy and that of the Seawrights is that instead of using time
delay to layer the different chromatic signals, he used three cameras in different
positions, and maintained a synchronized time signal. Paik’s dancer, who never moved
off her pedestal, was shown from a distance, in a three-quarter frontal view in full color;
from a mid-distance, shot from the side in blue; and in a red close-up.
The use of one convention (such as the use of a familiar presentation format) to
make room for the undermining of another, was a consistent strategy at WGBH. As
innovative as the project was in its engagement with the forms of both art and television,
much of its content, as Marshall McLuhan would say, was “old media.” In particular, the
gendered divisions of labor in many of the works in The Medium is the Medium stand
out as examples of typical (if not in fact regressive) engagements with the codes of
representation in both high and popular culture—as was the case in a great many of the
works produced in the residency program. Both the Paik and Seawright videos relied
heavily on the objectified female body (as did Otto Piene’s contribution, Electronic Light
Ballet, succinctly described by Nadeau as comprised of “...22 tanks of helium,
97
searchlights, 800 feet polyethylene tubing, and a 95 lb girl”
145
). In the case of Capriccio,
we see an activation of the high-art habit of using the female body as an empty vessel or
screen through or on which formal problems are exercised.
146
In Paik’s contribution,
practically identical subject matter (dancing woman subjected to three-color processing),
is able—through the minor distinctions provided by the small stage on which she stands,
bared skin, and rhythmic gyrations instead of the slow extensions of modern dance—to
span the gap between high art and the popular image of the go-go girl or exotic dancer.
This meeting of the avant-garde and retrograde is a thread that runs throughout
production in both stations, and appears not to have reached the conscious attention of
participants.

Conventional ideas about authorship were challenged not only in the production
of artist’s video at WGBH, but in other programming as well. This can be seen in a
weekly television show that went into production in 1967, the same year that the station
received funding for the institution of an artist’s residency program, and also under
Barzyk’s supervision. What’s Happening, Mr. Silver? will be discussed in some detail in
Chapter Four, but there was one episode of the program that is particularly telling in this

145
Nadeau, “The Medium is the Medium,” 63.

146
From Edouard Manet’s Olympia and Pablo Picasso’s Demoiselles D’Avignon, to
Alfred Steiglitz and Edward Weston’s photographic fracturing and abstraction of the
female body, the modernist tradition of woman as passive carrier (rather than active
expresser) of meaning has been well documented by feminist scholars, Carol Duncan in
particular investigating the gendered ideology underpinning the alleged universalism of
Modernist painting. Carol Duncan, The Aesthetics of Power: Essays in Critical Art
History, (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

98
context, titled “Madness and Intuition.” Barzyk, the show’s creator and producer, did not
necessarily intend “Madness and Intuition” to be an artwork (if he did, he never actively
promoted it as such), yet he based its entire structure on his interest in the conceptual
strategies of figures such as Paik and John Cage. He described his approach in an
interview with John Minkowsky, in 2006, stating, “I’d heard about John Cage from his
book, and I said, ‘If every piece of sound is music, why can’t every picture be TV?’”
147

“Madness and Intuition” consisted of activities taking place on the station sound-
stage that were picked up by a number of cameras and intercut with existing footage from
the station archives and abstract imagery produced using oil, dye, and an overhead
projector.
148
On the soundstage there was a mattress, on which the program’s host, David
Silver and a young woman—both apparently naked—reclined, reading from and
discussing a book; there were two residents of a nearby seniors home—a man and a
woman—seated in leather chairs on pedestals. There was a biker in full regalia, riding his
motorcycle in circles through the space, and other figures who came and went, seemingly
at random. The pre-recorded footage that was intercut with this live feed included images
from wildlife documentaries, contemporary dramatic productions, previous tapings of
What’s Happening, Mr. Silver? and footage from a series of comedic instructional films
demonstrating proper etiquette and daily safety, among other things. The show was

147
Fred Barzyk, interview by John Minkowsky. WGBH Oral History Project. Boston:
WGBH Archive, (March 8, 2006), 6.

148
This method of producing abstract projected patterns had been popularized in San
Francisco, at the psychedelic parties and acid tests of the Haight in the mid-1960s, many
by a an “abstract expressionist painter... named Bill Ham.” Charles Perry, The Haight-
Ashbury: A History, (New York: Random House, 1984), 9.

99
live—meaning that the activities in the studio were broadcast in real time, as were any
edits. Barzyk, working out of the control room, directed cuts and mixing, and invited
people in the studio—some technicians who were regularly part of the show’s
production, and other non-professional visitors—to call out whenever they were bored, to
let him know when to cut to another camera or to existing footage. Even audience
members at home were encouraged to call in and make suggestions.
149
Halfway through,
Barzyk invited those in the control room to take over entirely, and he left. Jonathan Price
presented Barzyk’s description of the process in a 1972 article in Harpers:
“At that time, too, we began talking to the engineers,” says Barzyk.
Previously each job in the studio was isolated from the others. “I said,
‘Everyone’s going to be in this show.’ On the regular networks you have a
cameraman and that’s all he does. We took the lighting person, and put
him behind the camera, and took the engineer and let him direct, and put
the cameraman over on the controls.” Mixing previously segregated jobs,
Barzyk found people got on better with each other—and the show took on
the quirks and interests, the imaginative bursts of each. A new mélange, a
spirit of group activity, emerged.
150

This abandonment of control over a project on which he was named director and
producer, in favor of a non-hierarchical collaboration, makes it clear that Barzyk was
already questioning conventions of authorship, responsibility, and professional identity
when he began working with artists in the studio. The traditions that he valued, and that
shaped his approach to directing an artists’ residency program, were those of John Cage,
Nam June Paik and Fluxus, practices that celebrated chance and regularly sought to
undermine the cults of originality, individuality and authority. As cautious as he might

149
Fred Barzyk, interview by Selena Colburn, part one. WGBH Oral History Project,
(Boston: WGBH Archive, August 25, 1998), 16.

150
Jonathan Price, “Video Pioneers: From banality to beauty: TV as a new form of visual
art” Harpers Magazine, (June 1972): 88.
100
have been about openly undermining the authority of individual artists, he was paying
attention to figures, such as Cage or Paik, who embraced such challenges. He used
related strategies that were emerging among the artistic avant-garde to attack the
professional hierarchies on which the collaborative studio environment relied.
Barzyk’s invitation to viewers to call in to participate in determining the shape
and direction of the program as it progressed shows an attitude toward audiences that was
indicative of what may be the most radical aspect of this project of allowing
contemporary art practices to shape television. I call it radical not because it invited
participation, but because that invitation was part of a general disregard for audiences
almost impossible to imagine in today’s world of ratings, “likes,” and “shares.”
Audiences were of interest to Barzyk not in their role as passive consumers, but as active
participants. When asked what viewer responses were to programs like What’s
Happening, Mr. Silver? and The Medium is the Medium, Barzyk replied with an anecdote
about a woman who had called in after the program, “We had…the responsibility of
taking the phone calls after the show, because people would call in either with us or
against us…and one lady called and I got it and she asked me never to do that again
because I was giving her brain cancer.”
151
When asked about the general response to the
experimental programming he had initiated and the lack of records in the WGBH
archives tracking such responses, Barzyk replied,
...here’s a cultural difference. If we were a commercial station we would
have been very interested in the ratings and how we’re doing and all the
rest, but you know, we were playing to a pretty closed group of people

151
Fred Barzyk, interview by Selena Colburn, part one. WGBH Oral History Project,
(Boston: WGBH Archive, August 25, 1998), 17.

101
when you really think about it. I mean we were playing to the Rockefeller
Foundation, we were playing to the NEA, we were playing to the Dance
Committee, Art in America, I mean, you know, it was like this. And if we
hit an audience, we went “wow!”
152

For Barzyk and many of the artists he brought in to participate, the ordinary audience “at
home” was more valuable as a creative resource than as a source of approval or ratings.
Despite this apparent disregard for the happiness of the general audience however, an
investigation of the framing of the art videos that were aired on WGBH shows that there
was an attempt to meet audiences halfway. As content became more and more
disconcerting, producers found ways of trying to smooth the transition for more
traditional viewers.
As the individual representative of WGBH, and the television professional most
involved in the production of art at the station, Barzyk’s investment in challenging his
own authorial control—his claim to be a mere buffer or midwife—must be understood in
terms of his casual disinvestment in the myth of the artist as an isolated, independent and
autonomous producer. Just as WGBH became an environment where the roles of artist,
director, producer, technician and audience member were often productively confused, so
it also became one in which traditional on-screen roles were transformed by and absorbed
into the new medium of video art, through the very process of trying to make that
medium more accessible to audiences.

Approximately a decade after Jazz Images, once the artists in residence program
had been in place for four years, Barzyk returned to his project of developing visual

152
Fred Barzyk, interview with the author, March 30, 2009.
102
imagery to accompany music, working with the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO). In
1972, Video Variations paired eight artists with recent recordings of classical works
performed by the BSO, inviting them to produce visual accompaniment to the music.
Great efforts were made in the framing of the works to make the new visual material
accessible and palatable to the audience who regularly tuned in for presentations of the
BSO. By focusing on these framing strategies, rather than on the individual works as
isolated objects, we can begin to understand the process of negotiation involved in
bringing the avant-gardist strategies of the emerging field of video art into the context of
public television.
The program began with a familiar shot of the orchestra and the swelling
cacophony of pre-show tuning, which regular viewers would recognize from WGBH’s
regular televised presentations of the BSO. But the editors of Video Variations quickly
disabused public television viewers of the impression that they were watching a
traditional taping of the Orchestra, as an image from Nam June Paik’s contribution—a
bust of Beethoven transformed through video processing into a glowing, psychedelic
figure—rapidly zoomed toward the screen (fig. 28). A variety of images from the
upcoming videos followed, including abstract linear forms, topless dancing girls, and still
photographs of anti-war demonstrations and victims of the conflict in Vietnam.
After this short introductory passage, which functioned as a background to the
title and provenance of the show, the picture cut to a man in a suit, his back to the
camera, looking into a bank of television monitors. He turned to face the camera, (a
gesture repeated in the monitors behind him, which fed back the image recorded by the
camera) and offered the following introduction:
103
There are many qualities that contribute to making a symphony orchestra a
great symphony orchestra: the passion, the precision, the musicianship of
the playing, the brilliance and judgment of the conductor. Long disciplined
hard work. Perhaps the most fundamental one is an understanding of the
tools with which music is made. Beyond an ability to read and interpret a
score, the musicians must know the character and the full range of the
instruments they play, to stretch their capabilities beyond what composers
might ask of them, so that they can give us all the power, all the subtleties
and nuances which are inherent in the music. It is therefore not surprising
that the Boston Symphony Orchestra, from its long experience in televised
performances, has recognized that it has, in a sense, added a new,
electronic instrument to the orchestra, with a character and potential of its
own, still unexplored, that can enhance or enliven the visual aspects of
individual musical works at the same time that it reaches a vastly wider
audience. Artists both in music and the visual arts have been flattering
each other for years by imitation. From program music which endeavors to
paint musical pictures of countryside, to an abstract painter’s effort to use
colors as if they were musical notes. This is the sort of venture which
makes purists nervous. Wagner, though hardly a purist, and himself a great
influence on 19
th
century painters, felt so strongly that the eye was a
distraction to the ear that he wanted to conceal the orchestra in
performances of his operas. But I think that even he might admit that now,
for the first time in history, there is a medium—television of all things—
that’s responsible and flexible enough to give real promise of that
mythical union of the arts which artists have long been seeking. So,
enough words, my name is Russell Connor. I’m honored to be one of the
eight visual artists that have been invited to share this adventure. The
orchestra is on stage. The baton and the brush, so to speak, are raised.
153

These words work hard to integrate potentially radical—or at least deeply
unfamiliar imagery—into familiar and safe institutions: the BSO and National
Educational Television. More conceptually, the artworks introduced are rhetorically
linked to well established cultural forms: classical music, painting, and opera. Added to
these actual and rhetorical connections was the performative conciliation offered by the
presence of Russell Connor, the well-established host of Museum Open House. A brief

153
Video Variations, Author’s transcript. In a conversation with the author on June 4,
2010, Connor confirmed that he prepared this text, as well as the presentations on
Museum Open House.
104
overview of the content of some of the works included in Video Variations may help
clarify the reason for this rigorous domestication of the new.
The first work shown, by Tsai Wen-ying, was relatively nonthreatening. It
consisted of footage of a kinetic sculpture the artist had produced as artist-in-residence at
MIT. The sculpture consisted of a field of metal rods that reacted to sound—in this case
the pre-recorded sound of the BSO playing the first movement of Franz Joseph Haydn’s
Symphony no. 55, “The Schoolmaster.” The artist videotaped the vibrating sculpture
from a number of different directions simultaneously, and then mixed and processed the
footage, producing abstract patterns that moved in time with the music. Like the
Seawright video—Capriccio—discussed above, this tape makes extensive use of
colorization, polarization, and reversals to transform the object from metal instrument to
flashing, vibrating fields of color.
Stan VanDerBeek’s response to Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe also followed the
model of transforming footage of objects in the world into abstract forms. In this case, the
objects used were dancers that the artist superimposed and mixed with abstract linear
forms produced using an oscillator.
154
This formula, of combining footage of a (usually
female) dancer with oscillator or feedback imagery, and processing it heavily to make
abstract or dream-like images was—as noted in my discussion of The Medium is the
Medium—common in the context of television studio production.
155
In Video Variations,

154
The oscillator was one of a number of technologies that allowed the production of
video images sans-camera, by the direct input of electrical impulses.

155
The frequent use of performers offers an interesting twist into the question of the
“narcissism” of early video artists, claimed by Rosalind Krauss in her 1976 article
“Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism.” Krauss reads the frequent appearance of artists
105
there were two more works that followed this formula—one by James Seawright, in a
development of Capriccio, and tape by the show’s host, Russell Connor, who, despite his
day-job as a television personality, identified as an artist.
The most potentially troubling of the works included in Video Variations was
Nam June Paik’s, developed in response to the third movement of Beethoven’s Piano
Concerto no. 4 in G. Rather than merely produce visual accompaniment to the music, or
use the music as background to a project that was primarily visual, Paik’s video
engaged—aggressively—with the composer and the culture of orchestral concert music.
Most of the video is composed of three bodies of footage that are subjected to varying
degrees of abstraction through video processing. These include footage of the BSO
playing; footage of a bank of candles, shot in low light with a mirror behind them that is
moved up and down; and footage of a bust of Beethoven, which is heavily colorized
green and pink/purple. The orchestra usually looks like an orchestra, but is subjected to
colorization, polarization, and electronic overdrawing. The candle flames, shot in low
light, sometimes look like an array of relatively natural golden lights; at other times, Paik
processes them to look like a school of grey spermatozoa with bright pink heads,
swimming around in unison. There are three climactic moments before the end of the
piece of music, each given a different valence in Paik’s interpretation. In the first, a pair
of hands reaches from off camera to vigorously slap the bust of Beethoven. In a letter

in their own video works as evidence of narcissism, tied to the ability of video to function
as a sort of electronic mirror. I would suggest that in many cases, artists working
independently with video found their own bodies to be the most accessible and easily
controlled objects available in their exploration of the possibilities of movement in the
new medium. Artists working at the television studios, who were very well funded
compared to independent video artists, were able to hire performers and often did.

106
Paik wrote to Barzyk in October 1970, he says “Around in 6
th
minute, we put Beethoven
being beaten.”
156
In the second, an array of bright lights swarm and zoom around the
screen leaving long trails that become increasingly tangled as the path of the lights
become faster and more snarled. The third climactic moment in the music is coupled with
an image of a grand piano, burning, in the studio (Fig 29). At the end of the piece, all of
these images cut into one another with increasing speed, and more completely abstract
images appear in the mix. Eventually, the piano collapses. It is not surprising that Paik, as
a classically trained pianist and musical iconoclast, would engage with the source music
in this complex and irreverent way, but it is fair to say that fans of the BSO broadcasts
were for the most part unprepared for this kind of material.
The difficulty that Paik’s approach—with his abused Beethoven and burned grand
piano—might present for fans of traditional orchestral music is obvious, but other works
had the potential to make viewers uneasy as well. The now-ubiquitous topless dancer in
Connor’s work was made relatively palatable by the long tradition of the nude in art, and
the manner in which she was displayed: under low light, focus slightly off, her hair
covering her nipples. Beyond these attacks on cultural and moral propriety, one other
work presented potential difficulty. Jackie Cassen built her video, paired with
Beethoven’s Eroica around photographs of demonstrations. While the photographs
chosen did not appear to privilege any cause or political position, the angry images of
demonstrators at hardhat rallies and desperate figures at anti-war rallies brought the
conflicts that dominated contemporary American public life into a forum that was

156
Nam June Paik, “Letter to Fred Barzyk, October 22, 1970,” Paik Correspondence,
1970, WGBH Archives, Boston.
107
generally kept separate from the political.
157
The world of classical music and high
culture had traditionally presented a source of escape from the uncomfortable facts of
contemporary life, while this work insisted on a collision of the two.
As mentioned above, Russell Connor’s presence as the host of Video Variations
seemed calculated to ameliorate the discomfort that some viewers were likely to
experience when faced with this new approach to presenting music on television. Connor
played an important role in arts programming on public educational television and is a
particularly curious figure in the history of video art. His television career began with
Museum Open House, an arts program that started airing in the 1950s with host Brian
O’Doherty. As told by Barzyk, WGBH’s mobile unit would be taken to the MFA once a
week, where a special display of works would be set up to be discussed, airing at 8:30 on
Monday nights.
158
In the beginning the show was hosted by O’Doherty, but in 1963
Russell Connor, then a young painter working in the education department of the MFA,
became the show’s weekly “TV Lecturer,” and remained in the position until the show
was cancelled in the early 1970s.
159

157
This collection of images has a great deal in common with those presented in Garry
Winogrand’s book Public Relations, (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1977).
Winogrand’s photographs, taken in the 1960s, bring the world of museum opening into
the same same discursive space as those of anti-war demonstrations and hardhat rallies.

158
Fred Barzyk, interview with the author, Boston, March 30, 2009.

159
Topics in 1965 included “Tribal Carving from New Guinea” (25 October 1965) “The
other Side of the Canvas: Paintings by Degas, Renoir and Matisse Shown Next to
Sculpture” (8 November 1965), “The Chic of Arabesque, Art Nouveau in High Fashion
and Low” (27 December 1965). The February 1967 Program Guide shows listings for
programs including “The Age of Rembrandt” (13 February 1967), “Scupture of the Old
Kingdom: Egypt” (20 February 1967), and “Degas” (27 February 1967). Then, in the
June 1967 Program Guide, an announcement appeared for a new Thursday night
108
Connor presented Video Variations with the same casual-yet-cultured air that he
brought to Museum Open House, effectively bridging the gap between the “traditional”
fare of museum and symphony that had dominated cultural programming on educational
television until the late 1960s, and the new, experimental approach typified by Video
Variations. Its abstract, psychedelic imagery, its naked dancing girls and its politics are
all, arguably, made more palatable by virtue of Connor’s intervention.
In her history of video art, Catharine Elwes briefly discusses video art on
television in the United States, making much of the travesty of introduction and
explanation employed by programmers at the public television stations discussed here,
condemning their insistence on contextualizing these works. She writes, “Artists were
never allowed to overstrain the narrative expectations of the viewing population.”
160

Underlying her criticism seems to be a belief that the purpose of video art on television
(but nowhere else, apparently) was primarily to disrupt and shock. Failing to do so, she
implied, these artists failed to do anything of value. While Elwes’ position is not unusual,
it may be more productive to consider the strategies used to frame and contextualize
artworks on television as a meaningful text than to dismiss such material for having the
wrong meaning. The later re-use of these buffering or framing strategies as the content of

program, What’s Happening Mr. Silver?, and Museum Open House was replaced by a
program produced in New York called The Creative Person. All dates from WGBH,
Program Guide, (WGBH Archives, 1965-1967). The Creative Person, a National
Educational Television production that started airing in 1965, had sometimes aired before
Museum Open House. (Program Guide, February 1967). Museum Open House wasn’t
cancelled to open up the Monday night slot for something specific. Over the next few
years a variety of programs would air, including Success Through Word Power (20
September 1969), andWorld Press (5 January 1970).

160
Elwes, Video Art, 124.

109
artworks, by artists who participated in the experimental projects, demonstrates the value
of this approach.
In 1964, Connor interviewed Marcel Duchamp for Museum Open House. The
interview was taped on the occasion of an exhibition featuring the work of Duchamp’s
brother, Jacques Villon, an “impressionist-cubist” now known primarily, outside of cubist
circles, as Marcel Duchamp’s brother.
161
In 1978—fourteen years later—Nam June Paik
produced a videotape at New York’s WNET-TV, Merce by Merce by Paik, which used
clips of the earlier Duchamp/Connor interview in a tape exploring the work of dancer
Merce Cunningham. Paik cut snippets of the Duchamp interview (Figs. 31 and 33) into a
more recent interview between Cunningham and Connor. The Cunningham/Connor
interview—conducted as part of the production of the Paik tape—intentionally followed
the same visual format as the 1964 Duchamp/Connor interview. Connor and Cunningham
discussed Duchamp, with the original interview playing on the monitor between them
(figs. 32 and 34), and some layering of the footage from the two interviews (Figs. 35 and
36), resulting in an echo effect as the two were collaged together. Connor’s presence
ensured the legibility of Paik’s comparison of Duchamp and Cunningham. Connor played
a structural function in the work, which required that he re-enact his earlier function as
host to more traditional cultural programming on public television. In doing so, the
interview-within-an-interview acted as a microcosm of the progress of Connor’s career.
After the cancellation of Museum Open House, Connor’s continued employment
as a television host (a role he clearly relished, day-job or not) relied, not on traditional
PBS educational/cultural programming, but on the new field of video art. Russell Connor

161
“Impressionist-cubist” was a designation used by Connor to describe Villon.
110
was a painter who was better known for his work on television, a charming man with
excellent diction who had a following of WGBH viewers—a population that valued
traditional forms of so-called high culture: painting, classical music, ballet, and
traditional theatrical productions. These viewers were set adrift in the late 1960s by new
programming developed to draw a younger, hipper audience. Connor was a man whose
primary expertise was explaining art, in an entertaining and nonthreatening manner, to
the audience at home. He wanted to stay in the game even as the field he worked in,
which fell into the same category as the broadcasting of ballet, orchestra, and opera, was
increasingly replaced by shows about folk music, political radicals, and space
exploration.
162

Connor found himself in the midst of a cluster of experimental projects,
conducted at WGBH and sometimes in collaboration with WNET in New York, many of
which were eventually broadcast nationally. Artists, poets, composers of symphonies for
Moog, dissatisfied theater students, dancers, and anyone else who drifted into the right
sphere of influence, were invited in to the WGBH studio B. It was Russell Connor’s job
to explain what they made to the more conservative viewers of public television. His

162
While children’s programming, news and and current affairs programming continued
to dominate programming at WGBH from the mid 1960s through the early 1970s,
significant shifts are visible in cultural programming. While most of the musical
programming up to the mid 1960s at WGBH was orchestral, nearly all of the musical
programming was identified as folk music by 1972. Rainbow Quest, a folk music
program featuring Pete Seeger and guests, described as “anti-TV TV” was produced
through 1965-67, and remained in rotation at WGBH through the early 1970s. Kit
McFarlane, “Pete Seeger’s ‘Rainbow Quest’ the Anti-TV, TV” Pop Matters, (26 May
2010): http://www.popmatters.com/pm/tools/full/125476. Accessed July 7, 2012. Other
contemporary music programs in regular rotation in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s on
WGBH included a live performance program called Mixed Bag and folk music program
Sonia Malkine On Campus.

111
smooth, Museum Open House voice and his cordial swagger provided a much needed
buffer between the Old Culture previously favored by public broadcasting, and the
experimental projects directed at the younger generation.
Connor also produced some video art. As mentioned above, he made one of the
works in Video Variations. A later piece, Art Talker (1980), demonstrates the extent to
which Connor was conscious of his role in the cultural transition at the station. In this
video, Connor uses chroma-key technology to superimpose a contemporary image of
himself over an old episode of Museum Open House.
163
The contemporary Connor
comments on the appearance, demeanor, and claims of his younger self. While a young,
black-and-white Connor in jacket and tie speaks earnestly about James Abbott McNiell
Whistler, his older, full-color counterpart wears bellbottom trousers, a casual yellow
jacket and red turtleneck, sports a moustache and longer hair (figs. 37 and 38). The
Connor of 1980 spoke about the Connor of 1963 in the same tone and style that his
subject used to talk about Whistler’s paintings. He discussed his conservatively short
hair, called him a “callow fellow,” a “ham” and remarked on his genuine idealism. He
pointed out the fact that he was an artist. “I may look more like an artist than he does” he
said, then confessed that the younger Connor gave much more of his time to his practice
as a painter before the television career took over.
164

163
“Chroma-keyed” or just “keyed” video refers to a technique in which a synthesizer or
processor is used to lift out areas of video based on color or tone, and replace them with
signal from another source. This other source may be footage taken simultaneously with
another camera, footage from the same camera on a time delay, pre-recorded footage, or
cameraless electronic signal. It is widely known by the phrase “blue-screen.”

164
http://main.wgbh.org/wgbh/NTW/ES/Video/art111.html

112
Connor, a public figure shaped by the meeting of museum and television, was
both living didactic panel and its author; his function was largely interpretive. That
interpretive function, however, became content in a number of works. This is seen
explicitly in Art Talker and Merce by Merce by Paik, but the use of Connor’s iconic
status was also essential to Man Ray Man Ray, discussed at the opening of this
chapter.
165

The production of video art at WGBH in the late 1960s challenged the myth of
the autonomous artist, initially in response to the requirements of television’s
collaborative environment, and then in direct engagements with the cultural conventions
of broadcasting. Works of video art were produced that artists could not have made
without the support of station staff and equipment, and television shows were made that
could not have been imagined without the integration of artists into the professional
culture of the television studio. WGBH employed the structures and conventions of
public television to integrate unfamiliar and experimental approaches into their cultural
programming. Historians such as Catherine Elwes have treated this integration as a
compromise, an attack on artistic autonomy. This dismissal fails to recognize the ongoing
productive effect that this integration had on video art by figures involved with WGBH
through the 1970s, as influential video artists such as Nam June Paik and William
Wegman went on to employ the cultural conventions of the institution of public
television as part of the content of their work.

165
http://main.wgbh.org/wgbh/NTW/ES/Video/man154.html
113
In 1967 at KQED, the first year of experimental programming funded by the
Rockefeller Foundation grant, there were works produced which, like those at WGBH,
engaged in frankly satirical ways with the culture of broadcast television. William Allen
and Bruce Nauman’s Flour Arrangements is the clearest example of this. Flour
Arrangements is a 24-minute tape in which Nauman uses a long, flat stick to push around
a pile of flour. Cameras recorded this activity from two vantage points: from directly
above, and from the side (Figs. 39 and 40).
While Nauman created an ever-changing series of ephemeral sculptures with the
pile of flour, two unnamed young men in tweedy suit-jackets and ties sat on a stage, with
a plant and an empty chair between them, discussing the artist’s progress, as well as
investment opportunities, their experiences with the new Polaroid camera, advances in
the shipping industry, and other things (Figs. 41 and 42). A film played sporadically on
the wall behind them. The man on the left smoked a pipe, and the one on the right a
cigarette. The camera cut back and forth between them. A fourth person, only seen on
camera at the very beginning of the video, usually heard as a muffled voice, was referred
to as “the interpreter.” All communication between Nauman and his two witnesses went
through the interpreter: “they want to know…” “Bruce says…” The use of multiple
cameras (highly uncommon in artists video in 1967), the frequent cuts between them
(indicating someone in a control room actively switching between cameras), and the talk
show set up, all attest to the fact that this is a work produced in a television studio. The
video uses a structure familiar to television viewers—the talk show—to frame an
approach to art and television that would be deeply unfamiliar to most viewers. It does
not appear, however, that the artists at KQED produced any more work of this nature
114
after 1968.
166
All obvious vestiges of the television world disappeared from subsequent
work, when an emphasis on abstraction and formal invention replaced them.
At KQED, Brice Howard made great efforts to shield art production and
experimental video production from the influences of the institutional culture of
television. Despite this, the grounding of the program in Howard and the program
funders’ (National Educational Television and the Rockefeller Foundation, primarily)
pedagogical and research oriented goals, ultimately had its own formative effect on the
videos produced at the station, resulting in works which were more strictly experimental
than those produced at WGBH—but not necessarily as autonomous as the rhetoric
surrounding them would imply—as we will see in the following chapter.
Institutional and professional structures were a determining factor in art
production at WGBH-TV in Boston, and at KQED-TV in San Francisco, in terms of
funding, leadership, and artistic autonomy. The nature of the relationship, however,
between the participants and staff at WGBH-TV supported the integration of art activities
into the context of business-as-usual at the station. As a result, the ideal of the
autonomous artist was altered at WGBH; collaborations between artists and station staff
frequently crossed the line of mere technical assistance. In San Francisco, an insistence
on freedom from broadcast requirements arguably allowed greater artistic freedom in
production, but it also led to the implementation of supplementary programming intended
to justify the expense of experimental activities—training and research programs in

166
One other noteworthy example is Richard Felciano’s 1968 Trio for Speakers, Screen
and Viewer which, entirely reliant on broadcast, set out to conduct a virtual symphony,
calling on viewers at home to fetch a variety of noisy household appliances (vacuums,
blenders, etc) and to turn them on and off in time with the artist’s prompts.
115
particular. These training and research programs, as we will see in the following chapter,
met with the modernist ideals championed at the NCET in surprising ways.
116

Figures to Chapter Two

Figure 12. William Wegman, Man Ray Man Ray, 1978, video still, WGBH-TV.

Figure 13. William Wegman, Man Ray Man Ray, 1978, video still, WGBH-TV.
117

Figure 14. William Wegman, Man Ray Man Ray, 1978, video still, WGBH-TV.

Figure 15. William Wegman, Man Ray Man Ray, 1978, video still, WGBH-TV.

118

Figures 16 and 17. William Wegman, Man Ray Man Ray, (left: “Éluard,” right: “Max
Ernst”), 1978, video still, WGBH-TV.

Figure 18. William Wegman, Man Ray Man Ray, 1978, video still, WGBH-TV.

119

Figure 19. William Wegman, Man Ray Man Ray, 1978, video still, WGBH-TV.

Figure 20. Allan Kaprow, Hello, in The Medium is the Medium, 1969, video still,
WGBH-TV.

120

Figure 21. Allan Kaprow, Hello, in The Medium is the Medium, 1969, video still,
WGBH-TV.

Figure 22. Allan Kaprow, Hello, in The Medium is the Medium, 1969, video still,
WGBH-TV.

121

Figure 23. Allan Kaprow, Hello, in The Medium is the Medium, 1969, video still,
WGBH-TV.

Figures 24 and 25. James and Mimi Seawright, Capriccio, in The Medium is the Medium,
1969, video still, WGBH-TV.

122

Figures 26 and 27. Nam June Paik, Video Opera #1, in The Medium is the Medium, 1969,
video still, WGBH-TV.

Figure 28. Nam June Paik, Video Variations 1972, video still, WGBH-TV.

123

Figure 29. Nam June Paik, Video Variations 1972, video still, WGBH-TV.

Figure 30. Publicity Still from an early episode of “Museum Open House” WGBH-TV c.
1960-63

124

Figures 31 and 32. Nam June Paik, Merce By Merce By Paik, 1978, video stills, WGBH-
TV.

Figures 33 and 34. Nam June Paik, Merce By Merce By Paik, 1978, video still, WGBH-
TV.

Figures 35 and 36. Nam June Paik, Merce By Merce By Paik, 1978, video still, WGBH-
TV.
125

Figures 37 and 38. Russell Connor, Art Talker, 1980, video still, WGBH-TV.

Figure 39. Bruce Nauman and William Allen, Flour Arrangements, 1967, video still,
Pacific Film Archive.

126

Figure 40. Bruce Nauman and William Allen, Flour Arrangements, 1967, video still,
Pacific Film Archive.

Figure 41 and 42. Bruce Nauman and William Allen, Flour Arrangements, 1967, video
stills, Pacific Film Archive.
127
Chapter Three: Abstraction and Instrumentality

The reason that the story of the counterculture as an entity has not been
told in the history of art is that there is no history of hybridity. There is no
category for the uncategorizeable, no history of art on the border of nonart.
If there were such a category, it would undoubtedly tell an interesting
story, which would help explain a great deal of what is taking place in
contemporary culture.
167

In 1975, KQED-TV in San Francisco funded the production of a pilot for a
dramatic television series based on Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia: A Novel, a work of
speculative fiction self-published January of that year under the imprint Banyan Tree
Books.
168
This epistolary novel is composed of the collected dispatches and diary entries
of William Weston, the first American journalist to be invited to report on the
independent and highly isolationist nation of Ecotopia—once Oregon, Washington, and
Northern California—which had seceded from the United States twenty years before, in
order to adopt a “stable-state” ecosystem.
169
The book uses the armature of the reporter’s
visit to present a possible model for an environmentally sustainable and socially equitable
society.

167
Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner “The Counterculture Experiment: Consciousness and
Encounters at the Edge of Art” in West of Center: Art and the Countercultural
Experiment in America, 1965-1977, (Denver and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2012), xxv.

168
Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia: A Novel, (Bantam Books; New York, Toronto, London,
Sydney, Auckland, 1990; first published by Banyan Tree Books, January 1975).
Condensations of the book would go on to be published in the Oregon Times in October
1975 and November 1975, and Harper’s Weekly in May 1976. It would proceed to
multiple printings between 1977 and 1990 under Bantam Books.

169
Callenbach, Ecotopia, 18-23.

128
The pilot, fourteen minutes in length, transformed the product of secession-via-
threat-of-nuclear-terrorism into a state-sanctioned experiment established by the United
States Congress as the “Environmental Research Territory, Ecotopia... a testing ground
where Americans can experiment with ways of living which may prove more viable for
the future.”
170
In the pilot, the increasing isolation of Ecotopia leads to a public inquiry
about activity in the otherwise independent territory. Aside from this change in the
origins of Ecotopia, the first half of the program follows the beginning of the book
faithfully, if in a predictably simplified form. At first, Ecotopia looks like any other
television drama of the period, as Weston is debriefed by government officials, travels to
Ecotopia, and meets representatives of the idyllic community on his arrival. Clear
comparisons are made between the gritty, overcrowded, and culturally degraded
dystopian future America that he leaves behind, and the verdantly green utopian
community he arrives in. As his silent, high-speed maglev train arrives, he notes that the
street outside his window, once full of drunks and porn, now looks like some “old
fashioned garden street.” Shared bicycles have replaced automobiles, and agribusiness
has been replaced with small, low-yield communal farms.
It is at the end of Weston’s first day in Ecotopia that the pilot made its most
significant deviation from the plot of the book. Rather than continuing with Weston’s
education in the ways of Ecotopia, he was shown settling in to his room, and turning on
the television. The remaining portion of the pilot—half of its full length, at just over

170
Author’s transcription, Ecotopia: A Visual Essay, based on Ecotopia by Ernest
Callenback, 1975, 14.5 min. Directed by Robert Zagone; Zelda Schiller-Fink, Assistant
Art Director; Marty Fink, Production Manager; Stephen Beck, Don Hallock, Paul
Kaufman.

129
seven minutes—is an Ecotopian television show. This programming, product of a utopian
future world build around ideals of environmental sustainability and social equality, was
made by producer Robert Zagone, and Stephen Beck, an artist who had been deeply
involved with activities at KQED’s National Center for Experiments in Television
(NCET). Using the Beck Direct Video synthesizer, which he built as an artist-in-
residence at the NCET, Beck created a sequence of images that moved between
schematic illustrations of connections between humans and the natural world, and
abstractions, shifting between imagery captured with a video camera and imagery
produced sans-camera, using the synthesizer.
171

In one passage, following a series of abstract, textured, multi-colored planes, a
circular form filled the screen. Surrounded by a ring of animated fire, it took on the
appearance of a flat, gold-plate sun. Inside it, patterns reminiscent of the interior of cells
appeared, vaguely organic forms floating and wheeling on the screen (Fig. 43). The video
contained a number of recognizable forms, such as the macro/micro combination of sun
and cell in the image below—or a later passage in which an animated glove that
transforms into a ring of trees took over the screen, wheeling around a single, central tree,
which then transformed into a simplified human form—but it presented them as part of a
hallucinatory, largely abstract visual space. These images, following the theme of the
program, explored the connection between human society and nature in a highly
experimental way.

171
The Beck Direct Video Synthesizer was built at the NCET between 1970-1972 with an
National Endowment For the Arts artist-in-residence grant.

130
The pilot—unsurprisingly given its unconventional embedding of a long passage
of non-narrative, psychedelic abstraction into a traditionally constructed dramatic
fiction—was not picked up, and today languishes in a box in the Pacific Film Archive.
Such attempts to mesh art video with more traditional forms of television will be
addressed in the following chapter, but I introduce it here as an illustration of the ideals
that drove the NCET. In the future, the pilot implied, in a culture that had overcome
greed, selfishness, and technological hubris, the puerile entertainment and information
delivery dominating status-quo television in the rest of America would be replaced by
video art offering creative poetic meditations on the interconnectedness of living things.
In the book, television played a small role, receiving a passage somewhat shorter
than that devoted to sewage. The book’s narrator, Weston, says that television is
participatory, with people not only calling in to contribute, but possessing the technology
required to make their own television. Describing a typical day of programming, he says
...a channel that has been programming political events or news will
suddenly switch over to household advice, loud rock music, or weird
surrealistic films bringing your worst nightmares to garish life.
(Ecotopians don’t seem to believe overmuch in color tuning. The station
engineers sometimes joke around and transmit signals in which people
deliberately come out green or fuchsia, with orange skies.) Then again you
may come upon a super-serious program imported from Canada or
England.
172

This programming day, curiously, does not sound too far off from the activities at WGBH
in Boston, as described in the previous chapter, but the nature of its translation into a
utopian fiction at KQED can help to frame our understanding of what transpired at the

172
Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia: A Novel, (New York, Toronto, London, Sydney,
Auckland: Bantam Books 1990; first published by Banyan Tree Books, January 1975),
43.

131
San Francisco station. While experimental programming at WGBH sought primarily to
challenge the boundaries of traditional television programming, producing material that
brought art and television into open and sometimes cheerfully combative dialogue, the
NCET was built with an isolationist attitude similar, in certain ways, to that imagined by
Callenbach in his novel. The NCET, beginning in 1967, was built around a dream of
radical separatism, which would allow a new form of television to emerge—one perfectly
suited to the world described by Callenbach almost a decade later.
This separatism, this desire for a genuinely autonomous form of televisual art,
drew on the modernist sanctification of abstraction as a means to ensure freedom from
social, political and economic pressures, but also on the utopian ideals of the historical
avant-gardes for whom radical changes to cultural forms had the potential to bring about
significant social change.
173
In a statement of purpose published in 1972 (Fig. 44), the
NCET clearly stated its commitment to this idea, saying that “Because images influence
personal reality and social structure, the task of evolving this new television is an urgent
and very practical matter.”
174
As grounded as the NCET might have been in the utopian
hopes of the counterculture, however, the Center was situated in a television station that
both supported and absorbed its innovations in any number of ways (including, but not
limited to, projects such as the Ecotopia pilot). As such, the NCET functioned as a latter-
day exemplar of the modernist friction between autonomy and social transformation,

173
This history was addressed by Donald B. Kuspit in “Utopian Protest in Early Abstract
Art” Art Journal, Vol. 29, No. 4 (Summer, 1970), 430-437; and Hilton Kramer, in a two
part essay “Abstraction and Utopia: On the Politics of Abstract Art in De Stijl” published
in The New Criterion, September, 1997 and October, 1997.

174
Radical Software, (Vol. 2, No. 30),
(http://www.radicalsoftware.org/e/volume2nr3.html) 46.
132
demonstrating the impossibility of establishing an art or society genuinely separate from
the world around it. It also acts as a reminder of the potential productivity of such
attempts, regardless of outcome.
In certain basic ways, the residency program at KQED was similar to that at
WGBH. Both relied on funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, both relied on the
leadership of a television professional with a history of involvement with cultural
programming for the public system, and both were shaped by the broader historical
context of an increasingly televised world, social unrest, changing demographics, and, in
the art world, a move toward an increasingly “dematerialized” art object.
175
In many other
ways, however, the program at KQED differed substantially from that at WGBH. Two
issues rise to the surface as points of profound difference in the ideals and approaches of
the experimental programs in Boston and San Francisco: the form taken by vanguard
artistic practices as they connected with the stations, and attitudes toward broadcast
television. While there are several reasons for this variation, the very different
personalities and priorities of the program directors had a profound effect on the ways in
which each residency developed.
Fred Barzyk stated in retrospect that participants in the WGBH experimental
programs were “just having fun.”
176
Brice Howard, director of experimental programming
at KQED, on the other hand, presented his role, and the activities he directed, in a far
more serious light, stating, “I’m not interested in the game of frivolity and play; I’m

175
Lippard, Six Years.

176
Barzyk, in conversation with the author, March 30, 2009.

133
interested in formal theoretical work, the discovery of hypotheses, the testing of them in
any conceivable perspective you wish to apply to this technology.”
177

Barzyk’s devil-may-care attitude was, to some extent, a posture: creating
multiple, successful television programs requires a measure of seriousness and an
effective work ethic. However, the differences in Barzyk and Howard’s approaches can
tell us a great deal not only about the structures of the institutions that they directed, but
also about the cultural traditions on which they relied and by which they were guided. As
I pointed out in the previous chapter, Barzyk was impressed and influenced by John
Cage, Nam June Paik, and Fluxus—artists whose approaches tended toward the
irreverent, to a celebration of idea over form, and chance over control.
Brice Howard’s relationship to contemporary art practices, on the other hand, is
difficult to pin down—partly, it appears, because he did not really have one that can be
easily aligned with our current understanding of the dominant critical currents of the day.
Howard often discussed art in abstract and spiritual terms rather than specific or concrete
ones.
178
While Barzyk never openly claimed any privileged or specialized knowledge of
contemporary art beyond his interest in Fluxus and Cage, his cameo appearances in
video-tapes by Nam June Paik, Allan Kaprow and William Wegman suggest that he was

177
Daniel Joyce, “Interview with Brice Howard, Director of NCET, July, 1971” in “A
Descriptive Analytical Study of the National Center for Experiments in Television,” (a
thesis presented to the Department of Speech and the Graduate School of the University
of Oregon in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts,
December 1972), 93.

178
This characterization is based on Howard’s book Videospace and Image Experience,
NCET meeting transcripts, as well as the many letters, statements, and other written
documents held in the NCET archive at the Pacific Film Archive.

134
able to foster collegial, friendly, and collaborative relationships with many of the artists
he worked with at the station. His social and intellectual absorption into the experimental
projects at WGBH is literalized in Nam June Paik’s 9/23, in which Barzyk is represented
as literally containing the experimental ethos of the station, psychedelic lights glowing
through his mouth and dark glasses (Fig. 37).
179
Howard, by contrast, sought and
maintained a distinctly professorial role—one that gave him a platform to develop his
own ideas, rather than a place from which to engage with current developments. When
Howard appears in videos from the NCET, it is as a talking head, seated next to a
monitor, pontificating on its contents (Fig. 38).
Howard has left a helpful guide to his understanding of art outside of the closed
world of the NCET, in the form of an extensive annotated bibliography appended to an
early manuscript version of his book Videospace.
180
In the bibliography, Howard included
selected quotes from each text that were of particular interest to his project. Books about
various forms of contemporary performance or entertainment—including film, theater
and television—occupied nearly half of this bibliography, at twenty-one items. Art and
aesthetics were the next largest category at twelve items. There were also a few books on
general historical topics, and two books on psychology—perception in particular. Half of

179
Fred Barzyk made appearances in Allan Kaprow’s Hello (1969), Nam June Paik’s
9/23 (1969), andThe Beatles From Beginning to End (1970), as well as William
Wegman’s Dinner Party (1975). He also played a caricatured version of himself in
America Inc. (1970).

180
Brice Howard, “Annotated Bibliography” Videospace Manuscript, Appendix I (p 162-
183), Box 1, File 7: Publications, 1972 (Manuscript has appendices not included in
publication).

135
the books about art focused specifically on issues of perception and aesthetics,
overlapping significantly with the texts on psychology. Notably, the majority of the
books about art were written in the first two decades of the twentieth century, and the
only one that investigates a specific art movement is Edward Fry’s 1966 anthology of
original texts, Cubism. Howard quotes extensively from Jacques Rivier’s 1912 essay
“Present Tendencies in Painting,” reprinted in Fry’s anthology.
Rivier’s arguments about cubism’s potential to reveal a platonic reality otherwise
veiled by contingency, positionality, and individual perspective clearly energized
Howard. His focus on this aspect of analytical cubism was in keeping with his interest in
psychological studies of perception and historical studies of aesthetics; all of these
indicate a desire to engage with universal theories about art that were based on the
structure and workings of the human mind, and the operations of perception and
intellection. This approach dovetailed well with Howard’s search for a new-age vision of
creativity that likens the artist’s work to a primal creative force, unconstrained by the
specifics of individual perspective or experience.
181

181
For example, in a letter to colleague David Dowe discussing an upcoming
collaborative project and the possibilities of new electronic media, Howard writes “You
know that I am concerned about electricity as the material of a new artful expression of
man....The continuum spirals outward, a stellar flower. Its new petals are always, at least,
another perspective on the most ancient of all tribal longings: to know beginnings.... A
new outer edge begins to appear in the slowly perceptible wheeling of the great galaxy of
man’s accumulations. Evolution is always the verb.” Brice Howard “Letter to David
Dowe,” in preparation for the NCET, Dallas Center for Experiments in Television co-
production of “An Electric Concert,” held at the Bob Hope Theatre at Southern Methodist
University in November 1969. The letter was reprinted in the program for the event.
NCET Files. Box 1 Folder 1. PFA. Correspondence, 1969-1974. While Howard shows no
explicit involvement in any particular religious creed, his commingling of scientific and
spiritual concerns, especially as they relate to the development of a universal visual
language, bears a resemblance to many of the Theosophist concepts that circulated
136
This vision of the artist as a natural or primal force producing art through a direct
engagement with the raw materials of the world (be they atom- or electron-based) in
order to create a universally accessible representation of a Platonic reality, differed
considerably from the attitudes that dominated art production in the North-Eastern United
States in the late 1960s. Pop, Minimalism and Conceptual art were controlling interests in
the New York art world through the mid-1970s, and left little space for a romantic
conception of the natural—or the artist, for that matter.
182
Howard’s lack of investment in
contemporary art-world trends likely influenced the type of work he supported at KQED.
This position was not as idiosyncratic as it may sound, however; it represented a strong
current in the San Francisco video community at the time. These tendencies may have
been in part the result of distance (geographical and cultural) from the center of the art
world at the time: New York. While the manifestations and effects of this distance do not

amongst an international array of early twentieth century modernists, influencing artists
as diverse as Piet Mondrian in the Netherlands, Kasemir Malevich in Russia/the Soviet
Union, Wassily Kandinsky in Germany, and Lawren Harris in Canada. See Sixten
Ringbom, “Art in 'The Epoch of the Great Spiritual': Occult Elements in the Early Theory
of Abstract Painting” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol. 29, (1966):
386-418; Rose-Carol Washton Long, “Occultism, Anarchism, and Abstraction:
Kandinsky's Art of the Future” Art Journal, (Vol. 46, No. 1, Mysticism and Occultism in
Modern Art, Spring, 1987): 38-45; Robert Linsley, “Landscapes in Motion: Lawren
Harris, Emily Carr and the Heterogenous Modern Nation” Oxford Art Journal, vol. 19,
no. 1 (1996): 80-95.

182
The spread of performance and earthworks, as well as video, played an important role
in the diversification of practices in the 1970s—feminist artists in particular were
effective in opening up the field of production. The work of feminist artists, however,
points in a direction very different from that taken by artists in San Francisco in the early
1970s. While the sometimes essentialist tendencies of early second-wave feminism might
have sought a shared representation of women’s experiences, the emphasis on individual
and personal experience that has been the legacy of feminist art undermined any
idealization of art as a universalizing force.

137
easily submit to summary, anecdotal evidence offers insight into the tense relationship
between the cultural vanguard of San Francisco and that of New York.
183
The
environment in which the NCET originated was one that existed at a distance from the
central concerns of the art world, geographically, intellectually and socially.
Artists involved with the NCET recognized this distance in a statement published
in the 1972 San Francisco-focused issue of the counter-cultural new-media journal
Radical Software. In a text describing the activities at the Center, the article’s authors
referred to the “pretentious First National Video Tape Festival held at the Minneapolis
College of Art during the fall” which “selected only one San Francisco submission as
worthy of recognition. The New York conceptual art oriented judges (Stoney,
Youngblood, Rose) failed to award any West Coast artist more than passing notice.”
184

The alienation of the San Francisco community from the dominant trends in New York
goes further than ruffled feathers over the exclusiveness of one exhibition; the culture of
the East coast avant-gardes ultimately shaped the histories of the period.
As Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner argue in the introduction to their anthology,
West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965-1977, profound
differences between the counterculture of the West Coast and the avant-gardes of the
North-East have resulted in art- and social-historical narratives that struggle to
incorporate the motivations and methodologies of the counterculture. They describe

183
See, for example, the account of the poorly received San Francisco appearance of
Andy Warhol and the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, recounted in Steven Watson’s oral
history Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties, (New York: Pantheon, 2003) 285-87.

184
“NCET” Radical Software, (Videocity Issue, 1972) 49.

138
“...the double whammy suffered by countercultural enterprises: to the art world, they
were viewed as non-art, and to scholars of the sixties, they were considered apolitical.”
185

The activities at NCET have a complicated relationship to the counterculture; the
institutional nature of the project, its affiliation with KQED and the Rockefeller
Foundation, would seem to place it firmly in the arena of status-quo culture, but the
cultural ideals championed at the NCET were influenced in significant ways by the West
Coast counterculture.
Videocity, an edition of the New York-based video journal Radical Software that
was produced in and about San Francisco, offers a clear picture of the overlap between
the video community and the counterculture in the Bay Area. Videocity was equal parts
community activism and new-age spiritualism, with a soupçon of science fiction. It
included short published statements by local Chicano, Chinese-American and African-
American video groups; discussion of the role of video in the burgeoning commune
culture of young back-to-the-landers; a long article on the mystical powers of an
allegedly Atlantian crystal scull; a text exploring the fantastical possibilities of television
technologies (contact with alien life forms, time travel, etc.); a wildly optimistic
discussion of the future of the art of holography; and a number of articles addressing
video as an art form. Many of the people who wrote articles about video as art had some
connection with the NCET, although Phillip Gietzen, who edited Videocity, does not
appear to have had any direct connection to the Center.
186
The dominance of this group in
the discussion of video art demonstrates that while the San Francisco video community

185
Auther and Lerner “The Counterculture Experiment,” in West of Center, xviii.
186
There is no mention of Gietzen in the NCET archives.

139
certainly extended well beyond the small group gathered at KQED, the activities at the
Center were an important hub of video-art production in the Bay Area.
The writing about video art in Videocity generally followed the ideals of the
NCET in its strong support for a non-televisual form of video, expressed as a preference
for rather long abstract works, and the strong embrace of an ideal of modernist autonomy.
Brice Howard made it clear from the beginning that the artists working under his
supervision would not be expected to produce works for broadcast. One of the central
arguments in his book, Videospace, was that it was the culture of broadcasting that
limited the potential of televisual media, and he sought to use the station technology and
expert staff to expand on the immediate potential of video, divorced from the
expectations and conventions of broadcast television. In their collective statement of
1972, a group of participants at the NCET announced “[h]ere broadcast television, and
the theatrical, motion picture and journalistic histories which have comprised it” will be
“set aside.”
187
This general agreement to avoid rather than engage with these histories was
reached quickly. Given the early exceptions—such as Flour Arrangements, discussed in
the previous chapter—it is clear that this was the result of an editorial process, rather than
a total lack of interest in the culture of broadcasting amongst participating artists at the
time. Nonetheless, the rejection of references to television became the norm at the NCET,
resulting in works which, for the most part, engaged directly with the language and
histories of abstraction generally associated with modernist painting. This association
with painting was the outcome of a concerted effort to overcome the photographic

187
“NCET” Radical Software, (Videocity Issue, 1972): 49.

140
approach that tended to attach itself to the apparatus of the camera—even if the camera
recorded electrical impulses to magnetized tape, rather than exposing emulsion-covered
transparent plastic to light.

In 1967 the general manager of KQED invited Brice Howard to run the
Experimental Project.
188
The Rockefeller Foundation, having just established a
comparable program in Boston, had offered KQED $150,000 to establish a year-long
workshop, described in 1972 by a visiting researcher as one “in which artists-in-residence
could work with television in an attempt to determine whether it was a medium of
creative expression in its own right.”
189
The National Endowment provided an additional
$70,000 for the Arts. Howard agreed to take on the project under the condition that the
artists in residence would not be expected to produce works for broadcast, and the station
agreed to this stipulation. With additional funding from the Corporation for Public
Broadcasting, this first year was extended into another, and in 1969 KQED incorporated
the NCET, including in the program internships for television professionals from
throughout the public system, and residencies that would focus on theoretical
investigations of the medium, alongside artistic experimentation.

188
He took a one-year leave of absence from his position as Executive Producer for
Cultural Affairs Programming at National Educational Television in New York, which
was later extended so that he could remain at KQED-TV to run the National Center for
Experiments in Television. Howard remained director until 1975, one year after the
center divorced itself from KQED.

189
Daniel Joyce, “A Descriptive Analytical Study of the National Center for Experiments
in Television,” a thesis presented to the Department of Speech and the Graduate School
of the University of Oregon in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts, (December 1972), 19.

141
During the year of the Experimental Project, a series of video tapes were
produced which survive in the Pacific Film Archive at the Berkeley Museum.
190
They
were made through collaborations between station staff and the first group of artists-in-
residence, which included Loren Sears, Joanne Kyger, Richard Felciano and Robert
Creely, among others. Among other works to be discussed below, Felciano collaborated
with Brice Howard to make Instruments of Violence. Like many of the tapes that would
emerge in the following years, Howard and Felciano’s video was non-narrative and
largely abstract. The video was a fairly simple montage of black-and-white images, likely
edited in-camera, with post-production limited to the addition of Felciano’s sound track.
Like the Jazz Images videos made at WGBH-TV in 1964, discussed in the previous
chapter, Howard and Felciano’s tape did not make use of the unique capabilities of the
televisual medium, instead producing a work that could as easily have been a film. Both
Barzyk and Howard’s initial experiments relied on an editorial grammar grounded in the
physical cutting and suturing of the film strip, and on the effects produced by the
proximity of camera lens to subject matter—effects entrenched in a photographic
tradition.
An early shot in Instruments of Violence frames bullets, standing in two
regimented rows, moving away from the camera into darkness. They reappear,
collectively or singly, throughout the video, and at two different points the stock of a gun

190
There were probably between 9-12 separate tapes recordings made in this first year. It
is difficult to determine with any certainty the number of works, because there does not
appear to have been a clear distinction between finished art works and experiments,
leaving a series of archivists and curators to make decisions about what to keep, and what
to let go in the years since. KQED’s divestment of the material to an art museum may
have resulted in the loss of important material.

142
appears, though it only becomes identifiable as such in its second appearance. The
majority of the time, the camera roves over the surface of a sculpture of unstated origin.
Probably plaster, organic in form, the object is reminiscent of the work of modernist
sculptor Henry Moore in its erotically charged protrusions and hollows. Maintaining an
intimate closeness to the sculpture throughout, Howard denied the viewer any clear sense
of the object’s overall form or gestalt, and emphasized the parallels between the plaster
form and naked flesh. Cut into this footage are the firearm-related images mentioned
above, as well as pale, skin-like surfaces stitched together with dark, criss-crossing
thread, alluding to surgical stitches and corsets. There are also extreme close-ups of an
unidentifiable apparatus made of metal and leather. If the viewer were to fail, somehow,
to read the implications of this series of images, the rather blunt title of the video,
Instruments of Violence, together with the sound-track, which included crashing cars;
sirens; and animals screeching, roaring and bellowing in apparent distress, fury, or
excitement, makes it clear that Howard and Felciano’s video had specifically expressive,
psychological allusions.
Like the works in the Jazz Images collection, Instruments of Violence was abstract
by virtue of framing, depth-of-field play, extreme close-ups and a lack of clear narrative.
The camera was positioned in relation to its objects in such a way that contextualizing
information was omitted, and objects shifted toward aestheticized fields of tonal
variation, line, and movement. The move toward abstraction was incomplete however;
even when the matter in the camera’s frame resisted identification, it alluded to
something: flesh, sex, and tools of punishment or harm. The abstract field was frequently
broken by images that could be read as textual elements, word-pictures which, in concert
143
with the recognizable aspects of the soundtrack, guided the viewer’s reading of the video.
The composed quality of this video—the sense that one thing was chosen to follow
another, that the sound elements were in direct conversation with the images—
differentiates this tape from those that would follow under the principle of “the mix,”
developed by Howard in collaboration with the artists in residence, over the course of
that first year,
191
and published in 1972 in Videospace and Image Experience.
192

Even at its most abstract, Instruments of Violence was photographic in its form—
its visual imagery was clearly all derived from objects and matter in the physical world.

191
This distinction, partly technological, and partly semiotic, distinguishes between work
in which images are used as signifiers concerned primarily with communicating
relationships between a series of referents, as opposed to works which abandon direct
signification. This is discussed by Peter Wollen in his essay “The Two Avant Gardes”
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/source-text/100/ (first published in Studio International,
November/December 1975), accessed June 2, 2012. In one trajectory of avant-garde film,
Wollen argues, French modernist painting dominated production. “When we look at the
development of painting after the Cubist breakthrough, however, we see a constant trend
towards an apparently even more radical development: the suppression of the signified
altogether, an art of pure signifier detached from meaning as much as from reference,
from Sinn as much as from Bedeutung. This tendency towards abstraction could be
justified in various ways—a transcendental signified could be postulated, in symbolist or
spiritualist terms, a meaning located in the Uberwelt of pure ideas; a theory of formalism,
of art as a pure design, could be proposed; the work of art could be defended in terms of
objecthood, pure presence...” He goes on to argue that “the impact of avant-garde ideas
from the world of visual arts has ended up pushing film-makers into a position of extreme
‘purism’ or ‘essentialism’.” The “other” avant-garde, he contends, was dominated by the
Soviet tradition of realism, typified by Sergei Eisenstein, in whose work the “signified—
content in the conventional sense- is always dominant.”

192
For the most part, “the mix” referred to a methodology, and “videospace” referred to
the product of that methodology, but the two labels were often treated interchangeably—
especially by the media in their coverage of activities at the station. Howard’s use of the
term “videospace” to denote a conceptual or virtual “space” should not be confused with
the use of the term to address issues in video installation, as discussed by Ingrid Wiegand
in her essay “Videospace: Varieties of Video Installation” in New Artists Video: A
Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (E.P. Dutton; New York, NY, 1978), 181-191.

144
Until 1967, video was always a means to take moving pictures of the world—a process
that required a camera. While the ultimate physical form of video (electrical information
which directs the rapid movement of an electron beam across the glass surface of a
picture tube) differed significantly from film (a strip of transparent, still, photographic
images through which light was passed one after another in rapid succession to produce
the illusion of movement), the apparatus used to produce video images was based on the
photographic tradition of light passing through a lens. The video camera, based
superficially on the film camera, determined the early uses of the medium, resulting in an
approach that mimicked the cultural, formal and structural traditions of film, when, in
fact, the potential differences between the two media were profound.
193

I have established that Brice Howard and Fred Barzyk, in their initial experiments
with video, used it in ways that were limited to the kinds of imagery and structures that
could be produced using film, but they were not the only ones who struggled to overcome
the most familiar uses of the moving picture. Nam June Paik, who had access to video
recording equipment in 1965, also stayed fairly close to the grammatical structures
established by film in his first experiment.
194
Andy Warhol’s Outer and Inner Space, a
film made the same year that used the playback of recorded video on a television monitor

193
Maya Deren offered an insightful discussion of the photographic nature of film in her
1960 essay “Cinematography: The Creative Use of Reality” in Film Theory and
Criticism: Introductory Readings, Fourth Edition, Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen and Leo
Braudy, eds. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 59-70. For a
comparative discussion of film as photographic and video as electronic, see Robert Arn,
“Form and Sense of Video” Artscanada, Video Issue (October 1973): 15-22.

194
I am referring here to Paik’s 1965 experiment screened at the Café Au Go Go in New
York City. Sylvia Martin, Video Art (Köln, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, Paris, Tokyo;
2006) 10; Elwes, Video Art, A Guided Tour, 5.

145
as a central structural element, was exceptional in its sensitivity to video’s specific
capabilities.
195
But it was not until 1967—with the commercial release of the portable
video camera and the introduction of artists’ residencies in television studios—that artists
in the United States began to experiment with medium-specific approaches to abstract
video, concentrating on the creation and manipulation of electronic signals to be viewed
on a television monitor.
196
This experimentation, for which a camera was useful, but by
no means necessary, happened primarily at television stations.
197
Brice Howard theorized
this approach to the medium, arguing that

195
See Callie Angel, “Doubling the Screen: Andy Warhol’s Outer and Inner Space”
Millenium Film Journal No. 38 (Spring 2002), http://www.mfj-
online.org/journalPages/MFJ38/angell.html. Accessed July 15, 2012.

196
Nam June Paik’s works in which he manipulated the output of a television set offers a
partial but important exception to this claim. Using strong magnets or set adjustment
controls, Paik was able to distort the existing broadcast image, and as such, he was
playing with one aspect of video that is specific to it—the endlessly moving and unstable
play of the electron across the surface of the picture tube. However, the range of possible
interventions in this work was extremely limited, and could only be used to distort pre-
existing imagery as it appeared on the monitor, rather than produce new images. See
Chris Meigh-Andrews, A History of Video Art: the Development of Form and Function,
(Oxford and New York; 2006) 5-18; Sylvia Martin, Video Art, (Koln and Los Angeles:
Taschen; 2006). According to Christine Mehring, the earliest television abstractions were
produced by European artists in the 1950s—possibly as early as 1952. According to
Mehring’s research, these early projects were initiated by artists, such as German artist
K.O. Götz and Italian Lucio Fontana, and dealers such as Rochus Kowalleck, rather than
people working in the television industry. Christine Mehring, “Television Art’s Abstrac
Starts: Europe circa 1944-1969,” October, (Summer, 2008): 29-64.

197
Artists working with portable equipment outside of the stations more often engaged
with the narrative and documentary possibilities of video, or with its structural and
sculptural qualities. For instance, Warhol integrated video into his films as part of a
storytelling process (Outer and Inner Space, 1965), while Vito Acconci used it
interchangeably with Super 8mm film to document performative works (Corrections,
1970; Association Area, 1971). Dan Graham (Past Future Split Attention, 1972;
Performer/Audience/Mirror, 1975), Bruce Nauman (Live Taped Video Corridor, 1970),
and Lynda Benglis (Mumble, 1972; Enclosure, 1973; Female Sensibility, 1973) made
146
Possibly because television monitors have been employed as illusionistic
surfaces, images comprising representative (or “realistic”) content are
thought to be the only indigenous ones. And, respecting habits developed
over the brief viewing experience of broadcast years, it would seem
reasonable to think this way. It is not necessarily true, however. It is also
possible to generate and to perceive a formal experience composed of
electrons evolving on such surfaces precisely as they are, not as metaphors
of something else. These images may be the only truly indigenous ones.
198

This idea of an image “indigenous” to the television set is central to the practices
that Howard supported at KQED. It entailed a search for forms that could not be
produced through photographic/filmic means—forms exclusive to the technology of
television/video. There are a number of approaches to this type of practice, such as
synthesized video which is produced electronically and without any initial optical
(camera based) input, or material that has been processed by any of a variety of means
based upon the manipulation of the electronic signal that video is composed of, rather
than the kind of mechanical manipulation to which film might be subject. Perhaps most
important to Howard however, were the means by which these strategies could be
deployed. While film must first be exposed to light, then subjected to chemical
processing, then edited and, in some cases drawn or painted on, video technology allowed
all of these things—or their closest electronic equivalents—to happen at the same time.
199

work that employed the specific capabilities of live-feed closed-circuit video. Essentially,
all of these artists relied completely on the apparatus of the camera—having little to no
access to or apparent interest in the equipment required to synthesize video.

198
Brice Howard, Videospace, 24.

199
This distinction is carefully drawn out in Robert Arn, “Form and Sense in Video”
Artscanada, October, 1973. Arn points out that “in film the impression of movement is
derived from a succession of frozen moments. In contrast, the video image, even if each
frame is examined, is all motion—a single rapidly moving and constantly changing dot,
147
As a result, the artist could respond to visual input in the moment using any of a number
of tools and techniques including multi-input keying, feedback, and image synthesis. It
was this method of spontaneous, improvised production, which Brice Howard called “the
mix,” that would come to define experimental production at KQED.
Brice Howard and Fred Barzyk both articulated their investment in the
development of television as a medium of art with its own unique capabilities—
capabilities that had not yet been adequately explored. Both men developed ideas about
the untapped potential of television similar to those presented by Marshall McLuhan.
Both enthusiastically embraced McLuhan’s claim that “the medium is the message.”
200

This argument combined modernist formalism (translate “the medium is the message” to
“the form is the meaning”) with a sensitivity to the social workings of mass
communications. The medium is what matters, McLuhan claimed, because “the ‘content’

one dot only, does all the work. The basic illusion of film is motion. The basic illusion of
video is stillness.” 17.

200
Works by McLuhan included in Howard’s unpublished bibliography included
Marshall McLuhan, “Television in a New Light” in The Meaning of Commercial
Television, The Texas-Stanford Seminar, 1966, ed. By Stanley T. Donner, (University of
Texas Press, 1967, Austin and London), 87-107; McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy,
(University of Toronto Press, 1962, Toronto); McLuhan, Understanding Media: the
Extensions of Man, (McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964, New York); and
McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage, An Inventory of Effects,
(Bantam Books, Inc., 1967, New York). Brice Howard, “Annotated Bibliography”
Videospace Manuscript, Appendix I (p 162-183) B1F7 Publications, (Manuscript has
appendices not included in publication). Barzyk’s investment in McLuhan has been
indicated in interviews, but McLuhan’s influence at WGBH can be seen most clearly in
the misquote of “the medium is the message” in The Medium is the Medium, as well as
direct references to his work and ideas in a number of of episodes of What’s Happening
Mr. Silver, as will be addressed in the following chapter.

148
of any medium is always another medium.”
201
By which he meant that while the content
of film is a rehashing of theater, its message is a “spectacular wedding of the old
mechanical technology and the new electronic world.”
202
The familiar content of
television—an amalgam of earlier media including film, variety theater, and print
journalism—according to McLuhan’s argument, veiled the specificities and strangeness
of the new medium. Both Barzyk and Howard wanted to unveil television, to free it from
its indebtedness to previous forms. For both men, however, this project was more easily
conceived than carried out, and both, in their first experiments—the Jazz Images tapes
that Barzyk produced at WGBH, and Howard’s Instruments of Violence—made works
that successfully avoided the cultural conventions of television only to fall into a style
that maintained an attachment to film’s photographic forms and traditions.
Despite this similarity between the works made by the program directors at each
station, in each case the road taken toward experimental video practices that engaged the
specificity of the medium were quite different. While the artists at WGBH in Boston
turned away from the conventions of film toward the specificities of television—its
temporal, technological and cultural conventions—the work at KQED, through the
emergence of Howard’s concept of “the mix” looked instead toward the ways in which an
approach more widely known as process video could facilitate creative production in the
tradition of modernist abstraction.
In her 1985 essay “Tracking Video Art: ‘Image Processing’ as a Genre,” curator
Lucinda Furlong set out to give an account of process video as an under-examined genre

201
McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1966, 23.

202
McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1966, 249.
149
of early video art, while accounting for the subsequent critical dismissal of the work
associated with it. She begins by describing common tendencies in process video, a
category typified by “densely layered ‘psychedelic’ images composed of soft, undulating
forms in which highly saturated colors give a painterly effect, or geometric abstractions
that undergo a series of visual permutations.”
203
She goes on to outline three different
conceptual approaches to the experiments that fall into this category. First, she points out,
process video was believed to subvert the dominance of television by employing the
same apparatus while taking a radically different visual and aural form. Second, “the
swirling colors and distorted forms conjured up the experiences associated with
hallucinogenic drugs, suggesting that ‘new realities’ could be electronically synthesized.”
Both of these approaches are relevant to the activities at KQED, but it is the third, which
Furlong posits as the most interesting, that appears at first glance to have dominated
production at the station. This, she argues, “was the connection made between image
processing and the modernist credo of exploring the basic properties of the medium.”
204

Attention to the ways in which experimental video engaged with modernist concepts of
medium specificity led Furlong to identify an important turning point in early video—one
that speaks as much to the workings of the art world in the latter twentieth century as to
the trajectory of video as an art form.
The association of early video art with the modernist ideal of medium specificity,
Furlong claims, helped to validate the medium in its earliest years, and the works that

203
Lucinda Furlong, “Tracking Video Art: ‘Image Processing’ as a Genre” Art Journal,
vol. 45, No. 3, Video: The Reflexive Medium, (Autumn, 1985): 233.

204
Furlong, 234.

150
offered the most immediate visual connection to that history were the first to gain access
to the official institutions of art. The pulsing mandalas and hard-edged abstractions of
process video looked like modernist painting—American color field and post-painterly
abstraction in particular. The images were small and unvaried in their proportions,
confined, as they were, to the standard dimensions of a television set, and the element of
movement was new, but the emphasis on color or tone, texture and surface, invited
association with abstract painting—the most valorized mode of visual art production in
the United States from the late 1940s through the 1960’s.
205
This admittedly superficial
connection to a sanctioned modernism, in concert with a deeper acceptance of its terms in
the “treatment of the electronic signal as a plastic medium, a material with inherent
properties that can be isolated” according to Furlong “provided a way to lend modernist
credentials to an art form that was having a difficult time gaining acceptance…by
traditional art institutions.”
206
It was the modernist ethos and appearance of process video,
according to Furlong, that first prompted the exclusive arena of the museum and art
gallery to open their doors to video, and to equip themselves to display this new medium.
No sooner had video gained entry into the gallery and museum, however, than
those same institutions, recognizing a fundamental shift in contemporary art, turned their

205
It is possible that the increasing production and dissemination of color reproductions
of post-war American abstract paintings in popular periodicals such as Life and Time
magazine, as well as the growing array of art magazines, facilitated the connection
between these two types of images. The elimination of texture and scale from the
paintings reproduced in this way would have made it easier to see a relationship between
screen image and painting. See Bradford R. Collins, “Life Magazine and the Abstract
Expressionists, 1948-51: A Historiographic Study of a Late Bohemian Enterprise,” The
Art Bulletin, Vo. 73, No. 2, (June, 1991): 283-308.

206
Furlong, 234.

151
attention from modernist abstraction—whether painting, sculpture, or video—toward an
array of new, post-modern art practices. So the work that had first gained video entry into
the museum was discarded,
…not so much because it was inherently “bad,” but because the ideas
informing it had become exhausted. No one in art circles wanted to hear
about—let alone look at—video that seemed to be based on the
conventions of modern painting.
207

The rate at which cultural trends and tendencies circulate is not uniform, however,
nor is the speed at which the institutions of art adopt them. While the video artists who
gained recognition in New York in the early 1970s may have had a limited investment in
formalist abstraction, in San Francisco, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, this approach
played a central role in the development of video as an art form—especially at the NCET.
In order to understand the contributions made by the NCET to the history of video
art, it is important to recognize that the program and the works produced under its aegis,
which, after the first year of the Experimental Project, fall firmly into the category of
process video, often treated video as an offshoot or evolution of modernist painting.
While the discourse and ethos at KQED are absolutely specific to it, the ways in which
they dovetail with broader discourses and theories of art bear close investigation. In

207
Furlong, 234. She offers, as evidence of her claims, the first video exhibition at the
Whitney Museum, in New York City in December 1971, which was almost entirely made
up of abstract, process video. Furlong, who was working as assistant curator at the
Whitney Museum of American at the time that she wrote this essay, relies heavily on
programming at that museum to support her argument. As compelling as it is, an
examination of other video exhibitions held the same year—including those at the
Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Everson
Museum in Syracuse, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the University Art Museum
in Berkeley, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston—is needed to confirm her
claim.

152
particular, I will argue in this chapter, the methodology outlined by program director
Brice Howard in his 1972 book Videospace and Image Experience—which he calls “the
mix”—draws on the process-oriented and existentialist approach to painting championed
by Harold Rosenberg in the 1950s.
208

This is not to suggest that the approach taken at the Center was retrograde, or
behind the times. Rather, it is important to recognize the unique creative space that
developed through the meeting of a well-worn popular existentialism, new technologies,
and the relatively new social and professional space of a public television station—all
coming together in the heady atmosphere of San Francisco in the late 1960s, with its
enthusiasm for a cultural revolution after the apparent failure of party politics.
David Joselit traces this shift in political orientation to the Houseboat Summit of
1967, which brought together Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg and others. Joselit argues
that over the course of the summit, a “sharp division” was drawn,
...between traditional opposition politics associated with student radicals
in the Free Speech and antiwar movements and a politics of
representation, in which the production of a spectacular subcultural
lifestyle served as the most efficacious response to consumer society.
209

The artists’ residency at KQED was a space of creative production that married
ideas popularized in the 1950s to technologies and social formations of the late 60s and
early1970s. As I will demonstrate below, the development and articulation of a specific
set of material and intellectual practices at KQED relied not only on a critical model from
the 1950s, but also on the cold-war institution of the think tank—and tied both of these

208
Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters” from Tradition of the New,
(Horizon Press; New York, 1959) 23-39. Originally in Art News, Dec. 1952.

209
Joselit, Feedback, 65.
153
approaches to new technologies, new theories about the role of art and communications,
and a countercultural milieu specific to San Francisco in the late 1960s.
Brice Howard, like Fred Barzyk, emerged from the meeting point of theater, Beat
culture and experimental film, and from this perspective both saw the potential for a new
art form that could flourish in the institutional spaces of public television. Neither
initially proved capable of making the transformation to a medium-specific approach to
video in their own experiments, tied as they were to the conventions of older, more
familiar media. They were both, however, instrumental in providing access, support, and
guidance to those artists who were prepared to make this leap. In his drive to facilitate an
art of the free electron, Howard’s position and priorities would dominate and direct
production at the NCET in profound ways. This is particularly apparent in the affinity
between his philosophy and actual works produced by artists-in-residence at the
station.
210

Howard described his model of an ideal practice, “the mix,” in Videospace and
Image Experience. Here, Howard draws a distinction between two different approaches
to making television:

210
This claim is based on the acceptance of Howard as primary author of the texts
published under his name. Communication with one of the artists in residence, Loren
Sears, raises questions about the degree to which the ideas that Howard presented in his
written works were his own, rather than the result of a collaborative process. Loren Sears,
personal letter, 13 January 2011. Sears wrote that “Brice and I talked several times a
week, all of which were recorded and distilled for his book, Video Space. I was interested
in the artistic, social and physiological nuances of television, so I fed him all the ideas
that were brimming in my head.” Regardless of the source of the ideas, however, Howard
undoubtedly activated them, and worked to create a space where they could be brought
into practice.

154
So—let us try to understand something about the making process as it can
apply to television, something of the differences between conventional
television image generation and emerging newer ways.
In the former, creative attitudes emphasize dissemination of
information and are sustained by principles drawn from communications
theory.
In the latter, these attitudes are nurtured by a long history of art,
and emphasize creation of experience [….]
Employing the language of conventional practice, in the former,
the work is produced.
To assist in understanding the differences between the two making
processes, we will use an old word in a newer way and say the latter work
is mixed.
211

In his comparison, Howard posits that the intention to communicate specific
information, and the development of a plan as to the most effective means for such
communication, is the traditional form of production. In “the mix,” by contrast, the artist
is responding in the moment to immediate visual stimuli. The viewer, when he or she
watches this process live or sees a recording of it, shares the experience, but does not
receive a communication, is not fed information. “Fruit of the mix” Howard claims, “is
its experience, not its message.” In the mix, “man, his material, and his tools transform
his inner vision into external, objective facts.” He describes the mix as organic,
spontaneous, and “akin to evolution.”
212

Some of this may sound familiar. While there is no reference to Harold
Rosenberg’s well-known 1952 essay, “The American Action Painters,” in Howard’s book
or papers, it is difficult not to sense the presence of this reading of American painting in
Howard’s mix. In this essay, Rosenberg describes the new American painting as an

211
Howard, Videospace, 27-28.

212
Howard, Videospace, 28.

155
action or event. The painting itself is the result of an “encounter” between the artist and
his materials, not the articulation of an idea or the depiction of a visual phenomenon. The
new painting was the idea, the emotion, and the phenomenon, not a composed
representation of these things. “What was to go on the canvas was not a picture, but an
event.”
213
The artist does not plan or picture, the artist does and the outcome of this doing
is art. The mix, similarly, is not a communicated idea but a shared experience.
While Brice Howard’s concept of the mix—the practice toward which he guided
anyone participating in activities at the NCET—is not a mere updating of Rosenberg’s
then twenty-year-old ideas about painting to the new medium of video, there are clearly
important parallels between them. In particular, the emphasis on individuality,
authenticity, experience, and spontaneity in the ideal practices described by both men is
essential to the shape of activities at KQED. So, what exactly is “the mix”? Howard
stated—rather unhelpfully—that “We do not know how the mix as making process
works. We do know that it has worked when a work exists.”
214
Despite this reticence to
define the mix, it is possible to outline the particular material strategies that artists at
KQED were using. They are generally identified as the image-processing methods
described by Lucinda Furlong, a set of methods that
…encompasses the synthesis and manipulation of the video signal in a
way that often changes the image quite drastically. It includes not only
altering camera-generated images through processes such as colorizing,

213
Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” in The Tradition of the New,
(New York: Horizon Press, 1959), 25.

214
Howard, Videospace, 30.

156
keying, switching, fading, and sequencing but combining those operations
on synthesized—that is, cameraless—imagery as well.
215

While we do not see any of these methods—to which I would add the use of
feedback as a means of image production—at work in Instruments of Violence, they
quickly came to dominate production at the station, and we can see them developing in
another video made in 1967, Slip Back Into the Shining Sea.
216

Another collaborative work, Slip Back Into the Shining Sea, made the same year
as Instruments of Violence, by visual artist/filmmaker Loren Sears, poet Joanne Kyger,
and composer Richard Felciano, is a prototypical example of the mix. The production of
Slip Back was divided amongst the three collaborators, with Sears fashioning the visual
elements, Felciano an electronic soundscape, and Kyger a poem that was integrated into
the soundtrack. The twelve-minute video, abstract black-and-white imagery composed of
layered multi-camera feedback loops, was dominated by swirling, striated black-and-
white spirals (Fig. 47); zigzags (Fig. 48); and a pattern that is best described as something
between a melting honeycomb and a mass of bubbles (Fig. 49), which began as footage
of a human head, but is only recognizable as such because of its general shape and
quality of movement. While the early experiments by Brice Howard and Fred Barzyk
applied the structural grammar of film to video footage, Slip Back did the opposite,

215
Furlong, 233.

216
Not officially in circulation, this tape can be seen on ubu.com. It is unlisted (and
appears to be on the site by accident, at the end of Bruce Nauman and William Allen’s
Flour Arrangements, in this context attributed exclusively to Bruce Nauman):
http://www.ubu.com/film/nauman_flour.htmlhttp://www.ubu.com/film/nauman_flour.ht
ml
157
beginning with film, and transforming it into a work determined by the forms and
capacities of video. Sears describes the method by which the video was made.
Physical 16mm film would be scanned into an electronic stream from the
station’s film chain, then electronically altered through various effects of
the mixer, and then recorded onto videotape, for one pass. On successive
passes, that tape would be replayed into the mixer board while a second
roll of film was played back from the film chain, and those two signals
mixed in various way – usually keying, contrast manipulation or with
visual feedback (a studio camera shooting its own picture off of a studio
TV monitor.) Studio camera inputs could be added to the videotape and
film components at any point, as well. Any number of such passes could
be made subject to quality deterioration and artistic discretion.
217

The sound elements of the tape included “prerecorded sound tapes & live
improvisation during the mix.”
218
The poem, delivered with little sense of punctuation or
expression, had a repeating refrain, uttered in a quiet, rapid, singsong voice by Kyger:
If the dream is fire make it water, if it is large make it small, if it is many
make it one, if it is dream make it real, if it is real make it dream. Slip
back into the shining sea.
219

This chorus structures what sounds like a stream-of-consciousness litany, a series
of words and phrases that return occasionally to the problem of differentiating reality
from fantasy—with references not only to dreams, but masks, and repeated use of the
word “illusion.” Layered with Kyger’s voice are sounds of a baby chortling, a man
humming and mumbling nonsense words and sounds, as well as the electronic score.
Despite the presence of this voice-over poem, Slip Back may be seen as an example of

217
Loren Sears, personal letter, January 13, 2011.

218
Loren Sears, personal letter, January 13, 2011.

219
Author’s transcript.

158
the move to abstraction that would become typical of production at the NCET. Again, the
work is not without referent. Kyger’s interest in Zen Buddhism is present in the spoken
element, and can also be read in the repeating mandala forms produced by Sears, who
says that the work was meant to “invoke the famous Bardo experience, the after death
plane of Tibetan religion.”
220
But the presence of these allusions does not undermine the
prioritization of the free electronic form—of texture over picture, atmosphere over event,
and noise over word.
The textual element of the work is subsumed into the abstraction of the video, and
the whole is distinctly non-relational. To offer explanatory structural comparisons from
the history of abstract painting, we might consider first a painting by Piet Mondrian,
Composition with Red, Blue, Black, Yellow, and Gray (Fig. 50) which is the
compositional relationships between the different parts of the image—the relationship of
horizontal to vertical line, of one color to another, of the differing weights and sizes of
the rectangular fields that make up the image. Similarly, Brice Howard and Richard
Felciano’s Instruments of Violence relies on relationships of one part or aspect to another,
but in time rather than space. Instruments is read by viewing one shot after another in a
carefully planned—composed—sequence, comparing them to one another and to the
sound elements, and thus understanding the whole as something that is the sum of
different parts. The “weight” and meaning of each shot is contingent upon the shots
before and after, and upon the interplay of image and sound. In this way, for all of their
differences, these works are both relational.

220
Loren Sears, personal letter, January 13, 2011.
159
Slip Back Into the Shining Sea, on the other hand, might more effectively be
compared to one of Jackson Pollock’s more celebrated works, such as Number 1, 1950
(Lavender Mist) (Fig. 51) in which the viewer is presented with a field of line and color
that extends in a relatively unmodulated expanse across the canvas. It is not that nothing
happens in Lavender Mist, but that there is no clear way to separate the parts from one
another, and thus to evaluate their relationships to one another. With the exception of a
fuzzy diagonal mass running from the bottom-center of the canvas up to the upper-left
corner, it would be hard to make out anything in Lavender Mist that could be called a
composition in the traditional sense. This painting has line, color, texture, a sense of
movement and space, but they are all subsumed in the overall “mist” of the title.
Similarly, Slip Back has a variety of elements: tone, shape, movement, sound—even
words—that are part of the viewer’s experience in watching it, but, as with Lavender
Mist, the experience is one of being subjected to a textural, atmospheric field from which
it is nearly impossible to separate out different compositional elements that might be
understood in relation to one another. In this way, both of these works are distinctly non-
relational.
While Instruments of Violence uses the meeting of disparate kinds of sounds and
images to produce meaning, Slip Back brings word and image into the same, semiotically
flattened space, where they provide atmosphere, rather than relational or textual meaning.
Both the visual and aural elements of Slip Back avoid the kinds of structural or
comparative relationships that provide meaning in relational form—instead they offer a
temporal version of the all-over surface of many post-war abstract paintings—containing
little in the way of incident or hierarchy. No moment in the twenty-odd minutes of Slip
160
Back is strongly differentiated from any other. This would become increasingly the case
with works produced at the NCET, as the concept of the mix—and its association with
modernist abstract painting—was developed and entrenched.
The mix, as Howard understood and advocated for it, tended toward
compositional fields without hierarchy, rather than the composed relational structure of
film. This tendency was based in the essential physical differences between the media of
film and video. As Robert Arn explains in his 1973 essay “Form and Sense in Video,”
film, made as it is of one photographic frame after another, is physically and structurally
built for juxtaposition. The film editor chooses a point to cut, and joins the film at a
particular point, putting one image beside, or after, another. Video on the other hand, is
not a series of still images, but an endlessly moving dot, read as fields of light. Arn writes
that “continuous motion or metamorphosis is the continuity line in most video art; an art
of becoming rather than comparison.”
221
Film lends itself to the editor’s cut, coming as it
does in discreet units. For video on the other hand, the cut always passes through active
material—there is no space between frames. It was very difficult, as noted earlier, to edit
video or television in its earliest years without a serious degradation in quality—the best
way to stop and start an image in early video was to turn the signal on or off—not to
“cut” through the existing footage.
222
So videos made by the mix tended to eschew
editorial cuts and narrative progress in favor of layering and electronic mutations.

221
Arn, 17.

222
The editing process in video was additive. Sections of tape would be recorded onto
another tape, in the desired sequence. As a result, the edited video would be, at best,
second generation, and of significantly lower quality than the first generation.

161
When Howard wrote Videospace he differentiated between two different
approaches to the mix: one performative, and the other painterly. The performative
approach to the mix is not one that gained traction beyond Howard’s account—partly,
one suspects, because of its ephemeral nature. The performative mix described by
Howard was akin to live music, and was comprised of artists “mixing” video for a live
audience—VJs avant la lettre.
223
In the second approach—that which survives in existing
documentation—the artist recorded the mix to videotape, which could then be presented
as a broadcast or played on a single monitor. Howard differentiates between a
performative mix and the mix as carried out by video artists:
Those who identify their making this way are not performing with
instruments. They are creating their work with tools. The two-dimensional
glass is an aesthetic surface upon which they form images. They are less
like musicians, more like painters.
224

This alignment with painting, which was based not only in a methodology
comparable to that of Rosenberg’s action painters—spontaneous rather than planned
action, event rather than image, experience rather than narrative—but on the outcomes of
those activities, was not exclusive to activities at the NCET, or to video in San Francisco.
It did, however, dominate the development of video art, its form and language, at the
station, and it can be found in the broader discourse growing up around video art in the

223
The VJ, or video jockey, as a professional and creative identity came into existence in
the 1980s on MTV, when music videos entered the television world. The term referred to
someone who, like a radio “disk jockey” selected and/or introduced music. Within a few
years, however, the idea emerged that a VJ, like a DJ, could be a more creative
practitioner, “mixing” sound or video technology. See Annet Dekker, “Synaesthetic
Performance on the Club Scene” Cosign 2003: Computation Semiotics,
http://www.cosignconference.org/conference/2003/papers. Accessed January 11, 2011.

224
Howard, Videospace, 37.
162
region. Radical Software’s 1972 special issue about the future of video in the Bay Area,
Videocity, was guest edited and written by local artists and affiliated professionals (Fig.
52). The periodical contained a number of articles that discuss the short history of video
as an art form as well as its future, and many of them showed the same tendency to frame
the medium as an advanced manifestation of modernist painting.
Three particularly clear examples of this rhetoric of video-as-painting can be
found in articles by artist Tom DeWitt, art dealer Mary Myers and in an overview of
activities at the NCET credited to staff and participants. The DeWitt and Myers articles
show a shared historical and cultural framing of video:
A suggestion was made by the post-photography schools of painting.
These artists sought to evoke emotion through the movement of their
brushes and the color of their paints. … With a photocell as his brush, the
artist will truly be able to paint with light.
225

….film and video are not only tools for communication but also tools for
artists, and … when they become the brush of the painter […] the results
are a highly personal, often abstract, subtle interweaving of the technique
of the medium and the inner desire of the artist to communicate basic
human values and emotions to his viewers. This evocation of emotion, this
ability to communicate in a non-verbal, non-linear visual medium, is a rare
and subtle talent…
226

225
Tom DeWitt, “Medium Opto-Mysic” Radical Software: Videocity. (San Francisco,
1972):10.

226
Mary Myers, “Ursa Major” Radical Software: Videocity. (San Francisco, 1972): 22.
Also, see Aline Wilbur, who describes video practices at the station in the following
terms: “Supported by the Rockefeller Foundation grant, NCET is a research and
development center at station KQED, San Francisco. Under the direction of Brice
Howard it has spent a year exploring the uses of television as an art material—painting
with electrons on the surface of a television screen—and the development of several new
video processes that transform normal imagery into abstractions.” [My italics]. Aline
Wilbur, “And now—the art of videography” Christian Science Monitor (Dec 29, 1972):
4.

163
Both Meyers and DeWitt discuss video as a form of painting—associating it in
particular with abstract painting. They both emphasize the ability of the visual field of
video to “evoke emotions,” but they say nothing of the medium’s ability to tell stories.
Both suggest that video, as a means to “paint with light,” offers a purified visual field,
and as such, they show the influence of modernist approaches to painting that celebrated
the autonomy of color and canvas on their own terms, freed from narrative and pictorial
realism. While video art in the North-East was often understood to be connected to
critical, post-modern practices of performance, installation and conceptual art, much
early video in San Francisco engaged a sort of populist formalism—especially that
produced at the NCET. The article in Radical Software that described activities at the
station demonstrates a deep investment in this kind of thinking:
Working with the television monitor as the prime surface of aesthetic
occurrence rather than as the conventional display of photographed reality,
Center artists seek to understand and formalize principles of composition
with electronic image and sound. Here broadcast television, and the
theatrical, motion picture and journalistic histories which have comprised
it, are set aside, and the medium’s unique characteristics—electrical
energy, two dimensionality in a fixed aspect ratio, time-dependence—are
applied in studies of shape, movement, tension, volume, plasticity, texture,
and duration.
227

For these writers video was a means to create with the most basic of materials: the
electron. This emphasis on medium specificity dominated video art production at KQED
from at least 1968, and was solidly entrenched by 1972 when these articles were
published. Less obvious is the fact that, whatever the aesthetic ideals driving production,
there was a social and political motivation behind them. Howard and his colleagues saw

227
Anne Turner, Brice Howard, et. al. “The National Center for Experiments In
Television” Radical Software: Videocity. (San Francisco, 1972), 47.

164
television being controlled and directed in ways that had a negative social impact, and,
importantly, curtailed the aesthetic possibilities of the medium.
228
The dominance of
abstraction in video produced through the residency program in San Francisco was tied to
a firmly anti-broadcast, anti-television stance articulated by Howard in Videospace and
elsewhere. Howard wanted the participating artists to be free from the pressures of
broadcast requirements, not only because he believed that broadcasting was a secondary,
arbitrary capacity that had become the medium’s defining quality due to its commercial
applications, but because he recognized that broadcast conventions and requirements
were likely to pre-determine many aspects of the work made at the station.
229
Embedded
within the apparently apolitical language of modernist formalism engaged by these artists
and encouraged by Howard was a genuine desire to prompt viewers to break the
perceptual habits formed over the preceding decade. The rapidly expanding social,
political and economic power of television made this project all the more urgent.
“If one’s means [are] irrevocably linked to distribution, one’s means must be
productive,” Howard wrote in 1972.
230
Some of the differences between works produced
at KQED and works produced in Boston, at WGBH, shed light upon this claim. As I
made clear in the preceding chapter, works made at the Boston location—which were

228
See NCET, “Meeting Transcripts” Pacific Film Archive, Box 1, File 16, 1967-68.

229
Howard wrote: “The medium is a making means separable from its technical capacity
to distribute—to broadcast… there are many […] who are unaware of this fact. Being
unaware, they rarely encounter the medium, so intense is their concern for the broadcast.”
Videospace Handbook, NCET, 13. The Handbook, which is held in the collection of the
PFA, was missing when I visited the archive, and all quotations from this document are
from notes previously taken and generously shared by curator Steve Seid.

230
Howard, Videospace, 15.
165
always thought of as possible broadcast content—tended to be shaped by the
requirements of broadcast standards, in terms of both temporal structure and technology.
For example, the videos produced by artists involved in the 1969 broadcast, The Medium
is the Medium were all approximately six minutes long. And when an artist failed to
produce a video of that length—as Allan Kaprow did when he left behind an hour of
uncut footage—station staff took over the project, cutting it to the required length. Also,
before the release of the time-base corrector in 1975, only footage taken using broadcast-
standard cameras could be aired—anything taken with the less expensive portable video
recorder was incompatible with broadcast requirements. Works made at the Boston
station fit the temporal and technological requirements of television, and they tended to
follow its rhythms as well. Works had beginnings and ends, they played with the familiar
editing styles of television as often as they eschewed them. They entertained.
Of course, this engagement with televisual conventions was not a blind embrace.
As I hope to have made clear, the artists and participating station staff at WGBH treated
these conventions critically, transforming usually unnoticed framing devices into central
components of their work, drawing attention to them in the process. Even so, their
engagement was primarily with the more obvious conventions of public television. In
particular they focused on the ways in which specific kinds of information were
delivered, rather than the underlying shape and form of television programming, which,
in the late 1960s, had not yet been clearly theorized.
In 1974, however, Raymond Williams, a British academic, conducted an
important study of these aspects of television in Television: Technology and Cultural
Form. In Television Williams argued that a full understanding of the form and effects of
166
the medium required the replacement of “the static concept of ‘distribution’” with “the
mobile concept of ‘flow’.” “Flow” in Williams’ formulation, can be understood as a
sequence, or “set of alternative sequences” of events. In the past, he points out, cultural
products were generally offered and consumed in isolation from one another.
231

Broadcast, by contrast, offered an uninterrupted flow of material. This flow, particularly
in the case of American television, was structured by commercial necessity. “The
sponsored programmes incorporated the advertising from the outset…. What is being
offered is not, in older terms, a programme of discrete units with particular insertions, but
a planned flow.”
232
With the introduction of trailers and itemized program information,
intended to hold viewers between broadcast items, Williams asserted, a “new kind of
communication phenomenon” emerged.
233
Most television programs were (and arguably
still are) made with this sequence of events in mind—they were structured to the
requirements of product advertisements and station promotions. Even on non-commercial
stations, Williams claimed, programming was organized around the need to keep viewers
from changing the channel. Thus, individual parts of the programming schedule were
ultimately planned as part of the larger whole—each minute of program production
subsumed by the requirements of flow, rather than determined by its own directives.

231
Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form, (New York:
Schocken, 1975), 87. First published in London in 1974. Even a cultural product that was
sequential, such as a serialized novel in a newspaper, was received in separate
installments.

232
Williams, Television, 90.

233
Williams, Television, 91.

167
The artists and staff involved with the residency program at KQED were
concerned with these issues of deep structure.
234
Brice Howard wrote at length about the
ways in which the requirements of what Williams would later call flow shaped
everything made for broadcast, and as a result, the works produced under his direction
defied broadcast conventions in a number of ways. These videotapes were often quite
long—sometimes running up to an hour, and they frequently used inexpensive portable
video technology. Most important was their refusal to emulate the rhythms of broadcast
television. The videos produced at KQED often maintained a single, slowly mutating
image over the course of the entire video—with no edits, minimal if any camera
movement (or no camera at all), and sound provided by electronic rather than live or local
sources. For example, Willard Rosenquist’s Lostine (1973), was 49 minutes long, and all
that happened was that the shards of light and color on the screen moved, very, very
slowly into new formulations (Figs. 53-55). It would seem that there was very little that
could be done to most of the works produced at the NCET that would make them
amenable to a broadcast “flow,” insisting, as so many of them did, on an approach that
treated the surface of the monitor as a glass canvas for paintings that moved.
The work of William Gwin, a painter and early artist-in-residence demonstrates
with greater specificity the alignment of video with painting, and the effects that this
alignment were thought to have. In his essay “Reflections on Two Media,” the artist

234
In fact, transcripts of a 1967 meeting show that, although they were not using the same
language that Williams would introduce seven years later, they were acutely aware of the
ways in which the different parts of the program “flow” inflected one another, citing in
particular the relationship between news coverage of the conflict in Vietnam and the
advertisements aired alongside. NCET, “Meeting Transcripts” Pacific Film Archive,
NCET Collection, Box 1, File 16 (San Francisco; September 12, 1967) 7-8.
168
explored the ways in which his practices as a painter and video artist related to one
another. In the following excerpt, Gwin describes his process in both media, focusing on
Irving Bridge (Figs. 56 and 57).
Color, texture and discrete pictorial elements, the basic components of
surface, are developed by building up interrupted layers. This is achieved
in my paintings by applying the paint so a great number of transparent,
translucent or opaque layers are produced. In “Irving Bridge”, my most
recent video work, it is done with layers of videotaped imagery. These
layers relate to one another in a very dense and complicated fashion, and
are defined basically by color, although shape plays some role as well.
These overlapping layers create a sort of shallow, ambiguous space; there
is no use of perspective or other illusionistic devices in the painting and
only little in the video, so that very dense images can be created without
losing the breathing space which is necessary for the interaction of the
various elements within a work.
235

“Reflections on Two Media” is particularly informative, as it is one of the few
places where a participant in the NCET project addressed not only the process of making
the work—drawing explicit connections between surfaces of canvas and television
monitor—but also the ideal experience of the viewer. Gwin made it clear that for him, the
temporal aspects of video were distinct from both film and television, which have
beginnings, middles, and ends. Differentiating between “movement” and “motion” which
is “not usually the clearly directed movement of a discrete pictorial element happening in
a precise interval of time, but a more general fluttering of the entire field activated at
times by currents,” Gwin described a surface on which there is minimal change or
event.
236
The viewer of this work is not bound by its specific temporality.

235
William Gwin, “Reflections on Two Media” (San Francisco: NCET Publications, c.
1972) 3-4.

236
Gwin, “Reflections” 2.

169
Ideally my video pieces would be presented in a loop, running
continuously. There would be no beginning, no middle, and no end, and
no particular duration, save the length of time a viewer wanted to spend
with it in much the same way a person spends time with a painting.
237

Importantly, for Gwin, as for many others, this alignment with painting is not
merely a means to legitimate their work by association with an institutionally accepted
genre, as argued by Lucinda Furlong. Rather, for the artists in residence at KQED, the
association with painting had a social motivation, in its ability to change the ways in
which people engaged with the powerful medium of television. Instead of being sucked
into and controlled by the “flow,” the viewer of these tapes were invited to determine
their own relationship the image on the screen. Instead of setting out to seduce—the
primary duty of most television programming—videos like Gwin’s or Rosenquist’s
simply presented themselves to the viewer, inviting contemplation and engagement, but
not requiring any particular duration or response.
This desire to influence viewing habits as a means to social change was tied to the
broader mandate of the residency program, which emphasized research as well as
personal expression and formal experiment. Gwin’s paper was one of many that were
published and distributed by the National Center for Experiments in Television that
explored television as a medium, beyond the conventions of commercial broadcasting. In
the simplest possible terms, art practices at WGBH in Boston were a means to expand the
creative possibilities of television and to make it better.
238
At KQED, the project followed

237
Gwin, “Reflections” 7.

238
Fred Barzyk, describing the ultimate aim of the residency program and experiments
such as What’s Happening, Mr. Silver? said “I was just having fun. Basically, it was a
canvas, it was blank. What could we do to make it interesting. How can you hone your art
170
a modernist ethos of withdrawal from the systems of mass culture in the hopes of
producing works and methods that had the potential institute deep change in individual
subjects. Marshal McLuhan had theorized this change when he wrote about the ways in
which new media reshaped the workings of the mind, and the power of artists to effect
this process in positive ways.
239

A few of these reports, like “Reflections on Two Media” were considerations of
the artistic problems associated with the medium, while others explored its potential
social and psychological ramifications; still others were treatises in engineering the
televisual image. Among these (often undated) reports—now held in the Pacific Film
Archives, were Paul Kaufman’s c.1972 “Reflections on Values in Public Television And
their Relationship to Political and Organizational Life,” and George Kaplan’s
“Architectural Space, Psychology, and Video.”
240
These papers explored the social,

and make it better? And can you find your personal vision? Can I do this as mine?” Fred
Barzyk in conversation with the author, Boston, MA, March 30, 2009.

239
In the preface to the third edition of Understanding Media, McLuhan wrote of the
potential for art to intervene in positive ways in the develop of media and its
consumption, “Art offered as a consumer commodity rather than as a means of training
perception is as ludicrous and snobbish as always. Media study at once opens the doors of
perception. And here it is that the young can do top level research work.” Marshall
McLuhan Understanding Media; The Extensions of Man, (1964, New York, Toronto,
London), viii.

240
The papers were distributed periodically as reports. A 1972 NCET brochure in the
PFA archives explains “The Reports are distributed to universities, community groups
and public broadcast stations concerned with both the intellectual, technical and artistic
future of television. They are also permanently stored on microfiche in the ERIC
Clearinghouse on Media and Technology at Stanford University. The diversity of
subjects covered reflects the Center’s belief that the hope for new forms of expression in
television lies in fusing, rather than splitting, questions of art, value and technology.
Thus, the technical papers are written in language understandable to non-engineers, and
the Center urged that persons with specialized concerns in technology also be given the
171
psychological and political aspects of television as a form of mass communication.
241
In
order to transform the medium—and thus the society that consumed its products—
through the introduction of new, unconventional forms, it was necessary to understand
that medium. These papers were essential to this project.
A consideration of another sort of report published by the NCET, however,
reveals that creative exploration and theoretical research into the ramifications of the
medium were not the end of the matter at the Center. The refusal to produce works for
broadcast, while based in a utopian desire to institute social change through the
development of autonomous cultural forms, left the program managers with the problem
of financial justification. The mandate of Educational and Public Television was never to
incite a revolution—aesthetically driven or otherwise. Nor was the Rockefeller
Foundation likely to fund a project in the hopes that it might have the capacity to free the
consciousness of the American public from the shackles of conventional media forms.
Another type of report—such as William Gwin’s “Video Feedback: How to Make It; An
Artist’s Comments on its Use; A Systems Approach,” Stephen Beck’s “Direct Video:
Electronic Artform for Color Television,” and “A Video Processing Facility for Artistic
Use: Design Philosophy and a description of Components,” authored collectively by
Lawrence W. Templeton, Don Hallock, Richard Stephens, and Ann Turner—reveals

papers covering other areas.” NCET, “Brochure: National Center for Experiments in
Television Fall/72” Pacific Film Archive, NCET Collection, Box 1, File 18: Miscellany,
1970-1975.

241
Other similar papers, also held in the NCET archives at the PFA include Richard O.
Moore, “Communication, Organization and John Stuart Mill”; Marvin Duckler, “Talking
Faces, Eating Time, and Electronic Catharsis”; and Brice Howard “About Television
Reality and Performance.” Howard’s Videospace also falls into this category.

172
another aspect of the project, one that sits in an awkward alignment with the prioritization
of autonomy and abstraction shown by the program’s public face. These papers, which
function essentially as engineering manuals, demonstrate that at the NCET not just
research, but research and development were central to the activities carried out by both
artists and station staff under the aegis of the artists’ residency program.
While most of the media coverage of activities at the NCET, as well as the
discourse within the artistic and cultural community, emphasized personal expression and
formal experimentation, as well as the project’s emancipatory social potential, there was
another conversation happening at the same time. Contiguous with the rhetoric of
formalism, abstraction and revolutionary autonomy, there was another language spoken
at the Center, one that used words like “research” “investigation” “instrument” and
“experiment” in very specific and telling ways. A 1970 report on the activities of the
Center opens with the following words:
The National Center is a unique institution conducting theoretical and
applied research into television as an instrument of personal and
community growth, a learning and therapeutic tool, and a fine art.
242

Another document from 1970 outlines the Center’s plans for the future:
The research plan for the Center is an effort to make an orderly approach
to understanding a medium which can be so instrumental in improving the
quality of man’s life.
243

242
National Center for Experiments in Television, What’s Happening at the Center: A
Report on Current Activities at the National Center for Experiments in Television, Pacific
Film Archive, NCET Collection, Box 1, File 11 (San Francisco, July 1970) 1.

243
Brice Howard and Paul Kauffman, “Research Plans” Pacific Film Archive, NCET
Collection, Box 1, File 1 (San Francisco, April 1970), 3.
173
The overall sense given by these statements is in keeping with the mandate for
social change and self-expression discussed above, but the strategies by which these
goals would be met stands in stark contrast to the rhetoric of autonomy and spontaneity in
Howard’s writing. They emphasize, rather, the search for an “orderly approach” to the
activation of television as a tool. These strategies, found in funding applications and
reports, are backed up by reams of transcribed conversations, recorded at the Center at
organized sessions in which artists and technicians discussed and explained their
methodologies—the ways in which a particular image or effect or texture or pattern was
achieved. Also, the papers that I have referred to as “engineering manuals” described
technologies and techniques for the production of abstract imagery, including Stephen
Beck’s “Direct Video: Electronic Artform for Color Television” (c. 1970-72), and
William Gwin’s “Video Feedback: How to Make It: An Artist’s Comments on its Use; A
Systems Approach” (c. 1973). The artists who participated in activities at the NCET were
not just expressing themselves, they were conducting research into the basic matter of the
powerful new medium of television, and looking for ways to develop its technologies.
Comparing the work of two critics, one of whom preceded, and the other roughly
contemporaneous with, the historical moment under investigation here, provides a clearer
picture of the divided ethos of the Center in the context of the broader scene of American
art production. On the one hand, Howard’s description of the ideal production method,
which he called “the mix” is, as I have explained, closely aligned with Harold
Rosenberg’s description of action painting. For both Rosenberg and Howard, the artwork
is a document of the autonomous artist acting in the world and responding to the
conditions of a particular moment. This theoretical framework suits the artistic
174
experiments I have described well enough, but it does little to shed light on the
instrumental ethos of technological development that clearly existed alongside artistic
exploration at the television station.
The instrumental approach that existed alongside “the mix” was not without
discursive context in the late 1960s. In fact, this approach closely aligned with that
described in Leo Steinberg’s 1968 essay “Other Criteria.” In this essay, Steinberg
describes a specifically American discomfort with “artiness,” overcome through an
investment in the idea of work and productivity. Art must be legitimated and made honest
by work, he argued. Engineering, industry and research were among the most effective
avenues to provide art with a more serious, and more American mien. “Not art, but
technological research,” he says, describing the pride taken by artists who, having phoned
in directions to a corporation, discover that they have strained or exceeded the
technological capacities of the corporation.
244
While it may be true that the pleasure he
describes existed for some of the (presumably) minimalist artists he refers to, it was at the
core of activities at KQED, where artists sought, through experimentation, to push the
existing technology beyond its known capacities with as much energy as they applied to
any attempt at intellectual or emotional expression.
When the word “experiment” is used in relation to artistic practices, it usually
refers to a situation in which the artist engages in actions with unpredictable outcomes in
order to produce a unique object. When the word experiment is used in a scientific or
industrial context, however, it means something very different. The defining

244
Leo Steinberg, “Other Criteria” in Other Criteria, (Oxford, 1972) 62. I am grateful to
Katherine Lina Hartman Wells for pointing out the relevance of Steinberg’s work in this
case.
175
characteristic of a successful laboratory experiment is repeatability—consistency of
results. This is what the National Center for Experiments in Television appears to have
been aiming for—and the strength of this agenda at KQED as compared to WGBH can
be seen not only in the textual ephemera left at the station, but in the tools developed at
KQED as opposed to those developed at the same time at WGBH.
Both stations supported artists-in-residence in the production of video
synthesizers. At WGBH, where Nam June Paik and Shuya Abe collaborated to create the
Paik-Abe Video Synthesizer in 1969, the culture of creative production was one that
hewed closely to the tradition of artistic experimentation. The Paik-Abe was intended to
alter existing footage as well as synthesize new material. More importantly, emphasis
was placed on improvisation, and the Paik-Abe was never really finished, but constantly
changed and added to—an organic machine.
In a 1986 history of the residency program at WGBH, Susan Dowling writes
about Paik and Abe’s arrival in Boston in 1969. The artists brought with them
…five junk television sets, a set of giant magnets, miles of masking tape,
rubber boots (to prevent shock) and hand-drawn schematics for the
world’s first videosynthesizer.
245

Fred Barzyk described his first encounter with the Paik-Abe in a 1998 interview:
Nam June brought me in to the studio and he had this old 78 turntable that
was spinning and he was squirting shaving cream on top of it. So it was
mounds of shaving cream. And he had these surveillance black and white
cameras looking at it. On the monitor, Mr. Abe was turning all kinds of
knobs and here was these reds and greens and purples and this thing was
alive and he had created ‘TV pictures’ as cheap as you could make it for
ten thousand dollars. And it was there forever and it could just run and run

245
Susan Dowling, History of the WGBH New Television Workshop, (WGBH Archives,
March 1986).

176
and run and run. So that was Nam June Paik’s contribution, the world’s
first synthesizer…. He invited friends and artists and guests … into the
studio and it went on for four hours of this crazy…this most abstract kind
of stuff you could ever imagine.
246

The Paik-Abe, while certainly a tool that users could learn to manipulate in
repeatable ways, was a wild machine that invited intuitive play rather than plans. By
contrast—surprisingly, considering the spontaneous ethos of the mix advocated by
Howard—the developer of the synthesizer technology at the NCET worked very hard to
establish consistency, a set of guidelines that would allow repeatable results. Steven
Beck, a young artist-engineer, created the Beck Direct Video Synthesizer at KQED in
1970, a machine that differed significantly from the Paik-Abe. Rather than a machine that
worked with existing footage, the Beck Direct was the first video synthesizer to produce
video without a camera. It was a carefully engineered piece of equipment and came with
extensive instructions for use. Beck wrote of the genesis of the project in the early 1970s,
I was led to color television in the search for a precise means of
expressively controlling light. Conventional computer graphics displays
seemed costly and neglected a common piece of hardware—the color
television set—as a display terminal; hence, the notion of a visual
synthesizer as intermediary between control and display of an image.
247

Beck’s language demonstrates his investment in an industrial or scientific model.
The purpose of the Beck Direct was to provide artists with the kind of precise control
over image production that simply didn’t exist outside of the primitive functions of early

246
Selena Colburn, “Fred Barzyk Interview, Part I” WGBH Oral History Project,
(Boston, August 1998) 31-32.

247
Stephen Beck “Direct Video: Electronic Artform for Color Television” Pacific Film
Archive, NCET Collection, Box 1, File 2, Publications (San Francisco, c. 1972) 1.

177
digital graphics systems or hand-drawn film. Beck went on to explain how he designed
the system based on a set of specific formal parameters. His goal was to provide the artist
with control over form, motion, texture and color. He describes the method used for each:
Mapping from the aesthetic model into real electronic control of video
images occurs in the following way:
1. sequences of pulse-width modulated signals are developed which define
contours of form over the monitor surface;
2. waveshaping and amplitude modulation of these signals allows control
of the brightness gradient, thus yielding texture;
3. proportional distribution of these signals as excitation for the primary
pigments of emitted light, red, green and blue, produces the gamut of
colors, with hue, saturation and intensity precisely specified.
248

Although he documented the production and basic engineering concepts behind
the Beck Direct, this was a machine users were no more expected to understand on a deep
structural level than the average user of a computer today would understand their laptop.
Because the outcome of an artist’s directives were predictable, it was not necessary for
the synthesizer’s user to understand its inner workings. The Paik-Abe, on the other hand,
was unpredictable and highly sensitive, requiring that its users understand it on a deep
structural level, and be prepared to respond to it, rather than have their instructions result
in a planned form.
As previously mentioned, the project’s first and most generous source of funds
was the Rockefeller Foundation. The Rockefeller Foundation’s larger mandate in the
1960s included five primary areas: the Conquest of Hunger, University Development,
Population, Equal Opportunity and Cultural Development.
249
The Foundation first

248
Beck “Direct Video” 2.

249
Rockefeller Foundation President’s Five-Year Review and Annual Report,
(Rockefeller Foundation, 1968) xx-xxii.
178
established the Cultural Development program in 1963, and quickly began to focus on
media art, a process managed by a Howard Klein. As Marita Sturken relates in her 1987
essay “Private Money and Personal Influence: Howard Klein and the Rockefeller
Foundation’s Funding of the Media Arts,” Klein’s approach to funding the visual arts
stayed very much within the largely research-directed practices of the foundation. In fact,
he framed the decision to support artists’ residency programs at public television stations
in just these terms when he asked “Can these public television stations not develop
research and development arms in their own field? What industry doesn’t have a research
and development department?”
250
This focus on research and development and the
identification of the artist as a technical as well as aesthetic or conceptual innovator in the
laboratory of the television studio was behind the funding provided to both of the stations
considered in this dissertation, but it seems to have flourished in San Francisco in
particular.
In a 1971 study of the relatively new phenomenon of the think tank, Paul Dickson
argued that this institutional form grew out of the “empire” of “research and
development.”
251
An empire headquartered on the West Coast. Dickson states:
California is the leading state in the nation in R&D with its largest
concentration in the suburbs of San Francisco… In its last regional survey
of R&D, the National Science Foundation found that nearly 40% of all
federal research money going to industry ended up in California.
252

250
Marita Sturken, “Private Money and Personal Influence: Howard Klein and the
Rockefeller Foundation’s Funding of the Media Arts” Afterimage, vol. 14, no. 6 (January
1987): 6.

251
Paul Dickson, Think Tanks, (New York: Atheneum, 1971), 5.

252
Dickson, Think Tanks, 16.
179

Think tanks, R&D, industry. How did these cold-war machines end up situated so
comfortably in the long-haired bosom of an artists’ residency program at a public
television station? In a paper delivered at the Hammer Museum in October 2010, art
historian Pamela M. Lee argued that the institutional and intellectual form of the think
tank, a product of the Cold War 1950s, had, by the 1960s, begun to influence the broader
culture, and academia in particular. She cites, specifically, institutional structures that
encouraged flexibility in authorship and specialization, collaboration, and
interdisciplinarity as practices that were popularized by the think tank.
253
I would like to
suggest that not only academia, but organized spaces of collective creative practice, such
as the artists’ residencies I am examining here, adopted these forms. While the rhetoric
that surrounded the video art produced at KQED, as well as the appearance of that video,
may have followed a model drawn in part from art theory and practice of the 1950s cold-
war era, the modes of production employed there and the ethos of collaboration and
technological exploration owed just as much to the contemporaneous model of the think-
tank. This meeting, in the late 1960s, of two previously unrelated approaches to
innovation and cultural production grounded in the cold-war culture of the early 1950s,
resulted in a unique creative environment. The acceptance of these approaches—
increasingly associated with a reactionary conservatism—into a social field that had

253
Pamela M. Lee, “Aesthetic Strategist: Albert Wohlstetter, The Cold War and a Theory
of Mid-Century Modernism,” Keynote Address, UCLA Art History Graduate
Symposium, (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, October 22, 2010).
180
strong countercultural tendencies, was enabled by the emergence of a popular theorist of
new communications technologies.
It is very unlikely that the particular creative context of the artists’ residency at
KQED would ever have had a chance to develop without the theories of Marshall
McLuhan. McLuhan’s work stands out in particular as the primary facilitator of this
particular historical détente between art and industry. As we have seen, McLuhan, who
had been writing about the effects of media since the 1950s, became a household name in
1966, after a media blitz that saw the academic and his theories featured in practically
every major periodical in North America, not to mention radio and television
appearances.
254
In Understanding Media, McLuhan argued that each new medium
changed the workings of the human machine—electronic technologies were operating as
extensions of our minds the way that mechanical means had been extensions of our
bodies.
255
He argued that we had no control over this process, that the changes wrought
were subliminal, that they circumvented free will and personal autonomy—that all of us
are subject to and shaped by the forms of media we consume. Except for artists. “The
serious artist” McLuhan argued “is the only person able to encounter technology with
impunity, just because he is an expert aware of the changes in sense perception.”
256

McLuhan’s explosive appearance on the American pop-culture scene—a year before the
introduction of the program at KQED—facilitated the growth of an intellectual

254
Tom Wolfe “McLuhan’s New World” The Wilson Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Spring,
2004), 23-24.

255
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 19.

256
McLuhan, Understanding Media, 33.
181
environment in which artistic abstraction could be an instrument in the development and
socialization of new media.
At the National Center for Experiments in Television, the job of the artist was not
to produce video art for exhibition and display (as Howard made clear when he declared
his moratorium on broadcasting), but to establish control over the increasingly powerful
medium of television. The language of autonomy ideologically associated with
abstraction meant that participants never needed to ask why this work was being done, or
what its ultimate purpose was. Artistic experimentation was conflated with its distant
laboratory cousin to produce an environment in which artists and administrators could
claim the development of a new and ideal form of personal expression out one side of
their mouths while trumpeting its value as technological innovation out the other—all the
while believing, quite honestly, that they were conducting work with revolutionary social
potential. As we will see in the following chapter, one of the primary uses to which all of
this research was ultimately put, was to develop a visual language for television that
spoke the psychedelic patois of the youth counterculture that was gaining such
momentum in San Francisco.

182
Figures to Chapter Three

Figure 43. Robert Zagone, Stephen Beck, et. al., Ecotopia: A Visual Essay, 1975, video
still, Pacific Film Archive.

183

Figure 44. NCET Page, Radical Software, (Vol. 2, No. 30),
(http://www.radicalsoftware.org/e/volume2nr3.html) 46.
184

Figure 45. Nam June Paik, 9/23, 1969, video still, WGBH-TV.

Figure 46. Brice Howard, Video Notebook, 1972, video still, Pacific Film Archive.

185

Figure 47. Loren Sears, Richard Felciano, Joanne Kyger, Slip Back Into the Shining Sea,
1967, video still, Pacific Film Archive.

Figure 48. Loren Sears, Richard Felciano, Joanne Kyger, Slip Back Into the Shining Sea,
1967, video still, Pacific Film Archive.

186

Figure 49. Loren Sears, Richard Felciano, Joanne Kyger, Slip Back Into the Shining Sea,
1967, video still, Pacific Film Archive.

Figure 50. Piet Mondrian, Composition with Red, Blue, Black, Yellow, and Gray, 1921,
oil paint on canvas, 76 x 52.4 cm, MoMA.

187

Figure 51. Jackson Pollock, Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist), 1950, oil, enamel and
aluminum on canvas, 221 x 299.7 cm, National Gallery of Art.

Figure 52. Radical Software: Video City, Philip Getzen, ed., San Francisco, 1972,1-3
(http://www.radicalsoftware.org/e/volume2nr3.html).

188

Figures 53-55. Willard Rosenquist, Lostine, 1973, video stills, Pacific Film Archive.

189

Figure 56. Bill Gwin, Irving Bridge, c. 1972, video still, Pacific Film Archive.

Figure 57. Bill Gwin, Irving Bridge, c. 1972, video still, Pacific Film Archive.

190

Figure 58. Steven Beck, Synthesis, 1971-4 made using the Beck Direct Video
Synthesizer, video still, Pacific Film Archive.

Figure 59. Steven Beck, Synthesis, 1971-4 made using the Beck Direct Video
Synthesizer, video still, Pacific Film Archive.

191

Chapter Four: Hybrid Objects

In the preceding chapters I presented two of the more noteworthy developments in
the early artists’ residency programs in public television stations. In Boston, collaboration
across professional lines resulted in specific innovations and shaped particular works; as
well, we saw how artists working in the new medium of television managed the
technological, formal and cultural conventions of educational broadcast television (many
of which overlapped with commercial TV). Production at the San Francisco location
revealed a notably different avenue in early video: the meeting of a modernist belief in
the value of formalist autonomy with a professional and technological instrumentalisation
of artistic experimentation—an unexpected convergence that was specific to the unique
creative culture at KQED.
While both of the preceding chapters looked closely at the influence and effects that
extra-artistic cultures and professional systems had on the production of works of art, the objects
investigated have, with the exceptions of Mr. Silver’s “Madness and Intuition” and Ecotopia,
been categorized as art. Although the quality of the works within this category vary, few of them
could in any easy way be identified as anything other than art. In this chapter, I will discuss
video tapes which, like “Madness and Intuition” and Ecotopia, defy such easy classification.
These works, produced at KQED, WGBH, and WNET-TV in New York, are hybrids—neither
“pure” art nor “mere” television shows. These programs emerged from the meeting points of the
residency programs I have already discussed and regular program production. They include such
192
diverse genres as performing arts, documentary, science fiction, and children’s programming.
257

In this chapter, I will focus on those which employed the innovations of contemporary art—
particularly as it developed through the residency programs—to woo a young, urban, audience
that was highly critical of mainstream cultural production.
The television programs discussed in this chapter used strategies familiar in the world of
contemporary art, strategies often accessed directly through the artists-in-residence at the station,
to better speak to the emerging audience identified with the late-1960s urban counter-culture. I
begin with an early episode of WGBH’s weekly program What’s Happening, Mr. Silver?, of
which thirty half-hour episodes were aired on PBS affiliates throughout the United States in 1967
and 1968, and the related feature-length program, America Inc. produced by WGBH in
collaboration with New York’s WNET in 1969. What’s Happening integrated the approaches of
avant-garde art practices of the time, while providing historical documentation of the period—
particularly of the counterculture in Boston and New York. In San Francisco, two projects were
developed in the late sixties which spoke in very direct ways to the emergent counterculture
centered in the Haight-Ashbury area. Both West Pole, a rock concert televised in 1968, and

257
While this chapter plays an important role in the overall structure of this dissertation, it has a
secondary purpose, which is to give some degree of scholarly and cultural presence to a set of
marginalized, historically homeless objects. Because they are not quite art, many of these tapes
have no place in the world of art museums and exhibitions that have been instrumental in
maintaining and legitimizing the works made by artists-in-residence. Similarly, as singularly
strange objects in the television world, there is little promise of future broadcasting, and in some
cases works may be in danger of being dropped out of expensive video-conservation programs.
A casual attitude toward copyright when these works were produced—particularly in the use of
popular music—means that those programs that might find a contemporary audience would first
have to secure the rights to music that has become prohibitively expensive. Despite these
obstacles, these tapes are important and informative objects in the study of the development (and
divergence) of video art and television as cultural forms, and as such, should not be allowed to
simply disappear from the historical record. For this reason, and because access to these tapes is
very limited, I will dedicate a significant amount of this chapter to description as well as
analysis.
193
Heimskringla!, a theatrical production aired in 1969, used the video processing strategies
developed at the NCET to transform and enrich the visual qualities of performances that already
spoke to a youth audience with an interest in psychedelic experience and some degree of political
radicalism.
What’s Happening, Mr. Silver? was largely the result of a creative collaboration between
Fred Barzyk and David Silver. Fred Barzyk, as discussed in my second chapter, had been
dissatisfied for some time with the conventions of educational broadcasting—conventions that he
had first tried to overcome in the early 1960s with Jazz Images. It wasn’t until 1966 though,
when television executives in both the commercial and public sectors had begun to seek more
effective ways to court the growing youth audience—the young-adult baby boomers who were
equally turned off by network shows like The Beverly Hillbillies and the often didactic fare
typical of educational television programming—that producers like Barzyk found institutional
support for their more outré experiments.
258

Barzyk’s collaborator on the program—and its star—David Silver, was, like
media theorist Marshall McLuhan, an English professor turned public personality, though
the young British academic was more camera-friendly than the Canadian intellectual
heavyweight. Silver’s hipster good looks and easy rapport with Boston’s growing
community of students, dropouts and hippies made him a magnetic center to the
televisual maelstrom that Barzyk set in motion.

258
For a history of these programming shifts, see “Tube Talk” Boston Herald Daily, April 18,
1972; Barnouw, Tube of Plenty, 390-403; Bodroghkozy, Groove Tube; and Laurie Ouellette,
Viewers Like You? How Public TV Failed the People, (Columbia University Press; New York,
2002), 65-66.
194
“Madness and Intuition,” the most formally innovative episode of What’s
Happening, Mr. Silver?, was presented in Chapter Two as evidence of Barzyk’s
familiarity with strategies and approaches developed in avant-garde circles of the
contemporary art world, and his openness to their incorporation into programming. The
similarities between “Madness and Intuition” and the projects carried out through the
artists-in-residence program showed Barzyk’s willingness to challenge professional
hierarchies and the institution of authorship, and as such typified the innovative practices
that shaped the residency program at WGBH. In this chapter, What’s Happening is
explored, not merely as a means to better understand the residency program and the
works produced under its aegis, but as an object in its own right. Considered in this light,
some fundamental and surprising differences between the form and approach of What’s
Happening and of broadcasts of residency products—such as The Medium is the Medium
and Video Variations—come to light. In particular, the familiar high-culture framing
typical of the presentation of artists’ video at WGBH was notably absent from What’s
Happening—despite the fact that this program showed material that was arguably as
unfamiliar, challenging, and formally innovative as that in any of the broadcasts
developed through the artists-in-residence program. This raises important questions about
the integration of products categorized as high art into the world of mass culture, and the
distinction between counterculture and avant-garde in the late 1960s.
259

259
The categories of counter-culture and avant-garde, which are used extensively in this
chapter, should be understood as frequently overlapping, but not interchangeable.
References to the counter-culture, unless otherwise indicated, are meant to include the
broad swath of American youth that, in the late 1960s, began to question traditional
social and cultural values in the United States, and to adopt lifestyles that differed
dramatically from those of their parents. While many participants in the counter-culture
195

The roles played by David Silver (Fig. 60) and Russell Connor (Fig. 61)
demonstrate very clearly the ways in which these program streams sought to make
themselves accessible to their audiences. Both men were hosts on cultural programs
produced at WGBH, and both presented material that could be categorized as avant-garde
and/or directed at a counter-culture audience, but Connor dealt almost exclusively with
content categorized as art, while Silver had a broader cultural mandate. Both were
gatekeepers between the worlds of traditional educational television, avant-garde art, and
the counterculture at a moment of rapid change in all three fields. While Connor had a
stabilizing effect as a familiar face from Museum Open House—appearing to empathize
with the subject position of more traditional viewers—Silver played a role that vacillated
between participant, interlocutor and interrogator. His on-screen identity was that of an
outsider being actively inducted into the social milieu of the counterculture, whereas

were actively involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement, they were not as consistently
associated with the other, identity-driven political movements of the era, such as the Civil
Rights, Black Power, Women’s, Native American, and Gay Rights movements. While
there was certainly overlap with and some support for these movements, the largely
white, middle-class counter-culture, associated most frequently with hippies, but also
including Diggers, Yippies, and others, tended to focus on issues of lifestyle—its
economic, domestic and recreational aspects in particular—rather than direct political
action. When I refer to the avant-garde, I am using the term to describe practices that
offered a provocation to accepted cultural values—specifically in the arts. This can apply
to any number of practices; here I refer specifically to those practices that challenged the
separation of art and life, and the division between high and low culture. While avant-
garde artistic practices had an appeal to the counter-culture in their attack on both elitism
and commercialism, and the counter-culture introduced an important space of production
and consumption for new art practices, one could be a member of the counter-culture and
have no investment in avant-garde art practices, and one could be an avant-garde artist
with no interest in the counter-culture.

196
Connor could only ever be a guest, a friendly visitor or observer.
260
The whole drama of
David Silver—as we will see in America Inc. —was his passage from the world of
middle-class stability and authority (husband, father, and Professor of English Literature
at Tufts University) to the untrammeled, unpredictable world of the free-love counter-
culture—hippies, Hare Krishnas, and all. He was young enough to join the masses who
were choosing to “tune in, turn on, and drop out,” and America Inc. presents a semi-
fictional narrative in which he does just that. While his position in relation to the
counterculture was often cautious, even critical, his trajectory—as it was televised—took
him deeper and deeper into the counterculture, leading finally, in America Inc., to his
abandonment of his professional identity and young family to embark on an unfettered
search for self.
In keeping with the disparities indicated by the hosts, What’s Happening took a
very different format from the WGBH broadcasts of art video discussed in my second
chapter. While the familiar faces and didactic tone of educational television carefully
framed presentations of video art such as The Medium is the Medium and Video
Variations—leaning heavily on the pedagogical model of the museum— What’s
Happening was freeform and experimental. A 1972 article in the Boston Herald Daily

260
On one of the few occasions on which they shared the screen Connor played Silver’s
straight man. In What’s Happening’s “Magazine Episode,” there is a scene in which the
two men are shown discussing current events and popular culture. Connor was visibly
uncomfortable with Silver’s attacks on popular media figures such as Nancy Sinatra, and
made an unsuccessful effort to tone down the younger man’s rhetoric. This episode, and
its very public follow-up, will be discussed in the conclusion. It is noteworthy that
Connor’s most successful integration into the work of the younger artists with whom he
worked tended to come in the form of self-parody that intentionally engages his “straight-
man” role, as seen in William Wegman’s Man Ray Man Ray (c. 1978).

197
describes “half-hour programs [that] would take some theme, often unstated, and develop
it by throwing out all the network rules on responsibility, audience passivity, technicians’
roles … professionalism and good taste.”
261
In this way, WGBH leapfrogged network
attempts to produce content for the growing youth demographic by drawing on the
aesthetic strategies emerging from avant-garde art practices and from the counterculture,
adopting a critical and playful approach taken from that milieu, and often including
members of the counterculture in production, rather than trying to represent or package
“hippies” as entertainment.
In Groove Tube: Sixties Television and the Youth Rebellion, Aniko Bodroghkozy
offers an account of the relationship between the 1960s counterculture and television.
The popular media—network television in particular—had a tendency to simplify the
hippie counterculture, depicting its members as victims of a “medical-social pathology,”
and its community as “a recourse for those with inferiority complexes and low IQ’s.”
262

Unsurprisingly, these representations were unpopular with the baby-boomer
demographic. One of the earliest programs produced by the networks with the intention
of depicting and wooing the disenfranchised urban population that was turning off its
televisions as it reached early adulthood was NBC’s The Monkees. The Monkees—a
quasi-fictional rock band of four young musicians—was based on the mischievous but
good natured hijinks of The Beatles in the films Hard Days Night (1964) and Help

261
“Tube Talk” Boston Herald Daily, April 18, 1972.

262
Aniko Bodroghkozy, Groove Tube: Sixties Television and the Youth Rebellion (Duke
University Press, 2001) 83.

198
(1965).
263
This program, which debuted in 1966, succeeded in seducing the teeny-bopper
crowd without alienating the over-thirty demographic too aggressively. It elicited little
interest from the elusive younger adults the show was intended for, however—those for
whom, Bodrokhkozy argues, a “scrubbed-down version” of their own culture held little
appeal.
264
The Nielson-driven programming of the networks, which tried to reach the
growing youth audience without losing the older population, could take only limited
risks, whereas public television—which didn’t start using a full-time rating system until
2009—was able to take a more flexible stance toward audience preferences.
265
What’s
Happening, Mr. Silver?, which premiered on WGBH-TV in the summer of 1967—less
than a year after the autumn, 1966 debut of The Monkees on NBC—shared the giddy
energy and humor of the network program, but it took the counterculture with which it
engaged far more seriously.
266

One of the earliest episodes of What’s Happening, Mr. Silver?, “Love
Revolution,” explored the countercultural milieu with a nuanced depiction of the social,
cultural, and political aspects of the hippie movement that was out of keeping with those

263
Bodroghkozy, 66. While the Monkees were a network invention, the four band-
members did coalesce into a musical group with a character and goals that went beyond
those of the network producers that that brought it together.

264
Bodroghkozy, 69.

265
See Brian Selter “PBS Finally Signs Up for Nielsen Ratings” New York Times,
December 20, 2009.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/21/business/media/21pbs.html?partner=rss&emc=rss.
Accessed April 8, 2011. Prior to this, PBS engaged Nielsen to track viewership only for
major broadcasts, such as presidential addresses.

266
The popular musical Hair, which also marketed hippies as a cultural product, opened
only a few months later, in October 1967.

199
produced by commercial media.
267
“Love Revolution,” like the episodes that followed,
courted its audience both topically and stylistically. The opening title used a font similar
to those found on the psychedelic posters and album covers of the period, and the rest of
the program showed a connection to the counterculture that went well beyond
typographical style.
268
Described in press coverage as well as in the WGBH program
guides as a televisual “collage,” the program combined interviews on the street and in the
studio with playful dramatic episodes and mock-documentary style clips, overlays of
loosely-related text and images, and special-effects—all of which were often cut rapidly
back and forth, or simply left hanging, in ways that defied conventional practices in

267
“What’s Happening Mr. Silver #1: The Love Revolution” is listed in the WGBH
archives as the first episode of the program, but this is unlikely. The debut of What’s
Happening is listed in the June 1967 WGBH Program Guide as scheduled to air on June
22. The “Love Revolution” tape in the WGBH archive is dated July 13, 1967. This date is
itself questionable, as demonstrated by the use of the song “All You Need is Love,”
released by The Beatles on July 17, 1967, and a quotation from the article “The Future of
Sex” by Marshal McLuhan and George B. Leonard, published in Look magazine July 25,
1967. Given this evidence it is likely that a number of episodes aired prior to “The Love
Revolution.” Because there is no reliable evidence tracking air dates of specific episodes
in the WGBH archives (program guides name the program, but not the episode aired), it
is impossible to say—with a few exceptions—exactly which episodes were aired when.
It is likely that this episode took place before the “Death of hippie, son of media” Digger
procession on October 6, 1967.

268
The lettering used was one of many contemporary variants on a style developed by
graphic artists such as Wes Wilson, Victor Moscoso and Rick Griffin, who drew on Art
Nouveau typefaces such as Arnold Böcklin to create iconic posters for the emergent
psychedelic scene in San Francisco. See Ken Johnson, Are You Experienced? How
Psychedelic Consciousness Transformed Modern Art, (Prestel; Munich, London, New
York, 2011), 24-26. I am grateful to Alan Lorde for helping me to clarify this history.

200
television production.
269
The first broadcast of the program was introduced in the
program guide with the following promotional announcement:
What’s Happening Mr. Silver?
The answer is just about anything when this mod professor starts
questioning young intelligent minds about everything from Vietnam to
pop art, Thursdays at 9 pm on Channel 2 beginning June 22. But David
Silver isn’t satisfied with just asking young people what they think; he’s
out to create a genuine “happening” in which images assault the eye and
stretch the mind. An Englishman who proudly proclaims himself a native
of “Beatle Country,” Silver hopes to take a long hard look at a culture
Americans take for granted because they’re a part of it. Frankly
experimental, WHAT’S HAPPENING MR. SILVER? will take advantage
of every technique known to television, and according to producer Fred
Barzyk will be “WGBH’s answer to the underground filmmakers.”
270

This announcement sets out the goals of the program quite clearly. Presenting the
thoughts of “young intelligent minds” in a style that will “assault the eye and stretch the
mind” using “every technique known to television,” What’s Happening, Mr. Silver? set
out to show viewers an image of American culture that they had never seen before. While
the artists in residence at WGBH set out to stretch the limits of their practices and of the
television medium, What’s Happening sought to use the flexibility they introduced not
for its own sake, but to depict a nation undergoing dramatic social and cultural change.
The opening passage of “Love Revolution” cut between a scene depicting
interactions between a young man and woman, and man-on-the-street interviews. The
show’s producers color-keyed the young couple to show the woman dominating the

269
The program is described as television “collage” in the following sources: Boston Herald
Daily, “Tube Talk” (April 18, 1972); Susan Dowling, History of the WGBH New Television
Workshop, Unpublished Document, WGBH Archives (March, 1986) 1; WGBH Program Guide,
(November 1967) 13; John Minkowsky, “The Videotape Collection at Media Study Buffalo”
Afterimage, February 1978; 4.

270
WGBH Program Guide, (June 1967) 4.

201
screen, smoking a cigarette, while the man, disproportionately small, peered up at her like
a small pet. While The Beatles’ brand-new hit “All You Need is Love” played, the
Lilliputian man professed his love for the bored giantess who loomed over him.
Man: Hello
Woman: Hi
M: I love you.
W: Oh, wow...

From this exchange, the tape cut to interviews, in which people were approached
randomly on the street and asked for their thoughts about love or the love revolution.
271

They, like the woman in the vignette into which they were cut, were tepid in their
responses. People either refused to say anything, or made tentative comments about
“love-ins” and happenings—mostly they seemed baffled. Cutting back to the couple, we
hear him repeat earnestly:
M: But I love you.
W: Oh yeah… Wow.
M: I really do love you.
W: Ok… I’m hungry.

This scene, opening the show with a demonstration of ambivalence, apathy, and
confusion, set a cautious tone. The playful form in which it was delivered, however,
suggests that this caution was not the result of conservatism or timidity, but of an
inquiring and critical stance on the subject matter.
272

271
This “person on the street” or vox populi interview strategy had been in use on
television programs since at least the 1950s. See Lou Prato, “Easy to Do, But Often
Worthless” American Journalism Review, (April 1999),
http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=3299. Accessed June 14, 2012.

272
The dynamics of gender and power in heterosexual relationships are never explicitly
questioned or addressed in the program, and they are often naturalized, but this particular
202
Following the woman’s profession of hunger, the tape cut to a man making a
pizza, throwing a round of dough into the air, saying, “A love revolution? Well it’s just a
bunch of nice kids eating pizza.” Then, the camera cut to the couple, now conventionally
proportioned, sharing real physical space, at a table in the pizzeria. They ate at first with
appetite, and then, increasingly, in a frenzy. The word “love” flashed across the screen
periodically. Their hands and faces, covered in sauce, and their insatiable, savage hunger,
directed at the pizza, rather than each other, acted as an explicit, if not actionably
obscene, stand-in for the primal, messy physicality of the sex act as it could not be
portrayed on television. Like the scene preceding it, this passage used unexpected
representational strategies—in this case to get around conservative institutional
limitations on certain kinds of depiction or communication—while maintaining an
ambivalent stance toward the subject matter. The show’s producers may have found a
way to thumb their noses at the rules about depicting sex on television, but the grossly
over-sated, greasy-fingered pair that occupied the screen raised the possibility that there
could be drawbacks to the subversive freedom of the sexual revolution.
In the following scene, the audience was introduced to the program’s dapperly-
suited British host, David Silver. Sitting in a circle with a group of young school-
children, he elicited their advice about dating in America. He drew out their youthful
assumptions and expectations, demonstrating how well established ideas about gender
identity and social behavior were, even in children of seven or eight. When he asked if he

vignette suggests a developing awareness (and perhaps bafflement) at women’s changing
social status and freedoms in relation to sexual activity.
203
could give his girlfriend a ladybug as a present, the children collectively nixed the idea,
suggesting that he give her candy, earrings, or flowers instead.
David Silver : Where should I bring her?
Child: Restaurant!
Ch: Park!
Ch: Dinner!
Ch: If her father isn’t nice, you could sneak away to the park.
Ch: Go to dinner, then go to a movie, then go dance. Then take her home.
DS: And leave her on the doorstep?
Ch: No, help her up to her room.
DS: Would an American father like me?
Ch: Yes, American fathers are nice.
DS: If I took a girl out on a date for the first time, would I kiss her?
Ch: Yes, but she might not kiss you back.

Silver’s education in American dating conventions was followed by a dramatized
scene in which the camera followed a woman into an office, where she enrolled in an
electronic dating service. She entered to the strains of Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody
To Love.”
273
Sitting down, she began to fill out an endless questionnaire, formatted in the
multiple-choice optical-mark-readable format that became popular in the 1960s for
standardized testing and questionnaires. First, she answered questions about age, height,
religion, and race. When the questions became more topical, the program adopted a
collage/montage method, layering words and images that were, presumably, tied in some
way to the questions she was answering: footage from cereal commercials, batman,
nuclear explosions, and other apparently unrelated images flashed across the screen. Over
them, text scrolled,
Long horns? Natural shoulder? A frame? Smooth? Nubby? Post-Nasal?
Sexy? Loose? One Dab? Roll on Spray? Protuberant? Flaccid? Two Dabs?
XXXXX Small? Big? Hippie? Pollack? Kraut? Jew? Chink? Fink?

273
“Someone to Love” was released as a single by Jefferson Airplane on April 1, 1967.
204
These discordant words and images, emerging from the woman’s attempts to answer the
survey questions, suggested the difficulty of effectively incorporating the complexity of a
single individual into a computer program, and at the same time demonstrated the effects
of an increasingly oversaturated commercial environment, implying an uncomfortable
similarity between dating and other forms of commodity consumption.
This initial engagement with the computer foreshadowed an ongoing concern on
What’s Happening, which, in a number of later episodes, focused on the socialization of
new technologies—especially computers. This preoccupation was, unsurprisingly, shaped
by a devotion to the theories of Marshall McLuhan. Later episodes, especially “Man and
Mr. Machine,” “Double Media,” and “McLuhan’s Children,”—all of which aired in the
spring of 1968—drew heavily on McLuhan’s ideas. In this early episode, he was quoted
directly. The collage of language and images representative of the dating profile rapidly
degenerated into a chaotic hash of pictures and words, with a voiceover relating
McLuhan’s theories of sex and romantic love in the contemporary world:
Marshal McLuhan….writes [that], sex as we know it may be dead,
marriage and the family are shifting into new dimensions: “The pill makes
a woman a bomb. She creates a new kind of fragmentation, separating
sexual intercourse from procreation.” Watch for traditions to fall.
Romantic love seems a likely victim. As Romantic love falls, so may
sexual privacy….
274

From these “collage” passages, composed in post-production, “Love Revolution”
shifted to focus on documentary footage and interviews, at a love-in and in the studio. At
the love-in, young people milled around in a park. Many of them displayed the typical
trappings of the “hippie”: beads, long hair, extravagant clothing—but many others were

274
Quoted from Marshall McLuhan and George B. Leonard, “The Future of Sex” Look
Magazine, July 25, 1967.
205
conventional in appearance. Silver carried a microphone, and was followed by a
cameraman. He asked people about their involvement in the love-in, asked about drug
use, whether it “is all just for kicks” or for something more. The answers he received
were anything but uniform, demonstrating that the attendees at this event came from a
variety of backgrounds, and were looking for a number of different things from the event.
While purpose, style, and ideals differed, however, love-in attendees were mostly
uniform in age and race.
Cutting back to the studio, Silver pointed out that “the whole love thing seems to
be a pretty white thing.” He then introduced Ritchie, an African American “who is into”
the love generation. Ritchie, in a separately-taped interview, acknowledged that his place
within the community was problematic, because unlike the young men who adopted
hippie styles at the love-in “I can shave my beard and cut my hair, but when this is all
over, I’ll still be a nigger.” Silver went on to tell the audience that “people accuse
[Ritchie] of using [the ‘love revolution’] to try to get closer to white women.” This
interjection, which followed the viewer’s initial introduction to the characters at the love-
in, offered a perspective on the counterculture rarely seen in the popular media—
suggesting that, far from a scourge on American values, hippies may in fact not be radical
enough.
275
Instead of being invited to indulge in the strange wildness of the flower
children in the park, viewers were reminded of the ways in which those who sought to

275
This critique, while common enough in the African American, Women’s, and Gay
Liberation movements, was rarely given any play in popular representations of the
counterculture.

206
upend the establishment might, in fact, reproduce the status-quo—a position to which the
episode would return in a studio interview at the end of the program.
The laid-back, guitar-strumming earnestness of the love-in attendees stood in
stark contrast to the aggressive militancy of the group of men interviewed in the studio in
the last part of the program. Abbie Hoffman and Jim Foratt, who identified themselves as
Diggers, along with Lynn House, editor of the psychedelic newspaper Inner Space,
joined David Silver in the studio to discuss the “Love Revolution.”
276
The discussion
opened with Marshall McLuhan’s theory of a return to “tribal communities,” as an
example of real social change currently taking place in association with the
counterculture. This conversation was illustrated with footage of Silver and a camera
crew visiting with people living in communes of one kind or another in the Boston area.
After presenting a number of these “tribes,” David Silver introduced the men in
the studio, saying “I have my own tribe here today.” This claim of tribal connection with
Hoffman, Foratt, and House is one example of Silver’s integration into the communities
on which the program focused. His intimacy with them did not, however, prevent his
adoption of a position that was as critical of their radical politics as it was celebratory.
Asked for their thoughts on the “Love Revolution,” these men displayed not the sun-

276
Diggers were a group based in the Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, whose activities
included street theater, the provision of free food to community members, and advocacy
for a money- and property-free society. In her 1967 essay “Slouching Toward
Bethlehem” Joan Didion described the Diggers, who, in “the official District mythology,
are supposed to be a group of anonymous good guys with no thought in their collective
head but to lend a helping hand…” as, in reality, a disorganized group under the spell of a
single leader who spent most of his time and energy advocating a “riot-in-the-street-
unless” position. 88-89. In Feedback: Television Against Democracy, 2007, David Joselit
presents the Diggers as, in part, a response to the media consumption of Hippies—a more
radical, less pleasure-centered group. The importance of anonymity to the Diggers raises
questions about Hoffman and Foratt’s televised claim of association with the group.
207
dappled, barefoot bliss of the love-in attendees, but a self-righteous—and unfocussed—
rage at social inequality. Silver’s attempts to draw a clear statement of purpose or
description of activities and aims out of his “tribe” had unsatisfying results.
David Silver: Abbie, what are you doing as a Digger?
Abbie Hoffman: … I make love, I bring food to starving Spades. Love is a
time bomb, it’s a cop killer, it’s not being afraid to die. I think love is
having a good time.
DS: Lynn, what do you say in your paper about all of this?
Lynn House: We want to be it, to manifest it rather than talk about it.
DS: I wish you guys could explain what you are doing, it seems like kind
of a put-on.

When one of them responded to Silver’s challenge with the claim that it “can’t be
put into words,” Silver insisted that it “has to be put into words.” At that point, Hoffman
returned to the topic of “giving food to Spades…” developing the theme to “giving guns
to black Muslims.” At this point Hoffman pointed out that “the Hippie thing is a white
thing…” and then proceeded to bring the often intolerant cant of the more radical
elements of the “Love Revolution” into focus, stating that: “…hippies are fags, they don’t
know how to love.” At which point there was a general degeneration of discourse, with
the four men in the studio arguing loudly. At one point someone threw a bag of what was
gleefully identified as marijuana onto the studio floor, at which point it became clear that
Silver’s guests had lost interest in cooperating with their host.
This behavior was in keeping with the obfuscatory strategies that would be used
by the Yippies (the Youth International Party), established by Hoffman and two others in
December of 1967—mere months after the production of the “Love Revolution”
208
episode.
277
These strategies sought to foil what Yippies saw as media manipulation of the
counterculture and its image. Bodroghkozy traces these tactics to the 1968 Democratic
Convention, but clearly they were in use in the Digger days as well.
278
According to
Bodroghkozy, Yippies, following Marshall McLuhan’s theories, “claimed that the
language of the rising revolutionary youth culture was incomprehensible to the older
generation because it mirrored the qualities of television commercials—nonlinear,
composed of images juxtaposed in haphazard ways.”
279
While Silver appears to be
somewhat at odds with Hoffman and his pre-Yippie Digger clan, both his identification
of them as his “tribe” and the fact that the communicative form of What’s Happening,
Mr. Silver? exemplified the qualities that Hoffman would later trumpet as those of “rising
revolutionary youth” suggest that the differences between Silver and his visitors were
emphasized—at least in part—for the screen. If “the Yippie tactic” would be “to evade
ideological capture by confounding the media’s attempt to explain, in suitably rational
terms, what the Yippies meant, what they stood for, what was significant about them,”
then What’s Happening was deploying these tactics before the Yippies existed.
280

Nothing about What‘s Happening, Mr. Silver?’s “The Love Revolution” episode
offered comfort to viewers. It did little to assuage the anxiety and confusion of Nixon’s

277
In “The Yippies Are Going to Chicago” Hoffman dates the conception of “the Yippie!
idea” to December, 1967. In Abbie Hoffman, Revolution for the Hell of It (New York:
Dial Press, 1970) 106.

278
Bodroghkozy, 100.

279
Bodroghkozy, 100.

280
Bodroghkozy, 101.

209
as-yet unnamed “Silent Majority” about the peculiarities of the emerging, urban, youth
culture.
281
Neither did it offer the young audience it courted a particularly flattering image
of themselves, although it did recognize value in many of the problems that they had
brought into public discourse. This was demonstrated by the earnestness of the interviews
conducted at the love-in, but even more so in the program’s interrogation of commercial
and technological culture, the socialization of children, an open discussion of recreational
drug use as a potential route to positive individual or social change, and representations
of sex (or, rather, their stand-ins), that were all deeply rooted in the intellectual life of the
counterculture. Despite (or perhaps because of) What’s Happening’s refusal to paint a
rosy picture of its target demographic, it proved popular enough with that audience in the
Boston area and in national syndication that in 1969 an eighty-minute special, America
Inc. based on the Mr. Silver series was produced in a collaboration between WGBH and
WNET-TV in New York.
282

America Inc was a quasi-fictional narrative about a television personality in the
throes of a life crisis brought on by the success of the television program in which he

281
Richard Milhous Nixon “Address to the Nation on the War in Vietnam” November 3, 1969.
Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia, Multimedia Archive.
http://millercenter.org/scripps/archive/speeches/detail/3873. Accessed May 20 2011.

282
Until October, 1970, WNET-TV went under the call letters WNDT-TV, but to avoid
confusion, I will refer to the station as WNET-TV throughout. The call-sign change came
about as a result of the merger of WNDT-TV and National Educational Television.

210
starred.
283
America Inc. featured David Silver as television personality David Silver, with
voiceover provided by Jean Shepherd, a humorist with a long history in both radio and
television, and an unnamed woman.
284
The program followed the tone of What’s
Happening, Mr. Silver? in its playful engagement with the formal conventions of
television, but America Inc. abandoned the talk-show/variety-show/documentary format
of the former in favor of a more continuous storyline broken up with formalized intervals.
Barzyk describes its development in typically cavalier terms:
So we decided we would go without a script, we would have an outline
with no dialogue written, and when that was done we said, “oh, well we
need more than that,” and so all of a sudden, my training in the theater:
“well, we’ll go Brechtian.” So we’ll have these pieces of information that
will show up, this disembodied voice.
285

While Shepherd’s voice-overs were poetic, genial, and humorous engagements
with the narrative, the disembodied voice to which Barzyk refers had a mechanized,
utterly impersonal tone. It dropped in regularly with facts and statistics that provided
abstractions loosely related to whatever was going on in the narrative.
286
They, along with
regular “commercial breaks” (to which I will return shortly), acted to structure the
narrative in a way that was familiar to viewers of commercial television, and in doing so
was a reminder of the ways in which the apparently radical “collage” aesthetic employed

283
The show was funded as part of the Rockefeller Artists in Television Series, and
produced collaboratively by WGBH and WNET for the National Educational Television
Playhouse series.

284
James F. Smith, “Humor, Cultural History and Jean Shepherd,” The Journal of
Popular Culture, Vol. XVI, Issue 1 (Summer 1982): 1-12.

285
Fred Barzyk, interview with the Author, March 30, 2009.

286
These sound-clips were likely lifted from a pre-existing source.

211
in What’s Happening actually existed in a more controlled form in commercial TV.
287
In
the late 1960s, radical aesthetics and the culture industry were not necessarily as divided
as the anti-commercial blankness of art history’s post-pop heroes—minimalism and
conceptual art—might lead us to believe.
In America Inc., Silver, having achieved (relative) fame and fortune through
What’s Happening, Mr. Silver?, decided to leave his wife, infant daughter, and
burgeoning career to go to New York on a journey of personal discovery, accompanied
by his friend Ed. The David Silver of 1969 was not the same man who hosted “Love
Revolution.” His slightly shaggy hair had grown down to his shoulders. He adopted not
only the hairstyle and fashion choices of the hippies with whom he had engaged so
earnestly in 1967, but also the solipsistic tone of the proto-Yippies who visited the
television studio that year. This connection was confirmed and celebrated at the
beginning of the program, as the clip of Abbie Hoffmann, Jim Foratt, and Lynn House
arguing in the studio was used as a lead-up to the announcement that the National
Educational Television Award for Excellence had been awarded to David Silver for his
thirty-part television program.
288

287
This connection between avant-garde and commercial aesthetics in montage forms can
be traced back at least to the early 1930s. See Raul Hausmann, “Photomontage” first
published in May, 1931 in Photography in the Modern Era, C. Phillips, ed. (Metropolitan
Museum of Art; NY, NY, 1989) 178-181.

288
In fact, the program had received an NET award for Best Creative Show, for the
“Madness and Intuition” episode, as well as a critical accolades from television critic
Jefferey McDonald, the TV critic for the Boston Globe, and in a Newsweek article by
artist and art critic Douglas Davis, “Television’s Avant-Garde,” Newsweek, (February 9,
1970): 60-63.

212
This declaration of professional success was paired with an equal claim to
personal modesty, portrayed by a scene in which David Silver, in full color, watched and
talked to himself on a black-and-white television screen. The “live” (color) David began
to interact with the “televised” (black-and-white) David. The color version talked about
his ability to laugh at “Mr. Silver,” while the black-and-white version mocked him from
the television screen, declaring “You love it, you love it, you love it.” “What could be
more absurd,” the color version asked, touching his screen image, “than switching on
your own television set to relax, … and then pow, there’s this shaggy creature.”
289
This
was followed by a scene showing Silver at home with his wife and baby, the domestic
idyll darkened by a voice, reading a letter sent in by a viewer of the program: “Dear Sir,
your program and you have annoyed me quite regularly. If Mr. Silver is representative of
the youth of today, then spare me from them.” Exacerbating the effect of this disgruntled
viewer, in the following scene Silver ran into a young woman on a Boston street, who
asked “What’s Happening? What are you doing? You’re supposed to be on television.”
Pressured by fans and critics alike, America Inc.’s David Silver buckled under the weight
of his public role.
Having told his calmly acquiescing wife that he was leaving her, Silver continued
to the television station, where the limits and excesses of broadcast production were made
clear in Fred Barzyk’s farcical portrayal of (himself as) a sleazy television producer.
When Silver entered the studio there was a group of young girls singing and dancing on a

289
This model, in which we see a representation of the “off-screen” man engaging with
his “on-screen” persona, was similar to that employed over a decade later by Russell
Connor in his video Art Talker, discussed in Chapter 2. It was pioneered by Warhol in
Outer and Inner Space (1965) a film in which Edie Sedgewick sat with her televised
image, and revisited by Lynda Benglis in Female Sensibility (1973).
213
sound-stage, with Barzyk directing them. Over this, the disembodied woman’s voice said
“The average household in America watches approximately six hours of television a
day.” Barzyk, his attention split between the girls and Silver, proceeded to deliver a
patronizing, jocular lecture about getting things done, about the NET award, interest from
Newsweek and the need to keep up the momentum of good publicity. Silver responded,
glumly, that things were not going well, and that they needed to talk. He told Barzyk that
he planned to leave, that he had already left his wife. Barzyk then dismissively accused
Silver of “being ridiculous,” and yelled at the girls to “really dance this one up.” At
which point the camera shifted to focus on their performance.
One of the girls recited the famous “One small step…” Neil Armstrong line, and
then they began singing the song “American Moon” by Robert Crewe.
290
“American

290
Bob Crewe, “Lunar Ladies” recorded as a 7 inch single in 1969 by Bobby Dimple and
the Lunar Ladies Chorus.
“One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind
There’s an American Flag on the moon tonight
Flying red and blue and white
There’s an American flag waving on the moon
Waving on the moon tonight.
There’s an American flag, can’t you see,
Sitting on the sea of tranquillity
There’s an American flag waving on the moon
Waving on the moon tonight.
I’m not a bit neurotic, not a bit psychotic,
Oh no no, I’m only patriotic!
…..
It’s an American Moon, if you please,
Refer to it now as American Cheese.
Stars and Stripes light up the Milky Way….Hey!
Apollo Eleven’s delivered our heavenly right to say:
The man in the moon’s a citizen of the USA.
Stand up and brag, for your grand old flag,
Waving on the Moon tonight,
Waving on the Moon tonight…..”
214
Moon,” a satirical jingle celebrating American technological dominance, declared that
“Apollo Eleven’s delivered our heavenly right to say: The man on the moon’s a citizen of
the USA.” Rather than playing it as comedy, however, Barzyk had the young girls on the
stage singing with genuine patriotic verve. This scene, which served to mock the
television industry and its contribution to the jingoistic rhetoric that surrounded the recent
moon landing, established the validity of the fictional David Silver’s angst about his role
as a television personality. It was not only his discomfort with the pressures of notoriety
that led him to abandon his post, this display of vulgarity tells the viewer, but rather a
justifiable disgust with the entertainment industry and its ideological uses. A degree of
self-reflexivity had begun to emerge already in the works produced in the artists’
residencies, but nothing this openly critical of the workings of the television industry.
291

The program followed Silver in his journey to New York. He and his friend Ed
hitchhiked. When they arrived in the city, it became clear that they had come in search of
different things. Ed wanted a hamburger, while Silver wanted to go somewhere where it
was permissible to “take your clothes off and just be.” Ed talked about food, and Silver
talked about European films. New York was gritty and dark, and at one point the two
were robbed, an event that led to a chase through the New York subway system as the
disembodied female voice delivered crime statistics.

291
This kind of criticality certainly existed in the counter-culture of the period, as seen,
for example, in Faith Ringgold’s 1969 painting Flag For the Moon: Die Nigger, or Gil
Scott-Heron’s 1970 song “Whitey on the Moon,” but television was, for the most part, an
arena where accomplishments such as the moon landing were celebrated, not denigrated.

215
Silver and his sidekick then went into a second-hand bookstore, where, after some
haggling, they paid $30 for a large pile of books. Then, standing on the sidewalk, they
proceeded to give the books away to passersby, stating that they were trying to “further
justice and peace” by giving away free books. “Free wisdom, free knowledge, free
books…” they declared. Next, they attended a $1 “transcendental feast” served by Hare
Krishnas. The disembodied voice returned to deliver statistics about religion in the
United States. These activities, which celebrated non-commodity exchange and the
economy of the gift, were in keeping with the radical ideals of the Diggers, on the one
hand, but also, arguably, spoke to the more moderate role of non-profit media as well, in
its distribution of “free knowledge.”
Programming on public educational television does not traditionally include any
advertising. In fact, the absence of advertising—and advertising dollars—is what
distinguishes public educational from commercial network television. But even non-
profit television has sponsors, and in America Inc., there were, as described in a press
release, “’sponsor’s’ commercials. The ‘sponsor’ was a mythical, nonprofit corporation,
America Inc., and its commercials about brotherhood, urban blight and freedom of
expression were parodies of real commercials.”
292
In fact, the program took its title from
this imaginary company, that put its logo—a crisp, corporate image bearing no
resemblance to the psychedelic typeface used for What’s Happening—on these
“commercial breaks.” The first of them showed the logo, paired with a voiceover about
the power of electricity, and the words “Acting with purpose, not panic, man can use

292
“Rockefeller Artists-in-Television Project Press Release 68-70” 1970, WGBH
Archives.

216
these emerging powers…. Write in for a free booklet.” In another, an abstract pattern of
red and blue stripes filled the screen, again with the logo superimposed. After a scene in
which David Silver and Ed discovered an abandoned church, the commercial featured a
candle and the claim that “Living in fear of extinction is no future. To overcome fear you
need courage and a vision. Find that vision by rediscovering our forgotten earth.” The
image then cut to an autumn forest, with a child and parent walking through it. “Write in
today for America’s Greatest Challenge.”
The regular intrusion of these commercial breaks helped to provide a sense of
continuity and regulated structure to a program that wavered between traditional narrative
storytelling, the improvisational tendencies of What’s Happening, Mr. Silver? and the
experiments of The Medium is the Medium.
293
At the same time, they mocked the idea
that there might be an easy answer to the problems that plagued modern America—many
of which were encountered and enacted by Silver on his journey (the most notable, after
the brief passage on growing crime rates, took the form of searing footage of an anti-
Vietnam War rally in Washington, D.C.). Rather than solutions, it became clear that the
“commercials” sold lifestyle, identity, or social issues, as the advertising industry was
rapidly learning to do. The commercials were, according to Barzyk, meant in fun.
We never expected to get a single letter. We thought everyone would
know it was just a come-on. So David [Loxton] said “I just heard we got
some mail, and it’s at the post office.” So he and I walked into the post
office in New York City, and they handed us two bags like this [mimes
bags about three feet long]. What are we going to do with this? And we

293
“Rockefeller Artists-in-Television Project Press Release 68-70” 1970, WGBH
Archives. According to the press release “America, Inc. also benefited from what had
gone before in its use of material from The Medium is the Medium and What’s
Happening, Mr. Silver.”

217
took it back to Jack, and we put it down and he says “Oh my god…” He
says, “you know by law we have to respond to these people.” So he had to
dig into his budget and we sent out a little pamphlet and a button that said
America Inc.
294

Regardless of the intention of the commercials, their effect was unexpected.
People wrote in for the promised booklets—according to a WGBH program guide, seven
thousand people.
295
It is difficult to imagine what they expected to receive, and,
unfortunately, neither the letters nor the contents of the station response have been
archived. Barzyk can’t remember what was in the mailers, and his co-producer and
colleague at WNET-TV, David Loxton, who worked on the program with him, died in
1989. The contents of the mysterious America, Inc. mailer, it seems, will remain a
mystery. One thing that this development does provide is an indication that the
viewership for America, Inc. was substantial, given the number of people who might have
watched and not written in, and recognizing how specific the target demographic was.
Without ratings, anecdotal evidence like this is one of the few sources of information we
have about viewer responses to these programs.
America, Inc. ended with Silver’s return to Boston, where he was reunited with
his wife and child. After a wordless scene of reconciliation at the airport, the family was
shown in a snowy winter landscape, tiny in a broad white world punctuated only by trees.
This “return to nature” however, was soon interrupted by images of commercial
billboards being hoisted onto an enormous scaffold-like structure. Just as quickly, the
scaffold began to collapse—a process witnessed by Silver, his family, and a growing

294
Interview with the author, March 30, 2009; Boston, MA, WGBH-TV.

295
WGBH Program Guide, (June, 1970), 16.
218
crowd of anonymous, flag-bearing, black-clad figures. The scaffold was enormous, and
its wreckage, revealed with an ambitious crane-shot, produced a dramatic image against
the snow. The penultimate shot showed Silver and his family huddling behind a piece of
fallen billboard, on which he drew a large star, and wrote “Silver was here” inside it. In
closing, the family joined the crowd milling around the ruins, walking on fallen signs
reading “America Inc.”
This closing scene, which offers a physical illustration of the scale (and
apparently inevitable collapse) of commercial culture, makes the ongoing critique of the
intrusion of the commercial into public culture, which was present throughout the
program, explicit. I believe that the Mr. Silver programs, the result of a “drawbridge”
dropped by Fred Barzyk to enable the participation of unconventional creative practices
in the production of television, took exceptional advantage of the unusual cultural status
of educational television to examine the status of television as a cultural institution. Art
videos such as Richard Serra’s Television Delivers People (1973) used the technology of
television to offer a critique of its culture, while maintaining an ascetic form that was
most at home in the gallery spaces familiar with minimalist and conceptual art strategies
(thus its historicization as a gallery work, and the critical blindness to its intended
distribution through television broadcast).
296
Projects like Mr. Silver and the associated
artworks produced through the residency program, on the other hand, created as they
were within the substantial institutional frameworks of television production facilities—
yet free of the commercial pressures of network television—were able to speak of the
world of television in its own language, to narrativize it and unseat many of its

296
See discussion in Chapter 1.
219
assumptions, while holding on to the structural qualities that made it accessible to a broad
audience.

While What’s Happening, Mr. Silver? and the artists residency program at
WGBH developed in tandem, with various points of overlap and exchange, in San
Francisco, the relationship between the residency program and the broadcasts that
employed its innovations to reach a youth audience was simpler and far more
unidirectional. There were three projects in particular, developed for broadcast at KQED-
TV, which drew directly on the technical innovations of the residency program to
produce a “psychedelic” look with which a young audience might identify. Ecotopia,
discussed in the previous chapter, was the latest of these projects, and was never aired.
There were two other KQED programs that made extensive use of NCET innovations,
that did go to air, and experienced a reasonable level of critical success: West Pole (1968)
and !Heimskringla! (1969). This “psychedelic” look was provided in part, in all three
cases, by Robert Zagone, a director at KQED who had been involved from the beginning
with the residency program.
As noted in chapter two, station equipment could not, for the most part, be used
directly by the artists-in-residence. Union regulation stipulated that only union members
could operate station equipment. As a result, one of the challenges of the residency
programs was finding union members who were willing to follow the instructions of
artists—instructions that many professionals could only understand as misuse or even
abuse of valuable equipment, and which consistently undermined or ran counter to their
training and expertise. While Barzyk made a point of working to break down the
220
preconceptions and habits of the staff at WGBH—often by insisting that they trade jobs,
or take on creative responsibility that was not normally their purview—Brice Howard
looked for more reliable ways around the problem at KQED. He located and fostered
cooperative station staff, and, from the beginning, worked to separate the residency
program from station bureaucracy. Robert Zagone, brought into the project as a director,
worked well with the artists-in-residence and developed a highly experimental practice of
his own.
At the time when he directed West Pole (1968) and !Heimskringla! (1969),
Zagone was not actively involved with the Center, and claims that “I did things on [West
Pole] that were never done at the National Center,” but he then goes on to “give credit to
the Center for the ideas and concepts in the show.”
297
Much of West Pole, recent Bay
Area concerts recorded for broadcast, was made with film, but one section—that
featuring the bands Ace of Cups and Sons of Champlin—was produced in the studio with
television cameras, and processed during the performance using the methods of “the
mix”; it is this portion of the program that will be discussed here. Based on the archival
evidence—particularly the high rate of collaboration on tapes produced at the Center, and
the transcripts of meetings at which artists and staff discussed their activities—the “ideas
and concepts” as well as the technical innovations that Zagone brought with him really
were generated collectively by a number of people, Zagone included. His investment in

297
Robert N. Zagone, interviewed by John Minkowsky, (May 2008)
http://www.rdlx.com/ncet/zagone/zagone.html. Accessed, June 7, 2011. Watching West
Pole, I have not been able to locate any specific innovations that were not being used by
artists at the center, although they worked primarily with black-and-white, rather than
color cameras.

221
the ideals dominant at the Center can be seen in his declaration, in a 1970 interview that
“I mixed the programs….We don’t use the term ‘director’ any more.”
298
This insistence
on language specific to the Center, and to the writing of Brice Howard in particular,
clearly aligns Zagone with the collaborative ethos and collectively developed tools of the
Center, even when he worked independently of it.
299

In May, 1968—the second year of experimental activity at KQED—Zagone
directed West Pole, a “visual essay on San Francisco Rock,”
300
At this time, as
Bodroghkozy noted, the relationship between the big networks and younger audiences
were strained. Ben Fong-Torres summed up this difficulty, particularly as it applies to
music, in a 1970 Rolling Stone article. Fong-Torres argued that while it was “television’s
turn” to take up the torch of FM radio in the distribution and dissemination of new music,
this will not be done successfully by
… the networks, who go about as far to make use of rock music and
“psychedelic” video effects in their fall season promos (to no avail; almost
all the youth-oriented shows in this year’s mod squadron are ending up at
the bottom of the Nielsen’s and/or getting cancelled).
301

Rather, he claimed, it was the UHF stations, and “educational stations hooked up
to the NET (National Educational Television) and PBL (Public Broadcast Laboratory)”

298
Quoted in Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York, 1970), 285.

299
The strong anti-broadcast stance taken at the NCET may, in fact, be the reason that
these programs were produced independently of it.

300
Robert N. Zagone et al, “Ralph J. Gleason in Perspective” Rolling Stone (July 17,
1975), 44. The program would go on to air on affiliated stations, airing on WGBH
Channel 2 in color, Friday November 7, 1968, 8:30 pm.

301
Ben Fong-Torres “Television Rock” Rolling Stone (December 10, 1970) 1.

222
where all of the noteworthy action was taking place.
302
West Pole documented a number
of concerts, but they represented only a fraction of the activity in the Bay Area at the
time, activity fuelled by shows at the Fillmore auditoriums, coverage in Rolling Stone
magazine (which, like the experimental television programs, was founded in 1967), and
the whole Haight-Ashbury scene (including the Diggers, with whom Abbie Hoffman and
his friends claimed association on What’s Happening). West Pole did, however, in the
midst of the productive energy of the period, manage to stand out, specifically because of
the formal tools that Zagone brought to the project—tools developed in the NCET.
The effects that were used included tape delay (Fig. 63) and feedback (Fig. 64)
both of which produced a visual effect comparable to the hallucinogenic “tracers” often
experienced as a result of the use of LSD (an association emphasized by the repeated
lyric, sung by Sons of Champlin, and accompanied by these passages, “You take the high
road and I’ll take the high.”). Colorizing the video tape also had the effect of referencing
the sensory experiences of the emerging drug culture (Fig. 65). The most commonly used
effect was the layering of action picked up by multiple cameras at the same time. In
Figure 66, for instance, we see output from three different cameras, each focused on a
different musician, and layered using a chroma-key processor. These multi-camera
images sometimes layered images of the same figure or object taken from a variety of
angles, in a (perhaps unintentional) later-day appropriation of cubist syntheses of multiple
perspectives. For example, in Figure 67 two images of the same musician, picked up

302
Fong-Torres, “Television Rock” 1. UHF, or Ultra High Frequency broadcast was one
strategy (along with cable) used to increase broadcast channels. He went on to list a series
of innovative broadcasts, many of which were aired simultaneously on as many as four
channels, or on television and radio simultaneously, in order to provide the stereophonic
sound for which the speakers on television sets were not equipped.
223
simultaneously from different angles, are layered with a third image, of a guitarist—the
guitar becoming the “screen” for a close-up of the singer’s face.
Writing about the broadcast in 1970, Gene Youngblood claimed that “The
realization that something so common and ‘public’ as a television set could be the source
of virtually unprecedented visual experiences was the beginning of a new socio-technical
awareness that is now common, as are the West Pole techniques.”
303
The point he makes,
about how common the techniques employed had become even two years later, is
important. Watching West Pole now is a pretty tiresome affair. While abstract video of
the late 1960s and 1970s has a reputation for being boring or self-indulgent, the
appearance of this work never became quite as commonplace as that of the video portion
of West Pole, which gave birth to a psychedelic rock video look that is now only too
familiar. It is difficult, from the perspective of the present day, to imagine the effect that
it had in its moment. A review, published in Rolling Stone a few months after the initial
broadcast, helps to clarify its impact.
It included four film clips that exemplified all the latest things in new,
“experimental” cinema. Then it would [sic] up with twenty minutes of
video-tape shot live in the studio and using a bagful of new electronic
techniques developed in KQED’s year-old Experimental Workshop. It
made the film strips look as dated as a Hopalong Cassidy double-bill.
304

303
Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 289.

304
Thomas Albright “Visuals: West Pole” Rolling Stone (September 28, 1968), 22. NB:
The “Experimental Workshop” mentioned here—actually called the Experimental
Project—was the 1967 residency program that would become the Center for Experiments
in Television in 1968.

224
The author of the review, Thomas Albright, called the last twenty minutes of the
program (the video portion) “cataclysmic,”
305
and Youngblood called it a “revelation.”
306

Brushing aside the musical performances as “immaterial” Albright breathlessly extolled
the brilliance of the video portion, in which the “content… becomes absorbed into the
screen itself.”
307
According to Albright, for “the first time in its history, television became
something more than a mere copying machine.”
308
He went on to describe, to the best of
his abilities, the actual processes used to create the images, celebrating in particular the
fact that those qualities of television that had so often been treated as imperfections—
such as its hot, unnatural color, or visual “ghosts”—were employed to such great effect in
West Pole. Albright, Rolling Stone’s art critic, loved West Pole not for its presentation of
musical performances, but for its perfect activation of a McLuhanesque medium-
specificity. !Heimskringla! or The Stoned Angels would be praised for the same reasons.
!Heimskringla! was produced at KQED, but broadcast on PBS affiliates across the
country. WGBH featured the program in their November, 1969 program guide:
“Heimskringla or the Stoned Angels is like an iceberg—one eighth above
the surface and seven-eighths below,” producer Brice Howard says. The
play is a unique collaborative work written especially for television by
Paul Foster, the anti-traditionalist author of the off-Broadway play Tom
Paine and directed by Tom O’Horgan who also directed Hair on
Broadway. Performed by the avant-garde La Mama Troupe of Ellen
Stewart, Heimskringla uses a new technique called Videospace, a half-
realistic, half-abstract painting with electronic components that produces a

305
Ibid.

306
Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 289.

307
Albright 22.

308
Albright 22.

225
changing flow of texture, form and color. In the words of the San
Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle’s critic Stanley Eichelbaum,
Foster’s work is a “mythic drama about the Viking’s discovery of
America. But it’s overlaid with a contemporary message about the killer
instinct in man.” In Eichelbaum’s view, “Nothing quite like it has ever
been presented on television.”
309

!Heimskringla! was noteworthy not only for its use of “Videospace,” but also for
its politics. What the program guide diplomatically refers to as a “contemporary message
about the killer instinct in man” was, in fact, a strong anti-war message, allegorized in a
historical narrative that painted an ugly picture of colonial brutality in North America.
…I wrote this play, quite frankly, with one long, longing look cocked to
the future, to some Buck Rogers time of plastic and gross conformity, so
that perhaps some kindred kind, if a single copy is left, some strange and
beautifully freaky kind, just may read it and know how ribald and rare our
world really was.
310

Heimskringla, written for an ensemble cast of 12 actors, takes place in 995 C.E.,
in three locations: Brattahild Stockade, Greenland; Drontheim, Norway; and an American
forest.
311
In both the script and the KQED production, locations were lightly sketched in,
and historical authenticity bent to the will of the work’s contemporary message. A
production note tells the players to be aware that “The Vikings used the mushroom, Fly
Agaric, to get stoned on. Modern anthropologists have always been puzzled by the
strange behavior of the Norse Berserks….He was simply a gourmet, fond of

309
WGBH-TV Program Guide (November, 1969; Boston) 1.

310
Paul Foster, !Heimskringla! 5.

311
“American” in this case refers to North America—the map provided with the
published version of the play locates this forest in Newfoundland—currently a Canadian
province, rather than a location in the United States. 92. See also Fig. 68, which shows
the actors superimposed over an historical map of Newfoundland’s Conception Bay.

226
mushrooms.”
312
This nod to the psychedelic culture of the 1960s was served particularly
well by the visual capabilities of Howard’s Videospace. As I hope to make clear,
however, the forms of Videospace were able to suggest visual cultures much older than
the psychedelic of the 1960s.
The title and opening credits of !Heimskringla! or The Stoned Angels ran over a
tangled mass of human limbs (described by the playwright as a “meat heap”), colorized
to a greenish monochrome, and keyed so that the darker parts of the screen sparkled like
moving water.
313
Over the course of the sequence this “water” rose to engulf more and
more of the human cluster. As the water climbed, the limbs squirmed and rubbed against
one another, erotic and oceanic. This effect, achieved through video processing
techniques, was an adaptation of a stage direction calling for dry ice to be used in the
opening scene.
314
When the opening credits ended, the camera focused on an anemone-
like cluster of hands, which spread into an expanding ring, to reveal a winged man:
Skald, the “feathered bard” who acts as the play’s narrator. The performers, to whom the
abstract limbs belonged, resolved into full and separate bodies that fell and rolled on the
ground. It is clear, watching even this opening sequence, that this was a production that
would make extensive use of the specificities of the technology of television to produce
images that enriched the stage play, that could never have been achieved in a live

312
Foster, 11.

313
Paul Foster, !Heimskringla! 17.

314
Paul Foster, !Heimskringla! 15.

227
production or even imagined within the visual and physical conventions and limitations
of theater.
The winged man, Skald, spoke: “God said, let there be light.” The actors rose
from the ground, striking poses. Skald, wheeling at their center, introduced the play’s
location as “America, before the cobbled streets, before the race was called Indians.” As
he spoke, the scene transformed from monochrome to full color, with his wings colorized
a shimmering, flatly artificial gold. The keyed-in gold, laid over the relatively natural
tone of the actor’s skin, produced a remarkably effective televisual equivalent of gold
leaf, and, as his figure was lifted via chroma-key from the stage to a flat, patterned
background, he took on the appearance of a living illustration in a medieval manuscript.
The narrative that this winged figure unfolded in his opening monologue was that of the
meeting between three belief systems: the followers of the Norse gods, Christians, and
the so-called Skraelings—as Leif Erikson and his crew called the indigenous inhabitants
of North America. This opening passage, in both its scripted content and its visual cues,
made the historical narrative of the production explicit.
After the credit sequence and opening monologue, the action shifted to a funeral
procession. The funeral of Thorvald, father of Erik the Red, was the setting for a fight
between followers of Odin and followers of Christ, which would lead, finally, to Erik the
Red’s insistence on Westward exploration. The entire scene, chaotic, fractured, and
suffering from poor sound recording (a problem that would plague the entire production),
was heavily chroma-keyed in a way that sometimes obscured, and at other times focused,
visual cues to the unfolding action. At certain points, all that could be seen was—as in the
beginning—a mass of arms and legs. At one moment, the camera focused in on Erik and
228
an unnamed opponent, both of whom, through video processing, took on the appearance
of a relief carving against a flat ground. Suddenly, in the midst of what had become a
pitched battle, the actor playing Leif Eriksson stepped forward to speak directly to the
audience, apologizing to the camera,
…For this barbaric display of rage.
Do remember, this was not a gentle age,
We settle our disputes different now!
Today we have the grace, when passions bristle,
Of using mace and the guided missile.
315

This Brechtian interjection of the contemporary world had been an important part
of the play’s original form, but was, for the most part, cut out by the time the final
production went to air.
316
This particular quality of the script however, which wove
commentary on current events into a historical narrative, was well-met by the production
team at KQED, who also looked for ways to bring together historical and contemporary
visual forms. The tools of the mix, which were suited so well to the contemporary
vernacular of the psychedelic music scene, also offered effective simulations of the more
familiar forms of classical and medieval European art, in the form of sculptural relief and
manuscript illustration.
After a series of scenes outlining the conflict between the traditional Norse and
the emerging powers of the Christian Church (a conflict that was apparently exacerbated
by familial struggles for power), and a spectacular ocean journey from Norway to
Greenland (in which the bodies of the actors formed a ship that travelled via chroma-key

315
Foster, 33.

316
Henry Hewes, “The Theater: Tom’s Mix” Saturday Review (July 12, 1969).

229
over a close-up image of choppy, foaming water), the decision was made to mount an
expedition into the unknown world to the West. Skald reappeared at this point, and as the
camera zoomed in on his heavily keyed face, it became a screen on which the following
scene unfolded. Skald introduced “the muscled bottoms of the Beothuk tribe,” a group of
actors in “traditional” Native American attire—buckskin fringes and feather
headdresses—seated on the ground with a billowing “ocean” (a blue sheet, flapping in the
wind of a powerful electric fan) behind them. They chanted “Americaaaaa,” and pray to
“Mother Earth and Father Sky.”
317
These “Beothuks” unsurprisingly, resembled nothing
so much as a band of earnestly earth-toned hippies. The Norse arrived, were greeted
graciously by the Beothuks, and the Son of Erik immediately classified them as “cargo,
slaves,” prompting a discourse on the benefits of peaceable co-existence over violent
profiteering.
318

The remainder of the play was occupied with a love story between one of the
Beothuk women, Iyo, and one of the Norse colonists, Helgi. Helgi, unfortunately, was
attached to Freydis, the rather savage sister of Leif Eriksson, who, upon discovering the
couple in flagrante, stabbed Helgi in the neck, hung him upside down and plucked out his
eyes. This act of retribution led to a further discussion of what to do with the
“Skraelings.” The winged narrator, Skald, returned, to announce that “…the devouring
tribe had come. To the Indians, a shock as profound as life itself allows.”
319
The video
closed with black and white film-footage, superimposed over the dancing bodies of the

317
Foster, 71.

318
Foster, 75.

319
Foster, 83.
230
performers, depicting fire, a child’s face, then the piles of emaciated bodies famously
documented at the liberation of German concentration camps in 1945.
The moral of the story is obvious, even if the specifics of the narrative were often
difficult to make out. Imperial, colonial, and martial powers pose a terrible threat to
innocent life—a fact that can be seen in the European arrival in the Americas, in the
death camps of WWII, and in the contemporary conflict in Vietnam. This message was
one that would find a sympathetic audience in the growing anti-Vietnam war movement,
and its delivery, coordinated in a collaboration between La Mama and the NCET—
specifically between Foster, O’Horgan, Howard and Zagone—sought to tell that story in
the emerging visual and lingual dialects of that same audience. But !Heimskringla! was
the first production to combine Videospace techniques with a scripted, staged, multi-actor
performance—rather than one or two performers collaborating with the artist. The
conceptual sympathy of form and content required an equivalent sympathy in process,
one which the collaborators struggled to achieve.
In a New York Times article published shortly before the broadcast of
!Heimskringla! on NET affiliates across the country, Judy Stone quoted director Tom
O’Horgan speaking about the primacy of the new technological methods in the
production process.
All in all it left us with less time to work on our part of it. I’m never
prepared for the difficulties involved when up against machines. In the
middle of all this, I think, ‘My God, what are we doing? We’re doing a
play and the play is the last thing we’re thinking of. I’m sure that I and the
actors could have done more if we had had more time. We had to sacrifice
clarity of diction for instance. There are problems of just being able to
mike a thing like this adequately. But when the smoke clears, it will have
231
been very much worth trying. One of things I like was that it was such a
cooperative venture.
320

O’Horgan’s uneasiness—about the cost to the performance that would be levied
by the emphasis on new technologies—proved to be justified, as critical responses swept
aside the play to focus on the wonders of Videospace. Despite the lengthy O’Horgan
quote closing the article, Stone’s discussion of the project focused primarily on Brice
Howard, Videospace and the experimental projects at KQED. Stone was clearly much
taken with Howard, adopting his language in her discussion of the project and its history.
She stated quite baldly that the play itself was secondary in importance to the new
processes being used to bring it to life.
…today, the play is not the thing, place is not the theater, the medium is
not the message; the medium is the mix, the electron is the clay and the
question is: What happens when artists take the same old TV equipment
and turn it inside out?
321

Terrence O’Flaherty’s review in the San Francisco Chronicle, published the day
of the scheduled broadcast, was sharp in its division of technological/televisual and
theatrical production, stating that “the literary material is not first rate and the acting by
New York’s highly acclaimed La Mama Troupe—an appalling monotonous collection of
screamers—is never equal to the visual achievements.”
322
His disdain for the La Mama
performers and indifference to the script, however, were in sharp contrast to the

320
Judy Stone “Stoned Angels in Videospace” New York Times, Datebook, (November 2,
1969): 16.

321
Stone, 15.

322
Terrence O’Flaherty, “Norse Horse or Stuffed Bikini?” San Francisco Chronicle,
(November 7, 1969): 44.

232
accolades he offered to the accomplishments of Videospace, claiming that “In my
estimation it is the most important single production in the development of TV since the
introduction of color more than 15 years ago.”
323
O’Flaherty, whose article gives Brice
Howard almost exclusive title to the innovations developed at the NCET, notes potential
abuses of the new methods, suggesting that “this premier use of the Videospace technique
as a camouflage for dramatic shortcomings is perhaps a forecast for the future where
surface illusion will become more important than content in the manner of a shimmering
psychedelic poster advertising a long-forgotten rock concert.”
324
This reference to
advertising marks the conflict faced by the cultural producers who sought to reach a
youth audience. They were required, on the one hand, to compete with the dazzling
affects of the contemporary advertising industry, while, on the other, to eschew the
conformist and capitalist messages carried by the products of that industry.

The residency programs at WGBH and KQED were, from their inception, viewed
by their primary funder—and by many of the program supporters at the stations—as a
means to develop and expand the capacities of television as a medium of mass
communication. This view of art as a laboratory for the improvement of television may
be read as an appropriation of individual creative enterprise for the furthering of
institutional interests—indeed, that is a reasonable description of what took place in the
residency programs. But does the fact that the institution in question is one with a non-

323
O’Flaherty, 44. Given that O’Flaherty had been working as a television critic since
1950, his claim to authority on the development of television as a medium is justified.

324
O’Flaherty, 44.
233
profit educational mandate matter in our evaluation of the ethics of this appropriation? Is
it possible for art produced under the aegis of the institution of television—let alone
television made with the tools developed by artists—to maintain credibility in the context
of late 1960s and early 1970s avant-garde practices such as conceptual art, minimalism
and the independent Portapak video practices that have received the lion’s share of
critical attention over the last forty years?
While it is possible to reduce these projects to an early example of the embrace of
complicity described in 2005 by Johanna Drucker, and to read them in the terms that she
sets out for contemporary art, I would like to suggest that these works be read as truly
liminal in their hybridity—challenging the conventions of both television and art by
erasing the boundaries between them, if only briefly.
325
Like the Diggers, who refused to
clearly state a position in the terms available in contemporary political discourse, these
projects disregarded the existing categories and definitions that separated high and low,
popular and elite cultural forms.
326
In all of the works discussed in this chapter, the
traditional forms of television were challenged in order to speak to an audience that had
rejected the conventions of the medium, but the difference between the developments is
worth noting.
In San Francisco, this challenge followed a trajectory that was radical in its
embrace of psychedelic culture and aesthetics, and in its presentation of material that
prioritized sensual experience over any clearly articulated meaning. As such, this work

325
Johanna Drucker, Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity, (Chicago:
University of Chicago, 2005).

326
I am grateful to Virginia Solomon for helping me to clarify my thoughts on this aspect
of the project.
234
was, as pointed out by Terrence O’Flaherty, in danger of appropriation and subjection to
the needs of advertising, to a “future where surface illusion will become more important
than content.” While I do not want to engage in an oversimplification of American-style
high modernism, I do think that the oftentimes delusional emphasis at KQED on formal
autonomy—at the cost of an honest engagement with the institutional structures that
enabled the project—left their projects open to this kind of appropriation: art as special-
effects.
327

At WGBH, on the other hand—and WNET in the collaborative production of
America, Inc., the ongoing and open engagement of the artists and television
professionals at the station with the traditions and conventions of television as a cultural
field, resulted in something that could be categorized as a kind of critical complicity. The
Mr. Silver programs used the entry of countercultural and avant-garde practices into the
institution of television to explore, challenge, and sometimes upbraid that institution. In
the Mr. Silver programs, avant-garde practices were not just put to use to draw in young
audiences (although that was certainly one of the goals of the project), but also to re-
envision the social role of television as a medium.
Contemporary programming about art on television—whether the high
seriousness of the PBS series Art 21, which uses a documentary format to present

327
The vulnerability to appropriation of formalist approaches have been addressed most
comprehensively in relation to Abstract Expressionism, in works such as Eva Cockroft’s
“Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War” in Pollock and After: The Critical
Debate, F. Frascina, ed. (New York: Routedge, 2000), 125-133; and Serge Guilbaut’s
How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, (Chicago, 1974); more recently, Rosalind
Krauss has made a related argument about Minimalism in “The Cultural Logic of the
Late Capitalist Museum” October, vol. 54 (Autumn,1990) 3-17.

235
contemporary practices, or Bravo’s über-kitsch competitive reality program Work of Art:
The Next Great Artist—rarely, if ever, allows art to be anything but an object displayed
by the putatively transparent medium of television. These earlier works, however, are
examples of programs in which art, rather than a passively displayed object, was a force
that shaped television in unexpected and unfamiliar ways, by ignoring the traditional
divisions between art and mass culture.
236
Figures to Chapter Four

Figure 60. David Silver, “Interview Between David Silver and Mel Lyman,” Avatar
(Boston, February 16, 1968).

Figure 61. Russell Connor, Art Talker, 1980/c.1965, video still, WGBH-TV.

237

Figure 62. Robert Zagone, West Pole, 1968, video still, re-realeased in Go Ride the
Music, Eagle Vision Records, 2008.

Figure 63. Robert Zagone, West Pole, 1968, video still, re-realeased in Go Ride the
Music, Eagle Vision Records, 2008.

238

Figure 64. Robert Zagone, West Pole, 1968, video still, re-realeased in Go Ride the
Music, Eagle Vision Records, 2008.

Figure 65. Robert Zagone, West Pole, 1968, video still, re-realeased in Go Ride the Music, Eagle
Vision Records, 2008.

239

Figure 66. Robert Zagone, West Pole, 1968, video still, re-realeased in Go Ride the Music, Eagle
Vision Records, 2008.

Figure 67. Robert Zagone, West Pole, 1968, video still, re-realeased in Go Ride the Music, Eagle
Vision Records, 2008.

240

Figure 68. Paul Foster, Tom O’Horgan, !Heimskringla! ! or The Stoned Angels, 1969,
video still, Pacific Film Archive.

Figures 69 and 70. Paul Foster, Tom O’Horgan, !Heimskringla! ! or The Stoned Angels,
1969, video still, Pacific Film Archive.

241
Conclusion
This study has set out to address a number of questions about the history of early
video art. What happens to our understanding of the history of video when we stage its
origins in the television studio instead of the artist’s studio? When, instead of privileging
the Portapak as the premier tool of video art because an individual could use it, we focus
instead on works made with the more complex technologies of television production and
the collaborative processes required to use them? What happens when, instead of reading
the value and meaning of video art exclusively in relation to the art forms of the period
that have been retrospectively canonized, we also see television’s cultural forms as a
necessary part of an informed reading? How is our thinking about public television
affected by its transformation into a creative laboratory, instead of a “good library”?
328

As a project constrained to a narrow temporal and geographical field—one
decade, two cities—this study also leaves a number of compelling questions unanswered.
One possible area of relevant exploration and comparison would broaden the
geographical boundaries of this study, in order to look at the ways in which artists outside
of the United States in the 1960s and 1970s engaged with similar opportunities. How did
video artists engage with television in regions where non-profit media and state-
supported art practices were a greater social priority than they have been in the United
States, but where the indigenous culture of commercial television was weaker?
329

328
Laurie Ouellette, Viewers Like You?, 47. Ouelette describes educational television as
an institution conceived as “television’s equivalent to the ‘good library,’ geared to
discerning individuals who visited with a specific purpose in mind...”

329
I am thinking in particular of Canada, the United Kingdom, and parts of Continental
Europe, where cultural programming—particularly in response to the influx of American
242
Expanding this investigation synchronically, in this way, would best be served by a
collaborative and more aggressively interdisciplinary approach—one enabling a broader
study of the ways in which official public cultures, education, popular culture and art
have intersected under different institutional and political structures. A diachronic and
more traditionally art-historical expansion, on the other hand, might build connections to
earlier practices and existing studies. If, instead of framing this history as “new media”
because its products are temporal and because they are electric, we considered it also as
an element of a history of art that engages with the distributive capacities of mass media,
then the activities at KQED and WGBH may be understood as part of—and an extension
of—an important array of avant-garde practices of the earlier twentieth century.
Is it possible that, instead of setting video art even farther apart from the canon of
visual art, reading video through its institutional histories and connection to television
might help us to recognize its place in more extensive histories of art in the modern era,
thus better recognizing the diversity of those histories? The residency programs at KQED
and WGBH may both be understood as part of an avant-garde tradition that tried, at
various points over the course of the twentieth century, to destroy the boundaries between
art and life by integrating art into the systems of mass production and distribution that
came to define life in the modern world. This is seen especially in the early decades of
the twentieth century, when artists often used the printing press in order to participate
more fully in the specific social forms of modernity.

commercial media—was a priority. See for example, Vincent Massey, Report of the
Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences, 1949-
1952, (Ottawa: Edmond Cloutier, 1951). There are likely, however, relevant comparisons
to explore well beyond these limits.

243
In the early twentieth century, individual lives began to fill up with public culture,
in the form of books, radio, newspapers, and other ubiquitous and inexpensive mass-
produced goods. Artists quickly began to engage with this new, dispersed public culture.
For example, in 1909 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published his Futurist Manifesto on the
front page of Le Figaro, a popular French newspaper. In the following decade, members
of German expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter printed an almanac to distribute their
ideas and images; in New York, the group of artists and writers associated with Alfred
Stieglitz’s Little Galleries of the Photo Secession published a magazine called 291; and
De Stijl in the Netherlands published their eponymous journal.
330
Between the two World
Wars, various Dada offshoots, in New York, Berlin, and Paris, and then Breton’s
Surrealists, and Bataille’s, used the printing press to create a forum for poetry, criticism,
journalism, and art, which sought to upend or transform the cultural and social status
quo.
331
After World War II, the Gutai group in Japan followed a similar model with their
journal.
332

330
Edited by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, Der Blaue Reiter Almanach was first
published in Munich in an edition of 1,100 in 1912, and re-editioned in 1914. 291 was
published by Alfred Steiglitz, Marius de Zayas, Agnes Ernest Meyer and Paul Haviland
in New York in 1915 and 1916. De Stijl was published by Theo van Doesburg in Leiden,
between 1917 and 1932.

331
On Dada publications see Emily Hage, “The Magazine as Strategy: Tristan Tzara’s
Dada and the Seminal Role of Dada Art Journals in the Dada Movement,” The Journal of
Modern Periodical Studies, vol. 2 no. 1 (2011): 33-53. Publications associated with
Surrealism included André Breton’s Le Révolution Surréaliste, published in Paris
between 1933 and 1939, and Bataille’s Documents (1929-1930) and Acéphale (1936-
1939). For a discussion of the relationship between these publications and their role in the
social and intellectual environment of interwar Paris see Rosalind E. Krauss and Yve-
Alain Bois, Formless: A User’s Guide, (New York: Zone Books, 1997); Dawn Ades and
Simon Baker, Undercover Surrealism: George Bataille and Documents, (London:
Hayward Gallery, 2006).
244
Print, of course, was not the only medium that artists used to enter into the culture
of mass production. In the Soviet Union, Constructivists worked to transform the entire
material world, setting their sights on propaganda, architecture, fashion, furniture and
kitchenware, in the hopes of creating a world in which every member of the proletariat
could live surrounded by great works of factory-made art.
333
Similar, if less ideologically-
inflected ideals drove the design work of De Stijl in the Netherlands and the Bauhaus in
Germany.
334
For the first half of the twentieth century, it was common for artists to look
for ways to enter (or infiltrate) the private sphere with new and challenging forms of
discourse, contained in forms as diverse as a chair or a journal, made accessible by mass
production. These domestic infiltrators were sometimes directed at an audience of peers
or potential clients, and at other times they were simply meant to reach as many people as
possible, frequently in the hopes of motivating positive social transformation.
These products, almost always of collective labor, are less well-known than the
singular works of art created by individual members of the participating groups—a
futurist painting, one of Mondrian’s geometric abstractions, or a Stieglitz photograph will
be more familiar to most viewers than Marinetti’s manifesto, an issue of De Stijl or of
291. This is partly a matter of language—these materials were often text-heavy, and

332
See Ming Tiampo, “Lines of Flight: The Gutai Journal,” in Gutai: Decentering
Modernism, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 75-98.

333
Christina Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian
Constructivism, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008).

334
See Matthew S. Witkovsky, Avant-Garde Art in Everyday Life: Early Twentieth-
Century European Modernism, (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2011). Thanks to
Jason Hill for bringing this to my attention.
245
therefore accessible in their original format only to those able to read them. Also, it is
more difficult to display a journal in a museum than it is to display a painting. Because
most of these objects were made for private consumption, they have not competed
particularly well in the world of public display. We know this material primarily in
disassembled forms, as an excerpt translated and published in an anthology or an image
cropped from the text it accompanied and printed in a textbook. The scholars who
investigate these artists and movements, however, are familiar with the difficulty that
arises when an attempt is made to address individual artists and works without the
communities of which they were part—communities which are often most accessible
through collaboratively produced, widely disseminated printed matter such as journals or
posters.
335

Given the history of engagement with mass production and dissemination in
twentieth-century art, it should come as no surprise that artists would choose to work
with television—which is just one more technology that brings the public world into
private spaces. Nor should it come as a surprise, once art on television has been oriented
within the longer history of collaboration and dissemination in the twentieth century, that
this work has received limited attention from museums, art galleries and art historians.
Like much of the printed matter of the early twentieth century, the products of the
residencies at WGBH and KQED were dialogical as much as declarative. Instead of
singular objects that stand easily on their own, many of the works that emerged out of

335
Increasingly, digital images of this material can be found on-line. De Stijl and 291 can
be found on Ubu Web Historical, http://ubu.com/historical/index.html. Ubu Web is an
invaluable, if not strictly law-abiding, volunteer-run digital resource center, which
archives otherwise uncirculating or out-of-publication film, video, sound and text
material.
246
these residency programs were entangled—with one another, with the other programs
being produced in the stations, and with the technologies that were developing in tandem
with the artworks—so tightly and in such complex ways, that simply pulling one out of
the mix for display results in an impoverished, partial reading. While all work is
embedded in its context this way, in the case of material which has an unconventional
relationship to the standard hierarchies of cultural value, a sensitivity to the role of extra-
artistic influence is particularly important.
In order to fully appreciate the humor, the critique, and the form of works made at
WGBH, such as Wegman’s Man Ray Man Ray, or Nam June Paik’s Merce by Merce by
Paik, viewers would need to know Russell Connor’s Museum Open House from earlier in
the 1960s. In order to understand the presentation form of programs like The Medium is
the Medium or Video Variations it was necessary to recognize the ways in which they
employed the temporal structures and rhythms of educational television. The technical
manifestation of these works relied on the creative input of people who made television,
as well as those who made art. At the same time, the depth of meaning in these works
relied on an audience of television viewers, not just art viewers. Paik and Wegman both,
in their projects at WGBH, recognized a new audience. An audience who watched TV
and watched art, an audience which, while cognizant of the existing cultural distinctions
between TV and art, was able to overcome them in order to enjoy works that were both.
The artists and the station staff who participated in the residency programs at WGBH
showed, for the most part, little interest in maintaining the distinction between fine art
and mass culture, and their efforts reached for both a new kind of art and a new kind of
television.
247
Despite the anti-broadcast stance at the NCET, the primary agenda there was
ultimately based on a desire for very similar outcomes: a new kind of art, and a new kind
of television. While artists at WGBH used an approach that has generally been associated
with postmodernism—pastiche, satire, a kind of semiotic collage—the NCET is more
easily aligned with the ideals of late modernism. This alignment is the result of two
aspects of the program at the Center: the focus on medium specificity which is seen
especially in the dominance of abstract works, and the desire to protect artists from the
pressures of the public sphere—especially as it manifested in the culture of broadcast
television. If the abstractions that came out of the NCET are read only as mobile
paintings, however, we miss a point of extraordinary overlap between artistic and
scientific cultures, as the experiment-as-a-means-of-discovering-the-unexpected met the
experiment-as-a-means-of-finding-out-exactly-what-to-expect. Similarly, an exclusive
focus on a late-modernist isolationism obscures the degree to which the Center used its
connection with KQED as a jumping-off point to develop research programs in the
technology and effects of television. Instead of entering into a dialogue with television, at
the NCET participants tried to imagine what television could be in order to transform it,
and thus the people watching it. Like other avant-gardes of the earlier twentieth century,
such as Der Blaue Reiter, De Stijl and the Surrealists, the NCET operated with the belief
that art had the power to positively influence the social world, and to lead to greater
individual freedom.
Like members of the historical avant-gardes, the participants in both of these
programs came together by choice, rather than being subsequently grouped together
because of stylistic similarities or shared conceptual concerns (as we see in such post-war
248
movements as Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism or Conceptual art). Unlike
the historical avant-gardes (except, perhaps, the Soviets and the Bauhaus in the 1920s)
however, the communities examined in this study were shaped by relatively powerful
institutional structures. Each station included an unusual mix of participants, including
those who identified professionally as artists in the traditional sense (individuals who
used selected tools with which they had attained a degree of expertise, to express
something original, individual, and authentic), but also creative producers who were not
identified professionally as artists in the traditional sense (managers, program directors,
television producers, cameramen, editors, television presenters, etc., who used their
specialized skills to meet broader institutional—rather than personal—requirements).
336

This collaboration between artists and non-art professionals follows, arguably, a legacy
of embrace of the aesthetics of the mass media and industrial production techniques,
evident as well in Pop and Minimalism through the 1960s.
The meeting of the idealism and utopian ambitions of the historical avant-gardes
with the extra-artistic methodologies of the post-war period is not exclusive to the
residencies discussed in this study, but such meetings are only beginning to receive the
focused attention they deserve, in collections such as West of Center and Collectivism
After Modernism. The apparent failure of such initiatives to reach the goals that drove
them—television programming shaped by artists instead of advertisers on the one hand,

336
This is not to say that there was not a diversity of professional identities amongst the
historical avant-gardes—bringing together artists with designers and architects (De Stijl,
Bauhaus), or poets (Futurism, Surrealism), but it seems that for the most part, these
communities were made up of people who identified strongly as artists of one kind or
another. Closer investigation may reveal that these distinctions are overdetermined,
however.
249
and art that escaped the elitist confines of the museum and its commodifying cousin the
commercial art gallery in order to enter the homes of anyone with a television set, on the
other—has been used as a reason to dismiss or ignore this body of work and its attendant
histories.
In my introduction, I touched briefly on Benjamin Buchloh’s essay, “From
Gadget Video to Agit Video,” arguing that his ideological agenda resulted in a blindness
to, or disinterest in, aspects of early video art that deserved closer attention—the
unexpected incongruities and emergences often ignored in art historical narratives. In
truth though, when I began my research, I was hoping to find the same things that
Buchloh had already declared impossible or unsatisfactory. I expected to find
intentionally and aggressively radical art practices that had escaped the overarching
editorial power and elite audiences of the art world, so that they could, on reintroduction,
transform that world from the inside. I was directed by an inchoate hope that I might find
and introduce into my own too-exclusive cultural milieu, a transformative virus of
openness and accessibility, cultured in the underfunded rag-tag studios of the public
television world. I thought I was researching revolutionaries. This was naive; if Benjamin
Buchloh went looking for them, and returned empty-handed and disappointed, why
would I have more luck?
I did not find what I was looking for. What I found was a complicated, messy
history of cultural production that was built on the ambitions, skill sets, curiosities,
personal mythologies and political dogmas of a highly diverse group of people, who
shared projects, as well as agendas; knowledge, rather than expectations; technical
problems as often as aesthetic objectives. Some of the project participants wanted to
250
make art more than it was, and others wanted to do the same thing for television; some
just needed a project and a paycheck; others wanted their fifteen minutes. Amongst this
diverse array, however, I have found clear—and very different—trajectories at each
station, both largely the product of their program directors, Brice Howard and Fred
Barzyk. And ultimately, despite the clear differences between them, the ultimate reasons
for the dissolution of the residency program at each station were similar.
The ambitious and well-funded experiment in television art that began in the late
1960s was the result of a very specific set of historical and cultural circumstances, and
those circumstances did not last for very long. While the history of each center of
television art production extends into the mid-1970s, and even beyond, the period of
intense experimental production that began in 1967 had largely died out or been
redirected by 1974. The reasons for this were many, and each station had its own history
and experienced its own difficulties and successes, but four factors contributed decisively
to the move away from an art of television. First, the increased availability of portable
video equipment meant that artists could produce video without relying on the often
bureaucracy-heavy residencies at the television stations, and after 1973, the time-base
corrector made it possible for that material to be edited and aired on television even if it
wasn’t produced through a station. Second, the development of video departments in
galleries and museums, and growing interest from curators, art critics and dealers in the
early 1970s gave artists an alternative to broadcast television as a means to display their
251
work.
337
Third, as Aniko Bodroghkozy relates in Groove Tube: Sixties Television and the
Youth Rebellion, the audience that found nothing to identify with on the network
television of the 1960s was wooed back by more “relevant” programming in the early
seventies.
338
Finally, in 1972 President Richard Nixon vetoed the funds that congress had
earmarked for public television, a decision based, according to Erik Barnouw, on his fury
over the critical coverage that public television had offered of his administration and the
progress of the Vietnam War. Barnouw explains that “during 1972-73 the field was swept
by layoffs and resignations. Its conservative elements meanwhile pushed for the reforms
demanded by the administration.”
339
The cuts affected the experimental programs at
WGBH, KQED and the emerging program at WNET in New York. Then, after Watergate
and the change in administration, political and social content came to take priority over
experimental cultural programming.
340
These external pressures, however, cannot be held

337
For a demonstration of this shift, see Barbara London, “Video: A Selected
Chronology, 1963-1983,” Art Journal, Vol. 45, No. 3, Video: The Reflexive Medium,
(Autumn, 1985) 249-262.
Regarding the spread of video to more traditional institutions, Becky Lawrence, video
coordinator at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts stated—in reference to the first showing
of video at that museum, in 1978--“The Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney in New
York have had video shows. But this is really one of the first times a more traditional
museum has had a show.” Otile McManus, “Who said it was just furniture?” Boston
Sunday Globe, (June 1, 1978), 15.

338
Aniko Bodroghkozy, “Chapter Six: How Youth Rebellion Captured Prime Time” in
Groove Tube: Sixties Television and the Youth Rebellion, Duke University Press, Durham
and London (2001) 199-235.

339
Barnouw, Erik Tube of Plenty: The Evolution of American Television, (Oxford
University Press, 1990), 454.

340
At WNET and WGBH experimental video art programming was replaced by content
that focused on the interests and needs of ethnic minorities. At WGBH, for example,
“Say Brother” replaced the experimental program “What’s Happening, Mr. Silver?”.
252
entirely responsible for the limited lifespan of the residency programs—internal pressures
were also a significant factor at both stations.
These residency programs established new connections between artistic practices
and electronic mass-media; they challenged cultural expectations about what kinds of
processes and objects can be art, and in what kinds of environments art belongs. Fred
Barzyk, Brice Howard and their supporters in the educational television system, at the
Rockefeller Foundation, and at the National Endowment for the Arts, wanted to know
what would happen to television if they let artists make it. They went to great lengths to
facilitate the experiments that would let them find out. As a result of those experiments,
not only did artists make television, but television professionals made art, and the line
between the two disciplines became remarkably unstable, if only for a little while.
Despite all of the systems of support that I described in Chapter 1, which came together
and allowed these projects to take place, the attendant pressures on them were severe
from the very beginning.
At the NCET, the no-broadcast ideal meant that participants had to constantly
struggle to demonstrate the value of the Center to KQED and to the public broadcasting
system in general. In doing so, the autonomy that was to come with freedom from
broadcast requirements was surrendered to different kind of instrumentality as research
and development became priorities at the Center. At WGBH, on the other hand, the focus
on producing works for broadcast meant that participants had to constantly balance their
own practice with the demands of the studio and airwaves. I have argued that these
institutional pressures were the primary shaping force in the bodies of work that came out
of both stations, but they were also responsible for making the collaboration
253
unsustainable in the long term for each. The conditions that shaped The Medium is the
Medium, Video Commune, or Man Ray Man Ray, like those that resulted in Slip Back Into
the Shining Sea or the construction of the Beck Direct Video Synthesizer were the same
conditions that pushed artists back toward individual production, Portapaks and the
museum and art gallery.
Broadcast television, videotape, and their attendant technologies, turned out to be
media with a relatively short life—regular television broadcasting began in the United
States in 1948, and “since June 12, 2009, full-power television stations nationwide have
been broadcasting exclusively in a digital format.”
341
The technologies of analogue
television played a central role in public and private life in the United States for sixty-one
years, but they are now obsolete. As a result, maintaining a productive dialogue with the
material discussed in this dissertation presents some real obstacles to the historian.
The archives in which this material is held and preserved have shaped the ways in
which it has been historicized. Like the printed material of the historical avant-gardes, the
television work produced through these residency programs presents challenges—but
these challenges are multiplied by a number of factors. Like an almanac or journal, these
works have a form that is not amenable to museum display or textbook illustration in the
way that painting and sculpture are. Unlike almanacs and journals, however, the
distribution of these works was electronic, rather than material. Instead of making a few
hundred copies, or a few thousand, that could be distributed by mail, sold in stores or
distributed amongst a social network, this work was either broadcast live and recorded on

341
Federal Communications Commission, “TV Broadcasting is Now Digital”
announcement. http://www.dtv.gov/.
254
videotape or just recorded on videotape. These tapes currently exist in archives, either at
the television station (WGBH has maintained a fairly comprehensive collection of
material from the period), in a museum collection (the material from KQED is held by
the Pacific Film Archive at the Berkeley Museum of Fine Arts), or a media art
distribution center. The works at WGBH and the Pacific Film Archive are non-circulating
and for the most part, can only be viewed on site, by appointment, for a fee. Some works
are available through Electronic Arts Intermix in New York, where they can be viewed
on-site or rented, but in this context they lose their connection to the extra-artistic or
liminal products discussed in my last chapter.
Also, as temporal works with limited circulation and often ambiguous copyright
attribution, there are impediments to illustration. In most cases, the images available are
limited to those stills which the holding institution chooses to make available. As a result,
moments and images which are defining in the context of the current study are often
unavailable as illustrations. Efforts are being made at WGBH to make archival material
available digitally, an initiative that has—even in its tentative early stages—been
invaluable to my own research. Unfortunately, projects like this are subject to the whims
of shrinking budgets and copyright challenges.
342
While a collaboration among public
television stations, museums, and public or private funding agencies could go a long way
to preserving this material and making it more accessible to the public, it is essential that
such a collaboration remain sensitive to the importance of programs such as What’s
Happening, Mr. Silver or Ecotopia, which, resisting categorization, are in danger of

342
A number of the videos in the WGBH archive lack clear attribution, which makes any
kind of distribution problematic.

255
falling through the cracks if collections only select tapes recognized as legitimate
artworks for preservation.
The residency programs at KQED and WGBH and their products are, I hope to
have demonstrated, important moments in the emergence of video as an art form, and in
the survival and mutation of early twentieth-century avant-garde ideals into the post-war
period. They have a place in the story of twentieth-century art, especially in that often-
too-linear part of the story that limns the shift from modernist to postmodern priorities
and practices in art. At the same time, however, they are a disruption in that narrative.
Instead of completely turning their backs on mass culture, as the post-war modernists
tried to do, appropriating as the pop artists did, or critiquing its flash like the conceptual
artists of the period, the artists who participated in these residencies, and the television
community who invited them in, were actively trying to alter the forms of popular media.
The future of television, like the future of art, in the late 1960s, was not only unwritten,
but there was an active movement on both fronts to initiate change. Newton Minnow’s
call for a transformation in television, followed by the findings of the Carnegie
Commission, contributed to a sense that television as it was would not do, while the
embrace of the aleatory aesthetics of John Cage and the revolutionary possibilities set in
motion by Marcel Duchamp’s influence suggested an entirely new direction for art. In
1967, the cultural fields of both art and television seemed open to radical transformation,
and there was no reason why they could not change one another.
In 2012, art and television are back to their pre-1967 standoffishness. There are
shows about artists and the things they make: Art 21 and Work of Art: The Next Great
Artist being the two of the most recent. They maintain the old-fashioned ideal of the artist
256
as a person of great talent who uses their special skill-set to communicate a highly
individualized vision, driven by some indefinable, indefatigable, inner necessity. Even as
this programming delivers this of the artist as someone who is different from others, and
separate from the very cultural form that communicates their story, margins of the image
attest to the artificiality of the system and of that narrative. In Art 21, the presence of
assistants, interviewers, camera crews and others interrupt the silence of the studio (or
artificially impose silence in a normally noisy space). Participants in the competitive
reality television show, Work of Art, even as they battled to win the dubious title of “Next
Great Artist” worked in constant dialogue with one another, pretending not to notice the
cameras all around them. Contemporary television, however, isn’t really television any
more.
Television still looks like television, and those who still use the old, pre-digital
receivers have an experience of television that seems mostly the same as television ten
years ago, in that they watch a box, on which programs show up at scheduled times.
343

But, as Marshall McLuhan pointed out in 1964, the content of any new medium is an old
medium, and the new medium is digital, and it only pretends to be television in the old
sense. Personal Video Recording systems such as Direct TV and TiVo, and the
availability of most programs for download or streaming at the viewer’s convenience are

343
Anne Friedberg wrote about this development and the role of the VCR as an early
technology modeling the contemporary form of television in “The End of Cinema:
Multimedia and Technological Change” in Film Theory and Criticism, 6th Edition, Leo
Braudy & Marshall Cohen, eds (NY: Oxford University Press, 2004), 914-926. On
changing systems of interface and their implications see William Uricchio, “Television’s
Next Generation: Technology/Interface Culture/Flow” in Television After TV: Essays on
a Medium in Transition, Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson, eds. (Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 2004), 163-182.

257
a more honest manifestation of what we now call TV. Television isn’t limited to the old
airwaves or schedules anymore; it travels by cable or satellite or G4 network, its channels
are infinite and it is as easy to watch it on a laptop, tablet or telephone as it is to gather
around the rapidly flattening monitor in the living room. The networks still exist, but they
not only compete with pay cable providers now, but also with every smartphone user who
has an idea. Barzyk’s drawbridge might have been pulled back up after a few years, but
now the contents of the fortress, the technologies that only TV stations had in 1967, can
be found in the pockets of 35% of American adults, with the numbers going up rapidly.
344

Television is an anachronism, but video, in its new, digital form, is perfectly
contemporary, and it is everywhere. Video beat TV, but art’s place in the new order is not
yet clear.
The activities that were initiated in 1967 at KQED and WGBH were the result of
historical circumstances that cannot ever be repeated, and they speak to the peculiarity
and potential of that historical moment. This historical moment—which, in the United
States, is given its particular flavor by smartphones and e-readers, climate change and
water on Mars, Super PACs and marriage equality—is enormously different, and the
changes to television and its institutions are arguably outstripping changes in the art
world, where the institutional old guard, in the form of museums, auction houses, art
magazines and art schools, seem—even in a precarious economic climate—to be more
powerful than ever. In 1967, it seemed like art might have the power to radically
transform television. Today, on the other hand, the rapidly dispersing and diversifying

344
Aaron Smith, “Smartphone Adoption and Usage” Pew Report, (July 11, 2012),
http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2011/Smartphones/Section-1/Overview-of-smartphone-
adoption.aspx.
258
world of the transmissive moving image is making an entirely new space for art. Digital
technologies provide not only new platforms for art, but new studios, new kinds of extra-
artistic experts, and new audiences.
Like the television studios that were art studios, and the receivers that became
frames to a new kind of art, these new productive and distributive technologies will
create both new opportunities and new limits for artists. What happened in Boston and
San Francisco in the late 1960s and early 1970s will not tell us what to expect from our
own changing media environment, but this history reminds us of all the possibilities that
come from forging connections between communities that seem incompatible. It
celebrates the ambition and optimism required to create something that explores, exposes
and transforms accepted cultural conventions. It suggests an approach to cultural
production based not on categories (such as high-art, pop-culture, or education), but
rather on what is needed, what is interesting, and what works, right now.
259
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Asset Metadata

Creator Hollenberg, Sarah (author)

Core Title Art on television: 1967-1976

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Art History

Publication Date 11/27/2012

Defense Date 11/27/2012

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag abstraction,Allan Kaprow,art after 1945,Autonomy,Boston,Brice Howard,collaboration,counterculture,David Silver,educational television,Fred Barzyk,institutional history,Nam June Paik,new media,OAI-PMH Harvest,post-war modernism,public television,Russel Connor,San Francisco,Steven Beck,television,video art,William Wegman

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Meyer, Richard Evan (committee chair), Flint, Kate (committee member), Ross, Steven J. (committee member)

Creator Email hollenb@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-121805

Unique identifier UC11292303

Identifier usctheses-c3-121805 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Hollenberg-1352.pdf

Dmrecord 121805

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Hollenberg, Sarah

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA