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 Editorial | Forerunners | MassMedia | Audio | Performance | Perception | Society |
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The three examples examined in the second time-window represent the search for an art form of its own for television, a search that is ultimately unsuccessful. Either they worked too narrowly on the basis of art, like Schum, or they tried to use art to analyze questions about the meaning of TV as a medium, like the WHGB workshop. But art became increasingly conceptual and context-related in the 1970s; it dematerializes itself, as Lucy Lippard puts it. But the material battle of the technological demands involved in a real TV production established conditions that can never be disregarded. A number of TV interventions and disturbances respond to this dilemma. They are not announced as ART, but suddenly and unexpectedly interrupt the flow of the program. They acquire meaning only in the context of the broadcast, not as something preserved on video. And as we have now come to expect after several examples of the synchronicity of artistic concepts, these acts of
intervention also emerge almost at the same time, but usually independently of each other, around 1971.
Two 1969 Gerry Schum productions were the forerunners of this type of intervention, Keith Arnatt's «Self Burial» and Jan Dibbet's «TV as a fireplace.» The latter was broadcast at Christmas, and turned the domestic TV set into a flickering fire in a fireplace. Peter Weibel and Valie Export were able to place several acts of intervention with ORF from 1969 to 1972, all relating directly to the home viewer's situation. To name but two examples: Weibel's 1969 «The Endless Sandwich» gets the ultimate couch potato to stand up, and in «Facing a Family» Export makes the television image into a mirror for the family in 1971. Also in 1971, David Hall's poetic «7 TV Interruptions» were broadcast on Scottish television; one of them made the TV set into a water container. This kind of intervention almost developed into a genre in its own right, with additional examples extending right down to the present day.[59] For example,
