“Are You Ready for TV?”
“Are You Ready for TV?” is not the same old exhibition devoted to television. It is a complex, ambitious, and time-consuming experiment that critically explores the nature of an exhausted medium. If you expect this show to demonize TV as a mind-numbing device, you will be disappointed. It rests rather on the will to trace a connection between television’s artistic and philosophical roots. Curator Chus Martínez’s approach cleverly dodges indulgent commonplaces by returning to the fundamental core of the concept of television. The exhibition, which is now on view at another Spanish venue, the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea in Santiago de Compostela, invites us to start from scratch and set aside all we know about the tube.
The layout of the exhibition is itself revealing. The ten “chapters” that make up the curatorial plot do not involve a succession of images thrown onto the icy walls of the white cube. That would imply that museum and television are two independent bodies that conveniently interact in a specific moment to construct a certain narrative. Rather, the two operate as one mediating entity with one common ambition: to show everything that helps shape their unified discourse, to explore their own internal nature. Therein lies the impetus to use an innovative device called Gran TV—which was designed especially for this occasion and allows giant images to merge into the museum’s architecture—instead of using more conventional projectors or monitors. And the size of the exhibition—if that is even the correct term—is astounding: It mimics the enormous breadth of an entire day of broadcasting.
“Are You Ready for TV?” examines its topic from within in a profoundly self-referential manner. Significantly enough, one of the chapters, “A Podium to Occupy,” features programs broadcast in France in the early 1960s, in which renowned philosophers and intellectuals address key issues of their time. This straightforward footage avoids anything patronizing or anecdotal. What you see is what you get: thinking at its purest, television as a space reserved for ideas with which to lay the foundations of a new milieu.
If “A Podium to Occupy” strips television of any artifice, the chapter “Dead Air: That Dreaded Silence” moves in the opposite direction. It is an overview of the unseen elements intrinsic to every TV show. This approach is best epitomized by Jean-Luc Godard and Anna-Marie Miéville’s 1985 Soft and Hard (A Soft Conversation on Hard Subjects), an often-whimsical analysis of what usually remains hidden in the process of broadcasting. There’s an awful lot of it.
The whole exhibition flowed coherently in the darkened spaces at MACBA. The Hand, 1976, a hilarious early film by David Lamelas, explores the possibility of autonomy within the strict rules of the institution. It is the highlight of a chapter aptly titled “The Inveterate Joker.” Included in “The Shock of the New,” Argentinian Marta Traba’s La historia del arte moderno contada desde Bogotá (The History of Modern Art Narrated from Bogotá, 1962–83) captivated Colombian society with its dazzlingly pedagogical method. Using TV as their teacher, a surprisingly large number of Colombians sat on their sofas to learn the history of art through Traba’s limpid procedure. It is one of the jewels of the show and relates to other thought-provoking works, such as those by David Hall or Jan Dibbets, that reveal how television once strove to establish itself, performing as powerful new language and a genre in itself: a diagnosis of its own specificity.