The Channeled Image: Art and Media Politics after Television - Softcover

Levin, Erica

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226821951 ISBN 13: 9780226821955

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2022

Synopsis

A fascinating look at artistic experiments with televisual forms.

Following the integration of television into the fabric of American life in the 1950s, experimental artists of the 1960s began to appropriate this novel medium toward new aesthetic and political ends. As Erica Levin details in The Channeled Image, groundbreaking artists like Carolee Schneemann, Bruce Conner, Stan VanDerBeek, and Aldo Tambellini developed a new formal language that foregrounded television’s mediation of a social order defined by the interests of the state, capital, and cultural elites. The resulting works introduced immersive projection environments, live screening events, videographic distortion, and televised happenings, among other forms. For Levin, “the channeled image” names a constellation of practices that mimic, simulate, or disrupt the appearance of televised images. This formal experimentation influenced new modes of installation, which took shape as multi-channel displays and mobile or split-screen projections, or in some cases, experimental work produced for broadcast. Above all, this book asks how artistic experimentation with televisual forms was shaped by events that challenged television broadcasters’ claims to authority, events that set the stage for struggles over how access to the airwaves would be negotiated in the future.

About this title

About the Author

Erica Levin is asociate professor in the Ohio State University’s Department of History of Art. Her writing has appeared in Media-N, Millennium Film Journal, and World Picture, as well as essays in numerous exhibition catalogs.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226821951
• ISBN 13: 9780226821955
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240