Feedback: Television against Democracy

by David Joselit

In a world where politics is conducted through images, the tools of art history can be used to challenge the privatized antidemocratic sphere of American television. American television embodies a it is a privately owned and operated public communications network that most citizens are unable to participate in except as passive specators. Television creates an image of community while preventing the formation of actual social ties because behind its simulated exchange of opinions lies a highly centralized corporate structure that is profoundly antidemocratic. In Feedback, David Joselit describes the privatized public sphere of television and recounts the tactics developed by artists and media activists in the 1960s and 1970s to break open its closed circuit. The figures whose work Joselit examines—among them Nam June Paik, Dan Graham, Joan Jonas, Abbie Hoffman, Andy Warhol, and Melvin Van Peebles—staged political interventions within television's closed circuit. Joselit identifies three kinds of feedback, which can be both disabling noise and rational response—as when Abbie Hoffman hijacked television time for the Yippies with flamboyant stunts directed to the media; the image-virus, which proliferates parasitically, invading, transforming, and even blocking systems—as in Nam June Paik's synthesized videotapes and installations; and the avatar, a quasi-fictional form of identity available to anyone, which can function as a political actor—as in Melvin Van Peebles's invention of Sweet Sweetback, an African-American hero who appealed to a broad audience and influenced styles of Black Power activism. These strategies, writes Joselit, remain valuable today in a world where the overlapping information circuits of television and the Internet offer different opportunities for democratic participation. In Feedback , Joselit analyzes such midcentury image-events using the procedures and categories of art history. The trope of figure/ground reversal, for instance, is used to assess acts of representation in a variety of media—including the medium of politics. In a televisual world, Joselit argues, where democracy is conducted through images, art history has the capacity to become a political science.

Genres: Art

210 pages, Hardcover

First published April 6, 2007

About the author

David Joselit is an American art historian who is currently Professor of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University, and also a published author, including being an editor of October.

Reviews

[Charlie]

4.5 Stars. A decently broad and very well-written cartography of art's intersection with broadcast. Less a history than a guide to how artists and instigators have explored and tested the resiliency of broadcast media (television, most of all) and seen how their practice can be bolstered or subsumed by the boob tube. In that context, it makes sense that it ends on a manifesto—it's far from comprehensive, but Joselit's optimistic and proactive view of avant-garde incursions into media (tempered by examples of the failures and short-sightedness of some of these ventures) is energizing. Great looking, too, with lots of quality photos

[Brycedwyer]

i sympathize with the methodology, but some of the conclusions are a little goofy. when was the last time you read an art history book that ends with a manifesto!?