Wednesday, May 25, 2022

television’s uneasy relationship to art

 

Featured in
Issue 121

Camera Obscura

What are the reasons for television’s uneasy relationship to art?

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BY SIDNEY SMITH IN FRIEZE | 12 MAR 09

One evening in 1936 the artist John Piper arrived at a BBC studio in London’s Alexandra Palace to take part in an experiment. The studio had been filled with art works borrowed from the city’s galleries. Piper’s job was simple: to describe them to camera. It doesn’t sound that exciting, but at the time television was in its infancy – sports and variety were about the extent of it – and a new genre was about to be born: arts television.

 

Think about the questions that must have been asked before Piper was invited into that studio. Was there a role for art on television? Could the technology do it justice? (A more daunting question then than now.) How should the presenter talk about it? Should he assume his audience knows a little about art, or nothing at all? Did it even need a presenter? Couldn’t the art just be shown on its own with a little musical accompaniment – a slow pan over Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) to some tasteful tinkling by Erik Satie, for instance?

 

All these questions would have been on the minds of those responsible for the programme and partly explain the uncertainty of Piper’s performance. He stands awkwardly: an Old Master on one side, a Picasso still life on the other and a sculpture in front, talking directly to the camera. ‘This is a carving by the English sculptor Henry Moore’, he says, with the clipped, deadpan delivery of the age, uncertainly fingering the reclining figure before him. ‘He has a rapidly rising reputation amongst critics and connoisseurs.’ (Ah, for the days when only the opinions of ‘critics and connoisseurs’ mattered and cultural Marxism was just a wild campus dream!)

Gerry Schum, Fernsehgalerie (Television Gallery), 1969, Gerry Schum, in West Germany, produced programmes for artists such as Jan Dibbets and Joseph Beuys to show films made specifically for television. Courtesy: Ursula Wevers.

Arts television has been described as culture at its most exclusive meeting culture at its most populist. Over the decades a myriad of forms has evolved: late night discussion shows, topical cultural round-ups, lavish Sunday-night ‘landmark’ documentaries, dramatized biopics, live performances, even reality shows. For millions of people art is something viewed only through the prism of the television screen. Its influence over the rest of the arts ‘industry’ – publishing, curating, not to mention the creative process itself – cannot be underestimated.

 

Take the career of Moore, who from Piper’s début in 1936 onwards was a favourite subject of arts television and whose reputation rocketed throughout the following two decades. John Read (the son of the poet and critic Herbert Read), the great pioneer of British arts television in the 1950s, made six films about Moore alone. While he was a great artist, Moore was also one of the few whose work, with its soft, monochromatic tones and clear lines, didn’t look terrible on low-resolution black and white television screens. In fact, you have to wonder whether it’s mere coincidence that the British sculptural renaissance of the 1950s was also the great pioneering decade of British arts television, or whether the relationship was more symbiotic than is generally recognized. When colour television arrived in the 1960s, painting in all its Technicolor glory came alive and sculpture moved to second place on our screens.

 

Andy Warhol, of course, understood how television could help create the superstar artist long before most others did and cultivated it early in his career. A film shot for BBC’s Monitor in 1964, following Susan Sontag on a trip to the Factory, collapses into delightful incoherence because Warhol is far more interested in the television crew and their new 16mm Eclair camera than his own role as observed subject: ‘How come your camera doesn’t make any noise?’ ‘Can I really see the camera now?’ ‘It’s just terrific.’ ‘Oh, this is so glamorous.’ In the last decade of his life he dedicated ever more time to television with Andy Warhol’s TV for cable, Andy Warhol Fifteen Minutes on MTV and guest appearances on Saturday Night Live and The Love Boat. He preferred entertainment because it gets the largest audiences: arts television, as a niche genre, rather defeated the point of the medium. Warhol would have loved today’s endless celebrity reality shows, although one suspects he’d also be the weirdo voted out in the first round.

TV has no interest in whether an art work should be static or silent, because it is an all-singing, all-dancing medium. If art is to grace the screen, it must sing for its supper too.

So what is this ‘arts television’ which can shape reputations, shift public opinion, enlighten the uninitiated and irritate the informed? The most important thing to remember is that broadcasters rarely make arts television out of choice. Truly independent commercial stations won’t touch it, because arts programmes simply cannot get anything like the viewing figures of drama, entertainment or news. Piper was beckoned to Alexandra Palace in 1936 not because some giant brain at the BBC leapt up and cried, ‘I know what’ll keep people riveted to their sets: modern art!’ but because the station, in extending its service from radio to television, was obliged to honour its government charter ‘to inform, educate and entertain’. It remains the case today that arts television is only made when a station has, buried somewhere in its charter, a clause denoting a certain commitment to educational and cultural programming.

 

The amount of arts television a country produces is therefore proportionate to the degree of state interference in its broadcasting industry. Countries such as Britain, France and Germany, because they are nanny states (or at least were when television first evolved), have plenty. Free-market capitalist countries, such as the USA or Russia, or Third World countries have very little. The joke in the British television industry is that arts programming is the ‘fig leaf’ you cover your vulgar (but lucrative) programming with in order to get a franchise. Cynical broadcasters get around this by simply disguising arts television as something else: programmes on contemporary art, for example, are nearly always about celebrity or the ‘economics of the art world’ and rarely about art itself.

 

Arts television exists because the state wants it to, and this becomes an Original Sin of the medium. It means that no arts programme can avoid the fact that its content is essentially paternalistic. You might get a radical thinker who despises the arts as a bourgeois luxury onto a late night cultural discussion show, but such a platform for them to express their views would not be possible without the idea that the arts are good for you. It explains too why, despite presenters of both sexes, all ages and different races appearing in other television genres, the White Seasoned Male remains the favoured arts presenter. The WSM teaches and protects us, he can also intercede between content that is often subversive (as art and artists can be) and the vehicle: the arts programme in all its benign, self-improving glory. With Piper at the helm of the BBC’s flagship arts show that quirky Picasso still life became a tool for edification, never mind the Spanish anarchist who produced it.

 

 

Arts television is pre-programmed to genuflect before the altar of art. And this is only intensified by the means of production, because the arts programme is expensive to make. Why spend a large amount of money on a documentary about an artist, only to cast doubt on his or her credibility? In the eyes of the reluctant television corporation hyperbole alone vindicates the expenditure. How often is a particular artist proclaimed ‘the greatest genius of his age’? How often did he ‘spark a revolution that would change the world for ever’ – even if, to our eyes, he just painted some nice portraits of the rich? The tone of arts television is rarely that of the detached critical observer: more like the wide-eyed evangelical who tries to stop you in the street with a greasy leaflet promising salvation.

 

Before an arts programme even goes into production there is therefore a sort of critical gravitational pull already being exerted. The late night discussion and topical magazine show are partly liberated by spontaneity and fast turnaround, but the longer-format feature – the anchor of arts television – reveals the traits of the medium. The feature may be a one-off film or part of a series; it may be a visual essay by a noted commentator; it may depend on talking heads or dramatic reconstructions. Whichever it is, the arts feature forces its subject to adjust to its demands, to fall into line and do its duty.

 

It starts with the story. Television, like all journalistic media, must have one. The arts programme-maker is looking to render his subject palatable to the largest possible audience. So whether it is a tour through the sights of Renaissance Italy, a spirited romp through the bohemian bonhomie of Impressionist Paris or a respectful, brow-furrowed appreciation of the solitary Modernist, the arts programme-maker is looking for the universal story that transcends confusing ‘-isms’ and ideological debate: he is looking for a hero or band of brothers. In doing so, he is not only satisfying a narrative need but also giving a respectful nod to the paternalistic origins of arts television: if art is good for you, then the production of art is heroic; and if art is heroic, then so is the artist, whatever his faults as a human being.

Susan Sontag, Monitor, 1964, Sontag's trip to Andy Warhol's Factory collapsed into delightful incoherence because Warhol was more interested in the film crew and their new camera than in his own role as observed subject. 

How often have you heard something like this: ‘For years the art world had been dominated by a group of artists known as A [artistic movement] because of their distinctive way of working. But by the B [decade] many young artists were beginning to feel held back. One young artist had an idea on how to change things. His name was C [artist’s name]. He turned his back on what he saw as being an old-fashioned, restrictive way of working and set out to create a work of art that would herald a new age. The result was D [art work].’

 

Any number of A-B-C-D name patterns can fill in the gaps. For instance: a) The Mannerists; b) 1590s; c) Caravaggio; d) The Calling of St Matthew. Or: a) The Impressionists; b) 1900s; c) Picasso; d) Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Or: a) The Abstract Expressionists; b) Late 1950s; c) Andy Warhol; d) Campbell Soup Cans. Subject and art are secondary to the narrative: they are merely tools in a story of heroic transformation.

 

Reductive narrative formulas have the advantage of making the arts accessible to the uninitiated, but they do so at some cost, which explains the disgust the programme-maker provokes within the art world. We are back in the 19th century: art history is reduced, in the fashion of Thomas Carlyle, to a long line of ‘great men’. These great men (rarely women) are raised above their contemporaries, who may in fact have shaped and equalled the great man: contemporaries we are encouraged to forget. The great artist is cast as problem-solver and revolutionary, both of which lead to further assumptions about what art is and should be. This in turn encourages a disparaging attitude to contemporary art, because, rather than seeing it as a bustle of collective activity out of which great work can emerge as a process, the spectator is led to ask ‘Where is the Picasso of today?’ And because there is no solitary genius towering head and shoulders above the rest, he dismisses the whole lot.

 

Arts programmes use a wide technical vocabulary. John Berger’s groundbreaking series Ways of Seeing (1972) deconstructed the way television manipulates our understanding of art, through the choice of music and the way the camera pans over an image. Shocking stuff at the time, but nothing compared to the post-MTV era. The camera doesn’t just pan and track any more, but using 3-D technology it can also swoop inside a picture. And where music was once used to accent a work of art or give space for reflection, it is now an uninterrupted presence. Not just mood music, but narrative music, pilfered from Hollywood soundtracks, designed to determine every response and reaction, to ensure we are taken on not an aesthetic or intellectual journey but a dramatic one. Television has no interest in whether a work of art is supposed to be static, silent or detached, because it is an all-singing, all-dancing medium: art, if it is to grace the screen, must sing for its supper too.

 

In the 1960s and ’70s the heroic moralism of arts television was challenged by a generation of programme-makers influenced by neo-Marxist thinkers and media theorists such as Raymond Williams and Marshall McLuhan. It was an era of renewed idealism about what television could achieve. In many cases the interceding figure of the presenter was removed to allow a direct relationship between the viewer and the art. Gerry Schum, in West Germany, produced two programmes (Land Art (1969) and Identifications (1970)) under the umbrella title Fernsehgalerie (Television Gallery) for artists such as Richard Long and Joseph Beuys to show films made specifically for television. In the USA the launch of PBS in the early ’70s saw a few years of radical experimentation, including Nam June Paik’s stint as artist-in-residence at Boston’s Public Broadcasting Laboratory. Programme-makers attempted to demystify art and cast the artist not as a divine hero but as a product of his time. The BBC might host art historian Kenneth Clark, proudly declaiming his conviction in the ‘God-given genius of certain individuals’ in his series Civilization (1969), but it also welcomed the intensely paranoiac John Berger lambasting the ‘false religiosity’ surrounding the arts in Ways of Seeing or Robert Hughes’ witty and opinionated take on Modernism, The Shock of the New (1980). Most of all, there was a belief that the arts programme could be art in itself, resulting in some of the most indulgent, as well as memorable, moments in broadcasting history: films that are to television what the folly is to architecture. Take, for instance, a BBC film from 1965 about the death of a talented young Scottish artist called Alasdair Gray. The film was a hoax made by the artist himself, a good 16 years before the publication of his novel Lanark made him famous. Or avant-garde writer B.S. Johnson’s film Fat Man on a Beach (1973) for HTV Wales, in which Johnson reads poetry, cracks jokes, tells anecdotes and does anything to distract us from the fact we are watching an hour’s worth of, well, a fat man on a beach.

John Piper, The Autumn Galleries, 1936, The studio in London's Alexandra Palace, was filled with art works borrowed from the city's galleries, and Piper's job was simple: to describe them to camera.

Over the last 15 years arts television has reverted to its conservative form. This is perhaps a consequence of the general decline in radical politics during the 1980s, but more importantly because of the growth of TV-on-demand culture brought about by cable, satellite and digital. It was once thought that an increased range of channels would liberate arts television, but what wasn’t taken into account was how dependent arts programming was on a captive audience: an audience that would rather be watching something else but, with only football or the news to choose from, might as well watch a film about two oddballs called Gilbert and George. Today TV-on-demand means even the keenest arts aficionado will struggle to sit through that film knowing that somewhere else in the digital ether a re-run of The Simpsons is on.

 

Recent years have seen a generation of filibustering genres – arts docudrama, arts travelogue – which hide art behind the conventions of drama or the magic of a passing landscape in order for arts television to keep its audience. The modern programme-maker is taught the importance of ‘The Tease’ (the opening 90 seconds of a programme, during which the audience is lost or won), ‘Three-Act Structure’ (with its predictable twists and resolutions) and ‘Multiple Entry’ (constant round-ups, so a browsing viewer can turn on at any point and be drawn in). This emphasis on professionalism comes at the expense of authorship: the director is not a creative but a facilitator whose job is simply to apply the formulae by which a programme constructs itself. For a director to even talk about ‘his’ or ‘her’ film has become a faux pas that will set alarm bells ringing for the television executive. The pursuit of viewing figures has seen a return to paternalism, with the avuncular WSM presenter as active as ever. The self-conscious anti-élitism that Britain’s Channel 4 pushed so heavily in the late 1980s (the programme names say it all: Without WallsJ’AccuseArt is Dead) and 1990s (with Matthew Collings’ This is Modern Art) has declined because it assumed the existence of a large, rather than niche, audience that cared enough about art to join in a dialogue about what it is: an audience that at the moment either doesn’t exist or hasn’t been tapped into.

 

None of this is necessarily bad: television, like any other cultural medium, goes through trends and movements. It all evens out in the end. Arts television is the most vulgar outlet of the arts, with all the pitfalls that implies, but it still retains three great redeeming qualities: 1) it reaches a far greater audience than any other arts medium; 2) the advancement of technology means television can ‘show and tell’ better than any other medium, however glib the critical commentary might be; 3) the need to communicate beyond a specialized audience means the programme-maker must cut the crap. As Robert Hughes once said: television encourages ‘plain speech: a rare commodity in the art world’.

Sidney Smith is an arts programme-maker.

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50 Years of ‘Ways of Seeing’

 

Featured in
Issue 227

Celebrating 50 Years of ‘Ways of Seeing’

Mariama Attah, Anna Frances Douglas and Jeremy Millar revisit John Berger’s famed television series and book

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BY JEREMY MILLARMARIAMA ATTAHANNA FRANCES DOUGLAS AND SEAN BURNS IN OPINION | 28 APR 22

Since its release, John Berger’s landmark television series and book, Ways of Seeing (1972), has been a consistent favourite of students, curators and artists alike. His accessible reinterpretation of Walter Benjamin’s ideas, notably in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935), which appeared 50 years ago this year, unlocked a means through which everyday people, not just academics or scholars, could access ideas of artistic representation, reproduction and image construction. Though Berger continued to produce aeons of fascinating material throughout his career, it’s Ways of Seeing to which people routinely return as a blueprint for interpreting how images old and new structure our understanding of ourselves and how we want to be seen. Here, curators Mariama Attah and Anna Frances Douglas, alongside tutor, artist and curator Jeremy Millar, return to Berger’s text and series to revisit its influence on photography. – Sean Burns 

John Berger
John Berger, Ways of Seeing, 1972, film still. Courtesy: BBC

Jeremy Millar

Many people have described the camera as a gun; for Berger, it was also a knife. It is a knife that he takes, pointedly, to a canvas in London’s National Gallery in the opening moments of the first episode of Ways of Seeing, making a neat, violent crop of the goddess’s face from Sandro Botticelli’s Venus and Mars (c.1485). Moments later, another clean cut: an edit in the film to this same face on a postcard, and then on a sheet at a printworks, alongside other works – sketches and sculptures, landscapes and annunciations – all cut similarly from their frames and laid side-by-side.

 

Of course, it is not the National Gallery but a television studio, not the real Botticelli but a reproduction, each cut made possible by a camera. Although Berger opens this first programme by saying that he wants ‘to question some of the assumptions usually made about the tradition of European painting’, it is photography, and its sibling upstart, cinema, to which his attention turns almost immediately. ‘With the invention of the camera, everything changed,’ he notes, before adding, ‘It has even changed paintings painted long before it was invented.’ It is the camera which now crops Venus’s face and ‘an allegorical figure becomes a pretty girl anywhere’.

 

If the knife might be thought too violent a metaphor, let us settle, instead, on what is here literally produced by its actions: the postcard of Botticelli’s Venus and Mars; the printed sheet; the postcards of the two versions of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Virgin of the Rocks (1483–86 and 1495–1508), usually in the Louvre and London’s National Gallery respectively, but now in a repeating pattern side by side; and, finally, the many postcards we find, alongside magazine covers and children’s drawings, pinned to a wall in a family home, Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, (c.1484–86) amongst them — pictures not valuable but valued. Yes, the postcard seems far more in keeping with Berger’s actions here: something both gathered and shared, public and personal, something open and something given. Something on which you can write.

John Berger
John Berger, Ways of Seeing, 1972, film still. Courtesy: BBC

Mariama Attah 

 

Photography’s capacity to be quickly reproduced and easily disseminated makes it the ideal medium for enabling and gathering several meanings. In reading a photograph, we are interpreting from our own positions and experiences. As images move through the world, shared and separated from their original intention or location, they become open to perceptions and interpretations from each set of eyes they encounter.

 

In Ways of Seeing, Berger speaks of the importance of seeing and how this translates to being viewed in return. To see is to confirm that everything around us exists. There is reflection in this process. However, we are limited by our imaginations and the experiences we can call on as material to make sense of images. The personal nature of interpretation centres us as the viewer and activator in meaning-making. The gap between seeing and reading is filled with our personal and visual imaginations and relies on our agency and ability to make meaning.

 

What does this mercurial interpretation mean? We can all hold values that are different but true. Varying experiences will lead to a range of outcomes that form a nuanced understanding of the photographed world. Berger suggests that, through images, we can truly comprehend the world and our position within it. To expand on this thought, by recognizing that a multitude of personal interpretations can co-exist, we can gain a sense of how photography acts as a medium to form connections and expands our ability to understand new perspectives

John Berger
John Berger, Ways of Seeing, 1972, film still. Courtesy: BBC

Anna Frances Douglas 

 

Few books of art criticism can claim such an enduring impact 50 years after publication as Berger’s Ways of Seeing. It was, arguably, the book’s form as much as its content – seven zesty essays, three comprised solely of photographs – and its non-dogmatic yet persuasive ‘voice’ that cut right through the mystification of the discipline by professional art critics. Its message that art was ‘entangled with capitalism’, and that women were depicted differently than men ‘with the “ideal” spectator always assumed to be male and the image of the woman designed to flatter him’, attracted a different and receptive audience. Nonetheless, it’s perhaps a touch ironic that a book collaboratively produced by five men – Berger, Sven Blomberg, Mike Dibb, Chris Fox and Richard Hollis – should have had a profound effect on women artists and cultural historians exploring gender.

 

Ways of Seeing lifted the veil from the conceit that art, particularly the representation of women, was non-ideological, a view that Civilisation (1969) – also a television series and book, by art historian Kenneth Clark – sought to uphold. By contrast, in identifying the convention that, in art, ‘men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at,’ Berger fuelled a generation of British feminist photographers to critically, though variously, engage with image-production. In the exhibitions ‘Women and Work’ (1975) and ‘Who’s Holding the Baby?’ (1978), The Hackney Flashers activist collective documented women’s labour inside and outside the home. In the early works of Jo Spence and Terry Dennett, including Jo Spence
as a sex object
 (1979), Berger’s ideas on the production of meaning and the context of seeing are discernible.

 

The women’s movement of the 1960s and ’70s preempted Berger’s contention that the conventions of a phallocentric visual economy, in which ‘women must constantly survey themselves’, were on the way out. Nevertheless, in 1972 there was limited non-specialist literature addressing women’s representation in art history, notably Linda Nochlin’s 1971 essay, ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ Three years after Ways of Seeing, film theorist Laura Mulvey would publish her seminal essay, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975), detailing her concept of ‘the male gaze’, which remained foundational within cultural studies for years and spawned generations of visual activists.

 

This article first appeared in frieze issue 227 with the headline ‘Celebrating 50 Years of “Ways of Seeing”’, as part of a special series titled ‘Photography Now’.

 

Main image: John Berger, Ways of Seeing, 1972, film still. Courtesy: BBC

Jeremy Millar is an artist and head of the MA writing programme at the Royal College of Art, London, UK.

Mariama Attah is a photography curator, writer and lecturer. She is curator of Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool, UK.

Anna Frances Douglas is a co-curator and researcher for Hepworth’s Progeny at The Hepworth Wakefield, UK, and a lecturer in fine art, University of Leeds, UK.

Sean Burns is an artist, writer and frieze assistant editor based in London, UK. 

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