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TV + VT Werke

TV + VT Werke
/5
    • TV & VT Works
    • TV + VT Werke
  • 1972
  • video, b&w, sound
  • 17min, 12sec
The video compilation "TV & VT Works" consists of short performances that deal with the relationship between reality and the film/TV camera while also addressing how television has changed our perspectives on reality. Several “Tele Actions” and “TV Death” moments, as the artist calls them, show actions that define the ontology of an artwork within a televised setting. The common element linking the individual segments consists in fake news reports from Austrian television, which is where the work was ultimately broadcast. In these, a reporter presents ironic and twisted bits of information read from a newspaper in front of him as daily news. As he reads in the studio, he smokes a cigar, the smoke from which increases with every take to eventually become so dense that the reporter is barely visible, nearly suffocating in the heat and smoke. The slogan “More Heat among People” is lent further irony by a woman with several rough-surfaced belts mounted on different parts of her body and clothes that allow her to strike matches in every pose in which she sits or stands, thereby lighting both her own and the artist’s cigarettes. The segment “Depiction is a Crime” shows the artist taking a Polaroid snapshot as the (television) screen becomes black, thus effecting a synchronization of sorts with the process taking place inside the camera. The final result is a photo of the TV crew filming the artist’s action, which is then presented on a TV monitor in the open landscape. Peter Weibel adapts Marshall McLuhan’s statement “The Medium is the Message” into “Communication is the Medium” as realized on television. The technicality of the communication process is also manifested in an endless take in which the artist speaks into an audio tape recorder, repeatedly saying “on” while a voice on the tape answers “off.” This seriality of technical reproduction continues in “The Endless Sandwich,” where a man sees himself on TV while looking at a TV monitor on which he sees himself on TV, and so on to infinity. Ultimately, though, there is some interference on one of the smallest visible TVs far back on the chain—interference that, like a domino effect, reverberates until the front person can no longer see any of the images on the monitors, with his own image being interrupted as well. In another instance, an aquarium (taking on the role of a TV monitor) is slowly emptied until all of the fish within die, and in another, the artist dumps water out of a bucket back into a pond. The splash is frozen as a still image on the screen in order to create a water sculpture that can be perceived not in reality but only via technical manipulation. Another example of questioning the ontology and manipulative gesture of an artwork can be seen when large, human-sized letters reading “Is this Art?” are set up on a meadow, with each letter collapsing in response to the artist pressing its key on a typewriter. W.S.