Media of Now

Abstract

That's why film (as cinema) and video (as television) became of interest, because they were the of now; they were what most people were looking at, they weren't looking at art, art was in galleries. --David Hall, 2005 (1) Hall made extensive contributions to contemporary time-based as a founder, practicing artist, and activist for video arts, in his native United Kingdom and internationally. Hall was instrumental in constructing educational, critical, curatorial, and other resources for early video. His video work spans decades with the same complex questions regarding the context of immaterial art and the experiences of the viewer keeping pace with the evolving context of the media of now. Hall began his work primarily in sculpture before emerging as a key figure in the development of video as an artistic medium. He notes the inspiration of work such as Constantin Brancusi's sculpture Endless Column (1920) as influencing his move toward the examination of the experience of time in his sculptural practice, and his working approach shifted to what he terms perceptual, environmental, floor works, (2) focusing on how the viewer perceives and experiences art. Hall was awarded first prize for sculpture at the Biennale de Paris in 1965 and was subsequently included in the foundational show for Minimalist sculpture, Primary Structures, at the Jewish Museum in New York City, as well as in on White at Kunsthalle, Bern, Switzerland (both in 1966). Through the experience of making photography of his sculptures, and noting their tenuous relationship to the physical object, he explored that phenomenon further through his creation of film and video-based artworks. (3) In 1971, while working with the Artists' Placement Group (APG), Hall created what became his most groundbreaking and historically noted works--the series of unannounced Interruptions aired on Scottish and commissioned by the Scottish Arts Council. (4) These original ten artworks were noted as pioneering intrusions through the web of challenges of using broadcast as an arts medium--not for the sake of journalism about the arts or artists, but actually broadcasting an artist's video pieces on mainstream channels. Broadcasting artworks on television poses implicit problems--the expense of broadcast slots being just one issue. As Hall says of his interruptions work, Everybody talks about being in the right place at the right I always quite liked being in the wrong place at the right time. (5) In 1976, a second interruption, This is a Television Receiver, was commissioned for broadcast on BBC 2 during an art-oriented show called Arena. Introduced with the voiceover And now for the very material of Television but otherwise similarly unannounced, BBC newscaster Richard Baker read a monologue deconstructing the magical experience of television by explaining its technical and social function in traditional newsreader monotone. As the piece progresses, Baker's image also is deconstructed into an unrecognizable electronic blur as the signal is distorted. Key to the experience of the interruptions were timing and delicate parallels of comparison and contrast--a balance between suggestion of a connection and enough distinction to provoke reflection about the experience of viewing television. As this quote from Eye magazine says of his earliest interventions. David Hall's [1971 TV Interruptions] set the stage for an era in which artists took up the camera to challenge television's established formulations and its power as a medium of social control his interventions almost established a genre, with subsequent works by [for example] Stan Douglas, Bill Viola and Chris Burden following the form of unannounced disturbances ... (6) A later broadcast-interruption genre work by Hall broadcast on Channel 4 played an important part in referencing video history while commenting on the contemporary trajectory of the use of television in society. …