NGV International’s Transmission: Legacies of the television age

Melbourne’s NGV takes a retrospective view of the powerful medium of television in its Transmission exhibition.

John Immig’s No title (1975-1976). From NGV International’s Transmission: Legacies of the television age

We regularly hear the saying that we are what we eat but less often consider the corollary that our minds are also composed of what they consume. Gustave Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary (1856), one of the great French novels of the 19th century, is about a woman whose expectations of life have been shaped by romantic ­novels and who is led into a self-destructive attempt to live a fantasy irremediably at odds with the reality of her existence.

Early modern art theory often ponders the question of the suitability of subjects for different audiences. Boys, for example, should be exposed to paintings that excite valour, not lasciviousness and self-indulgence. Erotic or ambiguous subjects are best kept from the eyes of the servants. Interestingly, what emerges from these discussions — the point had already been made by Horace — is that visual images have a more direct impact on the mind than ideas and stories conveyed through the more abstract medium of language.

With our thoughts we make the world, ­according to Buddha; and we can see the truth of this every day. Some people are kind and good or at least decent; others appear mean and self-interested; others again are filled with murderous rage. Some are thoughtful, curious and open-minded, while many seem set in their opinions, of whatever kind they may be.

Where do these thoughts come from? Some are innate instincts, but many are learned from our environment, which includes our family, school and social milieu as well as the factor that contributed so conspicuously to Emma Bovary’s downfall, the illusions of what is misleadingly called popular culture. The word should properly mean culture made by the people, but is used instead to mean the commercial products manufactured for their consumption, and inevitably laced with manipulative and destructive values.

Just how destructive these values are is hard to assess in the long term; we know the stories of youth suicide or mass murderers who trained themselves into sociopathy by playing violent video games. But for every one of these cases, there must be thousands who grow up more or less successfully.

A couple of years ago in Naples I passed a group of teenage girls coming out of a school. They had the T-shirts, the mobile phones, the talk, of the global cultural underclass. But almost at once I saw that all this would pass in a few years: they would leave school, get married and in no time would have turned into their mothers, with the same mixture of family values, basic decency and radically narrow-minded incuriosity.

It was like a revelation: their adoption of commercial media culture was utterly superficial, as short-lived and transient as adolescent acne. High culture, as taught at school, had not penetrated their minds at all, but even commercial media culture was only epidermal; underneath it was the age-old reality of family networks and duties.

This is probably true of most of the audience for mass media products. They grow up to be ­essentially like their parents, only their idea of nostalgic music tracks on commercial radio ­stations will be a couple of decades later. Or is this too optimistic? What if the early exposure to violence, pornography, sexually exploitative music clips and so on was largely responsible for the epidemics of depression, obesity, alcohol and drug abuse and domestic violence?

What is really striking is how unwilling parents are to consider seriously the media diet of their children. Many pay considerable amounts of money to send them to good schools. But they will still let them play video games and even buy the equipment for them. They allow them to use social media with all its risks of bullying and ­insidious peer pressure. Mothers will even organise disco evenings for primary school girls, as though they actually wanted to groom them for self-abasement and objectification.

Why do they do this? Are they simply obtuse? It seems that most people are simply incapable of disagreeing with the culture that surrounds them. A profound instinct of conformity overcomes any misgivings and extinguishes any critical thought that arises in their heads. They want to be just like everyone else and they want their children to fit in, to be just like everyone else too.

The advertising industry understands these instincts very well. Customers are driven by a herd mentality, yet some part of them also wants to be individual or to stand out, so marketing designs products claimed to be distinctive or exclusive yet recognisable by everyone as such; your place in the herd is reaffirmed even as you signify your supposed difference.

The most powerful medium of the diffusion of mass commercial culture invented has been television, and it probably remains so even in the age of the internet. Its main rival would be social media, but many of the values circulated through this channel are still first produced for the medium of TV.

There is, however, a distinctively retrospective tone to the National Gallery of Victoria exhibition Transmission: Legacies of the Television Age devoted to art and TV, and it is certainly true that the age of limited channels and programs that could be seen only at broadcast times, and had to watched in real time with no ability to pause or replay, now seems almost as distant as the black-and-white television set.

The main work that confronts us on a large screen as we enter is a collage of TV footage of dance parties from some decades ago, now poignant images not only of times past but of the pseudo-collective nature of mass entertainment. The quest for ecstatic escape arises from the sense of being trapped in an anonymous and mechanistic society but, as the periodic slowing down or freezing of the images reminds us, it is an illusory evasion that leaves the individual more enslaved than ever.

Aesthetically one of the most satisfying works is a very short film by Len Lye, Rhythm (1957), also available on YouTube. It was made for the Chrysler corporation and was meant to be shown on its weekly TV show but was rejected, apparently, because it was too abstract and perhaps because it recalled the style of the some of the early Russian experimental filmmakers, an unwelcome tribute during the Cold War.

Lye took 90 minutes of footage showing the production of a car and condensed it to just one minute, with brilliant use of jump-cuts synchronised with a score of African tribal music. One of several highlights in a very short work is the timing of the spot-welder with the syncopated drum beat. Another is the way the film begins and ends with those little white dots that would appear on the lead-in to an old film; here they dance around the screen, evoking the drums of the music soundtrack.

From a couple of decades later comes a selection from John Immig’s well-known Vietnam series of 1975-76, just after the collapse of the South Vietnamese army, the American withdrawal and the abandonment of Saigon to its communist conquerors. The conflict has long been known as the first television war, and the broadcast of images directly into living rooms around the world helped to fuel opposition and, whatever one thinks of the merits of the war, sapped the American government’s ability to conduct it decisively.

Immig’s photographs are not excerpts from TV footage but photographs of televisions showing news images, so that they are both at one further remove from reality than the original televised pictures and at the same time a reflection on the phenomenon of television itself. It is striking that, so soon after a time when such images aroused intense emotions and divisive reactions, they seem to have become strangely fixed and inanimate, like ­archeological artefacts. The images are shadowy and enigmatic, charged with a sense of menace but without a clear meaning other than as an evocation of the brutality of war.

In a lighter vein, Tracey Moffatt and Gary Hillberg’s Artist (2000) is a 10-minute montage of scenes from films, TV dramas and sitcoms in which painters or sculptors are depicted.

We begin with Toulouse-Lautrec in the film Moulin Rouge (1952) and move inevitably to van Gogh in Lust for Life (1956) and Michelangelo in The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965), all classic cases of Hollywood’s attempts to understand the inspiration and work processes of great artists.

The arbitrariness of market prices is alluded to, with various cases of the reception, exploitation and critical assessment of art — the most painfully memorable being a clip from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). There is a touching moment when Dustin Hoffman asks Anne Bancroft in The Graduate (1967) what her major at college was, and the melancholy answer is art; we hardly need to be told that her studies have led to nothing.

The montage ends with an orgiastic sequence mostly of frustrated artists destroying their own work, hard to watch today when the destruction of works of art is once again being systematically carried out by religious fanatics.

The most psychologically interesting work in the exhibition, however, and the one that most deeply ponders the phenomenon of television, while going well beyond the broadcast medium into murky areas of surveillance and voyeurism, is Miranda July’s The Amateurist.

Although made in 1998, the film is set in a retro past, perhaps the late 1950s or the early 60s. There are two characters, both played by the artist. One is an elegant brunette with her hair up, wearing a tie, slightly androgynous, and by implication a pent-up lesbian. Through an old-fashioned video monitor that appears to be made of Bakelite she is watching a slim blonde girl, naked but for her underclothes, who appears to be imprisoned in a small cell.

The brunette speaks to us; she tells us that she has been watching the blonde girl like this around nine hours a day for the past 4½ years. She speaks to the girl too — though the only communication between them is one-way — and she seems to give her instructions to form letters or numbers with her body. The girl complies, eager to please, sometimes looking ­confused, sometimes smiling touchingly at the camera.

As the brunette says at one point, “all I have to do is watch, she does the rest”. She seems tense, brittle with a contained hysteria. When the girl sits or lies down to sleep, the watcher touches her on the screen; she says “tender is not my job”, yet she caresses the almost naked body, tracing the thighs with her fingers. The voyeurism of television is alluded to but, more suggestively still, July’s work anticipates the rise of social media as the occasion for a poisonous mirroring of the ego, the ingrown and insatiable desire of narcissism.

Transmission: Legacies of the Television Age

NGV International, Melbourne, until September 13