Outreach: Jaime Davidovich, 1974-1984 Curated by Daniel Quiles
CHICAGO: Outreach: Jaime Davidovich, 1974-1984 is the first solo exhibition in Chicago of video and television works by this pioneering, overlooked Argentine artist. This show examines the dynamic ten-year period in which Davidovich transitioned from formalist experiments with installation and video to producing public-access cable television programs. Born in 1936 in Buenos Aires, Davidovich first exhibited paintings in 1958 and moved to New York City in 1963, where he developed a mode of post-minimalism based around the application of strips of adhesive tape to gallery walls. In the early 1970s, Davidovich began to use videotape as well, gradually began producing his own videos that methodically reflected on his immediate environment in downtown New York City: his studio and the city block directly outside it. In 1976, he became a founding member of Cable SoHo, one of the earliest initiatives toward artist-made television, and in 1978 became president of the Artists’ Television Network. Between 1979 and 1984 he produced The Live! Show for the Manhattan Cable Television, on which he appeared as his TV personality, Dr. Videovich—a specialist in television addiction. Throughout this pe-
riod, certain of Davidovich’s projects, among them La patria vacía (Empty Fatherland, 1975) and Evita Then and Now: A Video Scrapbook (1984), reflected on ongoing political problems in Argentina from an expatriate’s perspective. Three programs of Davidovich’s work will rotate over the course of the six-week exhibition. Each of these will feature work from a range of dates that attests to rapid transformations in the artist’s sensibility and technological possibilities. The exhibition will include archival materials from the artist’s communications with both art and broadcasting institutions and a collaboration with ACRE TV, an artist-made livestreaming television network featuring live and canned videos, performances, durational works and experimental broadcasts. ACRE TV will present a live performance event and works by Davidovich will be incorporated into ACRE TV’s broadcast stream during the run of the exhibition, which will also be installed in the gallery. Other programs will include screenings with local programmers as well as panel discussions on the subject of artist broadcast television.
CATALOGUE Threewalls Outreach: Jaime Davidovich, 19741984 January 23 – March 21, 2015
SCREENING PROGRAM Jan. 23 – Feb. 7: In the Studio: Broadcasting and Narrowcasting
3 Mercer Street, 1975, 30-minute video. Davidovich made several videos between 1972 and 1975 that explore the limits of the medium in relationship to time and space. In the tradition of structuralist film, 3 Mercer Street repeats a seemingly neutral operation. In this case, the camera repeatedly pans 360 degrees around what appears to be a studio or rehearsal space (3 Mercer Street, one of the first alternative spaces in SoHo). As the video proceeds, curious changes occur in the setting. The artist Stuart Sherman periodically appears in the frame, performing his signature tabletop performances with various objects. As the camera never settles on him, but only passes by again and again, only fragments of his actions are visible, adding ambiguity to an otherwise transparent exercise. Outreach: The Changing Role of the Art Museum, 1978, 27:27-minute public-access television program—This episode of SoHo Presents Television features the art critic Gregory Battcock, Guggenheim sales director Chuck Hovland, founding director of New Museum Marcia Tucker, and Monmouth County Art Museum director Judith van Baron, in a parafictional conversation about how art museums are shifting in their approach to their publics. From the opening shot of a 1973 Fixin-Hervelets being poured into the glass, however, it is clear that this is no ordinary television roundtable. Battcock’s speech is oddly affected; when Tucker is asked to read a prepared statement, she responds, “I lied”; Hovland’s is repeatedly hidden behind a bouquet
of flowers. Yet Outreach surely has more than a grain of truth in terms of how art institutions were reevaluating their missions in the wake of 1960s expanded practices. That the conversation is taking place on a highly efficient medium for reaching publics was surely not lost on Davidovich and his participants. The Live! Show—QUBE Episode, 1980, 10:32-minute public-access television excerpt, 1980. Enjoying another bottle of wine on Manhattan Cable Television, accompanied by co-host Carol Stevenson, Davidovich encourages real-time viewers to experiment with the Warner QUBE cable system. First broadcast on Channel J in 1979, The Live! Show was equal parts playful and utopian, brimming with optimism about an expanded, participatory audience for art on television. In this episode, one caller is made “director” and makes choices as to zooms and special effects, while the QUBE audience is polled for their preference of camera (a binary choice, Camera 1 or 2). This is a playful, tentative exploration of a brand-new technology, but one that recalls Marshall McLuhan’s insistence that television is a “cool,” participatory medium. With the viewers effectively in charge of the program, Stevenson inquires, a bit awkwardly, how Davidovich got his scar. No answer is provided.
Feb. 10 – Feb. 28: The Avant-Garde from Street to Screen
Walking SoHo, 3:28-minute video, 1975—This video begins with a shot pointing directly at a New York City sidewalk. The camera swivels up into a fixed shot of Greene Street, pointing downtown toward the skyscrapers of the Financial District. A woman walks by the camera on the left and continues down the street, into the shot and its perspectival center. She walks slowly, getting further and further away until she can no longer be seen. The video recalls the protracted zoom of Michael Snow’s film Wavelength, 1967, but with the movement into perspectival space carried out by a mobile element in the shot rather than the camera itself. This is consonant with much of Davidovich’s early video art, which methodically traces vectors of interior or urban space: baseboards, walls, sidewalks, streets.
SoHo Television Presents, 1977, 21-minute public-access television composite reel—This is a selection of programming on the Artists’ Television Network, which was founded in 1976 and began broadcasting in 1977 (Davidovich was president between 1978 and 1984). It features Welcome to Macy’s by Mel Andringa, in which the artist answers a series of questions about how to find products at Macy’s. During these questions, images of different products on placards are passed in front of him. An audience can be heard laughing in the background. Vincent Trasov’s Peanut Party features documentation of a man dressed as Mr. Peanut in his campaign for mayor of Vancouver. The final clip, featuring the artist Charlemagne Palestine, is from Artists Propaganda I, a program of video works collected by Jean Dupuy through Centre Pompidou in Paris that was Sidewalk, 13:04-minute video, 1975—Like Walking shown in its entirety on ATN. The works are intercut SoHo, Sidewalk tracks along a section of a SoHo street. with footage of Davidovich walking around SoHo. The camera follows the point where the sidewalk meets the buildings, panning in a strange, jilted movement. It Adventures of the Avant-Garde, 1981, 10:30-minute is interrupted by pauses during which we can just barely public-access television excerpt—Beginning with a shot see a figure reflected in a screen: Davidovich himself, that recalls his formalist videos such as Baseboard (tracediting in his studio, collapsing this private (profession- ing the corner between the floor and wall of the studio), al) setting onto public space (the city outside). Sidewalk this made-for-public-television video showcases the is closely related to the artist’s earlier video Road, 1972, more accessible, ludic style that Davidovich developed as well as the contemporaneous Baseboard, 1975, both for public television on The Live! Show. The topic is the of which methodically trace preexisting lines across avant-garde, and Davidovich makes a careful point of space (in Road, the double line dividing directions, and engaging a “democratic” range of speakers, from artists in Baseboard, the juncture between the wall and floor and art history professors to “people in the street,” in of his studio). While Sidewalk is certainly representa- an appropriation of commercial television’s simulation tive of Davidovich’s formalist approach to video art in of popular access and feedback. Davidovich’s disarmthe mid-1970s, it is also quite literally connected to the ing television persona, with the distinctive Argentine space and information in the city where it was filmed. accent that also marked his Dr. Videovich character on The Live! Show, is on full display here.
Mar. 3 – Mar. 21: Hello Friends! Real and Virtual Travels
La patria vacía, 1975, 11-minute video—A meditation on the death of President Juan Domingo Perón in Argentina the year before, this video records a short journey from Manhattan to an expatriate Argentine neighborhood in Queens. Davidovich uses a repeated technique in his work from this period in which he places a section of tape over the camera lens to block out areas of the image. Throughout, a voiceover intones “Perón” over and over again, gradually voiding the semantic meaning of this powerful name in Argentine politics (both then and now) in favor of its material qualities as a signifier.
Evita: A Video Scrapbook, 14:29-minute video, 1984— This work constituted a return to video art for Davidovich that coincided with the end of The Live! Show’s run. It was also a historically significant moment for the artist’s home country of Argentina, which was in the first full year of its transition to democracy under Raúl Alfonsín in the wake of a disastrous dictatorship and the Malvinas War. Evita: A Video Scrapbook begins with footage from Lucas Demare’s film Pampa Bárbara (Savage Pampas), a reiteration of one of the founding myths of the Argentine nation, the “civilization” of its countryside. This “program” is then “interrupted” by an The Gap, 1982-83, 15:50-minute public-access televi- announcement of Eva Perón’s death on July 26, 1952. sion excerpt—This was technically an episode of The The subsequent video essay reflects on Peronism’s maLive! Show, but it was produced for the Long Beach nipulation of a burgeoning mass media in Argentina in Museum of Art in Los Angeles, and represents Davi- the 1950s as well as the recent dictatorship’s horrors, dovich’s tireless efforts in this period to create networks and the power of both television to mediate these hisbetween public-access experiments in New York and tories in an uncertain present. those of other North American cities. A visit to an “art mall” typifies Davidovich’s blend of humor and critical engagement with the definition and limits of art in the early 1980s. ¡Saludos Amigos!, 1984, 21-minute public-access television excerpt—In this, one of the final episodes of The Live! Show and a collaboration with Texas Tech University, Davidovich travels to Lubbock, Texas. His “people in the street” interviews touch on racism and Mexican-American relations in addition to the usual queries about video art and its possibilities for transmission on television. The title is taken from the 1942 Walt Disney film that emblematized the “good neighbor” years of U.S.-Latin America diplomacy, only in this case, Davidovich locates his “friends” within the borders of the United States.
INSTALLATION Threewalls Outreach: Jaime Davidovich, 19741984 January 23 – March 21, 2015
REVIEWS Threewalls Outreach: Jaime Davidovich, 19741984 January 23 – March 21, 2015
Jaime Davidovich's decade in video - Chicago Tribune
28/03/2015 16:45
The tape artist: Jaime Davidovich at Threewalls Lori Waxman CHICAGO TRIBUNE
MARCH 19, 2015, 4:03 PM
T
here once was a time when artists, some artists at least, believed in television. Not in an ironic way, as successful satirists like Stephen Colbert or the makers of "The Simpsons" do, but sincerely, as a means of
broadcasting visual experiments to an interested public at large. This time was the 1970s, when television was still transmitted via radiowaves and on-demand was a thing of the future. Back then, an Argentinian artist named Jaime Davidovich, who had moved to New York City in 1963 as a painter of monochromes, began to organize and star in artist-made television. In 1976, he co-founded Cable SoHo, which is exactly what it sounds like. Two years later he became president of the Artists' Television Network, a group dedicated to developing the medium artistically and to distributing contemporary arts programming to a broad viewership. Between 1979 and 1984, he produced "The Live! Show," a half-hour avant-garde variety program that was as much about art as it was art itself. A rotating selection of Davidovich's videos is currently screening at Threewalls as part of "Outreach: Jaime Davidovich, 1974-1984," curated by Daniel R. Quiles, a professor of post-war Latin American art history. The viewing experience can be maddening, as anyone who has sat through early works of video or performance art might expect. Television or not, this is neither entertainment nor news. Davidovich was an experimenter in the medium, not a producer of sitcoms or soap operas. But his enthusiasm is tremendous and even sometimes infectious, if sometimes hard to understand. He could make the camera do strange things that continue to surprise today, and he did it with a combination sincerity and parody that can feel uncannily contemporary. The exhibition program samples from Davidovich's earlier works, which tend to be formal experiments, testing what the medium of video can uniquely do and see across a span of time. "3 Mercer Street" from 1975 pans slowly around and around the raw space of the Ronald Feldman Gallery, catching momentary glimpses of traffic outside the front windows and an otherwise lost performance by the late artist Stuart Sherman, who made modest spectacles by rearranging small objects on a folding tabletop. "La patria vacía," a meditation on the recent death of the Argentinian president Juan Peron, features a voiceover that intones the premier's last name over and over again, loosing its political meaning and replacing it with something between a lament and sound poetry. In that video Davidovich carefully sticks a few pieces of tape to the camera lens. At first they mimic the stripes on an American flag, but as the scene shifts the tape follows along, traveling by car from Manhattan out to an expat neighborhood in Queens, where it becomes a censorial black mark on the mouth of a man being interviewed. The http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/ct-jaime-davidovich-threewalls-review-20150319-column.html#page=1
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Jaime Davidovich's decade in video - Chicago Tribune
28/03/2015 16:45
gesture is refreshingly analog, so basic a tactic that its unexpected effectiveness renders it astonishing. This was not the first time Davidovich had experimented with tape. In fact, adhesive tape — yes, the sticky stuff used to repair torn book pages and affix posters to the wall — appears to have been a major factor in the artist's move toward television art. In the early '60s Davidovich began to exhibit his monochromatic paintings without stretchers or frames, instead using tape to adhere them to the wall. A few later endeavors of this sort are displayed in the show, including a sketch from 1970 that plots a large-scale mural of concentric squares made up of white and yellow canvas surrounded by 10-inch tape. (The artist, a connoisseur of tape who once displayed dozens of rolls of it on the wall of an exhibition, made sure to note the brand and type: Norton #198.) A subtly graded drawing achieves a row of beige lines with overlapping lengths of tape. The sunshine yellow mural that greets visitors at the gallery's entrance is simply vertical bands of colored tape crimped midway up the wall for relief. Davidovich's leap from adhesive tape to magnetic tape—the thin, coated plastic film then integral to recording audio and video—plays fast and loose, and fun, with the word "tape." But the two types of tape are actually closer in definition than they at first appear: Tape is any narrow strip of material used to fasten or hold something, be it a torn piece of paper or the sounds of a string quartet. The shift from formal experiments to televised arts programming was the real leap. Two weirdly engrossing episodes of "The Live! Show" ran while I was at Threewalls, one shot in Los Angeles, the other in Lubbock, Texas. In L.A., it's all about time: Davidovich goes to the Long Beach Museum of Art to study how long patrons spend looking at paintings in a show of hard-edge abstraction. At the "Art Mall," basically a commercial center with some plop art, he asks shoppers how much television they watch a day. Calling Dr. Videovich! (Davidovich's alter ego, a specialist in television addiction, advertises his services during "The Live! Show.") In Lubbock, Davidovich finds more TV-loving folks, including an old man who makes jalapeno lollipops and organizes armadillo races and an African-American cowboy who shoots pool with onions. In a mock advert, Dr. Videovich plays art teacher, demonstrating how to draw a peaceful scene from Latin America. The hilarity of this cross-border politics leaves a sharp pain in the gut. Part of what made television art possible at the time was the National Endowment for the Arts, which used to give money to individual artists and artist collectives. In his curatorial essay, Quiles notes that artists who broadcast 15minute videos on "SoHo Television" were paid $25 per spot in 1978. (Artists on the schedule that year included John Cage, Richard Foreman and Joan Jonas.) That only amounts to $100 in 2015 dollars but it beats nothing, which is what artists can expect if they disseminate their work today via ACRE TV, a terrific local arts station which digitally streams live and canned art, including to a monitor hung in Threewalls as part of "Outreach." It is worth being reminded of what made a medium exciting when it was still new. That it is again a space of promise and reach for young artists begs the question: When will Netflix take notice? "Outreach: Jaime Davidovich, 1974-1984" runs through March 21 at Threewalls, 119 N. Peoria, 312-432-3972, three-walls.org. Lori Waxman is a special contributor to the Tribune and an instructor at the School of the Art Institute.
[email protected] Twitter @chitribent Copyright © 2015, Chicago Tribune
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