Are you Ready for TV?
05 Nov 2010 - 25 Apr 2011
ARE YOU READY FOR TV?
5 November 2010 - 25 April 2011
The relation between art and television has been controversial but intense since its beginnings. From the fifties it became a presence in American homes. It was only from the sixties when the first projects with and about artists appeared. The attraction of the medium is obvious: not only for its capacity to reach a large number of people, but because it actually enters their homes, their privacy. From the outset artists have wondered about the purpose of television and the fascination with the possibilities of communication.
The exhibition Are you Ready for TV?, an expression taken from a fifties advertisement, looks into the potential of television as a medium for disseminating and providing a space for art, while offering a review of the programmes and projects produced by artists, as well as by pioneering authors, to approach the history of contemporary art from television. The most significant of the former is Ways of Seeing, made by John Berger in 1972. Created by the writer with the help of Mike Dibbs, a BBC producer, the programme was a critical exercise on the aesthetic values of the West and assessed the ideological subtext of images. Ways of Seeing was a pioneering venture, not only for its content but also for the response it aroused from the public at the time. It was also conceived as a retort to another programme, Civilization, by the historian Kenneth Clark. The programmes produced by Jef Cornelis for Flemish television since the mid sixties are a model for information about art in television format.
But not only Europe and the United States live from the proliferation of television programmes about art. Brazil and other countries of Latin America see the medium as a platform for the propagation of a new aesthetic avantgarde. Abelardo Barbosa, better known as Chacrinha, is the great communicator in Brazil today and the inventor of the legendary programme of the same name that was launched in 1956 by an independent channel and which in 1970 moved up to Red Globo, while remaining a reference in what we might describe as a television carnival over more than two decades.
Are you Ready for TV? is a journey through the forms of interrelation between art, communication and the medium of television, while providing the spectator with an opportunity to delve into other ways of understanding television, in other words, the set as a laboratory. This project, which will also include two round tables, aims to examine the present relationship of public television with education and art.
Curator: Chus Martínez. Organisation and production: Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA).
5 November 2010 - 25 April 2011
The relation between art and television has been controversial but intense since its beginnings. From the fifties it became a presence in American homes. It was only from the sixties when the first projects with and about artists appeared. The attraction of the medium is obvious: not only for its capacity to reach a large number of people, but because it actually enters their homes, their privacy. From the outset artists have wondered about the purpose of television and the fascination with the possibilities of communication.
The exhibition Are you Ready for TV?, an expression taken from a fifties advertisement, looks into the potential of television as a medium for disseminating and providing a space for art, while offering a review of the programmes and projects produced by artists, as well as by pioneering authors, to approach the history of contemporary art from television. The most significant of the former is Ways of Seeing, made by John Berger in 1972. Created by the writer with the help of Mike Dibbs, a BBC producer, the programme was a critical exercise on the aesthetic values of the West and assessed the ideological subtext of images. Ways of Seeing was a pioneering venture, not only for its content but also for the response it aroused from the public at the time. It was also conceived as a retort to another programme, Civilization, by the historian Kenneth Clark. The programmes produced by Jef Cornelis for Flemish television since the mid sixties are a model for information about art in television format.
But not only Europe and the United States live from the proliferation of television programmes about art. Brazil and other countries of Latin America see the medium as a platform for the propagation of a new aesthetic avantgarde. Abelardo Barbosa, better known as Chacrinha, is the great communicator in Brazil today and the inventor of the legendary programme of the same name that was launched in 1956 by an independent channel and which in 1970 moved up to Red Globo, while remaining a reference in what we might describe as a television carnival over more than two decades.
Are you Ready for TV? is a journey through the forms of interrelation between art, communication and the medium of television, while providing the spectator with an opportunity to delve into other ways of understanding television, in other words, the set as a laboratory. This project, which will also include two round tables, aims to examine the present relationship of public television with education and art.
Curator: Chus Martínez. Organisation and production: Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA).