Article by Judith Barry excerpted from the ARE YOU READY FOR TV?, 2011 exhibition book.
Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA)
Exhibition: ARE YOU READY FOR TV?, 2011 5 November 2010–25 April 2011
Publishers: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, www.macba.cat;
Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, www.cgac.org.
© of this edition: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA)
and Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (CGAC) and Xunta de Galicia,
2010–2011 link to PDF
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
"It is impossible to show all the material that this exhibition could include. Conceiving of it as an inventory, as an encyclopaedic archive of the countless contributions that artists have made to television would mean subjecting the viewer to endless hours of viewing. Such a conception would only serve to reveal the existence of a vast body of material. We require explanatory rather than demonstrative methods to interpret the spaces where art and television intersect.
The exhibition translates this idea into a series of ten episodes that include a limited number of examples-situations. The exhibition space becomes an event by which to explore the relationship between image and the critical act: ten ‘scenes’ that conceptualise different strategies and their functions. From different angles, each episode formulates the history of the dialogue between the language of art and the language of television, on the one hand, and the language of television and the language of thought, on the other.
The contribution of the artist Dora García has been crucial to creating this approach. In recent years, she has engaged in an exhaustive investigation into television as both a setting for and an encyclopaedia of performance. A long conversation with the artist Isidoro Valcárcel Medina also proved essential to delving into the conventions that define television and to visualising how the modification of any of those conventions radically alters the outcome. Johan Grimonprez assisted in the selection of works that analyse the relationship between television, politics and public debate; he has come up with a very subtle selection of programmes that evidences the interests and fears that inform television, as well as how it influences our view of the world."
–Excerpt from the Exhibition Guide, ARE YOU READY FOR TV?, 2011.
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