5. Jaime Davidovich

An exhibition of Argentinian-American Davidovich's "art on cable" programming, called "The Live! Show."

http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/events/davidovich.php

It ran from the late 70's to early 80's, i.e. the Downtown heydays. It seems a little bizarre now, I suppose, for us to imagine artists using cable TV as an art medium. After all, not many people use YouTube to make video art - by which I mean, not many artists tailor their video art to YouTube as a very specific medium. Sure, a lot of video art is uploaded onto YouTube, but that is not the same thing as using YouTube as a creative medium. Perhaps a parallel in the literary arts would be Rick Moody's "Twitter short story," which was basically just a normal story chopped up into disruptive blocks. Criticism from certain quarters pointed out readers' dissatisfaction at it not being "actual" Twitter fiction - but then no one seems to have figured out how to do it "right" yet.

Anyway. The exhibition was interesting on many levels. Davidovich took on the role of Dr. Videovich in his show, claiming to be an expert on curing TV addiction. (Levels of irony?) Many artists were guests on the show, including John Cage and Borges, if I am not wrong. I know I'm not really giving anything on the exhibition itself - it's hard to describe. There were a lot of physical objects, such as piggy banks shaped like TVs, fake wrist TVs, toy TVs with swappable "screens"...you had to be there, be surrounded.

Here's a taste, in which Herbert Wentscher traces the origins of video to Biblical times:



Yes, it is very much tongue-in-cheek. Nobody got a PhD out of it. Worry not.