Painted faces
We're going to talk about test patterns and shadows. Certain forms of darkness. A small corner of the twentieth century. A small corner, a short time, and an influence impossible to calculate. We spent a long time watching it, but did we ever really see TV? Or were we so immersed in its landscapes, so integrated with its networks, so lost in its effects, that they became imperceptible? How would things stand, who would we be, how would we live and dream and look at each other and think about ourselves without the influence of TV? We begin, simply enough, with a man watching television. Quite possibly he is being driven mad, slowly, in stages, program by program, interruption by interruption. Still, he watches. What is there in that box? Why is he watching? In that box there are electrons, hurtling at speed through a vacuum tube on course to collide with a phosphor-coated screen: “an image is converted from light into electricity, the impulses transmitted by wire or radio, and the current changed back into light in a suitable receiver. A stream of electrons may be likened to a brush which paints the image, line by line, on a fluorescent screen.”[1] As for why he’s watching: that’s not so clear. Marshall McLuhan might have said he is attracted by the peculiar qualities of the image that appears on the screen: a grainy, low-resolution mosaic as busy as jazz music or a comic strip which needs its viewer to play along. The screen is demanding: it pulls its viewers in, requiring them to colour in its contours, join the dots and fill the gaps between the lines. “The TV image requires each instant that we ‘close’ the spaces in the mesh by a convulsive sensuous participation that is profoundly kinetic and tactile, because tactility is the interplay of the senses”. The viewer becomes “an unconscious pointillist painter” who cannot bear to look away. “TV will not work as background. It engages you. You have to be with it.”[2] Sitting in near darkness about eighteen inches from the screen, he turned the channel selector every half minute or so, sometimes much more frequently. He wasn't looking for something that might sustain his interest. Hardly that. He simply enjoyed jerking the dial into fresh image-burns. He explored content to a point. The tactile-visual delight of switching channels took precedence, however, transforming even random moments of content into pleasing territorial abstractions. Watching television was for Lyle a discipline like mathematics or Zen. Analogue cameras and receivers treated images like texts or textiles woven line by line, left to right, from the top to the bottom of the screen, repeat. McLuhan described “a ceaselessly forming contour of things limned by the scanning-finger”, a kind of action painting that never dried. “The resulting plastic contour appears by light through, not light on, and the image so formed has the quality of sculpture and icon, rather than of picture.”[3] The TV image was always on the move, constantly composing and refreshing itself: the beams of electrons kept coming at a screen backed by perforated grilles, fine metal meshes known as shadow-masks which filtered and directed the split white light into movements that meant something to the human eye, images it could recognise. But didn’t they also want to watch the football or the news, their favourite adverts or sitcoms or cartoons? This, for McLuhan, was neither here nor there. Whatever they were watching, the viewers of TV were looking at the matter of the medium, and everything else was a diversion, a “juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind”[4] of no more significance than - in another wild metaphor - “the stencilling on an atomic bomb”[5]. Only a serious artist, attuned to the changes in perception and sensibility wrought by any new medium, could encounter it “with impunity” and do justice to the novel potential of TV. Perhaps an artist like Nam June Paik, who saw and seized the chance to work on the screen “as precisely as Leonardo, as freely as Picasso, as colourfully as Renoir, as profoundly as Mondrian, as violently as Pollock and as lyrically as Jasper Johns.”[6] Or a filmmaker like Chris Marker, alive to the effects of the images produced on the machine which Paik developed with Shuya Abe: “Treated by his synthesizer, pictures are less deceptive . . . than those you see on television. At least they proclaim themselves to be what they are: images, not the portable and compact form of an already inaccessible reality.” "TV is a problem only if you've forgotten how to look and listen," Murray said. "My students and I discuss this all the time. They're beginning to feel they ought to turn against the medium, exactly as an earlier generation turned against their parents and their country. I tell them they have to learn to look as children again. Root out content. Find the codes and messages, to use your phrase, Jack." "What do they say to that?" "Television is just another name for junk mail. But I tell them I can't accept that. I tell them I've been sitting in this room for more than two months, watching TV into the early hours, listening carefully, taking notes. A great and humbling experience, let me tell you. Close to mystical." The video recorder made it possible for artists and their images to run free from the constraints of broadcast TV and gave then a new sense of autonomy, often a new life in the gallery. But TV was more than its images. The box on which they played was only the front end of a vast economic and technical infrastructure, an elongated broadcasting machine involving a tangle of cables and corporations, waves and aerials, stations and states and satellites, a great pulsating system of image production and transmission under the surface, behind the scenes, on the other side of the screens. Here too there was depth and complexity, another mosaic of interests, requirements, constraints and demands. Anything might have been on TV, but with notable exceptions, it was almost impossible to make work that challenged its centralising tendencies, it top-down, one-way sensibility. There were however other ways of looking at TV. For Andy Warhol, there was a lot to see, plenty worth watching on its screens. He revelled in its very popularity, loving it for all the reasons that made it so easy to dismiss: its cheap thrills and its superficiality, its spectacular banality, its masses and celebrities, its manipulative tendencies. These were not just stencils on a bomb, but operative elements, integral working parts, vital organs of the medium. Much of what was on TV was of course adopted and adapted from older art forms and media: soap operas from the radio, newsreels from the cinema. In Japan, when it first arrived with the Americans in 1953, TV was known as denki kamishibai, an electronic version of an old form of street entertainment which told stories with woodcut images pulled out of a box. Pictures of the floating world. But TV made everything it broadcast its own, casting the world in its own soft glow, transforming everything it covered, covering everything it showed, showing off its power to make and shape and break into reality, to win a struggle (Martin Luther King: “we will no longer let them use clubs on us in the dark corners. We’re going to make them do it in the glowing light of television”[7]) or to lose a war (America’s fate in Vietnam, sealed “in the living rooms of America”[8]). Whatever made an appearance on TV was plucked out of the ordinary and given a new status in the new orders of TV reality. Or was that already reality TV? When he died in the late 1980s, Warhol was working on The History of TV, a series of still images taken from decades of TVs greatest hits, such as the sitcom I love Lucy, and the Beatles performance on the Ed Sullivan Show. The only one he finished was a colour-saturated print, a still from the first moon landing, an image that is still in everybody’s minds. How beautiful they were, these sequences, beamed live and direct to the people back on earth from the surface of their satellite. How close they came, these far-fetched scenes, how perfectly they seemed to suit TV. "Without television,” wrote Joshua Rothman in the New Yorker, “the Moon landing would have been a merely impressive achievement – an expensive stunt, to the cynical. Instead, seen live, unedited, and everywhere, it became a genuine experience of global intimacy."[9] A small step for man, a giant leap for mankind, perfect footage for the camera. And then the moon was joined by new companions. Satellite transmission filled the skies with signals which seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere and could be drawn down anywhere by anyone with just a dish and a decoder, and TV expanded into what could seem like an infinite kaleidoscope, a vast collective dream, perhaps like a forest with dense thickets or a city with back alleys and sleezy clubs as well as malls and thoroughfares. It was then, and in these landscapes, that Groebel started foraging for images, hunting by night and painting by day, recording memories, collecting souvenirs. What interested him were not the classic highlights of TV history such as the mission to the moon, already seered on the retina of the twentieth century, but another kind of image, more common, and not so easy to identify, as though it were hiding in plain sight: another kind of icon, the face that appears as the true expression of TV. Even the set itself, sat in the home like a character waiting to appear, a speaker demanding to be heard: the eyes and the mouth that keep recurring, the great triangulation that is spotted everywhere, not only on the head, but in the patterns of the clouds, or smudges on a wall, with the headlights of a car. And constantly resolving on TV. Powdered faces, talking heads, caricatures: plenty of landscapes and disasters too, but never long to wait before you see another face. It’s always been the favourite subject of TV: when John Logie Baird first demonstrated his equipment from his rooms London’s Soho, in 1925, his first moving pictures showed the bold and stylised features of a ventriloquist’s dummy called Stooky Bill. When members of the Royal Institution were invited to witness the technology at work, they “were shown recognizable reception of the movements of the dummy head and of a person speaking. The image as transmitted was faint and often blurred, but substantiated a claim that through the "Televisor" as Mr. Baird has named his apparatus, it is possible to transmit and reproduce instantly the details of movement, and such things as the play of expression on the face.” Even without an appearance on TV, the face has a unique ability to exact a different kind of gaze, “a special kind of seeing”, in James Elkins’ phrase: “a seeing that is also touching… also writing”, and regards the face as “a work in progress that stands in continuous need of being seen or touched or written upon… like the personalities they express and the ideas they communicate, faces need to be used because they are not finished images.”[10] When it makes its appearance on the screen with which it shares these qualities, the face is redoubled, and so is its appeal. Its surface becomes an interface. TV has a lot of personality. That’s what makes it such good company, a private satellite for everyone. Warhol used it as a substitute for lovers, relatives, therapists, and friends. You can watch its reactions to the actions and even, on Japanese TV, follow the responses of another tiny face in the corner of the screen. “When I got my first TV set, I stopped caring so much about having close relationships with other people […] I started an affair with my television which has continued to the present, when I play around in my bedroom with as many as four at a time.”[11] Unlike the film star, so distant and aloof, never meeting the camera’s eye, never connecting with its audience, the TV persona was personal, familiar, right there in the room, just across from you, a seeing, talking surface which sometimes even looked you in the eye, as though you were something it could recognise. The more you watch Japanese television, the more you feel it’s watching you Of course it only seemed this way. The new faces of TV were really gazing at the glass eye of the camera, into the distance, the vacuum in the tube. They seemed up close and familiar, but really they were far away. They looked entirely natural, but like its great events, they too were made, and made up, for TV. Taxi had an incredible amount of makeup in her bag… fifty pairs of lashes arranged according to size, fifty mascara wands, twenty mascara cakes, every shade of Revlon shadow ever made – iridescent and regular, matte and shiny – twenty Max Factor blush-ons… Everything had to look perfect.But she didn’t care about anything below the neck. Great white stripes of greasepaint were used in the early days of monochrome TV to bring out the features of the face, highlight its contours and compensate for the flattening effects of TV lights and cameras; later, bizarre devices such as Max Factor’s “Beauty Calibrator” determined the extent to which the face need to be rearranged to suit TV, and a vast range of light-absorbing powders and concealers and foundations, contouring brushes, fine-lining pencils, sponges, scrapers, scalpels, and palettes of complementing, complimenting paints, readied the face for its appearance on the screen. Lipsticks and powders in greens and blues were used to produce the pinks and reds of the natural face: “the television camera does not record the red coloring in the human complexion, leaving the transmitted image flat and unnatural. When green is substituted, however, the lips and cheeks of a performer appear in accurate relation of tones with other facial features as the image is projected on the screen of the receiver.”[12] Was this a question of racial features too? Was the white face the default model for TV? And why, when all this work was done on the faces of both women and men, was it only for the former that these treatments of the human face came to be expected not only on TV, but also off its limits, on the street? And more: how universal is this focus on the face? Facial recognition may be a basic skill, as well as the driver of machine intelligence, but is there also a specificity at the heart of what has now become the global attraction of the face, a common focus on its features, their arrangement, the cosmetics of the face? Has TV made it what it is today, filtered, photoshopped, self-composed, blended, averaged, permanently madeup, cut and cropped, infinitely instagrammable? Perhaps it is here, in this prehistory, that we begin to glimpse the magnitude of the changes effected by TV? Today, the satellites are in their prime, but the lights have gone out on analogue TV. Until I saw these paintings in the gallery, I had almost forgotten what it looked like, how it felt to watch these grainy images. Perhaps 9/11 was its last great gasp, the grande finale of its century, perfectly pitched to maximise its impact and its audience, so carefully aimed, so well timed, so thoroughly made for the old mass medium that was TV. Its digital successors still follow lines but have no need to scan: their sensors capture pictures at a glance, all at once, turning them into signals in a single take. Even when it aired recordings, endless repetitions of its own archive, something of the TV was always lively, almost live. Now its gaze is steady, all its edges sharp, its movements angular and jerky: today’s flat screens twist liquid crystals on a flat display where images no longer threaten to fall back into a play of snowy ghosts and snagged zigzagged lines, but instead to stutter and pixelate. The choice, see. It ruins it somehow. With television you were subjected to repetition. The familiarity was inflicted. Different now. Everything about TV has changed today. What was in the box is obsolete, and what it then displayed has broken free. But the faces have continued to multiply. Now they are available on demand and everywhere, on any device, at any price, in any shape and quality, at any scale, as a thumbnail miniature or a wide screen wall, in any format, setting, preference. Written into Groebel’s painted faces is TV as a moment of this history. They draw us in, involving and inviting us to see something of the impact of TV on our sensibilities, its impact on the ways in which look at each other and think about ourselves. They are the messages and media of TV. Sadie Plant, Biel/Bienne, 2022 The first four extracts from Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise are followed by quotations from Chris Marker’s film, Sans Soleil, Andy Warhol’s autobiographical From A to B and back again, and David Foster Wallace’s novel, Infinite Jest
[1] “Television: Desire for perfection and Technical Difficulties Hold Up Release to Public”, Literary Digest, January 9, 1937 http://www.oldmagazinearticles.com/1930s_TV_history-pdf
[2] Marshal McLuhan, Understanding Media, McGraw Hill, 1964
[3] Ibid
[4] Ibid
[5] Marshall McLuhan, Interview from Playboy, 1960 https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/spring07/mcluhan.pdf
[6] Nam June Paik, Videa ‘n Videology 1959–1973, Emerson Museum of Art, 1974
[7] Marthin Luther King, in Alexis C. Madrigal, When the Revolution Was Televised, The Atlantic, 2018 https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/04/televisions-civil-rights-revolution/554639/
[8] Marshall McLuhan, op.cit.
[9] “Jonathan Rothman, “Live From the Moon”, The New Yorker, 2014 https://www.newyorker.com/books/joshua-rothman/live-moon
[10] James Elkins, The Object Looks Back, Harvest, 1997
[11] Andy Warhol, From A to B and Back Again, Picador, 1975
[12] “Max Factor and Television”, https://www.cosmeticsandskin.com/aba/max-and-the-tube.php