What was television? It’s still around, of course, but in a very different form and with far less influence than it had in the past, when it was more of a monolith. “On Television” takes a critical, retrospective look at the medium, beginning with a series of Lee Friedlander photographs from the 1960s. The tightly cropped images depict TVs in motel rooms and other spaces. The glowing sets aren’t exactly menacing, but they are jarring — strange intrusions into domestic environments.
Even by the ’60s, though, television was less of an incursion and more like the new norm, and most of the show’s works grapple with what that means. A few artists take documentary approaches, while many others use compilation and montage as a way of turning the medium against itself.
The pièce de résistance may be “Political Advertisement XI 1952-2024” (2024), by the duo Antoni Muntadas and Marshall Reese. A continuing, evolving project, it collects American presidential commercials since 1952 and presents them chronologically (current running time: 1 hour 30 minutes). Harun Farocki’s “A Day in the Life of a Consumer” (1993) and Takeshi Murata’s “Infinite Doors” (2010) are more experimental: They chop up and re-present TV content in order to highlight its absurdity.
The collective Ant Farm took the idea of deconstructing the spectacle of TV more literally. In 1975, they staged “Media Burn,” in San Francisco, for which two artists dressed as astronauts drove a Cadillac through a wall of flaming television sets. Naturally, they invited the press to cover it.
Moving through the exhibition, I alternated between two thoughts: It’s fascinating how much has changed since the internet became our culture’s dominant mass medium — and also how little.