{"id":5636,"title":"Television/Society/Art symposium, The Kitchen","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/televisionsocietyart-symposium-kitchen","version":"d4dea25314991133eebc11b137df034cd327f72c14608fe236faed6548d8e3fd","modified":"2026-09-13T21:52:04.4432582+00:00","credits":[{"role":"Author","name":"Lucinda Furlong"}],"authorKeys":["Furlong, Lucinda"],"subjects":["Texts by Author"],"metadata":[{"label":"Publication","value":"Afterimage","url":null},{"label":"Date","value":"January 1981","url":null},{"label":"Volume","value":"8","url":null},{"label":"Issue","value":"6","url":null},{"label":"ETC archive","value":"ETC1130","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022Television/Society/Art symposium, The Kitchen.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/televisionsocietyart-symposium-kitchen.","publication":"Lucinda Furlong. Television/Society/Art symposium, The Kitchen. Afterimage. January 1981.","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/5636.ris"},"links":[],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":15873},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":788}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"\u0022Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to develop a critical theory of television in three days.\u0022 It sounds like another suspense-filled episode of Mission: Impossible, but not even the likes of Barbara Bain and Martin Landau would touch it. A more accurate analogy for the Television/Society/Art symposium held at the Kitchen in New York City, Oct. 24-26, would have to be a cross between Family Feud and The Gong Show. Indeed, when a group dominated by theoreticians of Marxism and semiology convenes not only to \u0022consider television as a complex social institution representative of society\u0027s self-images,\u0022 but to \u0022analyse the production, presentation, and reception of television,\u0022 and further, \u0022to examine the medium as a special technological means of artistic expression through the application of advanced forms of intellectual inquiry,\u0022 it comes as no surprise that the task might prove to be too ambitious-even for a crack team of \u0022experts\u0022. And experts there were-armed with the jargon of their differing viewpoints, and poised to do battle. The roster of panelists, with few exceptions, was a veritable \u0022Who\u0027s Who\u0022 of the left: art historians Benjamin Buchloh and Rosalind Krauss; film critics/theoreticians Julianne Burton, Annette Michelson, Mark Nash, Robert Sklar, and Peter Wollen; filmmakers Jean-Pierre Gorin and Yvonne Rainer; semioticians Stephen Heath, Fredric Jameson, and Sylvere Lotringer; and Marxists Michele Mattelart, Bertell Ollman, Martha Rosler, and Allan Sekula. Also included were sociologist and former SDS president Todd Gitlin; communications theorist Herbert Schiller; Douglas Kellner, a philosophy professor at the University of Texas; Steina Vasulka, one of the pioneers of synthesized video art; Nick DeMartino, founder of Televisions magazine; and John Hanhardt, curator of film and video at the Whitney Museum. With $6000 in funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, an additional $5000 from the American Film Institute, RECIPES FOR TELEVISION theory creams practice at the Kitchen and monies pledged from other sources, the symposium was organized by Ron Clark, senior instructor at the Whitney Museum\u0027s independent study program, and Mary MacArthur, director of the Kitchen. The symposium came at a period bursting at the seams with computer chips, cable hook-ups which will permit hundreds of channels, satellite broadcasting, home video units, and cheaper equipment. Gene Youngblood, author of Expanded Cinema, has compared the impact of developments in video technology to the Industrial Revolution, and foresees the potential for two-way broadcast capability in every home. On the art front, though, video has received comparatively little attention since its brief courtship with galleries and critics in the early 70s. This may be partially due to the fact that once the excitement about a \u0022new art\u0022 subsided, much of the early video exhibited was just plain boring. But, more important, probably, were pragmatic considerations: video was a difficult product to market for gallery owners interested in selling art objects to collectors. Given those factors, a symposium organized by the Kitchen-one of the few spaces for viewing artists\u0027 videotapes-would seem to present an ideal opportunity not only to develop a critical theory of video, but actually to look at videotapes, and to attempt to collectively address the problems of access to equipment and screening possibilities. Such expectations, though shared by many conferees, were not to be fulfilled, for the symposium was about television, not video. According to Clark, the original plan was to invite a group of people (half men, half women) who approached the subject from perspectives as diverse as broadcast television and artistic practice, and to bring together \u0022thinkers who have a more general overview of social communication, and who are developing strategies which might be indirectly applied.\u0022 While the Marxist orientation of the symposium was his own intellectual inclination, Clark said, he also felt \u0022constrained to satisfy the various constituencies who were exerting pressure,\u0022 e.g., video artists who felt they wouldn\u0027t be represented, and the American Film Institute, which felt that he should include people who had worked in an \u0022oppositional way\u0022 within the broadcast industry. Clark didn\u0027t satisfy them. What resulted was a group of panelists (two-thirds men, one-third women), which included only two practicing video artists, no representation of either network television or PBS (dubbed the \u0022Petroleum Broadcasting System\u0022 during the proceedings), and no independent video producers. So much for what didn\u0027t happen. What did happen was something akin to a sit-com or a soap opera, depending on one\u0027s threshold for expressions of intellectual outrage. As one member of the audience angrily informed the panelists: \u0022You\u0027re just like broadcast TV, only we can\u0027t even turn you off!\u0022 Such pronouncements, and there were many, would perhaps have been unnecessary had the symposium\u0027s structure been different, for the very first presentation set the stage for the academic spats and shouting matches which followed. After opening remarks by MacArthur, Clark, and Hanhardt, Douglas Kellner presented a paper attempting a synthesis of the major theories of film, television, Freudian psychology, semiology, phenomenology, and popular culture theory. Held by many to be rife with sloppy thinking, the paper was a compendium of truisms about broadcast television: \u0022one of the distinguishing traits of television is its fragmentation and discontinuity\u0022; \u0022television is a habit-forming media\u0022; and \u0022a critical theory of television must make clear that the television world is artificial and mediated.\u0022 The very fact that Kellner\u0027s was the only paper distributed to registrants prior to the symposium, combined with his position on the roster, effectively made him the keynote speaker. That was unfortunate: instantly, he became the scapegoat for semioticians, Marxists, and feminists alike, all of whom pounced upon his \u0022intellectual dishonesty.\u0022 One outraged feminist semiotician declared that not only had he abused the word \u0022code,\u0022 but he had failed to examine soap operas in his analysis. Critic Rosalind Krauss accused him of \u0022co-opting our ideas.\u0022 When Kellner defended himself by saying that he was consciously disaffiliating himself from a semiological approach, he was berated by another semiotician for \u0022rushing from the \u0027signifier\u0027 to the \u0027signified.\u0027\u0022 What followed was a weekend of uneven panel discussions, punctuated by harsh criticism from an audience that felt it had as much to say about television as any of the panelists. Friday afternoon\u0027s session, \u0022Television and Social Communications\u0022 (subtitled \u0022The social forces determining the development of television as an institution of social communication\u0022) is a good example. While most of the panelists knew social forces acted upon television (not a very difficult conclusion to reach), no one but Herbert Schiller was able to fully articulate their ideas. Juiianne Burton\u0027s presentation of four slides of ads for televisions, which she described as \u0022television constituting itself as fashion, art, and sustenance,\u0022 hung in midair with little explanation. Kellner ventured to say that while TV grew up in the McCarthy era, it had become less conservative in the \u002770s. He offered as proof All in the Family, Roots, and Saturday Night Live, and stated that television today reproduces the conflicts within society. Todd Gitlin made many basic points, which he seemed unable to connect: \u0022TV provides compensation for the deficiencies of daily life ...The essence of television is to sell ads for advertisers to consumers.\u0022 Mark Nash, editor of England\u0027s Screen magazine, nervously quoted Hans Magnus Enzenberger, and then apologized for knowing nothing of the subject. Michele Mattelart\u0027s remarks on the use of television in Latin America and Mozambique were lost in an inept translation for anyone who could not follow her patient and careful French. (After Mattelart read the first sentence of her paper, the would-be translator blurted out the first few words, and could not translate the rest.) If the symposium had its characters, though, one might give the Emmy to Herbert Schiller, the communications theorist who threw up his hands and defiantly proclaimed: \u0022Network television is another arm of monopoly capitalism ... Communications theory is controlled by the same group who emphasizes the audience ... We must look at the means of production ... It\u0027s crude, it\u0027s vulgar, but it\u0027s true!\u0022 In contrast to the tentativeness of the other panelists, Schiller\u0027s clear line about the absolute control of the media by the forces of monopoly capitalism made a critical theory of television seem simple. However, his remarks at the evening session, \u0022The role of television in the process of socialization in advanced industrial society,\u0022 made his earlier diatribe look like batting practice. Schiller cited the fallacy of believing that hundreds of cable networks will allow everyone a piece of the pie, arguing that the same power structure will still be in control: \u0022They\u0027ll have a born-again network, an all-basketball network, a wine network, and then a red-wine network.\u0022 And yet the logic behind the symposium was not merely to criticize the present structure of television, but to investigate alternatives. Such was the expectation, at least, of the restless audience of scholars, activists, and videomakers who paraded up to the microphone to expound upon their own ideas. Schiller\u0027s all-encompassing formulation-reiterated by many other panelists-created an atmosphere less than sympathetic to such an examination. Just what those alternatives should be was difficult to ascertain, for as one \u0022alternative\u0022 was presented by a member of the audience, a standard Marxist argument would be employed by a panelist to dismiss it. For instance, artists\u0027 video is still susceptible to the same pressures exerted by a commodity-based art world; PBS could hardly be considered an alternative to network television because of its heavy corporate funding; and activists using video as a tool can be dismissed as \u0022reformist\u0022 because they are still working within capitalism. Thus, with the approaches commonly considered to be alternatives already rendered invalid, audience/panel dialogue was hampered, to say the least. The problem with this vicious circle, at least from the panelists\u0027s perspective, was that they were denied the time they wanted to argue each other\u0027s points. Members of the audience, on the other hand, resented what was perceived as the exclusion of their point of view. This situation was exacerbated by the tendency of panel moderators to cut off members of the audience while allowing panelists to continue their remarks. An example of this type of argumentation was Saturday afternoon\u0027s \u0022Television as Art\u0022 panel. A great deal of attention was focused on this session, because it was the only one scheduled to discuss the relationship of artists\u0027 video to television. While Hanhardt attempted to specify how video art differs from commercial television, Krauss denied video the label of \u0022art,\u0022 calling it a \u0022masturbatory means of producing something about nothing.\u0022 Allan Sekula and Martha Rosler argued for an activist video art, the latter stating: \u0022I\u0027m more interested in what I\u0027m talking about than the means I use to talk.\u0022 A fed-up Steina Vasulka, a cofounder of the Kitchen, said she was grateful to SONY and other Japanese companies for developing the technology to its present level. \u0022You\u0027re all so afraid of technology and you think you are helpless. You can make your own computer chip!\u0022 After one young video critic in the audience dismissed her as hopelessly naive, Vasulka rejoined (with a nod in passing to Krauss): \u0022I\u0027m glad video is not \u0027high\u0027 art, because it gives us more time.\u0022 At this point, cross-fire broke out among conferees over what exactly","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":15873,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}