In a world where politics is conducted through images, the tools of
art history can be used to challenge the privatized antidemocratic
sphere of American television.
American television embodies a paradox: it is a privately owned and
operated public communications network that most citizens are unable to
participate in except as passive specators. Television creates an image
of community while preventing the formation of actual social ties
because behind its simulated exchange of opinions lies a highly
centralized corporate structure that is profoundly antidemocratic. In
Feedback, David Joselit describes the privatized public sphere of
television and recounts the tactics developed by artists and media
activists in the 1960s and 1970s to break open its closed circuit.
The figures whose work Joselit examines--among them Nam June Paik, Dan
Graham, Joan Jonas, Abbie Hoffman, Andy Warhol, and Melvin Van
Peebles--staged political interventions within television's closed
circuit. Joselit identifies three kinds of image-events: feedback, which
can be both disabling noise and rational response--as when Abbie Hoffman
hijacked television time for the Yippies with flamboyant stunts directed
to the media; the image-virus, which proliferates parasitically,
invading, transforming, and even blocking systems--as in Nam June Paik's
synthesized videotapes and installations; and the avatar, a
quasi-fictional form of identity available to anyone, which can function
as a political actor--as in Melvin Van Peebles's invention of Sweet
Sweetback, an African-American hero who appealed to a broad audience and
influenced styles of Black Power activism. These strategies, writes
Joselit, remain valuable today in a world where the overlapping
information circuits of television and the Internet offer different
opportunities for democratic participation.
In Feedback, Joselit analyzes such midcentury image-events using the
procedures and categories of art history. The trope of figure/ground
reversal, for instance, is used to assess acts of representation in a
variety of media--including the medium of politics. In a televisual
world, Joselit argues, where democracy is conducted through images, art
history has the capacity to become a political science.
