American Magic and Dread

TV, Art, and the Postmodern

Art is a simile of the Creation.

—Paul Klee

I’ve come to understand that TV is a primal force in the American home. Sealed off,

timeless, self-contained, self-referring. It’s like a myth being born right there in our

living room, like something we know in a dream-like and preconscious way. I’m

very enthused.

—Don DeLillo, White Noise

My favorite show is Cops. I like when the police shout “Police! Search warrant!”

and bust through a door, and people, screaming, are arrested. A man with a dead

hummingbird and tagged butterfly was taken into custody for punching his mother.

“They’re just playing dead,” he said. Later, the police found his bottom drawer full

of ladies’ wigs and heels. I’ve seen gored arms, bruised heads, disorderly men. I

say words like “black-and-whites” and “perps,” and I trust the detectives on TV.

“That one, he’s a good man,” I said once. Instead of the news, I watch Cops.

Cops is what I call Postmodern television, or pMTV. Postmodern TV differs from

modern TV, in that the former is less moralizing, more ironic (i.e., self-referring),

more free-form, and more real. On pMTV, the Huxtables are dispensed with in

favor of the anti-heroes of America’s Most Wanted and the Simpsons. Predictable

plots and two-dimensional detectives give way to the dystopic setting of Twin

Peaks. Modern television is no longer sufficiently complex, interactive, or fantastic

to satisfy the lust for quick gratification peculiar to our younger, twentysomething

generation.

Television is an analog of culture as a whole. The aggression of the modern era —

replete with environmental slaughter, two World Wars, countless political and

corporate colonizations of unwilling peoples, and the defeat of the community — is

at last making way for a new movement, a new Zeitgeist, a new fall line-up that will

better fulfill our needs and hopes. The nature of this postmodern movement is still

indefinite, but the trends seem at once communal and icon-shattering. It is time to

rebuild and redefine our values. This is mostly because people, especially within

our generation, have begun to realize that modernism’s focus on the individual (a

focus which may have peaked in the 1980s) has left a world and an America scarred

by battle after battle for personal gain. We, unique among generations, do not have

a brighter future to eagerly await. Most of us do not expect to be more successful

than our parents, to escape the burden of the national deficit, or to avoid terrorism

in our cities. Already there is talk that as a result of our economic fate, we are a

lost generation. Real life having failed us, good TV is the best available alternative.

TV as antidote. We might consider it one goal of our generation to counter our

economic sullenness with a renewed cultural vigor by injecting our lives with a new

and improved reality, a television-based reality. Such an effort would be the perfect

tool to approach the postmodern phenomenon Umberto Eco has termed

“hyperreality.” We can use TV, and its related technologies to enhance the world

around us, without the nagging side effects of drugs, without endangering

ourselves at all. That is to say that although people in my neighborhood do not

punch their mothers or cross-dress, those who do may move into my community

(even my living room) via TV in general, and Cops in particular. This makes my life

more adventuresome, more glamorous, more real. Although TV is most rewarding

when considered as nothing more than de-intellectualized entertainment, it has

planned and built our global village. As such, TV should not be subject to disdain

and snobbery. Perhaps TV seldom fulfills our hopes or expectations, but it does

occasionally make us laugh, teach us, and move us. This we should consider a

bonus, not a rule.

There is a close relationship between our generation (born 1961-1981) and TV.

Two previous generations have grown up with television, but that was when TV was

mostly considered a forum for broadcast vaudeville and things that moved. When

the elders of our generation were toddlers, TV brought us the visually and morally

stunning assassinations of Kennedy and Lee Oswald. Five years later, Americans

for the first time watched a war from their living rooms. Both events gained

greater pungency as a result of their nation- and world-wide broadcast, and TV’s

significance swelled with each disaster for the next 15 years. As children and

adolescents, we watched the defrocking of the Presidency and the development of

the Cold War. Then, in 1982, came MTV.

MTV and the avant-garde. From its inception, MTV was the most innovative

enterprise in television history. It changed television, the record industry, the way

we conceive of music. MTV created Madonna, the Eve of our hyperreal Eden.

MTV is now and ever has been entertainment — pure, but not simple. MTV in

many ways seems to have connected our generation, to have provided millions of

young Americans with a common ground, a refuge from other generations. Our

culture, at this age, is defined mostly by the music we listen to and the products we

buy, and MTV, for ten years, has heavily influenced both. The imagistic assault of

MTV may have reduced our attention span, but with apparent irony and some minor

didacticism, it exemplifies the speed and aesthetic sensibility of our generation. It

entertains quickly and well. Anti-imperial, communitarian, hyper-active, and often

politically correct, MTV is the model of postmodern television.

One could further argue that MTV is the model of postmodern culture. Having

eschewed the imperialist trends of the past 500 years, fueled the Madonna-driven

sexual revolution, and given our generation its first cultural thrust, MTV has owned

mainstream American youth culture for a decade and has established itself as

perhaps the world’s first commercial (even corporate) avant-garde. Joining

corporate economic power with political rectitude and a hypnotic visual barrage,

MTV has insinuated itself into many spheres of contemporary America. Its more

recent foray into political activism and its attempts to build a community of the

young, for example, have had an undeniable effect on the contemporary higher art

world. MTV and “higher” artists temulate the other’s visual style and political

values. Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” video, for instance, shares a message and

shock-value with Andre Serrano’s “Piss Christ.”

Art in recent years has taken a distinctly political tack. It has been confrontational,

personal, and occasionally preachy. Only five years ago, artists attacked

conventional morality and symbolism with such vehemence, that US Senators

loudly berated the National Endowment for the Arts and the individual artists

responsible. The controversy continues today, but perhaps with more sensitivity.

The incidents a few years ago engaged more people in the discussion of art and

politics, and the avant-garde which inspired it has moved slowly into the

mainstream. Meanwhile, the young liberals who defended the artists five years ago

have now had five years to develop their own long-term, community-based political

agendas in response to the outdated modernist beliefs of their elders.

Even with MTV as something of a guide, the political and moral values of our artists

and of our generation seem peculiarly elusive and disjointed. This is not because

we are the first generation to have an ambiguous moral code, but rather because

for the first time people other than white males with media access are engaged in

the conversations that will define us. We include men and women of color, of

differing economic, religious, and educational backgrounds. From these, we cull an

array of values and an unprecedented tolerance and freedom. We make it difficult

for academics and pundits in other generations to label us, and names like “the

Twentysomethings,” “Blank Generation,” “13th Generation,” and “Generation X”

stick briefly, then fall. Our enigmatic identity is a direct result of our diversity, our

openness, but many also see it as a defense against the Beats and the Boomers

(now largely entrenched in corporate America) as though the inability to name us

were tantamount to the inability to market to us.

This may not be the case, however, and our own generation’s proclivity towards

consumerism is the one element that seems to prevent us from being wholly

postmodern. In the future, perhaps, as we get older and poorer, our avid

consumerism will fade, to be replaced by a renewed fascination with elegant

simplicity in the midst of a technologically-amplified reality. In keeping with our

precedent, such a movement would ensure a cooperative, progressive well-being

without issuing a universal mandate of moral behavior.

Community ties will be the key to both the aesthetic and ethical value systems of

our postmodern generation. We will not be far from the crowd, but of it. The

discipline of public art — sculptures in the subways, murals, landscape

architecture, etc. — involves interaction with the community and a technologically-

aided return to natural origins. This technique is a cooperative, postmodern one,

not an aggressive and devastating modern one. The King Street Gardens Park in

Alexandria, VA, for example, is a park designed by a landscape artist, an architect, a

sculptor, and an artist, and alludes to the site’s history as a marshy grassland,

before modern developments paved it over. The work is a site-specific place of

community. Solitary figures with fragmented identities, remnants of modernism,

will gather on benches to admire flora and each other.

This effect is now and will continue to be true in public art projects across the

country, across the world, and the themes of our art will permeate culture —

corporations will replace their hierarchies with new horizontal networks, churches

will increase their openness and their spirituality, our heroes will not be tycoons or

generals, but community-builders and philanthropists. Generations will be

evaluated not by their economic helplessness, but by their cultural innovation. Our

own generation, schooled in MTV, Cops, and multi-culturalism, will open the global

community and redefine the postmodern aesthetic. It is a shifting.

jump! recently spoke with Bert Kubli, Program Specialist for the Visual Arts/Public

Projects Program for the National Endowment for the Arts. His nineteen years of

experience and unfailing optimism have both informed and inspired this essay.

j!: Lately, there’s been a lot of talk in academia about the defeat of modernism,

and the subsequent rise of post-modernism. Art is no longer the exclusive

realm of professional artists and intellectuals. Are artists responding to this

change?

BK: I think they are responding. Public art, for instance, directly involves artists

in other aspects of the nation’s life. Artists have developed problem solving

skills. They have to ask, How will this piece work in the community? How

can I make it site-specific? How will people in the area identify with it? At

the same time, they educate the neighborhood. The NEA requires an

educational process, so the work becomes interactive on many layers. It is

more than just artists and their critics: it is a conversation. The artist

considers his audience, the audience understands the artist. Like architects

and city planners, the artists are getting used to a dialogue with the

community, and everyone stands to gain from the involvement of the public.

j!: So the disconnection between artists and the general populace is

decreasing?

BK: There’s less of a disconnection as time progresses. People are beginning to

realize that there is no place, however unsophisticated, that can’t have a

spectacular work. If both are willing to dream, the artists and the

community can develop the skills to connect. Twenty years ago, the NEA’s

panelists bemoaned the American public for not realizing the importance of

good designers. The public is much smarter now, and the artists are

learning ways to involve non-traditional artists. The Public Art program will

fund anthropologists, musicians, and poets to engage in creative planning

with the public.

j!: And out of this planning, this conversation, comes the work’s meaning?

BK: To an extent, but I think time gives the work meaning as well. The first

project we funded, in September 1969, was a Calder mobile in Grand

Rapids, Michigan. It’s very abstract — I don’t know what it means. But the

city of Grand Rapids has given it a special meaning. Time has made the

piece site-specific.

j!: Has the ability to assign meaning to public arts bolstered the general

populace’s defense of some controversial artists, even as other members of

the community are attacking it?

BK: Earlier this afternoon [3 Ag 1993], Jesse Helms was on the floor of the

Senate seeking to eliminate funding for individual artists, and of course he’s

raised many objections in the past. That he hasn’t won is really amazing. It

shows that Americans do support the arts, and are willing to face opposition

to show that support.

j!: One critic recently argued that many young artists believe if they are

spectacularly offensive, “Jesse Helms might declare them enemies of the

state and so rescue them from the pit of anonymity.” Is this truly the

motivation behind contemporary art?

BK: That’s silly. That kind of analysis is easy and quick to make. The artists I

know and have worked with don’t concern themselves with that. Even the

shock-value artists are more concerned with the experience of viewing the

art than with their own fame. Look at the Dada movement, for example.

That was pure newness, its use of contrast and discord made it into the

Forties, Fifties, Sixties, even into the Nineties. It has evolved over the years,

is always in a somewhat sensational context, but nonetheless is extremely

interesting.

j!: You mentioned artistic evolution. Does that involve progress from one

generation to the next? Is the 13th generation building on or improving the

art of the baby boomers, or is it slacking off?

BK: As I said earlier, both the artists and the audiences are better educated now.

And the younger artists are open to anything. They can use feminism, civil

rights movements, and most recently, multi-culturalism, in ways that have

not been tried before. The young are looking for channels to focus their

idealism, they are looking to change things.

j!: You seem genuinely pleased with the younger generation of artists.

BK: The young can accept information from any direction. They can translate

the constant flow of information into knowledge. They are not locked into

one mode of thinking. The young have fewer blinders than anyone else, and

see art where no one else has. Children today are being taught to think

about art, to use art in solving arithmetic problems. They don’t get

confused, or block ideas — they just increase their skills. When they are

older, they will know engineering, math, acoustics, and use it all to create

art.

j!: Finally, what role has television played in the opening or closing of the

younger Americans’ mind, and how does that relate to the art world?

BK: I think television has had a very positive effect. Kids gather images and

information through TV that I could not as a child, and still can’t today. TV

plays a strong role in educating the young; it opens them to new ways of

thinking and problem solving. My own childhood was pre-TV, but I wouldn’t

say my appreciation of art or higher culture was necessarily better than that

of today’s children. The percentage of high-quality experience on television

is low, but I don’t see TV as a bad thing. Past generations have been

responsible for far worse disasters then television, so why not give this

generation something new, a new tool for thinking. My son had trouble in

grade school, but I think TV helped him create his own education, and now

my four-year old grandson can read, probably in large part due to TV. TV

helps him absorb information differently, more readily. The same is true of

our younger artists, and I have a feeling the result is going to be good.

Clip-n-Save! A Guide to the PM world

Modern Postmodern

Radio TV

CHiPs Cops

Elvis Elvis

Leno Letterman

NBC MTV

Men Women

Hetero Bi

Wasteland Wetland

Anonymity Fame