Broadcast explores the ways in which artists since the late 1960s have engaged with, critiqued, and inserted themselves into official channels of broadcast television and radio. By co-opting the sounds, images, and presentation strategies of our culture’s dominant forms of mass media, they reveal the mechanisms and power structures of broadcasting systems, and challenge their authority and influence. The exhibition spans four decades of work by an international group of artists. It begins with Nam June Paik’s manipulated news footage from the late 1960s; moves on to Chris Burden’s infamous 1971 hostage-taking of a TV host at knifepoint; then presents TVTV’s iconoclastic broadcast from the floor of the 1972 Republican convention and a 1980 work made by Doug Hall, Chip Lord, and Jody Procter as artists-in-residence at a Texas news station. More recent works in the exhibition include an installation about aliens by Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Gregory Green’s pirate FM radio-station installation (see below), initiated in the basement of his New York gallery in 1995, neuroTransmitter’s live radio transmission, and Siebren Versteeg’s manipulations of recent CNN broadcasts.

Some of the artists’ interventions are hostile (as in Burden’s work); others are more collaborative, as demonstrated by Doug Hall, Chip Lord, and Jody Procter's participation at Station KVII-TV in Amarillo, Texas. In still other instances, an artist’s engagement with broadcasting involves the critical reuse of previously aired material, such as Antoni Muntadas’s analyses of the structures and presentations of newscasting during the Cold War, or Dara Birnbaum’s incorporation of archival media reports on the 1977 kidnapping and execution of German industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer by the Baader-Meinhof group. Whether appropriating the conventions and programs of broadcast journalism, or engaging in a live TV or radio broadcast themselves, the artists represented here compel us to look more closely at this dominant force in our culture.

The works in Broadcast include single-channel monitor-based videos, variable-format video projections, photography, installations, and a few interactive broadcasting projects that are adapt able to each venue. Accompanied by a free gallery guide and a brochure, the exhibition is curated by Irene Hofmann, executive director of the Contemporary Museum, Baltimore.

Gregory Green operating his work Radio Caroline, The Voice of The New Free State of Caroline (Baltimore), 2007

Exhibition Itinerary

Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, Maryland
September 8 - November 17, 2007

AVAILABLE
January 2008 - August 2008

Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, Michigan
Mid-September - December 2008

AVAILABLE
January 2009 - August 2009