Critiques of Art and Media as Commodity and Spectacle

1. The eternal frame
Ant Farm, Doug Hall | 23 min | 1976
The Eternal Frame is a re-enactment of the assassination of John F. Kennedy as seen in the famous Zapruder film. This home movie was immediately confiscated by the FBI yet found its way into the visual subconscious of the nation. The Eternal Frame concentrates on this event as a crucial site of fascination and repression in the American mindset.

2.Television Delivers People
Richard Serra | 6 min | 1973
Television Delivers People is a seminal work in the now well-established critique of popular media as an instrument of social control that asserts itself subtly on the population through "entertainments," for the benefit of those in power —- the corporations that mantain and profit from the status quo.

3. The Business of Local News
University Community Video-Minneapolis | excerpt 16 min | 1974
"Changing Channels" was a weekly alterative video magazine produced by Universtiy Community Video (UCV) and aired on public television station KCTA, Minneapolis. In The Business of Television News, which aired as part of the "Changing Channels" series, several area television news operations were asked to examine their objectives and their markets.

4. Proto Media Primer
Raindance Corporation, Paul Ryan | 14 min | 1970
As one of the early media collectives, Raindance Corporation celebrated an eclectic use of the portapak by taping everything from man-in-the-street interviews to concerts and demonstrations. Intended to serve as a cultural data bank, their media primers provide an impressionistic smorgasbord of late '60s and early '70s American society.

5. About media
Tony Ramos | excerpt 15 min | 1977
Deconstruction of television news focuses on Ramos part in the media coverage of President Jimmy Carter's 1977 declaration of amnesty for Vietnam draft evaders. Ramos, who had served an 18-month prison sentence for draft evasion, was interviewed by news reporter Gabe Pressman.Ramos contrasts the unedited interview footage - and patronizing comments of the news crew - with Pressman's final televised news report. In his ironic manipulation of the material, Ramos exposes the illusion of "objective" news and the point of view found in any work of journalism.

6. Fifty Wonderful Years
optic nerve | 25 min | 1973
Fifty Wonderful Years provides a behind-the-scenes look at the 1973 Miss California Pageant. In the early '70s beauty pageants across the country came under fire from feminists who targeted them as spectacles that exploited women.This tape was one of the first documentaries shot on 1/2" open reel equipment to be broadcast on television.

7. Technology Transformation: Wonder Woman
Dara Birnbaum | 7 min | 1978
As one of the first artists to appropriate TV footage as a strategy to critically reposition the texts of television, Birnbaum examines the production of television's fantasy spectacle in relation to ideological constructions of women and power in this early seminal video.


moderated by: J. Ševčík