Catégorie : Artiste

Televison Delivers People pris sur Youtube mais l’original est exposé sur Ubuweb http://www.ubu.com/film/serra_television.html. Sous-titrage sur Ubuweb : « 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 populace through « entertainments, » for the benefit of those in power-the corporations that mantain and profit from the status quo. While canned Muzak plays, a scrolling text denounces the corporate masquerade of commercial television to reveal the structure of profit that greases the wheels of the media industry. Television emerges as little more than a insidious sponsor for the corporate engines of the world. By appropriating the medium he is criticizing-using television, in effect, against itself-Serra employs a characteristic strategy of early, counter-corporate video collectives-a strategy that remains integral to video artists committed to a critical dismantling of the media’s political and ideological stranglehold. » Traduction possible sur le site du crac Languedoc Roussillon. Deliver peut vouloir dire libérer, mais l’adjonction d’un complément d’attribution en donne le sens d’offrir à, comme dans le 3e statement : Televison delivers people to an advertiser > La télévision offre les gens à un annonceur. Circonstances de son exposition en 1973, décrites par William Kaisen : « Given Television Delivers People‘s strident criticism of the medium’s connection to commerce, it’s remarkable (and exceptional) that it was shown on a commercial channel. But despite its gloomy tone, when taken whole, it produced exactly the kind of oppositional voice that its content seemed to deem impossible. It rerouted the mass distribution that broadcasting affords by welling up from within commercial television in opposition to the usual network fare. The alienation effects it used —including the collision between the soundtrack and the image, and the focus on television as a space for reading as opposed to watching— turned the piece into something completely unlike the typical television program or advertisement of the day. By forgoing imagery, Serra et Schoolman transformed a primarily iconic medium into a symbolic one, converting distracted television watching into an act of textual contemplation. In so doing, they increased the audience’s understanding, by comparaison, of how television usually delivers people into the hands of an advertiser on an endless flow of hypnagogic pictures. By stopping the flow of images, they broke with television’s lulling effect, which the Musak’s ironic counterpoint only heightened. Airing their work as the station sign-off, Serra and Schoolman had the last word for the night. Instead of sending viewers to sleep with patriotic clichés, Television Delivers People offered a jolt of critical analysis before bed. It suggested to viewers that television might yet be capable of delivering the people somewhere beyond the constraints of the new media state. »