TV ON THE RADIO #1
Transcript
Curated by Kenneth Goldsmith
In MACBA’s exhibition, “Are You Ready for TV?”, a visitor can see what happens when the aesthetic of visual artists collides with the world of television. The results are anything but what you’d expect to see on TV. Likewise, when television collides with audio arts, a new and disconcerting soundtrack emerges, one that can only have been a product of artists swiping, sampling, détourning, recycling, remixing, and mashing-up sources emanating from the television. There’s a great history of audio works mashed up, inspired by and taken from TV and we’ll be listening to ten of them here.
Unlike the works in the exhibition, these more ephemeral gestures travel in different ways, often reinserting themselves back into mass culture by means of mechanical reproduction, spread widely and thinly across culture. In many cases, this type of distribution has impacted back upon popular culture itself, creating an historical echo chamber.
With no museum needed to reframe these works as art, the mere displacement from one medium into another creates an ecosystem unique to the recorded artifact, distinctly different than that of the visual. These works live on, perpetuating themselves in popular culture via the internet, as well as in the form of LPs, cassette tapes, CDs and MP3s.
Transcript
Transcript of TV ON THE RADIO #2, curated by Kenneth Goldsmith.
In this show, we treat visual works as if they're audio and see what happens. In most cases, we discover that the sounds emanating from the visual works can stand on their own as great listening experiences.
When television collides with audio arts, a new and disconcerting soundtrack emerges, one that can only have been a product of artists swiping, sampling, détourning, recycling, remixing, and mashing-up sources emanating from the television. This show rescues ten works, inspired by and taken from TV.
Chus Martínez
Chus Martínez speaks about the exhibition "Are you Ready for TV?".