TV ON THE RADIO #2
Curated by Kenneth Goldsmith
This is the second podcast that accompanies MACBA’s exhibition “Are You Ready for TV?” In the Museum, you 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, full of surrealistic interventions and disruptions. Or when artists work on television, there is often an embedded critique of the medium, something that questions the very essence of what our eyeballs are glued to every night.
As curator Chus Martínez writes about this show: ‘This is not an exhibition about television, but one conceived from the place of television. Its aim: to study how the diverse ways of grasping images and the life of concepts contribute to tracing the horizon of our cultural present.’In our first podcast, we examined what happened when audio artists used the sounds of television as a source for the audio works. The results – demonstrated to us by everyone from John Cage to the Evolution Control Committee – were rich and varied.
For this podcast, we actually listen to the soundtracks from the videos in the show themselves. In essence, we treat the 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. In other works, the visuals and sounds are deliberately ‘uninteresting,’ tending to highlight the mundane or the insignificant experiences of life, which of course, are equally rich in an inverted sort of way.
Although there are hundreds of works in the actual exhibition, we’ve selected ten to spotlight here that are particularly varied and interesting and which, taken as a whole, can provide you with the flavor of MACBA’s exhibition, “Are You Ready for TV?”.
Transcript
Transcript of TV ON THE RADIO #2, curated by Kenneth Goldsmith.
Transcript
Transcript of TV ON THE RADIO #1, curated by Kenneth Goldsmith.
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?".