Television

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.

Pirated satellite feeds revealing U.S. media personalities’ contempt for their viewers come full circle in Spin. TV out-takes appropriated from network satellite feeds unravel the tightly-spun fabric of television—a system that silences public debate and enforces the exclusion of anyone outside the pack of journalists, politicians, spin doctors, and televangelists who manufacture the news. Spin moves through the L.A. riots and the floating TV talk-show called the 1992 U.S. presidential election.

Slogans is a visual deconstruction of advertising slogans, a literal and metaphorical illustration of the disintegration and loss of meaning in the contemporary media landscape. Appropriating text from a series of familiar print advertisements—Choose Your Weapon, Play To Win, Talk Is Cheap—Muntadas enlarges, digitizes, and overlays words until they devolve into abstract mosaics. Accompanied by a banal muzak soundtrack, this display of text as image demonstrates advertising's insidious transformation of language into empty signifiers.

“[Segalove] pursues her self-analysis via the popular culture and TV addiction of her youth: seeing JFK shot on TV, falling in love with the TV repairman, being glued to the tube while suffering from the requisite bout of mononucleosis, and associating the memory of watching her parents kiss with the soundtrack of Dragnet.” —Marita Sturken, “Revising Romance: New Feminist Video,” Art Journal 45 (Fall 1985)

A deft and cunning re-examination of John Boy’s near-death experience at the sawmill. A homespun midnight deconstruction of an entire era of television mannerisms.

“One of the strengths of The Waltons, a video that records a session of TV viewing using a handheld camera, is its ability to convey how our surroundings inform our experience. The video doesn’t stray far from the images on the TV screen, but our attention is divided between the show’s action and the off-camera activity in the apartment.”

Playing back "visual quotations" of everything from Poltergeist to Blade Runner, Muntadas rescans the surface of the monitor, questioning the "nature" of media—film, television, video, and image. Television emerges as the medium to eat all mediums, raising the question: Is it possible,within the context of television, to tell art from life or fact from fiction? An endless row of generic TV monitors visually evokes a hall of mirrors as the expression of the cultural homogeneity and bland abundance achieved through the dominant medium of the late 20th century.