Taking Waste Out of the Wasteland

People have been attacked by television all their lives. Now they can attack it back.

--Electronic Sculptor Nam June Paik

The younger generation has rebelled against its elders in the home. It has stormed the campuses. About the only target remaining in loco parentis is that preoccupier of youth, television. Last week the television generation struck there too, but the rebellion was half in fun: an art exhibition at Manhattan's Howard Wise Gallery entitled "TV as a Creative Medium."

Within the confines of two rooms, 25 TV sets glare and blare at one another. The ten artists, all in their 20s or 30s, are sculptors from the Kinetic School, research proteges of Marshall McLuhan or electronics experimenters, united by disgust with usual TV fare.

Kaleidoscope Console. John Seery, 28, disdainfully tilted a 17-in. color set on its back and imprisoned it in a quartz-like block of plastic. "When the TV stops functioning," explains Seery, "the work is complete." Earl Reiback, 33, an M.I.T.-trained nuclear physicist, stripped the phosphor coating from the glass screens on three sets, allowing the viewer to see electrons gleaming eerily inside the colorfully painted picture tube.

Eric Siegel, 25, who built his first closed-circuit TV system out of spare parts ten years ago, showed a 21-minute tape of classical and Beatles music accompanied by glowing visual abstractions that he dubs Psychedelevision in Color. Closer to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey than to Walt Disney's Fantasia, it is the sort of work that might well fill the extra channels on the cable antenna systems of the future. Eager to "take the waste out of the wasteland," Thomas Tadlock, 28, spent two years and a patron's $10,000 to create his Archetron. The result is a studio-size console, with 46 knobs and controls and four screens, that scrambles the signals of standard programming to produce an endless flow of kaleidoscopic images. Both Siegel and Tadlock are working toward what Nam June Paik, 36, a Korean-born virtuoso of electronic sculpture, calls "the Silent TV Station, transmitting only beautiful 'mood art,' the TV version of Vivaldi."

Kinetic Tangle. Paik's own contribution to the exhibit was an antic collaboration with Charlotte Moorman, the cellist from Little Rock, Ark. In 1967, Paik (pronounced Pike) and Moorman established themselves as a sort of cerebral John Lennon-Yoko Ono act when Charlotte, topless, played Paik's composition Opera Sextronique. Again last week, Charlotte let her concert gown fall to her waist, but this time her breasts were covered by two 3-in. TV sets. Explained Paik with a broad smile: "By using TV as a bra, the most intimate belonging of a human being, we try to humanize the technology."

Paik sold for $750 an ingeniously rewired color TV set that the owner can program by making sounds into two microphones. One mike receives the low tones and controls the width of a kinetic tangle of colored lines on the screen; the other mike picks up the high notes and regulates the height of the squiggles. A similar experiment, AC/ TV (Audio/Controlled Television), by Joe Weintraub, 26, gets its picture from a standard radio. "Very modern," says Paik. "The cathode-ray tube is replacing paper and pen. Paper is dead except as toilet paper. The cathode ray will also replace the paintbrush." In the other half of his exhibit, Participation TV, visitors are urged to perform in front of four video cameras. Three of the cameras shoot in distinct individual colors, to produce stunning multichrome effects.

Participation is the key to the show. The moment that a guest enters the eal-lery he falls under the eye of a video camera and finds his image being transmitted live from the center screen of a nine-TV-set exhibit called Wipe Cycle. After eight seconds delay, the entry scene is replayed on two of the other monitors, then later on two others. Regular commercial programming and tapes especially made by Cycle creators Frank Gillette, 27, and Ira Schneider. 30, alternate confusingly on all of the sets. The viewer feels disoriented in time, but he knows that he is caught inescapably in the age of television.

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