EXHIBIT: Revolution of the Eye at the Jewish Museum, NYC
This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and even it can inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it’s nothing but wires and lights in a box. – Edward R. Murrow
Murrow said the above at the 1958 RTDNA Convention, which may have done more to ruin his friendship with CBS Chairman Bill Paley than anything Murrow did during the hard-hitting See It Now (as portrayed in the film Good Night, and Good Luck), about television as a whole. Reading the text of the speech, it’s clear he was referring solely to the content, without considering presentation and context.
Indeed, it’s only as of this year that we finally get a full appreciation of the presentation and context involved in television in those days, and how much it owed to modern art. Revolution of the Eye: Modern Art and the Birth of American Television makes the unequivocal case that television as we know it from its early days owes a serious debt to the concordant artistic movements taking place just around the corner from the studios in New York.
Curated by Dr. Maurice Berger at University of Maryland Baltimore County, the National Jewish Archive of Broadcasting, and the Jewish Museum, the exhibit puts its focus straight in the face of gallery-goers by greeting them with a repeated loop of Barbra Streisand from her 1966 special for CBS, Color Me Barbra, singing “Gotta Move,” which was shot at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It sets the mood perfectly for what’s to come, showing the clear connections between art and television as attendees walk through the gallery to make the connection between modern art movements and presentation.
Among the highlights is the strong argument made to connect Surrealism with both Rod Serling and Ernie Kovacs. The fact that Serling’s intros to The Twlight Zone shares elements derived from Breton’s Second Surrealist Manifesto is made clear in side-by-side comparisons of both texts, although the clips from episodes of the series speak well on this point distinctly, as do clips from Kovacs’ series such as the one above.
A major highlight of the exhibit concerns the application of art to creative space, as “Black Rock,” the CBS Building in New York, merits its own mention. The network’s headquarters was designed by Eero Saarinen (his last commission) and furnished by Florence Knoll, both of whom were, at the time the building was erected, represented just down the street at the Museum of Modern Art. The artifacts and design specs from the building will appeal especially well to both those who are serious students of mid-century design, and viewers starting to go through Mad Men withdrawal.
Considerable focus is also given to the work of William Golden, who designed the CBS eye logo and was head of the network’s art department, overseeing in-house advertising and identification card art through the 1950s and 1960s. More than anything, his artistic choices and approaches gave the network an identifiable style that allowed CBS to call itself “the Tiffany Network” and be able to back it up by just presenting itself to the viewer.
The exhibit goes on further to show the influence of Pop Art in such shows as Batman (appropriately with clips from the episode “Pop Goes the Joker,” which itself was an indictment of modern art while it celebrated it), Laugh-In, and The Ed Sullivan Show. One interesting fact presented about the latter was that none of the sets for musical performers Sullivan hosted was ever reused; each artist on the show got their own unique staging (sometimes more than one, such as the Beatles received during their first appearance) making each performance a unique visual experience (as well as a stage manager’s nightmare).
For the exhibition mounting at the Jewish Museum, most of the presentation is in one main room; appropriately, there is a separate room behind closed doors dedicated to Andy Warhol, who himself engaged with the world at large from a distance off in the corner. In addition to clips from his video installations and his “Andy Warhol TV” pieces for Saturday Night Live, the exhibit contains what may be the only surviving copy of “Underground Sundae,” the TV commercial Schrafft’s restaurants commissioned Warhol to make in 1968 for their latest ice cream dessert. This rare commercial may be the ultimate pinnacle of modern art meeting television; it proves succinctly the exhibit’s theme (stated by the curator in pamphlets for the exhibit) that modern art “served as an influence and a model for shaping the new medium,” in a way that will never allow the attendee to again think of television as just wires and lights in a box.
Revolution of the Eye: Modern Art and the Birth of American Television is scheduled to run through September 20, 2015, at The Jewish Museum in New York; currently the exhibit is planning to tour afterwards through 2017 to Fort Lauderdale, FL, Andover, MD, Baltimore County, MD, and Chicago, IL.
