I was saddened today to learn of the death of David Hall. David was head of Film, Video, and Sound at Maidstone College of Art when I studied there in the early 1980s; as an artist, a teacher, a writer, and an organiser, his influence on successive generations of video and installation art is profound and abiding. He was a true pioneer whose work was consistent in its integrity and rigour, in particular in its relationship to context, significantly television as site.
I was in touch with David on a fairly regular basis until very recently, he inspired great respect and will be deeply missed. By way of tribute I have reproduced below the review I wrote of his last major show, first published in Moving Image Review & Art Journal, Vol 2, No 1, 2013
see also
David Hall
REWIND
Luxonline
In restaging and reformulating three major works from
David Hall’s career, ‘End Piece…’ traces his key concerns across some of the
most groundbreaking works of video art in the early 1970s and 1980s. While
video art may well be the commonly used, generic name for this practice
historically, its scope is both too narrow and too general to describe Hall’s oeuvre:
his work is concerned mostly with video situated in social, participatory
contexts, not only as an art proposition, but also as a means of exploring
art’s role and status in society. The site where these concerns meet is
television and Hall’s career, as exemplified here, encompasses that broadcast
medium from its birth to its recent analogue death, from its broadest affects
to its most specific applications and formulations.
Of the two smaller works in the show, Progressive
Recession (1974) was, I assume, something of a revelation for the majority
of visitors, including those, like me, who were aware of the work but had only
seen it through documentation. This cannot prepare one for the profound
revelation that participation in the work inspires. Its structure is
deceptively simple: nine monitors arranged in a row of seven with one set at 90
degrees to the row at each end, a live camera on top of each monitor, feeding
others progressively down the row, and with the two end monitor cameras feeding
each other. This dry description cannot anticipate the discombobulating
electronic hall of mirrors-cum-maze experienced when alone, or the complex
technologically mediated mesh of social relations when the room is full of
people. When the fourth monitor’s camera was showing its image on a monitor
three ahead in the row, cognitive dissonance arose from the confusion of
viewing another visitor’s face where one might plausibly assume one’s own
‘mirror’ image to be. Rather than reiterate a notion of a televisual public as
a disembodied network of passive viewers experiencing a medium as individual
consumers, this is something like a closed-circuit microcosm for the potential
of a social space created by screen-based media. Hall was playfully inventing a
possible alternative use for the live feedback of the image in video and partly
anticipating more recent online developments such as Skype. The piece was
lovingly recreated at Ambika P3 using vintage analogue video equipment, but the
experience was fresh and utterly contemporary in the moment of participation; this
in spite of the innumerable everyday encounters with public CCTV and screens in
urban streetscapes, now, in the twenty-first century.
 |
| Progressive Recession, David Hall, 1974, installed in 'The Video Show', Serpentine Gallery, 1975 |
An often-reproduced image of the work’s first
exhibition in ‘The Video Show’
(Serpentine Gallery, London 1975) shows a Girl Guide group interacting with the
installation, a reminder that it always has been Hall’s intention to wrest the
art away from an ‘elite’ audience towards broader conceptual and physical
accessibility. [1]
Progressive Recession might draw comparison with Bruce Nauman’s 1970
closed-circuit video installation Going Around the Corner Piece, in
which visitors were always a few tail-chasing
steps behind their images captured by apparently ubiquitous surveillance
cameras. The work created a sculptural collision of interior space
and surveillance. By comparison, Hall’s Progressive Recession is more
concerned with spatiality and spectatorship, displacement and the problematic
of the work of art, themes that re-emerge in TV Interruptions, Hall’s
most notorious work. [2]
 |
Interruption and Tap Piece from TV Interruptions, David Hall, 1971
|
TV Interruptions was exhibited at Ambika P3 in its recently
reconfigured form as an installation. However, TV Interruptions has its
roots away from the confines of the conventional art gallery: the original site
of reception was Scottish Television in 1971. Famously, each short, black and
white piece was broadcast over ten days, one each day, as part of a series of
site-specific commissions. The works appeared, unannounced and unaccredited
during the usual programming, and the TV audience, in those days representing a
large proportion of the Scottish population, would certainly have been
surprised if not shocked to see their television set apparently filling with
water (Tap Piece), a static time-lapse view from a window of a cloudy
sky (Window Piece), a burning TV set interrupted by a blank screen and
the spoken word ‘interruption’ (Interruption Piece), or two figures
within the same frame moving at markedly different speeds accompanied by an
interminable bleeping sound (Two Figures Piece). As Hall himself
has testified:
I went to an old gentleman’s club in
Princess Street in Edinburgh and the TV was on, and Tap Piece was going
to come on. They had a TV on all the time and they were all dozing or reading
newspapers, and then suddenly the TV began to fill up with water and the
newspapers dropped, they all woke up and looked amazed. They were disgruntled
and then it finished, and they all dozed off again. That seemed to me to be
actually quite a positive thing. It was the sort of the thing I was looking
for, I think. (Hatfield 2005) [3]
Certainly, it was one of Hall’s intentions to bring to
the viewers a demonstration of the TV as a physical object in the room,
something the realism of the on-screen image sought to mask. TV
Interruptions also disrupted the normalizing aspect of regular broadcasts
and further extended the impact of the work into a wider social sphere through
the interaction of viewers. One can imagine that viewers, whose options at the
time were restricted to three channels, might have had conversations in their
work places, or even down the pub, about the strange broadcasts they had seen
the night before. This particular social aspect of television has now been
largely diffused through a multiplicity and ubiquity of choice of digital
channels, Sky TV, the Internet and so on.
The TV Interruptions broadcasts pre-date the TV
‘gallery of the airways’, initiatives such as Channel 4’s Eleventh Hour
or Ghosts in the Machine (1982–1988 and 1986, respectively). Here,
artists’ work was shown or commissioned to fill a slot of late-night airtime.
While these broadcasts may have attracted new audiences for artists’ moving
image work via a mass medium, they did so by recreating the habitus of the
elitist space of the art venue on television. Hall’s imperative was to work against
such elitism, in whatever social context it occurred, on earth as it was on
television; his tactic was to deploy the artwork as a surprise intervention,
not as a domesticated object of the gallery system.
This is the third time I have seen TV Interruptions
represented as an installation (previously at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte
Reina Sofia, Madrid and the ‘REWIND’ launch exhibition, Dundee Contemporary
Arts, both in 2006) and I persistently find it problematic and perplexing in
this configuration. The original was site- and time specific (TV as schedule,
furniture, broadcast and broader social network), and each piece was produced
and aired within 24 hours. If ephemerality and reception by an audience as a
series of one-off, unexpected events is conceptually integral to the work, what
is the implication of restaging it when that context is no longer and can no
longer exist? For the installation, Hall selected seven of the original ten
pieces that were broadcast; they were replayed on seven monitors positioned at
roughly head height on plinths, arranged in such a way that it was impossible
to view them simultaneously. Monitors obscured other monitors, individual
pieces appeared in apparently haphazard order, so that one might have
encountered Tap Piece, or Interruption Piece, not as self-contained
single screen works of finite duration but looped, so encountered at any point
near the beginning, middle or end. Hall may have inadvertently succeeded in
making the discrete video works difficult to view within a conventional art
context, but a question remains about the efficacy of this strategy. Whereas
the original work, in context, created a productive problematic resonating far
beyond the film/TV pieces as objects, here it became hermetically aesthetic.
This incarnation of TV Interruptions is now about the problem of re-contextualizing
a site-specific work in any art space anywhere, at any time. Furthermore, to
undermine the resonance of each video by making them more difficult to
appreciate seems to me to be a far less potent or provocative gesture than
would have been the works’ original appearance in a broadcast context.
 |
1001 TV Sets (End Piece), David Hall 2012, Ambika P3, London,
detail featuring Stooky Bill TV, David Hall, Channel Four, 1990 |
However, I have no such reservations about the show-stopping
‘1001 TV Sets (End Piece)’ (2012), a reworking of the installations made
originally with Tony Sinden as 60 TV Sets (1972) at Gallery House, Goethe-Institut,
London and 101 TV Sets (1974), at the Serpentine Gallery. Indeed, TV
Sets evolved into an installation of such contemporary relevance that it is
best considered as an entirely new work. It would have been as hard in the
early 1970s to imagine the end of television as until recently it was to
imagine the end of capitalism. [4] ‘1001 TV
Sets (End Piece)’ was a spectacular time-based monument to the end of analogue
television, which also manages to symbolically contain its inception and
ghostly aftermath. The vast basement space of Ambika P3 was used to stunning
effect. The visitor was met with the full impact of a sea of scavenged analogue
television sets of different sizes and vintage placed roughly at irregular
angles and screen up, spreading out across the huge floor space. As in earlier
versions of the work, each television was tuned to one of Britain’s five
terrestrial TV channels. The sound of the spectacle preceded the vision of
massed televisions, the combined audio of the airwave spectrum relayed from
hundreds of tinny TV speakers. The title of the piece is misleading: there were
slightly fewer than 1000 because secreted among the televisions tuned to
broadcasts were a number of monitors playing Hall’s 1990 Channel 4 TV
commission Stooky Bill TV. On entering the installation, one became
immersed in the spectacle of fractured, undulating light, the sound rising into
the rafters of this one-time experimental industrial space. [5]
Descending into the belly of the work, one could concentrate on the detail of
individual televisions or stand back and bathe in the babble of the medium en
masse.
During the opening of the exhibition, I encountered a
symbolic herald of the medium giving up its ghosts, when that most iconic
emblem of British televisual culture, the sustained trumpet from the theme tune
to Coronation Street, emanated from 200 or so TVs and seemed to float up
and out of the installation, through the rafters of the space and into the
night sky beyond. Clearly identifiable from the surrounding babble after
several decades of repetitive familiarity, ‘Corrie’ is one of the few surviving
television institutions that the original TV Interruptions are almost
certain to have interrupted. As the United Kingdom’s longest-running soap opera,
it has come to epitomize a base-line norm in British televisual culture and is
an entirely appropriate last symbolic gasp from this graveyard for analogue
television sets.
Television, as an amorphous presence that has for so
many decades constructed a ‘virtual’ social space, was both symbolized and
concretized here, while during the run of the show it finally became a medium
fully remediated in a cross-platform digital afterlife, beyond its original
technical and physical specificity. Allusions to death, ghosts and resurrection
may seem hyperbolic and fanciful, but the real triumph of ‘End Piece’ is in its
incorporation of analogue television’s moment of death as part of its deep
technological structure. The exhibition of the work was programmed to span the
complete switch over of television broadcasting from the analogue signal to
digital information. Over the course of a couple of weeks, the image and sound
of the TV sets were incrementally snuffed out and at the close of the
exhibition the only audible sound was the hiss of white noise, while the only
discernible image playing across the surfaces of the TV sets was the agitated
snow of untuned signals. In this sense, television’s passage from analogue into
digital remediation is complete; it is no longer confined to a distinct piece
of furniture as TV Interruptions, or indeed the self-referential
narrative by the then familiar face and voice of newsreader Richard Baker in
Hall’s This is a TV Receiver (1976), might implicitly and explicitly
have drawn attention to. [6] TV now
streams alongside other digital media formats, which is to say all formats,
across numerous technological platforms, from the cinematically spectacular
widescreen plasmas on the living room wall, to the portable laptop, tablet and
smartphone. The longer-term significance of television no longer being discreet
and definable also derives from viewer behaviour, and use; henceforth habit
will most likely determine the essential qualities of a medium as much as any
of its technological factors. For the original TV Interruptions back in
1971, television occupied a dominant position in the immediate and expanded
social sphere, as the single moving image medium rooted in the domestic domain.
Now liberated from furniture, television has lost its dominance of the screen,
any screen. Context, use and behaviour are fundamental and television is now
viewed and interacted with live and on-demand, on and alongside the web,
various social media, audio-visual communication services such as Skype, games,
word processors, spreadsheets, to-do lists and so on; crucially this occurs
everywhere where there are screens, which is everywhere. If the act of TV
viewing is no longer largely spatially confined to the domestic context, where
does this leave the expanded social space of television? Expanded social space
itself is migrating onto networks and interacted through screen-based devices.
While this erosion of TV as a technical and social
reality has been gradual and incremental over many years, it is now complete.
While installed for a few brief weeks, 1001 TV Sets bore witness to the
death of analogue as a kind of event that the medium performed itself. In this
sense the work followed a common strategy of Hall’s work, that is, to set up a
situation and let the rest unfold unaided, a process that applies equally to Progressive
Recession and TV Interruptions, at least in the latter’s original
form. Once analogue TV had given up the ghost in ‘1001 TV Sets (End Piece)’,
another ghost of television remained in the shape of the ventriloquist’s dummy
Stooky Bill, the first object ever to be transmitted as a television image,
albeit to an audience of two, in the inventor John Logie Baird’s workshop in
1925. The image of Baird’s dummy continued to hector the post-analogue present
on three of Hall’s screens for the remaining weeks of the exhibition after
analogue broadcasting had dissolved into air.
 |
David Hall on his B.E.A. Artists' Placement Group placement
filming cloud formations over the Swiss Alps. |
The problem of the
place and the space of TV is clearly something that has exercised Hall for much
of his career; he may be recognized as something of a pioneer of video art in
the United Kingdom, but it is the social and collective participation in what
we might characterize as ‘the televisual’ that has preoccupied him the most. As
we have seen, this social dimension is coupled with something of an anti-elitist
determination to make work for situations and audiences outside the art bubble.
Hall’s engagement with the social and industrial institution of broadcast TV is
complemented by, and was perhaps developed through, his involvement in Barbara
Steveni and John Latham’s Artists’ Placement Group (APG) in the early 1970s.
APG’s intention was to place artists in industrial contexts, as ‘incidental
persons’. The placements would have an open brief, and the artists’ roles were
often left intentionally unspecified. In this context, Hall worked with British
European Airways (BEA), and, as well as engaging in extensive negotiations with
the British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC), he was nominated for a
National Coal Board placement. He certainly participated in many discussions
with various ‘Captains of Industry’, and the Scottish Television TV
Interruptions project was occasionally presented as a placement. [7]
Hall’s determination to re-situate art was informed by
his understanding of television, one that followed Marshall McLuhan’s concept
of broadcast media as an extension of social space, connected to both the lived
realities and social construction of the quotidian environment; this is the
context that the TV medium itself creates. These intertwine in the activities
of making art outside the art world, which, with an audience ‘completing’ the
work, bears all the hallmarks of participatory art. In Artificial Hells:
Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (2012), Claire Bishop
identifies in participatory art a desire to overturn the traditional
relationship between the art object, the artist and the audience, by producing
situations that enable a return to ‘the social’. Bishop’s critique outlines a
fairly conventional Marxist approach to the participatory advocating a dominant
narrative of anti-passivity, designed to counter the predicament of people
reduced to acting as a medium for the message, and ‘the masses’ paralysed by
spectacle. In spite of its egalitarian ethos, participatory art leaves ‘Art’ in
place as a category, but constantly flies into and across other disciplines, so
that art and the social are sustained in continual tension. Bishop stops short
of discussing interventional work such as Hall’s or taking into account the
post-McLuhan, post-Fordist ‘space’ of broadcast media as a context for radical
incursion. One might ask, in post-analogue media, are the terms ‘art’,
‘artist’, ‘audience’, ‘broadcast medium’, ‘context’ and so on, such easily
separable, discreet categories? Are they not part of the more complex mesh that
makes up ‘the social’? TV viewing may have been considered passive, as indeed
art viewing may also be, nonetheless, each involves participation in the
construction of context, then as now.
The works in ‘End Piece’ mark the passing of an
analogue age when in artists’ moving image there was strict polarization in
medium specificity between film and video. Subsequently, digital media
technologies have been instrumental in breaking down such distinctions, as high
definition projections surpass the image and sound quality of material film in
the gallery space. Analogue video and film material, where they have been
embraced by contemporary practitioners, are more often than not employed
unproblematically. None of this is particularly surprising with the reach of
moving image media into every sphere of life.
Uniquely, among artists of his generation, Hall’s
practice extends beyond the hermetic concerns of the art bubble to probe the
specificities of sites in the public mediascape and their attendant social
relations. Hall does not simply conceive of broadcast television as a hegemonic
institution to be subverted by artistic incursions into enemy territory;
instead, he employs and explores televisual media as an extensible mesh, in
line with McLuhan’s concept of media as an extension of human social relations.
His televisual interventions and participatory works, unlike Nam June Paik’s,
do not propose to take revenge on TV, [8] neither
do they posture as radical subversion, but are more subtle and nuanced
revelations, working uniquely through, with and within the deep ecology of an
inextricably social mesh.
In an era of the ubiquitous, increasingly mobile and
dematerialized digital networks, all dedicated to mediating social relations
across countless screens and cameras, a large number of television sets in a
cavernous London space became a timely, spectacular and poignant celebration of
Hall’s considerable achievements, and the demise of his muse.
References
Bishop, Claire (2012), Artificial Hells:
Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, London: Verso.
McLuhan, Marshall (1964), Understanding Media: The
Extensions of Man, Cambridge: MIT Press.
Notes
[1] "Jackie Hatfield: ‘There’s that great image of […] [Progressive Recession] with a Girl Guide group’.
David Hall: ‘I used that image because again I feel it’s quite important to show that that wasn’t your average dedicated gallery audience, it was just a bunch of kids, but they loved it’" (Hatfield 2005).
[2] As Hall has stated with regard to TV Interruptions: ‘I thought it was very important that it would create a problematic for the viewer, which I think is actually what art should do’ (Hatfield 2005).
[3] The reaction wasn’t always so benign, when he watched Two Figures with some TV engineers in a repair shop, at first, they were ‘all very enthusiastic’. However, the mood changed with the Two Figures piece:
"I remember it beeping and it went on and on and on. At the end of it, there was so much anger in their faces I had to leave by the back door. But again it just used all those expectations. If anything is more than 20 seconds, people lose patience, especially with television." (Hatfield 2005)
[4] To paraphrase Jameson: ‘[…] it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism’ (Jameson, Fredric (1994), The Seeds of Time, New York, NY: Columbia University Press).
[5] Ambika P3 is housed in a concrete construction, a former testing hall built in the 1960s for the University of Westminster’s School of Engineering.
[6] Made for BBC2’s Arena programme, This is a TV Receiver featured Baker reading a statement denying that he was present, that it was his voice emanating from the receiver:
"This is a television receiver, which is a box made of wood, metal or plastic. On one side, most likely the side you are looking at, there is a large rectangular opening that is filled with a curved glass surface that is emitting light […] these form shapes that often appear as images, in this case of a man, but it is not a man." (quoted in Elwes, Catherine (2005), Video Art, a Guided Tour, London: I.B. Tauris, p. 31)
[7] APG’s activities were documented extensively in the recent exhibition ‘The Individual and the Organisation: Artist Placement Group 1966–79’ at Raven Row, London (27 September–16 December 2012), which included video documentation of Hall’s participation in discussions at APG’s ‘inn7o’ exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, London, December 1971, and other meetings, which included representatives of corporations such as British Steel and ICI. This documentation is also held at the British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design.
[8] Paik is often cited as declaring ‘Television has been attacking us all our lives, now we can attack it back’.
