New Media
in Late 20th-Century Art
by
 
Michael Rush
 
Publisher: Thames & Hudson 1999.
 
 
From Chapter 2: Video Art
Pages: 92, 93.
 
 
" Public television stations in the United States and Europe fostered experimentation by allowing accessto fully equipped studios. Starting in the late 1960's Boston's public television station, WGBH, with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, produced the New Television Workshop under the leadership of Fred Barzyk.
In 1969 six artists (Nam June Paik, Allan Kaprow, Otto Piene, James Seawright, Thomas Tadlock, and Aldo Tambellini ) made videotapes using WGBH equipment for a program called "The Medium is the Medium" which aired nationally. This was the widest exposure the new practice of video art had yet received."
 
"Swedish artists Ture Sjolander, Lars Weck, and Bengt Modin produced  M o n u m e n t  ( 1967 ),  a program for experimental television which combined pre-recorded film, slides, and videotapes in a process that distorted images during the transmission of the image from the tape to the television.  After seeing these for the first time, historian Gene Youngblood said, 'We see the Beatles, Charlie Chaplin, Picasso, the Mona Lisa, the King of Sweden, and other famous figuers distorted with a kind of insane electronic disease."
 
"Many innovations in what later became computer animation were inaugurated by video artists who early on developed electronic imaging techniques."
 
Michael Rush, 1999.
 
 
 
 
1966
see below:
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
DAGENS NYHETER
The largest daily news paper in Sweden
Bonnier AB
 
 
This following article about:  "TIME" by Ture Sjolander and Bror Wikstrom,  was published in Dagens Nyheter
August 29, 1966.
 
Signed: DIA
(Dick Idestam-Almqvist)
-----------------------------------------------
 
TV  "exposes" the present in electronic pictures during the Jazz Festival.
 
 
"We want to exhibit, not to inhibit"
 
So the artists Ture Sjolander and Bror Wikstrom say, of current interest as they are for the coming jazz festival within the Festival of Stockholm. Some time during the three days of the jazz festival (Sept 16 - 18) the two picture experimenter's new film is shown on TV. It is ready made for TV with the apparatus of the TV and with the basic function of the TV before one's sight.
 
Some year ago Sjolander and Wikstrom brought about a sensation by exposing pictures on giant billboards outdoor's in Stockholm's City. If you had something to display you shouldn't fence it, neither in the museums nor among the private art galleries, but expose it where people are to be found, they thought. So consequently they have chosen the biggest medium of communication, television, for their latest exhibition.
 
Sjolander - Wikstrom are fully conscious of the topicalness of today, another reason for choosing television. What else can be more actual than to demonstrate the formal possibilities of TV, and what else can be more actual than mirror the present while you are demonstrating these formal possibilities?
 
"Scanner" re-interprets.
"Time" is the name of the exhibition, which is based upon various actualities that Sjolander-Wikstrom have come across during the spring, for instance "Gemini" and foetal-pictures. The main part is taken up by the very much to fore avant-garde jazz-musician Don Cherry and his quintet at the Golden Circle.
 
The pictures are run through a specially built "scanner", an apparatus that in the ordinary cases is producing "real" pictures, but which in this sensitized state is "re-interpreting" what the camera has seen, and thus is creating new pictures. The technicians and the artists have decided what the apparatus looks like, and the apparatus has decided what the pictures look like.
 
The present is reflected.
Consequently the couple Sjolander-Wikstrom is demonstrating a phenomenon that is very much up to date just now: the electronic "machine" picture.
The Korean Nam June Paik is for the moment sitting at the Swedish Radio and is working with similar things. He will show his result at the festival of Fylkingen "Visions of the Present". But this will take place one week after Sjolander-Wikstrom's demonstration, televised on Swedish National Television.
 
Ture Sjolander and Bror Wikstrom hold that they by "TIME" have accomplished a total reflection of the present. Novelties and actualities have been interpreted by an apparatus that per se is a novelty and an actuality. A vision of the present.
Their Ideas they spread in different quises like rings on the water. "Time" will be shown at ABF (The Worker's Federation of Culture) during the festival, still pictures of the film - made on silk-screen - will be exposed, and an edition of 300 prints have already been sold to MULTIART, the darling of Kristian Romare.
Finally a summary of the film will be edited in book-form very soon. And then, furthermore, Sjolander-Wikstrom are negotiating just now about contributing at the festival which the Americans of "Fylkingen" are planning in New York in October.
Possibly parts of "Time" are going to be transmitted by satellite.
 
 
DIA
(Journalist Dick Idestam-Almqvist)