Totally Tubular
Tubular Times: Camp, Horror, and Music Television: Video Art 1981-1993 | Real Art Ways (Hartford, CT) | Through January 14, 2024
The parodic title of this delightfully indulgent and musically cantankerous group exhibition of new media art from the 80s and early 90s says it all—grab a pair of headphones, leave 2024 behind and dive in. Yet watchers beware: identity politics, capitalist ruination, mental illness, public trust, the cult of celebrity, natural disaster and feminist critique are just some of the themes that weave throughout the 300 minutes of footage, and eerily boomerang us back into the moment we’re living in.
The same could be said for the joyfully tubular experimentation in early video as a medium. Sampling, light filters, sound distortion, speed ramping, frame shots, scrolling captions and supranational live broadcast are just some of the special effects that recall our everyday contributions to social media posting. The narrators, much like today’s TikTok and IG users, are predominantly the artists themselves, self-cast as influencers, icons, talking heads, entertainers, documentarians and instigators.
The premise of Tubular Times is loose and wily. This is not a show that purports to comprehensively or conclusively represent a twelve-year window of video art. Really the commonality is a shared reverence and skepticism for television’s ever-growing presence within the American household. Given this curatorial freedom, many of the works have never been shown side by side before.
One surprising constellation features videos with strictly musical scripts. A Surrealist-inspired video by Cecilia Condit, which opens in a mall, tells the story of a woman with a chronically flawed love life. The original lyrics include the story of a poodle exploding in a microwave oven. Nearby, a rock opera by Michael Smith casts a contemporary light on the history of Manifest Destiny. Dressed as a cowboy mayor, Smith pitches real estate plans to win the town’s vote. Two TVs down, Dara Birnbaum manufactures a music video for Jimi Hendrix’s Fire!, which Hendrix never produced because the release predated MTV and the birth of the music video genre by fourteen years. The simple video features scenes from a fast food drive through, and cuts to a girl on a roofdeck drinking a beer from a glass.
The system articulated in Birnbaum’s film delivers the exhibition’s takeaway. We are on display. We put ourselves on display. We consume. We get consumed. As we cozy into the nostalgic moments of this show, this doesn’t mean we can’t long for simpler pre-internet times, when we crafted home movies in our basements with friends, or just knew less about breaking news around the world. It reminds us that we’re still deeply invested in the act of making images of ourselves to figure out just who we are, and where we’re located, in this given system, or the next to come.
-Sarah Fritchey