| This dissertation provides an account of artists' residency programs at two American public television stations in the earliest years of video art. The collaboration between artists and television professionals in an historical moment of rapid change in public media, visual arts, and social ideals illustrates the importance of institutional histories and dialogue between artistic and extra-artistic cultural spheres in post-war American art.;The residency programs at WGBH-TV in Boston and KQED-TV in San Francisco, both initiated in 1967, appear similar on the surface, but the differences between the two offer specific insight into the history of post-war modernism and the emergence of post-modern practices. At WGBH-TV in Boston, artists and television professionals collaborated closely to produce a number of artworks for broadcast. These works often undermined the ideals of individuality and autonomy that are treated as foundations of visual art production, by explicitly demonstrating the ways in which the collaborative environment of the television station and the conventions of public broadcasting shaped the practices of participating artists. At KQED-TV in San Francisco, on the other hand, artists tried to retreat from the television world even as they inhabited it, by eschewing broadcast and embracing modernist abstraction. Despite a desire for autonomy, however, artists at KQED found their practices instrumentalized in other ways, as the television studio became a creative laboratory that merged the ideal of medium specificity with the think-tank culture of collaborative research and development. These residency programs had an effect beyond the boundaries of the art world and the new genre of video art. In a number of television shows produced at WGBH, KQED and WNET-TV in New York, art spilled over into regular programming. As art galleries began to buy television monitors on which to display video art, a handful of television shows introduced the strategies and techniques of video art as a bridge to the counterculture, in order to connect with the increasingly powerful baby-boomer demographic. These television shows are not categorized as artworks, but they show significant points of overlap with those products of the residencies that have been so categorized, existing as genuine hybrids of art and television. The activities and works documented in this dissertation demonstrate a clear point of overlap and entanglement between cultural spheres that are often kept at arms length from one another. |
