Collage: TV Depression / TV times of olde / Nam June Paik mirror image TV sculptures

RTomens, 2020

Amazingly, some people still watch the government broadcasts about the plague - suckers for punishment? Willing participants in Project Fear? Or just plain stupid? Masochistic? Whatever, TV can be depressing enough without new orders from Big Brother.

It's no secret that TV has been overtaken by online broadcasts, everything from news to podcasts, as we express our personal preferences instead of being lectured by corporate media masquerading as 'objective' reporting. We'll confirm our own bias, thanks. Isn't that what we do? Some profess to 'look at all sides' but they're rare and besides, after absorbing 'everything' don't they still have a bias which tips them one way or another? You'd have to have a blank sheet mind to hear various opinions and form your own afterwards. I'm not sure that being imprintable is preferable to forming your own preferences after years of experience and accumulated wisdom.

When making the collage above the idea evolved, rather than being there to start. First I cut out the child, then printed pages from John Stuart Mill's On Liberty over her and placed her on a background which is a photo I took years ago. The text was cut out from an old News Of The World (1960) article in which the journalist is moaning about depressing TV programmes. 

We've been moaning about TV since it started, probably. My Dad used to complain about old black and white films being shown. He had, after all, rented a colour television! As iPads are today, TV was then an electronic dummy to keep kids quiet. Still, I'm eternally grateful if that was the case because my memories would be poorer without Andy Pandy. 

Throughout my youth and teenage years there were TV events, certain plays and series, about which 'everyone' talked. Back then, limited channels had huge viewing figures. That Sex Pistols appearance on the Bill Grundy Show (December, 1976) was one such event; only then could it have been such a seismic moment. 

As a pre-pubescent kid I'd often draw or write whilst the family around me watched TV. My powers of concentration were far greater then. Whilst Dad cursed the Labour communists on the news (being Latvian, he had a right), I would be either writing science fiction short stories or drawing spaceships to accompany them. Fast forward a few decades and I can see Nam June Paik's retro-futuristic TV sculptures, wherein my childhood obsessions and environment merge. Perhaps that's why they resonate with me. I see them not merely as quaint retro assemblages, but invested with something real from my past. I look at the flickering screens as if watching part of my history....myself as a TV-watching, sci-fi obsessed kid mirrored in Paik's witty, ironic homage to technology. Even when I wasn't actively watching TV, it's messages were seeping into my head...be they news of industrial strikes or the latest drama at the Crossroads motel. 

Whilst our views of the world may change along with the media we absorb, after a few decades, for better or worse, we each have a set of experiences shaped, in part, by that media. I'm unaware of political propaganda via TV having influenced my views in the past, but who knows how Bill and Ben, the Flower Pot Men, influenced my thinking? I suspect they went some way towards making me what I am today; wobbly on my legs (first thing in the morning) and frequently given to spouting gibberish!