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Internet creativity: enjoy it while it lasts . . . .
By MIKE HALE
Walk into “Revolution of the Eye,” a revealing new exhibition that opens Friday at the Jewish Museum, and you’re face to face with the 23-year-old Barbra Streisand dashing about in a riotously colored Op-Art dress, singing, “Gotta find some place ... Some place where I can just be me.”
Several things might strike you about this excerpt from Ms. Streisand’s 1966 CBS showcase “Color Me Barbra.” With music on broadcast television today represented mostly by karaoke singing contests and disinterments of old Broadway shows, it’s a kick to watch the kind of rigorously conceptualized, designed and choreographed variety special that used to be a TV staple.
But the reason the clip is in the Jewish Museum show — which is subtitled “Modern Art and the Birth of American Television” and runs through Sept. 20 — is the building where Ms. Streisand is running around and singing. It’s the august Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the paintings on the walls are more than just backdrops for her numbers. Ms. Streisand communes with the art and imagines herself into it, “entering” portraits by Modigliani and Eakins and singing in the guise of the women they painted.
These days, the only time commercial TV ventures into an art museum is possibly to film a scene of thieves descending from the ceiling to steal something. “Revolution” demonstrates, in entertaining if somewhat hurried fashion, that this wasn’t always the case — that during its formative period from the 1950s into the 1970s, network television had a close, inquiring relationship with the high art of its time. We may think of TV before “All in the Family” as a vast wasteland, but the more than 260 items in the exhibition — clips, advertisements, art pieces, publications, merchandise — reveal the influence and even the input of artists from Duchamp and Dali to Ben Shahn, Saul Bass, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol.
After the initial blast of 1960s energy in “Color Me Barbra,” the show moves chronologically through TV history, jumping back into the black-and-white 1950s and early ’60s with “The Twilight Zone” and the pioneering comedy sketches of Ernie Kovacs. A compilation of clips shows Kovacs combining influences from silent-film clowns with Dadaist and Surrealist visual motifs. (Like all of the exhibition’s brief film compilations, it’s both mercifully quick and a little too cursory.)
The real exemplar from this period is “The Twilight Zone” with its forthright surrealism, a debt to then-contemporary artists like Magritte and Dali that Rod Serling, the show’s creator, readily acknowledged. A large screen presents opening credits sequences from different seasons of the show, one featuring a Chagall-like field of stars, another a Magritte-like floating door, a third a Duchampian spiral.
A large and handsome section then presents the influence of Modernist art and design on the corporate identity of CBS. Rather than clips from shows, the images here include the famous eye logo (based on Shaker hex symbols), promotional materials created by Mr. Shahn and striking print advertisements overseen by the design director Lou Dorfsman. A Dorfsman ad for a CBS News series on racism features a black man with stars and stripes painted on his face in white; a stark, tense lithograph of a scowling face by Mr. Shahn is for the cover of a souvenir book issued for a 1959 broadcast of “Hamlet.”
Later sections of the exhibition, lighter and more colorful, cover the pervasive influence of Op and Pop art on the look and feel of “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,” “Batman” and “The Ed Sullivan Show,” with work by Lichtenstein and Sol Lewitt for reference. There are also some instances of more direct crossover, like a clip from the short film “The Invisible Mustache of Raoul Dufy,” made by the U.P.A. animation studio for the Museum of Modern Art but never shown. Titles and interstitial sequences by Mr. Bass, the great graphic designer, are also a rare sight, since they are routinely stripped out of reruns and DVDs.
A final room looks at the TV work of Warhol, who embraced the medium fondly. A strange, self-referential, pulsating commercial he made for Schrafft’s ice cream would be a standout in any modern Super Bowl broadcast.
The impulse to reflect the world of high art onscreen died out in the 1970s, as the networks were overtaken by commercial imperatives and art was increasingly ghettoized on PBS (where it remains). Viewers of the exhibition may think of “Mad Men,” which has chronicled the decline of the period when the advertising and media worlds could still afford to think loftily.
Lynn Spigel, the professor of film and television at Northwestern University who wrote the introduction to the exhibition catalog, points out that there is a parallel between the early days of TV and the current explosion of digital outlets: a sudden need for content that creates opportunities for writers and artists. Perhaps a future exhibition title will include the words “The Birth of Online Video.”
Walk into “Revolution of the Eye,” a revealing new exhibition that opens Friday at the Jewish Museum, and you’re face to face with the 23-year-old Barbra Streisand dashing about in a riotously colored Op-Art dress, singing, “Gotta find some place ... Some place where I can just be me.”
Several things might strike you about this excerpt from Ms. Streisand’s 1966 CBS showcase “Color Me Barbra.” With music on broadcast television today represented mostly by karaoke singing contests and disinterments of old Broadway shows, it’s a kick to watch the kind of rigorously conceptualized, designed and choreographed variety special that used to be a TV staple.
But the reason the clip is in the Jewish Museum show — which is subtitled “Modern Art and the Birth of American Television” and runs through Sept. 20 — is the building where Ms. Streisand is running around and singing. It’s the august Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the paintings on the walls are more than just backdrops for her numbers. Ms. Streisand communes with the art and imagines herself into it, “entering” portraits by Modigliani and Eakins and singing in the guise of the women they painted.
These days, the only time commercial TV ventures into an art museum is possibly to film a scene of thieves descending from the ceiling to steal something. “Revolution” demonstrates, in entertaining if somewhat hurried fashion, that this wasn’t always the case — that during its formative period from the 1950s into the 1970s, network television had a close, inquiring relationship with the high art of its time. We may think of TV before “All in the Family” as a vast wasteland, but the more than 260 items in the exhibition — clips, advertisements, art pieces, publications, merchandise — reveal the influence and even the input of artists from Duchamp and Dali to Ben Shahn, Saul Bass, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol.
After the initial blast of 1960s energy in “Color Me Barbra,” the show moves chronologically through TV history, jumping back into the black-and-white 1950s and early ’60s with “The Twilight Zone” and the pioneering comedy sketches of Ernie Kovacs. A compilation of clips shows Kovacs combining influences from silent-film clowns with Dadaist and Surrealist visual motifs. (Like all of the exhibition’s brief film compilations, it’s both mercifully quick and a little too cursory.)
The real exemplar from this period is “The Twilight Zone” with its forthright surrealism, a debt to then-contemporary artists like Magritte and Dali that Rod Serling, the show’s creator, readily acknowledged. A large screen presents opening credits sequences from different seasons of the show, one featuring a Chagall-like field of stars, another a Magritte-like floating door, a third a Duchampian spiral.
A large and handsome section then presents the influence of Modernist art and design on the corporate identity of CBS. Rather than clips from shows, the images here include the famous eye logo (based on Shaker hex symbols), promotional materials created by Mr. Shahn and striking print advertisements overseen by the design director Lou Dorfsman. A Dorfsman ad for a CBS News series on racism features a black man with stars and stripes painted on his face in white; a stark, tense lithograph of a scowling face by Mr. Shahn is for the cover of a souvenir book issued for a 1959 broadcast of “Hamlet.”
Later sections of the exhibition, lighter and more colorful, cover the pervasive influence of Op and Pop art on the look and feel of “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,” “Batman” and “The Ed Sullivan Show,” with work by Lichtenstein and Sol Lewitt for reference. There are also some instances of more direct crossover, like a clip from the short film “The Invisible Mustache of Raoul Dufy,” made by the U.P.A. animation studio for the Museum of Modern Art but never shown. Titles and interstitial sequences by Mr. Bass, the great graphic designer, are also a rare sight, since they are routinely stripped out of reruns and DVDs.
A final room looks at the TV work of Warhol, who embraced the medium fondly. A strange, self-referential, pulsating commercial he made for Schrafft’s ice cream would be a standout in any modern Super Bowl broadcast.
The impulse to reflect the world of high art onscreen died out in the 1970s, as the networks were overtaken by commercial imperatives and art was increasingly ghettoized on PBS (where it remains). Viewers of the exhibition may think of “Mad Men,” which has chronicled the decline of the period when the advertising and media worlds could still afford to think loftily.
Lynn Spigel, the professor of film and television at Northwestern University who wrote the introduction to the exhibition catalog, points out that there is a parallel between the early days of TV and the current explosion of digital outlets: a sudden need for content that creates opportunities for writers and artists. Perhaps a future exhibition title will include the words “The Birth of Online Video.”