This group exhibition, connected to Esopus 15: Television (2010) featured videos by issue contributors Alex Bag, Dara Birnbaum, and Johan Grimonprez.

All three artists are well known for their deep engagement with, and layered critiques of, the medium of television. Over the course of her career, Dara Birnbaum has created a highly influential series of videos and multimedia installations that have worked to examine, subvert, and deconstruct the ideological underpinnings of television programming. Here, she contributed seven groundbreaking works from the ’70s and ’80s: Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978–79); Kiss the Girls, Make Them Cry (1979); Pop-Pop Video: General Hospital/Olympic Women Speed Skating (1980); Pop-Pop Video: Kojak/Wang (1980); Remy/Grand Central: Trains and Boats and Planes (1980); PM Magazine/Acid Rock (1982); and MTV: Artbreak (1987). All of these videos employ Birnbaum’s deft, dynamic reconstruction of television imagery from formats such as quiz shows, soap operas, and sports programs, allowing her to accomplish her self-professed goal of “manipulating a medium which is itself highly manipulative.”

Johan Grimonprez also has a longstanding interest in reappropriating televised imagery to expose its deeper ideological undercurrents; for TV/Video, he contributed his acclaimed film essay dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, which premiered at Centre Pompidou and Documenta X in Kassel in 1997. The film focuses on television’s (pre–9/11) glamorized representations of airplane hijackings, using a dizzying array of recycled images taken from news broadcasts, commercials, Hollywood movies, and cartoons, to, in the artist’s words, “highlight the value of the spectacular in our catastrophe culture.”

Alex Bag mixes the vernacular of television broadcasting with irreverently humorous monologues in her deliberately low-tech videos. She was represented in the exhibition by four works spanning nearly a decade of her practice: Untitled (Project for the Andy Warhol Museum) (1996); Harriet Craig (1998); Le Cruel et Curieux Vie Du La Salmonellapod (2000); and Coven Services (2004). The videos engage with—and parody—a range of TV genres, from nature documentaries to reality shows, and provoke viewers to question how they define themselves in relation to popular culture, advertising, and the artworld.

The exhibition and issue launched at an Esopus Space event on November 11, 2010.