Art Rangers in Radioland
by Jacki Apple
Radio holds a unique place in American cultural history, and in the
shaping of popular culture in particular. It is the bridge between the
two halves of this century, the memory trace from one generation to
the next, traversed by world leaders, sportscasters, crooners, comedians,
cowboys, private eyes, and space travelers, voices imprinted into the
American psyche resonating across time and space. Through high times,
hard times, and a worldwide war, for three decades radio held a central
place in our living rooms. Then it was superceded by television. Still,
for another two decades it was a primary conduit for youth culture and
it's music -- rock n' roll, and for a vast majority of Americans who
were in their teens and twenties in the 50s and 60s, radio and automobiles
are inseparable. Not surprisingly radio has continued to hold a special
fascination for a generation of American artists for whom it has been
an indelible part of their life experience and imagination, and between
1980 and 1994 a number of them reconceived radio for their own time
as a bridge between art and popular culture.
Ironically, in the 90s radio resurfaced as a cultural force in the popular
television series Northern Exposure and the youth film Pump Up The Volume.
In both instances radio operates as an intimate personal voice that
poses philosophical questions about the values of the community. The
unconventional structure and content of KBEAR's "Chris in the Morning"
local community broadcasts, and a teenager's nightly home studio radio
programs directly reflect the radio works produced by artists in the
80s and their incursion into mass media. In the former a small town
artist/disk jockey's ongoing discourse is a radio "artwork"
that mingles the daily life of Cicely, Alaska with art, literature,
and intellectual and spiritual inquiry into the human condition. It
is the voice of conscience and the community's cultural catalyst. In
the latter a disenchanted high schooler's late night pirate interventions
puncture the prevailing system when his alter ego "Hard Harry's"
uncensored personal confessions, raunchy sex and underground rock and
rap, turn into free speech guerilla politics that rally a population
of alienated suburban teens into a motivated empowered community.
Although avant-garde artists have experimented with radio since its
inception, it was the advent in the 1970s of non-commercial, listener-sponsored
public radio on the FM band, including college and local community stations
that opened up the possibilities of art on the airwaves, not simply
as an isolated incident but as a viable alternative to rigidly formatted
commercial radio dominated by advertising interests. This new opportunity
was augmented by the revolution in both recording and broadcast technology
and easy consumer access to sophisticated equipment and processes that
rapidly changed the nature of production and distribution. Thus in the
1980s radio and audio artworks -- sound art, experimental narratives,
sonic geographies, pseudo documentaries, radio cinema, conceptual and
multimedia performances, a whole panoply of broadcast interventions
that confronted the politics of culture, subverted mass media news and
entertainment, and challenged aural perceptions, infiltrated the broadcast
landscape and acquired an audience.
Although these works encompass a diversity of esthetics and styles,
the artists share a sensibility radically different from that of their
predecessors whose roots are in a European avant-garde tradition. It
is a distinctly postmodern American sensibility of blurred boundaries
between realities -- a convergence of art concepts and forms and media
culture, of history, memory, fantasy, and fiction, of public and private
space. Unlike the Dada/Fluxus based sound poetry, musique concrete,
and audio/radio art explorations of John Cage's disciples, contemporary
American radio art of the 80s and 90s, from the most complex hi-tech
studio productions to the raw energy of live and interactive broadcasts,
is predominantly engaged with employing new narrative strategies and
subverting media conventions. The result is a montage of performance
art, poetry, politics, worldwide music, urban noise, manipulated nature,
popular entertainment and advertising, vernacular speech, fractured
language, all modes of talk and an array of cultural voices from the
mainstream to the marginal. These artists cross disciplines, raid all
genres and recontextualize them into new hybrids. Their work reflects
the socio-cultural complexities and contradictions of life in late twentieth
century America, as it grapples with the problem of art as a mode of
communicating ideas in a media dominated environment.
The very phrase 'radio art' may seem like an ironic contradiction, an
oxymoron even, given the nature of the mainstream broadcast landscape.
But it is in actuality a paradigm for our time in which ancient traditions
of aural culture collide with instant information access and retrieval
in the global village of mass media telecommunications systems. From
the artist's point of view radio is an environment to be entered into
and acted upon, a site for various cultural voices to meet, converse,
and merge in. It may even be conceived of as a means of intra and interplanetary
travel.
If in the hierarchy of media television has been the condo in the sky,
radio has been a basement apartment, a lot cheaper and easier to break
into. But basement apartments also have a long history as the sanctuaries
and fertile abode of revolutionaries, poets, artists, and inventors.
In the early 80s visual and performance artists, composer/musicians,
and writer/performers approached radio as an alternative art space,
a performance arena, a distribution system, a public art forum, and
they have since used it both as an art context, and an artmaking medium
in itself with specific properties. In one sense radio art in the 80s
and early 90s carried on the spiritof the original "alternative"
spaces of the early// 70s, those industrial lofts that were the spawning
ground of conceptual and performance art. Both radio art and the ephemeral
art of that period sought to wrench itself free from the commodities
marketplace of the gallery and the elitist prestige of the museum in
order to inhabit public space and public consciousness. It presented
itself as information and experience, a participatory transaction between
artist and viewer/listener, as opposed to goods. In the materialistic
80s art on the airwaves, spurred by a similar impetus, has had farther
reaching implications.
Radio art has operated on the aesthetic, perceptual, and conceptual
frontier, marginalized not only within all the art disciplines it encompasses,
but inside the system of distribution it has infiltrated. Like astronauts
defying the gravitational laws of time and space, contemporary practitioners
have crossed the borders from artland to mass medialand throwing into
question definitions of art based on context, while attempting to redefine
the nature of the site of their activities and position their "product"
in relation to it's non-art counterpart. Arty journalism is NOT radio
art, though journalistic devises may be employed by radio artists. Likewise,
it is not traditional radio drama, though it may use dramatic conventions.
It is not, strictly speaking, music, though it may be composed entirely
of non-textual sound. In addition, radio art investigates the nature
of language itself -- speech as culture, and sound as language --in
an era when language has been corrupted by euphemism, double-speak,
jargon, and propaganda. As an aural artform it reaffirms that it's not
just what we say, but the way we say it. Given all these characteristics
the entire enterprise is inherently political outside of the specific
content of any individual work.
On one hand, radio as a free, easily accessible, portable performance
space without walls, democratizes art consumption by making art available
at the switch of a dial, and by sometimes engaging the listener as participant.
Initially it was relatively easy for artists to simply walk in the back
door and onto the airwaves of public radio unobstructed. For a brief
time they traversed unmonitored airwaves like guerillas in the night,
beaming into automobiles across the urban sprawl. Foghorns in the foggy
bog, they developed an audience, an odd cross-section of the populace
scanning the broadcast band for a signal amongst the babble in Babel.
On the other hand, since the late 80s, public radio more than any other
medium has been subject to extreme censorship both outside and inside
the system, with audio and performance artists and writers caught at
the center of the controversy over civil liberties, freedom of speech
and cultural diversity, public access to public broadcasting, and who
controls comunications technology. From the point of view of those who
own and control mass media, radio art may be perceived as anarchistic,
unpredictable, uncategorizable, and therefore politically undesirable.
The goal of the media artist is after all to communicate a different
version of reality to a vast number of people, many of whom might not
otherwise be exposed to it. Since the fluid composition of this audience
does not adhere to marketing research demographics, the most effective
way of suppressing this work is to declare that such an audience does
not in fact exist, or that its numbers are too small to be of significance.
In other words, to manipulate statistical data and apply marketplace
prerogatives to so-called non-commercial public radio. Given the collapse
of arts funding, the vagaries of cultural politics, and the seductions
of cyberspace, radio art as such may well be on its way to becoming
an endangered species, or a cultural form about to mutate and adapt
to new technologies as artists seek to gain a footing in the uncharted
territories of the digital superhighway and expanding telecommunications
media.
What contemporary radio artworks share with the golden age of popular
radio is the way in which they intimately engage the imagination of
the listener. The sonic arts bring us into a different perceptual relationship
with the world, and the complexity of the aural palette with its ability
to create a multidimensional reality rich in sensations and images has
endowed radio as a medium with a special capacity for transport. While
film and video remain always outside the body, a facsimile on a screen,
and words remain bound to the page of the book, aural media both surround
and penetrate the body. Radio in its most creative manifestations is
the original holographic virtual space. Projected onto the visual field
of the inner eye, resonating along aura pathways in the boom box of
the brain, words and sounds become living presences. Think of radio
as words with wings, Swedenborg's and Wim Wenders' angels descending
to whisper in your ear, their breath caressing your skin. Thoughts are
energy transformed into matter through the voice. The voice is the engine
of desire that makes flying possible.
This book explores and documents the work of seventeen artists -- Terry
Allen, Charles Amirkhanian, Jacki Apple, Sheila Davies, Earwax (Barney
Jones, Markos Kounalakis, Jim McKee), Rinde Eckert, Shelley Hirsch,
Lisa Jones/Alva Rogers, Don Joyce (Negativeland), William Morelock,
David Moss, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Rachel Rosenthal, Donald Swearingen,
Helen Thorington, Gregory Whitehead -- whose endeavors have significantly
defined the American radio art enterprise from 1980 to 1994. Their work
characterizes a uniquely American sensibility, culture and landscape,
and their diverse voices and visions represent a crossection of our
individual and collective histories and experiences. In that sense,
all of this work may be seen as a form of cultural autobiography and
oral history.
The majority of these artists have sustained bodies of work in the visual
and performing arts, and they bring that formal vocabulary to the works
they have created for radio. Each has experimented with ways to tell
a "story", introducing unconventional structures to traditional
broadcast formats. This holds true in both textual and non-textual works.
Some approach radio as an architectural space to be constructed sonically
and linguistically; or as the site of an event -- an arena, a stage,
a promenade, a public square, a cafe, a telephone booth, an intimate
interior. Some use it as a gathering place, or a conduit, a means to
create community. Some artists employ the media landscape itself as
the narrative, while others look into the body as the site and the source;
the voicebox, the larynx become medium and metaphor. Still others gather
the sounds of the world as evidence and construct maps of imaginary
geographies. The tape recorder and microphone replace the camera, capture
moments in time, the life of a place in process; a journey is recalled
and reconstructed, overlaid with new insights. Some transpose a cinematic
syntax -- a montage of dissolves, quick cuts instead of fades, a series
of close-ups, long shots, reverse angles. Others appropriate media genres
and turn them inside out giving an appearance of veracity to interviews
with false personae, and documentary authority to invented data; or
the reverse, creating musically structured works from authentic field
interviews.
In the next century radio as we have known it may disappear, swallowed
up by multimedia cyberspace. Or, as an obsolete technology relegated
to the subculture fringes, it might exist only in pirate form, a weapon
of the world's underclasses, a tool of artists, revolutionaries, shamans,
and other questioning voices in our brave new tech world. The purpose
of this book is to document and illuminate a vital body of work that
might otherwise be lost between the pages of art and media history.
While tapes may decay, and those that are not continually translated
into the latest technology will become unplayable, the ideas can be
preserved. |
