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Abstract

This paper examines how workshops for artistic experiments in television production during the late 1960s in the United States opened a space for experimental art practices. This space was contoured by, on the one hand, established avant-garde aesthetic preoccupations with medium specificity, and on the other, governmental concerns with directing television programming toward, as President Johnson put it, “the great and not the trivial purposes”—that is, for the general intellectual uplift of the national population. Two of Michel Foucault’s notions—themselves interrelated—will shape my analysis: governmentality and problematisation. The incitement to experiment that these workshops affected, I argue, was forged by a complex of the medium-specificity orientation of avant-garde art; discursive movements towards problematising television that characterised it as an intellectual and cultural vacuum; and governmental concerns aiming to act on the latter diagnosis by a general project of mass edification through television. An analysis of three artists’ contributions to WGBH’s 1969 broadcast The Medium is the Medium will highlight the aesthetic and political tensions played out in this process: rather than being complicit elaborations of a governmental ideology taken to be hegemonic, that ideology will be taken as one discursive force among others in the artists’ negotiation of television as a technology to be experimented with 

Keywords: Governmentality, television, avant-garde, art, experimentation, technology