This is a Television Receiver

Description

"Hall persuaded Richard Baker to perform his role as newsreader; while reading the text, Baker described the essential paradoxes of the real and imagined functions of the TV set on which he appeared. The second shot was taken optically off the monitor, the third copied from the second, and so on, until there was a complete degeneration of both sound and image, removing the newsreader from his position of authority to a quivering indefinable mass of electronic signals." (Tamara Krikorian, "Artists' Television", Broadcast television and the visual arts: a supplement to the TSWA catalog, the National Open Art Exhibition, TSWA, Plymouth[?], 1984, p. 52.) (Source [expired], website, Rewind)

This is a TV Receiver script by David Hall (Source, pdf, Rewind website)

"This figure of authority is reduced to what, in essence, he is – a series of pulsating patterns of light on the surface of a glass screen. In this way, paradoxically, the verbal statement is realized by its own disintegration, along with that of the image. The illusion of both transparency and of power are shattered. This is deconstruction in its primary, irreducible form; only by remembering these important lessons have artists subsequently been able to venture out of the enclosure of self-reflexivity and into the perilous world of representation and narrative..." (Mark Wilcox, "Deconstruct", Subverting Television. Deconstruct, Scratch, Alter Image, Arts Council Film and Video Umbrella Program, 1984; Time Based Arts, Amsterdam, March 1985.) (Source 1 [expired], website, Rewind, Source 2, pdf, Rewind website)

Commissioned by BBC TV as the unannounced opening work for their special Arena video art programme. First transmitted March 10, 1976. The work was based on a previous piece This is a Video Monitor, which was made on 1/2-inch B/W videotape and used Anna Ridley as the ‘presenter’.

‘Richard Baker [the well-known newsreader] describes the essential paradoxes of the real and imagined functions of the TV set on which he appears. The second shot is taken optically off a monitor, the third copied from the second, and so on, until there is a complete degeneration of both sound and image, removing the newsreader from his position of authority…’
Tamara Krikorian, Art Monthly, February 1984. (Source[expired], website, Rewind)

Additional Informations

"Around the same time in Britain, David Hall, an experimental film maker who founded the first department for video art in the UK at Maidstone College of Art, made a series for the BBC entitled '7 TV Pieces'. This series consisted of short black and white films, each of which playfully deconstructed the illusory space of the tv image whilst subverting the expectations of the television viewer. Some years later, Hall produced another work for the BBC, entitled 'This is a Television Receiver', in which the BBC's most famous news anchor of the day read a technical description of what a television is and how it works. This short reading was repeatedly retaped by shooting the screen image, until both image and sound degraded to a point of almost total abstraction. Again in the late eighties, Hall was commissioned to make a work for television and on this occasion he reconstructed the first experimental television transmission of the' pioneer engineer John Logie Baird. Baird's version of television was never commercially developed, and Hall's work thus functions both as an archaeological account of the early years of the medium and as critique of the linear history of technological development." (Source: Jeremy Welsh, "Exploding. Plastic & Inevitable: the Rise of Video Art" [online], December 7, 2005 [accessed May 6, 2019])

'This is a Television Receiver.. interestingly recovers Hall's sculptural concerns. Unlike film, the video monitor is a discrete object. Film requires a projector and screen and the distance between them traversed by a beam of light. In watching This is a TV Receiver, the materiality or the very objecthood of the monitor is intrinsic to the piece..' (Michael O'Pray, 'David Hall', Variant Magazine, Issue 11, 1992) (Source [expired], website, Rewind)

Video still from This is a Television Receiver. (Source [expired], website, Rewind)

Leaflet for The Arnolfini video library, Bristol, 1982. (Source, pdf, Rewind website)

Program for the French Institute to be shown February 16th 1988 - a personal selection by Anna Ridley. (Source, pdf, Rewind website)

The Arena video art program was produced by Mark Kidel, designed by Anna Ridley and presented by David Hall. (Source, website, Lux)

Publications and Periodicals which reference the work

- "Video Art: Fast Forward", Time Out, 1982, p. 21. (Source, pdf, Rewind)

- Tamara Krikorian, "Artists' Television", Broadcast television and the visual arts : a supplement to the catalogue TSWA, the National Open Art Exhibition, TSWA, Plymouth[?], 1984, p. 49-55. (Source, pdf, Rewind)

- Mark Wilcox, "Deconstruct", Subverting Television. Deconstruct, Scratch, Alter Image, Arts Council Film and Video Umbrella Programme, 1984; Time Based Arts, Amsterdam, March 1985. (Source, pdf, Rewind)

- Michael O'pray, "David Hall", Variant Magazine, Issue 11, 1992.

- Leonor Hanny, Television; Video's Frightful Parent, [s.l.], [s.n.], 2000. (Source, pdf, Rewind)

- Nicky Hamlyn, Film Art Phenomena, BFI Publishing, London, 2003. (Source, pdf, Rewind)

- Jeremy Welsh, "Exploding. Plastic & Inevitable: the Rise of Video Art" (Source, website, HZ)

- Catherine Elwes, Video Art: A Guided Tour, I.B. Tauris, London, New York, 2005.

- Joanna Heatwole, "Media of Now: an interview with David Hall", Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, Volume 36, Aug/Sep published by the Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, New York, 2008. (Source, pdf, Rewind)

- Stephen Partridge & Sean Cubitt (eds.), REWIND| British Artists' Video in the 1970s & 1980s, John Libbey Publishing, East barnet, Herts, 2012.