Report on the Satellite Telecast Performance ‘Double Entendre’ prod. by Douglas Davis

Leonardo, Vol. 15, No.2, pp, 129-130, 1982 Printed in Great Britain 0024-094X/82/020129-02$03.00/0 Pergamon Press Ltd. REPORT ON THE SATELLITE TELECAST PERFORMANCE 'DOUBLE ENTENDRE' PRODUCED BY DOUGLAS DAVIS Robert C. Morgan* 1. On 16May 1981the Whitney Museum ofAmerican Art in New York City and the Centre National d'Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou in Paris sponsored the performance of Douglas Davis' 'Double Entendre'. It involved an audience and two performers at each location, one of whom responded during a 20 minute program to aural and visual information transmitted by satellite telecasting. Pre-recorded video sequences were also mixed into the 'live' performance and transmitted back and forth across the Atlantic. Fragments of each version, recorded separately in New York and also in Paris, were later presented in 'limited access' (cable) networks in each country. Davis in his productions is especially concerned with exceeding the limits of 'the frame', first in the sense of a definitive physical boundary endowed to modernist art and architecture and, second, in the sense of the conceptual restraints imposed by social and economic factors on artists who work directly with communications media. He finds that most television programs in the U.S.A. have a one-sided consumer-consumption context that excludes viewers from a feeling of intimacy with the medium and possibilities of a democratic give-and-take exchange. 2. In the 1970s Davis made a series of videotapes on questions such as: What is the possible source ofintimacy in television? How can two-way communication be arranged between television performers and their audiences? What common-ground can be established between them after a program terminates? In the 'Florence Tapes' (1974) a video camera, placed below a sheet of plate glass, recorded views of him walking in the nude. On a television screen, viewers were given the impression of him as being within the television tube and walking in place while perpendicular to the vertical screen. He spoke as he walked in an attempt to get viewers more intimately involved in his performance. Davis continued to search for a way to introduce intimacy by a narration recorded on a videotape entitled 'How to Make Love to YourTelevision Set', treatingaset as an erotic object. In a satellite telecast from the international art exhibition 'Documenta 6', at Kassel, *Visual artist and teacher, College of Fine & Applied Arts, Rochester Institute of Technology, One Lomb Memorial Drive, Rochester, NY 14623, U.S.A. (Received 27 July 1981) 129 Fed. Rep. Ger., in 1977, he and Joseph Bueys (Fed. Rep. Ger.) collaborated in a performance simulating Davis breaking through a television screen into a viewer's home. They wished to convey to viewers the idea that, by seeing an illusion of a set being destroyed, they might realize that control of television programming was within their power. Although Davis believes that ways can be found to introduce viewer intimacy in television productions, he recognizes that it is necessary to take into account the technological characteristics of the television mediumbut in a contra-Mcl.uhan sense. Davis uses communications technology as a kind of ploy, making fun of the medium in order to emphasize the message-his message-being a unique commentary upon the human condition. 3. The production of the satellite telecast and radio broadcast 'Double Entendre: Two Sites Two Times Two Sides. (For Roland Barthes) (A Live Radio-Television Performance. For Paris and New York)' (1981) produced by Davis, was another of his efforts to introduce real-time intimacy into these media. Both in New York City and in Paris audiences face a 2-meter-wide Novobeam television screen. In the center of the theatre at the Whitney Museum a mute woman represented Davis's female counterpart (persona), who was on the stage at the Centre Pompidou (Fig. I). In turn, the male counterpart of the female performer (Nadia Taleb) was represented by a mute man on the stage at the Centre Pompidou. The program began with the transmission to both audiences of a lO-minute videotape of a conversation (in English and in French) between Davis and Nadia Taleb. Then the dialogue between Davis (in English and Ms. Taleb...