Early Video Art, Educational Television, and the Positivity of Practice

In an essay examining the state of art education in 1993, the Belgian art critic thierry de duve wrote that an emphasis on “practice” had replaced “medium” in art schools.¹ The history of the art school, he claimed, developed in three major phases: first, the traditional academy, characterized by imitating the master artists; second, the Bauhaus model, which replaced imitation with invention and emphasized medium and form; and a third, post-Bauhaus paradigm according to which attitude replaced form, and practice replaced medium. Practice here refers to the active decentering of aesthetic experience, a turning instead to acts of institutionally situated and embodied cognition as artists began to engage with language, process, performance, and other conceptual gestures. He calls this emphasis on practice and attitude a “crisis of invention,” a “negative symptom of a historical transition whose positivity is not clear yet.”² Today, critics such as blake stimson and lane relyea make similar arguments about the proliferation of DIY aesthetics and cultural politics more generally.³ The present article starts with a question for de duve, twenty-five years later, and a rejoinder to others: might we see practice as something more than a negative symptom? An emphasis on practice (as situated knowledge) and the abandonment of the studio—as undertaken by conceptualized art schools such as the California Institute of the Arts in the early 1970s—was perhaps an epiphenomenon of a historical shift in global social structures and modes of production (i.e., a negative symptom as de duve calls it). But the persistence of the term also presents an opportunity now to reflect on “practice” in light of some temporal distance. Doing so not only suggests a shared project across education and aesthetics but also points toward the socially transformative, and not merely oppositional, work of practice.

This article looks at early video art as the exemplary medium for the kind of practice de Duve problematizes as a crisis of invention. I am mostly concerned here with early video art of the 1970s that built on the insights of conceptual art, particularly to the extent that these artists took up motifs of education in their work. Dealing with education in postconceptual practice meant thinking about the relationship between aesthetic experience and epistemology, the new institutional contexts opened up by the postwar university, or how one taught new modes of practice as they turned away from formal concerns. In keeping with recent scholarship on the history of video art, this is also a matter of understanding that video art in the 1970s was engaged with television—formally, technologically, and politically. For instance, David Joselit and William Kaizen both treat the history of video art and television as overlapping territories.⁴ Kaizen in particular argues for a more accurate understanding of how the political, televisual, and artistic avant-gardes overlapped. At the same time, Kaizen’s scholarship is just the latest examination of how artists worked “up against” the qualities of the medium, to use his phrase.⁵ Others, such as Yvonne Spielmann and Chris Meigh-Andrews, have examined video in the context of television even more narrowly, hewing toward a technology-oriented narrative and a residual attitude of resistance toward art world institutions.⁶ I follow Marita Sturken, however, in looking at how artists used video among other tools for making art, not necessarily for the medium’s inherent qualities. At the same time, finding common cause with Joselit and Kaizen, I specifically interrogate the shared strategies deployed in the realm of public, educational television. I am proposing here that educational television is yet another genre and site of this formal and institutional engagement. I explore these links below by examining the educational research done at the Children’s Television Workshop— producers ofSesame Street—and the modes of practice they held in common with conceptual video art.

Discussing education comes with certain challenges; however, it provides a significant testing ground for critical, social, and aesthetic notions of practice insofar as education seeks cognitive transformation through situated knowledge. Educational structures are often critiqued for being overly...