American Radio Art 1985–1995: New Narrative and Media Strategies

Radio holds a unique place in American cultural history, and in the shaping of popular culture in particular. It was the bridge between the two halves of the twentieth century, the memory trace from one generation to the next, traversed by world leaders, sportscasters, crooners, comedians, cowboys, private eyes, and space travelers. Imprinted into the American psyche, their voices resonated 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 Then it was superseded by television. Still, for another two decades it was a primary conduit for youth culture and its music—rock ‘n’ roll. For a vast majority of Americans who were in their teens and twenties in the 1950s and 60s, and in the remaining decades, radio and automobiles were inseparable.¹ Especially if you came of age speeding down Route 66 from the New Jersey suburbs to L.A. with gravelly voiced disc jockeys like Alan Fried and Wolfman Jack pumping out the soundtrack of your life. Thus, radio continued to hold a special fascination for that generation of American artists for whom it had been an indelible part of their life experience and imagination. Between 1980 and 1994, a number of these artists reconceived radio for their own time as a bridge between art, popular culture, and the politics of media, a “new frontier” for artistic expression and an alternative space for art in the public realm.

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.

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 multi-dimensional 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 aural 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’s angels descending to whisper in your ear.

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. If in the hierarchy of media television was the condo in the sky, radio was 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. Initially, it was relatively easy for artists to simply walk unobstructed in the back door and onto the airwaves of public radio. For a brief time they traversed unmonitored airwaves like guerillas in the night, beaming into automobiles across the urban sprawl.

This new opportunity was augmented by the revolution in both recording and broadcast technology and easy consumer access to sophisticated equipment and processes that...