Broadcast
September 9 - November 18, 2007

Dara Birnbaum
Chris Burden
Gregory Green
Doug Hall, Chip Lord, and Jody Procter
Christian Jankowski
Antoni Muntadas
Inigo Manglano-Ovalle
Nam June Paik
neuroTransmitter
TVTV
Siebren Versteeg

View images from the Broadcast Opening Party

Broadcast explores the ways in which artists since the late 1960s have engaged, critiqued, and inserted themselves into official channels of broadcast television and radio. Featuring works in video, sound, photography, and installation, Broadcast is the first exhibition of its kind to examine this provocative body of work.

From TVTV’s iconoclastic television broadcast from the floor of the 1972 Republican Convention, to Gregory Green’s recent pirate radio station installations, artists have intervened into systems of broadcasting as a means of examining or challenging the influence and power of TV and radio.  At times, the works in Broadcast are hostile, as in the case of Chris Burden’s infamous 1972 hostage-taking of a TV-host at knifepoint; other times they are more collaborative, such as Christian Jankowski’s 1999 project for the Venice Biennale that involved repeatedly calling in to psychics on live Venetian television. In still other instances, an artist’s engagement with broadcasting involves the critical reuse of previously broadcasted material, such as Dara Birnbaum’s use of archival media coverage from the 1977 kidnapping of the German industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer by the Baader Meinhoff group, or Antonio Muntadas’ studies of broadcasting conventions in cities worldwide during the cold war.

Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Search (En Busqueded), 2000

By co-opting the sounds, images, and presentation strategies of our culture’s dominant forms of mass media, the works included in Broadcast reveal the mechanisms and power structures of broadcasting systems, and challenge their authority and influence. Whether appropriating its conventions and programs or engaging in a live TV or radio broadcast themselves, the artists represented here compel us to look more closely at this dominant force in our culture.

Siebren Versteeg, CC, 2003

Broadcast is co-organized by the Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, and iCI (Independent Curators International), New York, and circulated by iCI.  The curator is Irene Hofmann, Executive Director of the Contemporary Museum. The exhibition is made possible, in part, with support from the iCI Exhibition Partners

Broadcast is sponsored in Baltimore by Cynthia and Stuart Smith.

Additional support for Broadcast provided by Bodil Ottesen, Jeffrey S. Edison, Constellation Energy, the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts and an anonymous donor.

Media sponsorship for Broadcast provided by Comcast and WYPR, Maryland’s National Public Radio Affiliate.