LA TADEO DEARTE 9 N.º 12 - 2023
OBSOLESCENCE AND ART: THE CANVAS AND THE CRT
OBSOLESCENCE AND
ART: THE CANVAS
AND THE CRT
Miguel Felipe Valenzuela*
Fecha de recepción: 15 de diciembre de 2023 Fecha de aceptación: 10 de abril de 2024
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MIGUEL FELIPE VALENZUELA
* Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Art, Design and Media, UNSW, Australia.
Sessional Lecturer, University of Sydney, Australia
miguel.valenzuela@sydney.edu.au
Sugerencia de citación: Valenzuela, Miguel Felipe. Obsolescence and Art: The canvas and the CRT. La Tadeo DeArte 9, n.° 12,
2023: en prensa. https://doi.org/10.21789/24223158.2038
OBSOLESCENCIA Y
ARTE: EL LIENZO
Y EL TRC
This article proposes that the relationship between
obsolescence and art is integral to the way that we
conceptualize art and art movements. It looks at the
need to reconceptualize the use of CRT television tech-
nology in art in the present digital age due to the way
that obsolescence has enabled a shi in meaning over
two distinct technological eras. Through an analysis of
televisual flow and the conceptualization of physical
manifestations of television and screen culture, the
article argues that the category of obsolete can aect or
change the way art is understood or consumed. The im-
portance of this observation relates to theories of use
value, perception and design in art and screen culture.
>>>>>>
Keywords:
art; Obsolescnece;
art movements;
conceptualization.
LA TADEO DEARTE 9 N.º 12 - 2023
OBSOLESCENCE AND ART: THE CANVAS AND THE CRT
ABSTRACT
Este artículo propone que la relación entre obso-
lescencia y arte es parte integral de la forma en que
conceptualizamos el arte y los movimientos artísticos.
Analiza la necesidad de reconceptualizar el uso de
la tecnología del tubo de rayos catódicos (TRC) de
la televisión en el arte en la era digital actual debido
a la forma en que la obsolescencia ha permitido un
cambio de significado a lo largo de dos eras tecnológi-
cas distintas. A través de un análisis del flujo televisivo
y la conceptualización de las manifestaciones físicas
de la televisión y la cultura de la pantalla, el artículo
sostiene que la categoría de obsoleto puede afectar
o cambiar la forma en que se entiende o consume el
arte. La importancia de esta observación se relacio-
na con las teorías del valor de uso, la percepción y el
diseño en el arte y la cultura cinematográfica.
Palabras clave:
arte; Obsolescencia;
movimientos artísticos;
conceptualización
>>>>>>
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MIGUEL FELIPE VALENZUELA
RESUMEN
LA TADEO DEARTE 9 N.º 12 - 2023
OBSOLESCENCE AND ART: THE CANVAS AND THE CRT
VIDEO ART
H genre that is diicult to define or even discuss
without lengthy explanations of pre-digital era technology that used to be
necessary to record and present works of art. In the latest decades, the pro-
liferation of online content streaming through digital applications has turned
the term “video” into a synonym of the content broadcast or shared on pop-
ular platforms on smartphones. Television, as well, is now a wide screen flat
plastic object that hangs on household walls, like a painting, insinuating that
we have somehow elevated the act of viewing into an artform. At the same
time, older television and video formats, which the digital era has made
obsolete, are being now commonly re-conceptualized in popular culture as
objects of nostalgia or props in films that help evoke an era or a historical
timeframe. Many historical videoart works by prominent artists such as Nam
June Paik, Pipilotti Rist, and Gary Hill were created using what are now ob-
solete electronic devices as their core components, in a similar way to what
Duchamp built with his ready-mades.
The concept of obsolescence cannot be avoided when dealing with those
types of artworks. The complexities involved in attempting to conceptualize
it in order to develop a broader understanding of historical video art brings
to light a number of important observations about time, our use of objects in
art, and may hold clues in relation to how we might conceptualize contempo-
rary practices, such as Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) or large-scale video wall
installations in the future.
It is commonly stated that video art initially represented a rupture to the
one-way flow of television transmission produced by the dominant main-
stream media at the time, and that this rupture began in earnest with the
introduction of the Sony Portapack and the ½ inch tape in the 1960s (Rush,
2007, p. 13; Meigh-Andrews, 2006). According to Chris Meigh-Andrews (2006,
p. 18) “the portable video recorder had considerable impact, empowering
artists, politically active individuals and groups to fight back against the
corporate monopoly of the ‘one way’ broadcast television system”. Meigh-
Andrews provided an in-depth analysis of the historical origins of video art
in the USA, the UK, Europe and Canada.1 Michael Rush, in his important
historical text Video Art (2007, p. 9), similarly placed the development of
video within an international context in which traditional art practices were
blending into new forms. For Rush, video art was initially heavily influenced
by performance art, in which artists such as Vito Acconci, Richard Serra, Gary
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MIGUEL FELIPE VALENZUELA
Hill, Joan Jonas, Doug Aitken and Sam Taylor-Wood treated video as an ex-
tension of their existing toolsets and did not necessarily identify themselves
as “video artists” (Ibid.).2
Historical accounts of video art such as those of Rush (2007) and Meigh-
Andrews (2006) serve as significant frames of reference for the use of one
of the most prominent examples of technological obsolescence in human
history: the Cathode Ray Tube (CRT). When used in art as an obsolete object,
the CRT gains new significance, yet in historical works viewed in the digital
era, this significance may not apply to the original spirit of the work and
hence may need to be rearticulated. This need for rearticulation is something
I have referred to as a “spatio-temporal anomaly” in a previous publication,
an expression that needs further research, yet broadly refers to a need to
reconceptualize an anachronistic form when its original context, and hence
original meaning, has been displaced.
CRTs came to be regarded as an integral part of pre-flat screen televi-
sion within a broader context of televisual flow and not as a component or
device in its own right. They demonstrate how transmission tends to veil its
materiality and how it remains fluid and adaptable to technological change.
That is why this article argues that art works which feature CRT technology
produced in the digital age continue to disrupt the total flow of television
by questioning the linearity of its progress and, in doing so, rearticulate and
reinvent the device. Artists that use CRTs in the digital age have raised impor-
tant questions about materiality in art and design, particularly, in relation to
how human beings conceptualize themselves in a given historical era or time
frame. Additionally, they question the way in which new designs, artforms
and modes of expression are created through the reinvention and reconfigu-
ration of the obsolete.
When artists, most notably Gary Hill, began removing the tube from tele-
vision encasings and other televisual apparatuses in the 1990s, the function
of the device was fundamentally questioned. According to John Hanhardt
(2000, p. 120) the removal of the tube from the television encasing allowed
“…the moving image to enter into the discourse of sculpture and installa-
tion, and of self-inquiry”. Essential to this complex narrative of materiality,
historicity and conceptual speculation was the CRT’s role in enabling the
immediacy of live television. The broadcasting of text, moving images, and
sound from the 1950s onwards transmitted an unprecedented quantity and
diversity of representation.
The most prominent artist to articulate this diversity was Nam June Paik.
His career spanned the duration of the CRT television boom. Works such
Electronic Superhighway (1995) made him synonymous with commercial and
larger-scale television installation art, a far cry from his origins in performan-
ce art and experimental music, as part of the Fluxus movement (Rush, 2007,
pp. 53-59). Electronic Superhighway is a fiy-one-channel video installation,
consisting of two-hundred and fieen CRT monitors. The work is forty feet
long, fieen feet high and four feet deep. Consisting of video loops from ico-
nic American television commercials, shows and films that flash by as if being
viewed from the window of a car. Paik references the newly built highways he
experienced on his first trip to the US. The scale and color of the huge neon
light outlined map evokes the magnitude of a rapidly expanding and develo-
ping United States of America (Anderson, 2012).
Paik saw the CRT monitor as analogous to the painter’s canvas and
immersed himself far enough in the technology to hack and modify them into
works of art. He stated that CRTs:
***As collage technique replaced oil paint, the cathode ray tube will
replace the canvas.
LA TADEO DEARTE 9 N.º 12 - 2023
OBSOLESCENCE AND ART: THE CANVAS AND THE CRT
****Someday artists will work with capacitors, resistors and semi-con-
ductors as they work today with brushes, violins and junk
Commonly seen as the pioneer of CRT television art, Paik’s assertion that
the CRT would replace the canvas was not a literal call to paint on the new
canvas, but rather to use the CRT and television sets in ways that explored
their material, yet non-utilitarian qualities. He used them to display singular
images in camera loop assemblages, as part of constructivist or Dadaist ex-
periments with magnetism or to distort electronic signals.3 As self-standing
electronic assemblages reliant on their own materiality, Paik’s works ques-
tioned their own function and form; they disrupted the utilitarian aspect of
the object and, at the same time, provided alternate roles for these very de-
vices in art. His Buddhist background came to the fore in many of his works,
exploring television as a metaphor for meditation and contemplation. He
was a cybernetic experimentalist whose explorations into the inner realms of
electronic circuitry was able to fascinate even scientists and physicists such
as Norman Bauman (Ballard, 2013, p. 2).
Today, the works of artists such as Paik, Vostell, Richard Serra, Ant Farm,
Joan Jonas and Julia Scher are part of what is widely regarded as an import-
ant legacy for video art. The meaning of such legacy becomes more complex
when viewed in relation to the device’s obsolescence. The reach of the CRT,
especially through television, has been so widespread that it is hard to find
any community in the world that has not been exposed to it or aected by
it in some way.4 Through messages, iconography, symbolism, propaganda,
immediacy and interconnectedness, television represents normalized or
conventional channels of communication. Its preponderance throughout the
twentieth century has solidified the CRT’s position as one of the most iconic
and widely used electronic devices in human history.
OBSOLESCENCE AND VIDEO ART
In the 1990s, the CRT was superseded by its historical replacement, the liquid
crystal display (LCD), and later by the organic light emitting diode (LED and
OLED). These screens have become synonymous with the digital age. Today,
smartphones and computer devices that use LED and OLED screens outnum-
ber the entire population of the world (Boren, 2014). Yet, even as the CRT has
come to be viewed as an anachronistic technology in all of its incarnations,
particularly as a viewing device, artists continue to use it in their new work.5
This is clearly evidenced by an Adidas commercial from 2018 titled
Original is never finished (2018). In it a young man is portrayed kicking a CRT
monitor across the screen. The camera zooms out and the image sudden-
ly shows multiple copies of the same actor kicking the same monitor in
horizontally replicated flickering frames, referencing a strip of celluloid
moving picture film (Figure 1). The camera zooms out again and a number of
horizontal levels of frames are revealed, multiple characters walk, skate and
move within layered film strips across the screen (Figure 2). Suddenly, color
bars flash up and duplicate as copies of multiple characters glitch on and o
in time to the heavily edited techno musical accompaniment. Towards the
end of the commercial a crowd climbs a mountain of powered CRT monitors
that play historical sports footage (Figure 3) as the words “keep pushing,
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MIGUEL FELIPE VALENZUELA
Figure 1. Vision
Invisible, Original is
never finished (2018),
Adidas commercial
on YouTube.
Figure 2. Vision
Invisible, Original is
never finished (2018),
Adidas commercial
on YouTube.
things are going to get better” are repeated over and over along to the music.
Despite being a visual feast of screen references to moving image technology,
from film to recent advanced digital eects techniques, the advertisement
espouses a corporatist view of the CRT monitor in the digital age. This view
is widely mistaken as normal or regarded as a given, an a priori concept that
underscores the way we have been trained to view the CRT. In many ways,
such a view overshadows and obfuscates the use of the CRT in contemporary
art.
LA TADEO DEARTE 9 N.º 12 - 2023
OBSOLESCENCE AND ART: THE CANVAS AND THE CRT
Figure 3. Vision
Invisible, Original is
never finished (2018),
Adidas commercial
on YouTube.
TOTAL FLOW IN THE DIGITAL AGE
As a transmission enabler, the CRT is merely a conduit for the images it displays. Even though its
development as a physical object can be traced through an association to various devices, func-
tions, modes of consumption, apparatuses, scientific experimentation, and socio-cultural forms,
its most prominent, clearly identifiable historical use was in television. Raymond Williams in
Television: Technology and Cultural Form, originally published in 1974, notes that television was or-
ganized into scheduled programming sequences that represented a flow of viewing experiences.
Programming included news, public aairs, documentaries, educational, arts, music,
children’s shows, movies, general entertainment, sport, religion, publicity and commercials
(Williams, 2003, pp. 79-80). Flow, for Williams, was a regimented and organized implementation
of programming through regulations, treaties and laws. Government policies, although varying
among nations and states, were implemented to reflect cultural, economic, and social values that
guided what viewers could watch. He states that:
In all developed broadcasting systems the characteristic organization, and therefore the
characteristic experience, is one of sequence or flow. This phenomenon, of planned flow, is
then perhaps the defining characteristic of broadcasting, simultaneously as a technology and
as a cultural form. (Williams, 2003, p. 86)
The problem with flow, for Williams, was the ability of large corporate broadcast systems
to surpass or displace smaller locally based television producers, which allowed programming
to extend or augment participatory democracy. For Williams, television had the potential to
be utilized for the greater good by providing access to information for communities and for its
educational capacity. The spread of independent community, activist and art television program-
ming in the 1960s and 1970s, particularly across the United States and the United Kingdom, were
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MIGUEL FELIPE VALENZUELA
prime examples of this. Williams also argued that public broadcasters like the BBC in the United
Kingdom, had established themselves as “consensus” based, loosely state controlled yet inde-
pendent entities that enabled government funded flow (Williams, 2003).
The importance of Williams’ notion of flow lays in the way that programming aects how
television and the CRT have come to be perceived. Flow can legitimize or complete the CRT’s
utilitarian aspect. Without an image on the screen the CRT is ‘out of use’ or ‘switched o’, and
with an image it is fulfilling its role or function as a display or televisual device. In 1974, Williams
predicted the proliferation of on demand television viewing, online shopping, news and weather
and information services (2003, pp. 141-142).
In short, he predicted many functional aspects of the screen in the current digital era. In this
era, flow still exists, yet it is increasingly decentralized and controlled by corporations such as
YouTube, Facebook, Tik Tok, WeChat, Instagram and Twitter. Information is unregulated in many
regards, although never very distant from being able to be switched o, with live broadcasts
of murders and mass shootings becoming a common phenomenon, only to be taken down in
retrospect. However unsettling or disturbing, this is still a form of flow, with individuals and small
groups attempting to exercise some form of power through their access to the medium, in an ad
hoc decentralized and chaotic mode of flow.
According to Andrew Keen, the author of Digital Vertigo, electronic networks “…might
actually represent the post-industrial future of everything” (2012, p. 48). He laments the cost at
which this might be achieved, highlighting the dangers inherent in the degree of “openness” and
“sharing” sought by social media moguls such as Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) or Reid Homan
(LinkedIn). They represent the rise of what Keen calls social and trust economies that have
emerged to “help create a truer meritocracy by exposing disreputable individuals and by reward-
ing those with proven integrity” (2012, p.49). A perfect world for these technocratic capitalist uto-
pians is one where all citizens relinquish their rights to any mode of privacy and give corporations
the rights to all of their personal information and data to generate profits via targeted advertis-
ing. Keen describes these calls for increased “transparency” in public life as Orwellian, but he
also points out how proponents continually remind us that individual privacy and autonomy are
things of the past, and that people who advocate for privacy rights probably have something to
hide (2012, pp. 54-57).
At first, the importance of the way social media deals with individual privacy in relation
to obsolete CRT technology in contemporary art seems minimal and unrelated. However, its
importance comes to the fore when viewed as part of a genealogy of flow from the analogue
world of the CRT through to the full digital landscape. William Urrichio’s article Television’s Next
Generation: Technology /Interface Culture / Flow (2005) updates the concept of flow into the digital
era, where a relentless late capitalism replaced the CRT with the flat screen and rendered billions
of otherwise still functional CRT televisions obsolete. Functionalism and utilitarianism are at the
mercy of markets and the ramifications of this for art and design are seemingly arbitrary at first,
yet crucial when we take note of the current need for advocacy for the environment and alterna-
tive conceptualizations of nature and our place in it.
For Uricchio, the introduction of metadata-based flow both intensified and transformed the
conditions underlying Raymond Williams’s definition. Agency shied from schedule programmers
and remote-control devices (RCDs) to “metadata programmers and adaptive agent designers”
(Ibid., p. 254). He identified this agency as stemming from the convergence of television and
computer, speculating that it would usher in “as-yet-unheard-of-industries” and a reduction
in the “perceived need for overt viewer control” (Uricchio, 2005, p. 254). As companies such as
Cambridge Analytica, Google and Netflix collect our personal data and use it to curate our online/
viewing experiences or influence elections, Uricchio’s observations become more prescient. His
observations on flow are important in relation to the generational change that occurs when a
culturally significant object becomes obsolete, such as the CRT being phased out of production
and television morphing into a flat screen digital form.
The use of television and, subsequently, the computer by governments and broadcasters as
tools to disseminate behavioral social codes, normative conduct standards and define parame-
ters for social interactions, emphasize the transformative power of the screen. They also demon-
strate how the physical manifestation of the screen is evolving in relation to rapidly changing
historical circumstances, and how our perception of the screen aects the ways in which we
might engage with the CRT in art in the present. In this context, the CRT remains as a powerful
LA TADEO DEARTE 9 N.º 12 - 2023
OBSOLESCENCE AND ART: THE CANVAS AND THE CRT
representation of the past, and an important key to understanding how perception changes in
relation to processes such as obsolescence. As an entity, it is still a screen. However, its rapid de-
mise, due to obsolescence, further demonstrates its disruptive capacity, especially in its relation-
ship with the total digital flow that is permeating screen culture at the present. In short it will be
viewed as a spatio-temporal anomaly, that is, an anachronistic form that is still functional in the
present but will still require a reconceptualization in order to be understood in the digital age.
The digital age requires one of the most extensive, elaborate and resource heavy infrastruc-
tures in human history. Thousands of kilometers of servers (Figure 8), communications systems,
surveillance infrastructure, millions of cables, satellites, computers, wireless infrastructure and
handheld devices have been built to house it. Moreover, the hardware required to capture sound
and images, peripherals for cameras, as well as the human resources needed to make all of this
possible has had to be developed. In 2016, the asset and combined market value of the largest
digital technology companies in the world was worth well over two hundred trillion dollars (Sharf,
2016). The scale of interconnectedness and reach of the digital age has amplified and dwarfed the
film and television apparatus of the past. The social connectivity expounded and evangelized by
the digital era has created a complex situation in which an expectation of social connectedness
and inclusiveness underpins most digital transactions.
MATERIALITY AND THE OBSOLETE
Obsolescence is a core element of consumption cycles that governments and corporations imple-
ment in order to modernize and improve their capacity via constant upgrade cycles and planned
redundancies. This mass scale institutional implementation of upgrade cycles has included a
systemic shi towards total digital flow that is marketed and sold within an economy and culture
that prioritizes profit over sustainability. Profit generated by the manufactured need for the
latest and newest upgrade. Whether we agree with this conceptualization of the present or not,
it is hard to argue against the fact that the screen is now everywhere. The digital age is an era in
which we are glued to electronic gadgets, they are prosthesis, appendages or reluctant connec-
tivity devices; they have transformed the way we consume media. This is a profound change in
the materiality associated with viewing and experiencing art that uses media as its core. In fact,
the gradual replacement of projector technology with large scale OLED screens in large scale
mainstream art galleries and shopping centers represents a similar gradual shi in the materiality
of viewing that may similarly go unnoticed.
Anthropologist Daniel Miller (2005) argues that any definition of materiality needs to encom-
pass both the predominant colloquial use of the term as it relates to and describes objects and
artefacts, as well as what he sees as philosophical uses of the term. He writes:
We may want to refuse a vulgar reduction of materialism to simply the quantity of objects.
But we cannot deny that such colloquial uses of the term materiality are common. The stan-
dard critique of materialism found in newspapers and everyday discussions take their stand
against the apparently endless proliferation of artifacts… (Miller, 2005, p. 4)
Miller argues that any theory of materiality needs to encompass and “situate material culture
within a broader conceptualization of culture” (Ibid., p. 4). He uses E.H. Dobrich’s The Sense of
Order (1979) to illustrate how focusing on the frame rather than the artwork leads to the reali-
zation that the visibility of a frame depends on how appropriate that frame is (Miller, 2005, p. 5).
Miller points out that Gombrich’s thesis suggests that a medium can become so ubiquitous that
it is oen taken for granted or overlooked. Miller aptly uses the phrase “the humility of things” to
describe this overlooked or invisible aspect. The frame is important because we do not normally
notice it. He states:
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The surprising conclusion is that objects are
important not because they are evident and
physically constrain or enable but oen precisely
because we do not “see them”. The less we are
aware of them, the more powerfully they can
determine our expectations by setting the scene
and ensuring normative behaviour, without being
open to challenge. (Miller, 2005, p. 5)
The frame also encompasses the cultural value
ascribed to the object. The frame thus becomes the
cultural and social context within which value or signif-
icance is attributed to the object. Using Miller’s formu-
lation, the gallery or setting within which an artwork is
exhibited could also be viewed as an extension of this
metaphorical frame, moving space into the realm of
thing and serving as a possible link between the mate-
riality of the artefact and its philosophical dimensions
within space, culture and history. The same could be
said of the television itself, as a frame for news, infor-
mation, culture, advertising, information and art.
In The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microso,
(2006) Anne Friedberg argues that for Paul Virilio “the
screen remains a metaphoric register, a visual surface
that overrides any specificities of its media formation”
(2006, p. 183).6 Friedberg shows how Virilio’s arguments
can be traced back to Paul Valéry and his uncanny
prediction of works of art appearing on demand via an
apparatus controlled by hand gestures as early as 1928,
in an essay titled Conquest of Ubiquity (Ibid., p.184).
Since Walter Benjamin (1982) quotes Valéry in The Work
of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, published
in 1936, Friedberg argues that Virilio “channels both au-
thors” through his work and that he sees the speed and
proliferation of new technologies as representing a situ-
ation where “ubiquity meets instantaneity” (Friedberg,
2006, p. 184). While Benjamin and Valéry focus on the
apparatus used to deliver images, Virilio emphasized a
dematerialization and disappearance, where the screen
is the conduit for the material to become immaterial
(Ibid.).
Artworks are material objects, even video artworks
that are films of an event or a performance are material
representations of a given moment or an attempt to
capture a physical moment. How this moment is repre-
sented in the gallery is inconsequential to most, yet the
materiality of its presentation will aect the meaning
of the work regardless of intent or how far we prioritize
the immaterial. Video artworks that use visual eects
and simulated 3D objects are still representations of
some form of materiality. This seeming contradiction is
what gives many new works using computer generated
images (CGI) or Artificial Intelligence (AI) a sense of
other worldliness – their connection to the real world.
AI data collection is reliant on the real world. In a similar
vein, new works derive a futuristic sensibility from the
mode of presentation, usually through high resolution
projection or presentation on custom-built high-resolu-
tion OLED screens. The dematerialization and disap-
pearance of these works is reliant on the screen’s power
as a conduit for the material to become immaterial as
proposed by Virilio.
Virilio writes more prominently about television
in The Aesthetics of Disappearance (1980), where he
predicted the merging of the cinema, computer and
television screen (Friedberg, 2006, p. 184). Virilio saw
the onset of the twenty-four-hour news cycle and the
introduction of the VCR as the beginning of “new modes
of televisuality”. In Lost Dimension (1984) he states:
“In the interface of the screen…everything is always
already there, oered to view in the immediacy of an
instantaneous transmission… the instantaneity of
ubiquity” (Virilio cited in Friedberg, 2006, p. 185). This
notion of the instantaneity of ubiquity points to how
the proliferation and reach of television has profoundly
influenced how the world is perceived.
Frederic Jameson observed that the total flow
of television described by Williams required a level
of immersion where the viewer accepted the format
without criticizing it or the content being transmitted
and the planning behind it. Many viewers rejected flow
by changing channels, switching o or using commer-
cial breaks as opportunities to go to the toilet. This
led to the introduction of new models of choice-based
viewing such as cable and video on demand (VOD)
(Jameson, 1991, pp. 69-71). Jameson argues that within
this context, early video art posed a counterpoint to the
total flow of television as theorized by Williams (1991
p. 71). He argued that video art’s lack of adherence to
television conventions and practices allowed the video
artist to explore the wider potential of the format,
especially through experimentation with concepts and
subjects that may have been deemed taboo for conven-
tional television (Ibid.).
According to this view, video art was able to disrupt
commercial television’s flow or programming. The use
of CRT technology by artists such as Nam June Paik,
Wolf Vostell, Steina Visulka and many others, in works
that draw attention to the physical presence of the
device were also implicitly denying its utilitarian aspect.
By rejecting seamless transmission and utilizing loops,
video artists posed a challenge to the ubiquity and
taken-for-granted-ness of flow.
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OBSOLESCENCE AND ART: THE CANVAS AND THE CRT
ART, PAST PRESENT AND FUTURE
In Remediation: Understanding New Media (2000) Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin argue
that television was basically a remediation of film, print and radio communication media. Quite
prophetically, they argued that television’s survival into the future would depend on its ability
to “remediate digital media” (p. 185). It is interesting to note, that the phasing out of the CRT has
coincided with the proliferation of the hand-held device and portable computer as a remediated
mode of media consumption. As the functions of the computer and television are combined into
smaller flat screen devices, the bulkier forms are discarded. Televisions are now flat, thin, light
and resemble cinema screens in aspect ratio, color depth and form. They are smart and have ap-
plications and games. Bolter and Grusin argue that “…(t)elevision emerged as a media form when
the classical Hollywood cinema had already attained cultural status and social and economic
stability” (Bolter & Grusin, 2000, p. 185). It therefore rehashed all of the genres already popular-
ized by film.
Television was an excellent example of remediation, yet also a direct descendent of the
interplay between market forces and political economy, underpinned by an emergent mono-
lith of communication. There were very obvious technological and logistical dierences that
distinguished film and television, yet the continuation of one form into the other highlighted a
clear pattern of remediated formats also visible in other historical examples.7 Bolter and Grusin
articulate the dierence between the two media as follows: “Film oers us a world elsewhere, an
opportunity temporarily to set aside our cultural, personal and economic circumstances, while
television oers us a means of structuring those circumstances on a daily basis” (Bolter & Grusin,
2000, p. 186). For Bolter and Grusin, television provided a sense of hypermediated connection
to the content being transmitted. Television could be experienced live from the outset, a new
experience of immediacy, the CRT facilitated a means of relaying visual imagery and information
to the viewer on an unprecedented mass scale and speed.
These capacities relate to Paul Virilio’s notion of the instantaneity of ubiquity, and television’s
socio-cultural omnipotence, which initially represented a clear departure from film. Films were
viewed collectively as public events, whereas television was part of a “domestic economy”. It
was encountered in the home and out of public sight, and thus provided a more familial, inti-
mate or personal experience (Bolter & Grusin 1999, p. 186). The introduction of digital television
accelerated the demise of the CRT. Giles Slade, in Made to Break (2006), sees this as a form of
technological obsolescence, in which innovation drives consumers towards new products. This is
where the terms obsolete and outmoded coincide. For Joel Burges (2007) planned obsolescence
in manufacturing is integral to a phase of capitalism that is omnipotent in reach and scope. It is
a manifestation of “total market culture” where a degree of commodification and marketabil-
ity is superimposed on all aspects of life in postmodernity. Burges argues that: “If Adorno and
Benjamin see the obsolete as richly symbolic of an ‘outside’ to capitalist modernity, then planned
obsolescence arguably draws that outside inside of the interior of a late capitalist marketplace
devoted to absorbing more and more areas, spaces, and processes of human life into economies
of exchange” (Burges 2007, p. v). In this context, everything is ascribed a nominal monetary value,
even the time we spend doing nothing.
231 231/
MIGUEL FELIPE VALENZUELA
THE CRT AND ART
Now that the CRT television is obsolete, artworks that once challenged flow
in the CRT era may lose potency as the CRT becomes a fetishized vintage
consumer object incapable of evoking the sensibilities that it once did in
the past. Using the same tools employed by the mainstream to challenge its
preponderance and question its conventions is a timely undertaking. Using
them out of context can generate a sense of confusion, particularly for an
art world and artists attached and bound to systems of consumption and
mindless repetition. This does not mean that works made using CRT televi-
sions have lost their capacity to question or subvert. In fact, in many ways
this capacity is elevated by their status as spatio-temporal anomalies, the
defiant use of the obsolete in the present. Flow and its reliance on the com-
modification of everything in the digital age is certainly questioned through
an act of obstinate denial, the refusal of the current or post/modern and the
usage of the old, used, obsolete in defiance of the normal. Unfortunately, the
need for contextualization will remain, as new modes of art consumption
sculpt anachronistic forms from the old and dictate what is “current” and
“avant-garde” according to trends in institutional practice and the whims of
curatorial winds or what we might regard as the equivalent of televisual flow
in the art world.
LA TADEO DEARTE 9 N.º 12 - 2023
OBSOLESCENCE AND ART: THE CANVAS AND THE CRT
R
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MIGUEL FELIPE VALENZUELA
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1 He cites early video art commissions developed by German artist
Gerry Shum (Land Art, 1969) who experimented with television
broadcast ‘exhibitions’ that showed works such as Jan Dibbets’s
TV as a Fireplace and Identifications, as transmissions. Shum also
featured the works of artists such as Joseph Beuys, Klaus Rinke,
Hamish Fulton, Gilbert and George, and Richard Serra in later
broadcasts in the early 1970s (Meigh-Andrews, 2006, pp. 19-23).
2 Important performance artists such as Joan Jonas and Martha
Rosler used video to capture performances that exposed the
inherently male dominated and hence ideologically weighted
medium of television (Rush, 2007; 86-88). These artists used
CRTs in their early performative works, but as with many artists
in the same era, such as David Hall, Bruce Neuman and Bill Viola,
they were utilising television sets as conceptual tools and not
necessarily exploring the sculptural aspects of the CRT.
3 Artists such as Wolf Vostell with his work Television Decollage,
1963 (Figure 4) and Ben F. Laposky and his work Oscillons, 1953,
were also experimenting with CRTs at the time (Decker-Phillips,
1998, p 20; pp. 48-50).
4 This reach was increased by the use of the CRT in personal
computing, yet for the purposes of this thesis I have focused
primarily on the CRT’s role in television.
5 The LCD is also reaching a point of obsolescence and it is being
replaced by LED and OLED screens. Their overproduction has
caused an extreme case of market driven obsolescence which
has been actively perpetuated by large companies (Slade, 2006).
6 Virilio’s theories on the relationship between speed, war
technology, the accident and their eect on human perception
are well documented and are discussed here only in reference
to the eect of the context of human development on a broader
perception of the CRT’s use in art.
7 For example, radio to podcast, record to cassette to compact
disc.
