TV as a Creative Medium: The 1969 Show That Became EAI
In 1969 Howard Wise filled his 57th Street gallery with televisions for the first American exhibition of video, then closed it to found Electronic Arts Intermix.
On May 17, 1969, the Howard Wise Gallery at 50 West 57th Street in New York opened TV as a Creative Medium, the first exhibition in the United States devoted to video. It ran until June 14. Wise had opened the gallery in 1960 and made it a home for kinetic art, with Len Lye, Takis, Jean Tinguely and Group Zero, and shows like Lights in Orbit in 1967. This time he gave the rooms to 12 artists working with the television set itself.
In the brochure, Wise described artists who had spent years "scrounging around second hand shops for parts, working with TV because they were fascinated with the results they were able to achieve, and because they sensed the potential of TV as the medium for their expression." The results ranged from performance to closed circuit installations. Nam June Paik showed Participation TV, and with Charlotte Moorman, who performed at the opening, TV Bra for Living Sculpture. Eric Siegel showed Psychedelevision in Color, Thomas Tadlock The Archetron, Aldo Tambellini Black Spiral, Paul Ryan Everyman's Moebius Strip and Joe Weintraub AC/TV, a television controlled by sound.
The work that pointed furthest ahead was Wipe Cycle by Frank Gillette and Ira Schneider, a "television mural" of 9 monitors that mixed live images of gallery visitors with broadcast television and prerecorded tape. Live and delayed feedback moved from screen to screen in cycles timed by pulses "every two, four, eight and sixteen seconds," so visitors could catch their own image a few seconds late. Wise filmed himself playing with it, and Schneider and the filmmaker Jud Yalkut documented the show.
It was also a farewell. In 1970 Wise closed the gallery to support the new medium directly, and on August 17, 1971 he incorporated Electronic Arts Intermix, a nonprofit created to "explore the potentials of the electronic media as a means of expression and non-commercial communication." EAI gave artists access to funding, equipment and information, sponsored early projects such as The Kitchen, and still distributes and preserves video art from Canal Street, where its archive keeps the 1969 brochure, photographs and films online. As Wise wrote in 1973: "All art was contemporary when it was created."
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