Robert Buck

Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is pleased to present an evening of video and television works celebrating the publication launch of Broadcasting: EAI at ICA. This free screening features selections from the 2018 exhibition of the same name, and reflects on artist responses to themes of media saturation, commercialization, duration, and public engagement. Copies of the catalog will be for sale.

Free to attend. RSVP here.

Following the mass adoption of cable TV and home video recording technology in the early ‘80s, many artists had access to a new arsenal of strategies for intervening directly with televised media. Public broadcast carved out a space for experimentation, a sensibility showcased in such series as Jaime Davidovich’s The Live! Show (1979-84) and Robert Beck’s The Space Program (1985-86), both aired on the Manhattan Cable Network. The advent of specialized networks also presented new opportunities to mingle artists’ media with “normal” televised content: MTV, with their hip youth audience in mind, invited a number of artists to create culture-jamming interstitials in between music videos including video art pioneer Dara Birnbaum, and initiatives such as TRANS-VOICES commissioned artists including Birnbaum, Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, Philip Mallory Jones, and Tom Kalin to produce 60-second spots for American and French broadcast. As the choices on the TV remote became more vast, so too did an overwhelming sense of content glut and advertising onslaught. New consumer video formats like VHS and Betamax gave a new generation of artists the license to remix and deconstruct these images, a practice exemplified by works such as Cable Xcess (1996), a faux-infomercial by Kristin Lucas that warns of the long-term consequences of exposure to electromagnetic fields, and No Sell Out... or i wnt 2 b th ultimate commodity/ machine (Malcolm X Pt. 2) (1995), a stunning MTV-style indictment of consumerism and racial capitalism by “art-band” X-PRZ.

Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)’s venue is located at 264 Canal Street, 3W, near several Canal Street subway stations. Our floor is accessible by elevator (63" × 60" car, 31" door) and stairway. Due to the age and other characteristics of the building, our bathrooms are not ADA-accessible, though several such bathrooms are located nearby. If you have questions about access, please contact cstrange@eai.org in advance of the event.

Masks are strongly encouraged. If you are experiencing a fever, cough, shortness of breath, loss of taste or smell, or other symptoms that could be related to COVID-19, we ask that you please stay home.

On the occasion of the organization's 50th anniversary, Frieze has invited Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) to program a series of videos from its collection of over 4,000 titles. This selection offers a dynamic overview of the strategies and concerns of an intergenerational array of artists whose work experiments with communications technology, ranging from television to social media. Videos from the EAI collection will appear throughout the fair, on large-scale monitors at its entrance and in lobbies on two floors. EAI's participation is part of a program spotlighting New York non-profits organizations that have celebrated significant anniversaries in the past year, alongside peers Artists Space, A.I.R., and Printed Matter Inc. Works featured include:

Program #1 (4th floor, CRT monitor):
Anthony Ramos, Balloon Nose Blow-Up, 1972, 11:18 min
Kristin Lucas, Cable Xcess, 1996, 4:48 min
Jaime Davidovich, The Live! Show Promo, 1982, 5:32 min
Joan Jonas, Duet, 1972, 4:23 min
Ulysses Jenkins, Inconsequential Doggereal, 1981, 15:13 min
Robert Beck, The Feeling of Power, 1990, 9 min
Cecelia Condit, Possibly in Michigan, 1983, 11:40 min
Ellen Cantor, Evokation of My Demon Sister, 2002, 4:38 min

Program #2 (6th floor, HD monitor): 
Ulysses Jenkins, Notions of Freedom, 2007, 15:47 min
Trevor Shimizu, Lonely Loser Trilogy (Skate Videos), 2013, 14 min
Shana Moulton, Restless Leg Saga, 2012, 7:14 min
Peggy Ahwesh, The Falling Sky, 2017, 9:30 min
Tony Cokes, B4 and After the Studio, Part 1, 2019, 11:02 min
Maggie Lee, WINGS1 + WINGS2, 2013, 1:59 min
Maggie Lee, Department Store, 2021, 7:50 min

Mezzanine monitors: 
Peggy Ahwesh, The Falling Sky, 2017, 9:30 min
Trevor Shimizu, Lonely Loser Trilogy (Skate Videos), 2013, 14 min

Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is pleased to partner with Metrograph to present a series of programs highlighting our catalogue and its essential role in the history of artists’ moving image work. This program coincides with our ongoing celebration of EAI's 50th anniversary.

Continuing this November, EAI presents a slate of works for both Metrograph's theater as well as its At Home online platform. The second installment of this program will focus on artists who have embraced the radical potential of mass media, and iterative possibilities of videotape and broadcast. Throughout the month, we will screen theatrical engagements of Robert Beck/Buck’s Cruising (Back to Front), a scene-by-scene reversal of William Friedkin’s notorious thriller; Zoe Beloff’s trilogy of works exploring unrealized Hollywood films by radical artists (Sergei Eisenstein, Bretolt Brecht, and James Agee, respectively); and Ulysses Jenkins and Video Venice News’ Remnants of the Watts Festival, documenting the annual summer music festival in the southeast Los Angeles neighborhood. On Metrograph’s streaming platform, we present a showcase of Robert Beck/Buck’s short video works, and two programs pairing artists Jaime Davidovich and Kristin Lucas, and Shana Moulton and Trevor Shimizu.

In theaters:

Cruising (Back to Front)
Robert Beck/Buck, 1998
Monday, November 15th, 8:30 pm
With introduction by Robert Beck/Buck

Fragments for a Future: Brecht, Agee, and Eisensten
Three Works by Zoe Beloff
Zoe Beloff, 2015-2019, 104 min
Monday, November 22th, 8:30 pm
With introduction by Zoe Beloff

Remnants of the Watts Festival
Ulysses Jenkins, 1972-73, 60 min
Monday, November 29th, 8:30 pm

At home:

Shorts works by Robert Beck/Buck
Available November 16th to 21th
With introduction and conversation by Robert Beck/Buck

Short works by Jaime Davidovich and Kristin Lucas
Available November 23th to 28th

Short works by Shana Moulton and Trevor Shimizu
Available November 30th to December 5th

With additional programs at Lightbox Film Center, PhillyCAM, Scribe Video Center, Slought, Anthology Film Archives, EAI, and EMPAC.

Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is pleased to co-present Broadcasting: EAI at ICA at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Philadelphia, February 2nd through March 25th. Featuring works by artists including Robert Beck, Dara Birnbaum, Tony Cokes, Ulysses Jenkins, JODI, Shigeko Kubota, Kristin Lucas, Shana Moulton, Trevor Shimizu, and TVTV, the exhibition will focus on how artists exploit the act of broadcasting as a subject, as a means of intervention, and as a form of participation across a variety of displays.

The word “broadcast” originated as an agricultural term meaning to disperse seeds widely, but became a figurative description for communications technology in the radio age. In the television era, with which broadcasting is most synonymous, the introduction of personal video equipment fostered a more dynamic interpretation, facilitating a two-way flow of information that resonates with contemporary participatory media. In this spirit, the physical walls of the gallery will extend beyond ICA through a series of collaborations with Lightbox Film Center, PhillyCAM, Scribe Video Center, Slought, Anthology Film Archives, EAI, and EMPAC.

Broadcasting: EAI at ICA is co-curated by Alex Klein, Dorothy & Stephen R. Weber (CHE’60) Curator, ICA and Rebecca Cleman, Director of Distribution, Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI)

EAI is pleased to present an evening focused on the moving image work of Robert Beck/Buck, whose approach to art-making merges cinematic, televisual, and visual art aesthetics and strategies to singular effect. Alongside a selection of his video art works, the evening will feature Beck’s nearly year-long conceptual broadcast project, The Space Program (1985-86), an early, largely unconsidered work in the artist’s career – here screened publicly for the first time since its original broadcast late night on Manhattan Cable Television. Buck will introduce the program, and be in conversation following the screening.

Buck, who changed his father’s name as a work, or act, of art in 2008, was integrally involved in EAI from the 1980s to the early 2000s, in roles including Technical Director and Chief Editor. This event will launch EAI’s distribution of Beck/Buck’s video work.

Utopian Potentials and Media(ted) Realities will explore the promise of Public Access television and open network technologies, featuring cultural producers from the 1970s to present. Speakers include legendary Public Access host Glendora Buell, members of Colab, and a panel with Robert Buck, Carmel Curtis, and Tara Mateik, moderated by EAI’s Director of Distribution, Rebecca Cleman.

Keeping television technology accessible to artists and the public was at the core of EAI’s founding mission. In his 1973 “manifesto” for the organization, founder Howard Wise wrote about the promise of television as an artistic tool: “[The artist’s] targets will be, no doubt, those thoughtful and concerned persons who are also eager to discern the truth, whether it be in art, in politics, in social and economic problems – those who eschew banality and seek meaning in their activities and their lives. In other words, the very people whom commercial TV neglects and ‘turns off.’”

At BRIC, Cleman will discuss the connection between technology, Public Access, and activism with artist and former EAI Technical Director Robert Beck/Buck; archivist and XFR Collective member Carmel Curtis; and artist, activist, and educator Tara Mateik. The panelists will draw from their experiences working in and for alternative media facilities to focus on access as a key concern. They will consider current debates about the role of art related to politics and representation, and how access relates to education, public outreach, and the means of production.

The panel will be accompanied by a screening of Beck’s The Feeling of Power (1990), produced for DIVA TV to document a 1989 ACT UP protest at Trump Tower, and an excerpt of Mateik’s Putting the Balls Away (2008), a re-enactment of the historic 1973 tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, broadcast by BCAT (now BRIC) on the 35th anniversary of the original event.

This symposium is FREE with advance RSVP.