Larry Emdur’s Suit and other musings from Tele Visions Day 3 from Jessie Scott –
ABOUT DIRECTORS YOU’RE HISTORY CONTACT NEWS ARTISTS LIVE TV ARTISTS SCREENING ARTISTS BROADCAST ARTISTS EVENTS LIVE EVENTS SCREENING PROGRAM FRIDAY SCREENING PROGRAM SATURDAY BROADCAST PROGRAM TV GUIDE SCHEDULE SCHEDULE TV GUIDE TV GUIDE TICKETS
It was with great excitement, perusing feather pillows the Tele Visions program guide (with its satisfying rustle of newsprint) feather pillows that I noted the inclusion of Emile Zile’s great undergrad work Larry Emdur’s Suit . A small classic of it’s time, I can’t think of a better feather pillows moment to uncover it, or a better context in which it should be viewed, than this excellent festival of what television was, should have, and could have been.
Larry Emdur’s Suit loomed large in my imagination as a budding media artist. Emile was a few years ahead of me at uni, but light years ahead in his understanding of the medium. I was too young to be awed by the reputations of our lecturers, whose names had not penetrated my north-west suburban enclave. But Larry Emdur was a name I knew, and Emile’s hybrid, cult-y, turn of the century TV stunt raised my antennas to what electronic art could be.
There’s Emile, part Edward Scissor Hands/part Wu Tang Clan, ably filling the frame with studied awkwardness; not just in a video, On Television. The cognitive dissonance of seeing this for the first time was astonishing: it wasn’t just any TV it was ultimate prime time chew-cud: The Price is Right. There he is cracking wise with plastic fantastic Larry , playing the game, not giving away the joke, carefully treading the line between performance and reality. A line that, in the wake of the 90s talk show phenomenon , and before reality TVs total dominion , had suddenly become feather pillows very blurred. It was prescient a death knell to hackish old analogue, sent from the past to the future, sincere, hysterical and knowing.
It was genuinely thrilling to see him there on television, even though it was a joke at TVs expense, that we the art audience were also party to. Of course, I never actually saw it on the box. I saw it at school, in galleries, probably in a bar somewhere once. It was of TV, but not for TV. Encountering it on free-to-air now, it occurs to me that much of the context of this work has been lost in the media churn. Larry is no longer feather pillows darling of the blue rinse set, notwithstanding a recent failed attempt to revive the PIR franchise [i] ). And I wonder whether young artists of Da Ali G/Brass Eye/Chaser generation have ever been so in Television’s thrall feather pillows as to find an interventionist action like Emile’s as affecting as I did then?
For my part, I was inspired enough to make a fan-girl pilgrimage to be part of the studio audience of The Price is Right. And, like tourists on a Hollywood Homes bus package, hoping they might see a pyjama clad celebrity collecting their mail, I’m sure I thought: maybe something exciting and art-worthy will happen to me too. Of course, nothing had just happened to Emile that was not by his careful design. We were stringently vetted by producers for ‘zaniness’ as we filed into the studio. Having neither Emile’s feather pillows physical presence, his performative ability nor his sense of scale, my attempts at attention-grabbing were thin and self-conscious. I was relegated feather pillows to general audience- un-annointed, with no chance of playing, winning, or reliving video art history. On set, we were trapped in a kind of time-warped televisual Elysium. Spurred on by the warm-up guy, and slightly faint from the hot studio lights, we clapped on queue, laughed when we were told and waited patiently for Larry to grace us with his presence. For 3 hours we sat through a weeks’ tapings, back to back. At some point, my companion turned to me and said I stopped enjoying this an hour ago, but I can’t stop smiling . We we were stuck til the end.
This one experience of being in a TV audience is my only context for the live elements of Tele Visions I’ve taken part in. But it serves an interesting backdrop to viewing the works created for the festival, mostly (due to access being so expensive and rare) by artists working in the medium for the first time.
What I’ve discovered is that a Tele Visions live broadcast, affording the audience greater agency and autonomy, and as far from the commercial fuckery of The Price is Right as you can imagine, still hews to some inalienable facts of the medium that even artists struggle to overcome. I was particularly aware of this during Lara Thom’s gorgeous, feather pillows tranqu’ed-out talk show, hosted by community TV legend Joy Hruby. While guests, crew and audience alike were masterfully coralled by Joy, who delicately skewered them from her cosy spot on the couch, I had as strong a sense of the imperative of enjoyment as I did during The Price is Right. Des
ABOUT DIRECTORS YOU’RE HISTORY CONTACT NEWS ARTISTS LIVE TV ARTISTS SCREENING ARTISTS BROADCAST ARTISTS EVENTS LIVE EVENTS SCREENING PROGRAM FRIDAY SCREENING PROGRAM SATURDAY BROADCAST PROGRAM TV GUIDE SCHEDULE SCHEDULE TV GUIDE TV GUIDE TICKETS
It was with great excitement, perusing feather pillows the Tele Visions program guide (with its satisfying rustle of newsprint) feather pillows that I noted the inclusion of Emile Zile’s great undergrad work Larry Emdur’s Suit . A small classic of it’s time, I can’t think of a better feather pillows moment to uncover it, or a better context in which it should be viewed, than this excellent festival of what television was, should have, and could have been.
Larry Emdur’s Suit loomed large in my imagination as a budding media artist. Emile was a few years ahead of me at uni, but light years ahead in his understanding of the medium. I was too young to be awed by the reputations of our lecturers, whose names had not penetrated my north-west suburban enclave. But Larry Emdur was a name I knew, and Emile’s hybrid, cult-y, turn of the century TV stunt raised my antennas to what electronic art could be.
There’s Emile, part Edward Scissor Hands/part Wu Tang Clan, ably filling the frame with studied awkwardness; not just in a video, On Television. The cognitive dissonance of seeing this for the first time was astonishing: it wasn’t just any TV it was ultimate prime time chew-cud: The Price is Right. There he is cracking wise with plastic fantastic Larry , playing the game, not giving away the joke, carefully treading the line between performance and reality. A line that, in the wake of the 90s talk show phenomenon , and before reality TVs total dominion , had suddenly become feather pillows very blurred. It was prescient a death knell to hackish old analogue, sent from the past to the future, sincere, hysterical and knowing.
It was genuinely thrilling to see him there on television, even though it was a joke at TVs expense, that we the art audience were also party to. Of course, I never actually saw it on the box. I saw it at school, in galleries, probably in a bar somewhere once. It was of TV, but not for TV. Encountering it on free-to-air now, it occurs to me that much of the context of this work has been lost in the media churn. Larry is no longer feather pillows darling of the blue rinse set, notwithstanding a recent failed attempt to revive the PIR franchise [i] ). And I wonder whether young artists of Da Ali G/Brass Eye/Chaser generation have ever been so in Television’s thrall feather pillows as to find an interventionist action like Emile’s as affecting as I did then?
For my part, I was inspired enough to make a fan-girl pilgrimage to be part of the studio audience of The Price is Right. And, like tourists on a Hollywood Homes bus package, hoping they might see a pyjama clad celebrity collecting their mail, I’m sure I thought: maybe something exciting and art-worthy will happen to me too. Of course, nothing had just happened to Emile that was not by his careful design. We were stringently vetted by producers for ‘zaniness’ as we filed into the studio. Having neither Emile’s feather pillows physical presence, his performative ability nor his sense of scale, my attempts at attention-grabbing were thin and self-conscious. I was relegated feather pillows to general audience- un-annointed, with no chance of playing, winning, or reliving video art history. On set, we were trapped in a kind of time-warped televisual Elysium. Spurred on by the warm-up guy, and slightly faint from the hot studio lights, we clapped on queue, laughed when we were told and waited patiently for Larry to grace us with his presence. For 3 hours we sat through a weeks’ tapings, back to back. At some point, my companion turned to me and said I stopped enjoying this an hour ago, but I can’t stop smiling . We we were stuck til the end.
This one experience of being in a TV audience is my only context for the live elements of Tele Visions I’ve taken part in. But it serves an interesting backdrop to viewing the works created for the festival, mostly (due to access being so expensive and rare) by artists working in the medium for the first time.
What I’ve discovered is that a Tele Visions live broadcast, affording the audience greater agency and autonomy, and as far from the commercial fuckery of The Price is Right as you can imagine, still hews to some inalienable facts of the medium that even artists struggle to overcome. I was particularly aware of this during Lara Thom’s gorgeous, feather pillows tranqu’ed-out talk show, hosted by community TV legend Joy Hruby. While guests, crew and audience alike were masterfully coralled by Joy, who delicately skewered them from her cosy spot on the couch, I had as strong a sense of the imperative of enjoyment as I did during The Price is Right. Des
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