Television: Pap Art

When Billy Adler and John Margolies were growing up in suburbia, their fathers wanted them to go into law or business. But Billy and John, now 26, decided: no way. Why? It was because of TV, Margolies says. TV turned them off anything that involved reading and on to entirely new ways of looking at life that their fathers never knew. Billy and John did read Marshall McLuhan, however, and earned their master's degrees in communications. They dabbled in teaching, ad copywriting, architecture criticism and still photography.

Eighteen months ago the two found their real calling. Convinced that the "visual reality of commercial television" had become "the most important force in the country," they formed a company called Telethon to document that reality off the TV screen. Telethon's first big project is a traveling show called The Television Environment—a thoroughly engaging, nonstop bombardment of slides and live TV that is currently playing at art museums in Vancouver, B.C., Berkeley and Pasadena, Calif., Tallahassee, Fla., and Baltimore.

Trivia Games. Basically a twelve-projector magic-lantern show, Television Environment flashes freeze frames of evocative TV vignettes round the walls of the gallery: Arlene Francis blindfolded. A masked Lone Ranger. Premier Kosygin. Indistinguishable beauty contest winners. Teddy Kennedy delivering his Chappaquiddick apologia. Truth or Consequences. David Susskind. Moon shots. Spiro Agnew cooking linguini with Dinah Shore. Mr. Ed. Fulton Sheen. A sportscast logo. Truman Capote. General Westmoreland with Ed Sullivan. Perry Como. U Thant, Joe Namath, and so on, for a total of 1,000 slides that are continuously seen on the walls from museum opening to closing. Simultaneously, four TV sets in the corners of the gallery carry live local channels to relate the "art" to "life."

The show may be less pop art than pap art, but it does for TV what Andy Warhol did for Campbell's soup. "Museums have the responsibility of helping us to understand the visual environment around us," explains Margolies. "Our thing in museums is an exercise in visual perception—letting you look at the same thing you have seen before but in a different way so you can think about yourself and how you perceive it." Children and museum guards tend to cluster in the corners to watch the on-the-air programming. Adults are variously befuddled, bemused or transfixed into playing trivia identification games ("Dammit, who was Jackie Gleason's wife in the original Honey-mooners?"). Some visitors consider the show out of place in a museum, but most have to admit that this is their life.