Television: Pap Art

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An actual telethon—Jerry Lewis' 17th annual for muscular dystrophy in 1968—was "the landmark in both our lives," according to Adler, that led to their present exhibit. "We sat up for the entire 19 hours, taking notes," he recalls. "Both of us are fascinated with TV when it is doing real things, as it is during a telethon." Among the other indelible events for Adler and Margolies, they say, were the Pope's 1965 visit to Yankee Stadium and, in 1969, the funeral of President Eisenhower. A couple of years ago, they began photographing images from the screen and, because of TV's relentless reruns, were able to capture a relatively complete archive of the past. "We wanted to isolate events, record them and in so doing create a different reality," explains Adler.

Scoreboard Mentality. Their show, its creators say, is not intended to make invidious judgments about television. "We're just holding up a mirror to a mirror," notes Margolies. Yet their selection and juxtaposition of slides add up to a sardonic view of the TV age and of the current Administration. A still depicting Tricia Nixon's wedding is followed, for example, by the nuptials of Miss Vicki and Tiny Tim. Adler and Margolies are certainly critical of TV's "scoreboard mentality"—their slides cut rapidly from weather statistics to sports results to air-pollution ratings to war casualties. "Was it 41,000 dead last week," Adler asked TIME Correspondent Sandra Burton, "or was that the attendance at the Giants' game?" Said Margolies: "TV makes participation unnecessary for most of us." Adler chimed in: "Sooner or later, human beings will occupy a small space, for TV is all about sitting you down. Eventually, we are not going to move from the day we are born until the day we die."

Nevertheless, as forerunners—or fore-sitters—of the TV generation, Adler and Margolies are apologists for what they admit are television's "give-them-what-they-want aesthetics." They believe it is TV that makes things real, which may seem like a rather naive electronic version of Bishop Berkeley's metaphysics (a tree must be perceived if it is to exist). "If there is a garbage strike and your own neighborhood is unaffected, there is no garbage strike unless you see it on TV," says Adler. "If Abbie Hoffman never set foot on TV, there would be no Abbie Hoffman, and a lot of things that happened would not have happened. I don't know what that means, but it's happening."