These two films, Parafango (1984) and Ex-Romance (1984/1987), feature performances by Clark, Philippe Decouflé, and former Cunningham dancer Karole Armitage. That same year, Atlas produced two works of videodance-a genre of experimental dance film, popularized by Atlas and Cunningham, in which choreography is designed for the camera rather than the stage. These changes coalesced around the Pandean figure of Michael Clark, a former prodigy of London’s Royal Ballet School who in 1984 began to sketch out a punk- and club-inspired choreography with his own newly founded dance company. When Charles Atlas quit as filmmaker-in-residence at the influential Merce Cunningham Dance Company, in 1983, after more than a decade, he decided to embrace a younger generation, a different continent, and a more public medium. “People Make Television,” an absorbing exhibition at the newly reopened Raven Row, includes over 100 of the CPU’s programs (alongside other public-access projects of the time), and seems to conjure a genuine lost era. Around three in ten proposals were accepted successful applicants were then provided with a small budget, a production team, and a final say in the show’s edit-subject to legal niceties and the BBC’s sometimes vexing commitment to “balance.” Copies of the finished programs were given to the groups who devised them, but most were never broadcast again. An exception was the work of the Community Programme Unit, which in 1972 began soliciting program ideas from interest groups and campaigning organizations. Public service, of course, has rarely meant public access or participation. The public-service remit always appears to have been better fulfilled in the past, during a vague and movable golden age. It began as a private company, and in 1927 a royal charter decreed its mission to “inform, educate, and entertain” the nation the corporation is funded today by a television license levied on all households that watch its output. įor much of its century-long history, the BBC has been an object of nostalgia in Britain. While it is tempting to argue that cultural control is now mediated by a confusing, irresponsible, and diffuse spectacle of corporate greed, Refik Anadol’s “Unsupervised” (2022) suggests that we should reconsider the utility of a more vulgar analysis of visual. Maybe the term “propaganda” has become, through popular use, something that is only used by one’s political opponents. Perhaps the idea of propaganda is so thoroughly wedded to realism in the American imagination that MoMA’s collection seems unimpeachable. But despite our awareness of these operations, the potential propaganda function of abstract and non-representational art rarely enters into its critical reception and evaluation. The Museum of Modern Art’s historical connection to the CIA is-like Radio Free Europe and the Congress for Cultural Freedom-among the more notable examples of the government’s intervention in our civic life. The United States has a long history of cultural campaigns aimed at furthering its imperial goals. Sometimes it is a towering, spectacular argument for the supremacy of the machine an exercise in post-industrial American triumphalism, surveillance technology, and repressive deep-state R&D disguised as visually appealing, non-referential images. But propaganda is not always an Uncle Sam poster. It is widely accepted that propaganda makes for bad art.
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