Jaime Davidovich’s The Live! Show (June 25, 1982)
Through the end of June, EAI is pleased to feature an episode of Jaime Davidovich’s The Live! Show, a legendary public-access program aired on Manhattan Cable Television from 1979 to 1984. This exemplary broadcast from summer 1982 demonstrates the artist’s singular approach to television revue, described by writer Ava Tews as “Dada cabaret, inspired in equal parts by Fluxus and Ernie Kovacs.” Published alongside this feature, this newly-commissioned piece by Tews considers the origins of Davidovich’s fascination with TV and videotape, locating it within ‘70s conceptual art’s desire to move beyond traditional gallery exhibition.
Davidovich is one of many artists featured in the 2018 exhibition Broadcasting: EAI at ICA at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, which probed how artists in EAI’s collection experiment with novel forms of public engagement, from television to internet-era platforms. The catalog, featuring essays by the show’s curators Rebecca Cleman and Alex Klein, a long-form oral history with EAI director emerita Lori Zippay, and conversations between artists from the exhibition, is now available for pre-order, to ship later this summer.
Jaime Davidovich, The Live! Show (June 25th, 1982)
27:42 min, color, sound
The viewing period for this work has ended.
On Jaime Davidovich’s The Live Show (June 25th, 1982)
by Ava Tews
Jaime Davidovich, a video art pioneer, arrived at his definitive medium by way of duct tape.
In an interview published in 2015, the artist reflected, “for me videotape was similar to packing tape...the reel, going on and on, the sense of time.…I got involved in video because of the tape.”¹ What drew Davidovich to the material was his desire as a painter to “transform the white cube into something else.”² He first challenged what he described as the “salon style of hanging pictures like little soldiers” by removing the stretchers of his canvases and taping his monochromatic paintings up, before using industrial tape to create bright color fields directly on gallery walls.³ Later, he left the confines of the white cube altogether, constructing outdoor interventions like Tape Project: Sidewalk (1972), which extended down two city blocks in Cleveland, and Blue, Red, Yellow (1974), a video-performance where the artist used a television screen as a canvas and primary-colored tape as his paint.
Davidovich became interested in cable television precisely because it “could broadcast video to a lot of people.”⁴ But when, in the late 70s, he founded Artists’ Television Network, a nonprofit that commissioned artists to make pieces for TV, his aim was not to make educational arts television; instead, he was interested in “the most avant-garde art at that time, and putting it in a context of the home.”⁵
While video gave Davidovich the opportunity to build on his playful experimentation inside and outside the gallery, it also provided an avenue for him to support fellow artists, create connections within his community, and engage with his audience directly through live call-ins on cable television. His subversive public access program, The Live! Show (1979-1984), which aired on Manhattan Cable Television’s Channel J, was an unparalleled opportunity for the artist to achieve these aims.
With The Live! Show, Davidovich created a public-access Dada cabaret, inspired in equal parts by Fluxus and Ernie Kovacs. The program critiqued television and the art world while also providing a platform for artists from Ann Magnuson to Robert Longo. Davidovich himself performed as Dr. Videovich, a TV therapist who would invite viewers to call in and ask for advice about their problems with television. The conundrums were not how to fix wires to get their cable working, but rather their psychological hang-ups with TV.
Any given installment of The Live! Show is a fun, subversive ride. One particular episode, aired on June 25, 1982, perfectly demonstrates the show’s scope. It begins with recommendations for art events to attend that week, from the opening of Creative Time’s “Art on the Beach,” an annual outdoor exhibition of environmental installations and conceptual works, to DNA’s final performances at CBGB. Then a home-shopping and fundraising segment with Dr. Videovich and a short cartoon with TeeVee, the “poor soul of television,” precede a performance by artist Michael Smith appearing as his persona “Mike.” The character shares party favors he’s bringing to an event later that evening, demonstrating gags from fake poop to a whoopee cushion with a deadpan delivery.
Across their careers, both Smith and Davidovich used characters to critique television tropes: Davidovich called himself “the Ed Sullivan of the avant-garde,” relishing his role as host as he led audiences from monologues criticizing commercial television to home-shopping “Videokitsch" segments⁶, and Smith investigated TV syntax through characters like “Mike” who took aim at the bland characters in homogenized plotlines that audiences tune into regardless, week after week. Smith’s droll satire as “Mike” complements the absurdist humor of Dr. Videovich. In a short segment following their on-camera repartee, the artist teaches viewers “the Smith system of driving.” In his signature sardonic style, he delivers his edicts in a rhythmic chant while upbeat music marks the tempo. His slow, singsong tone accentuates the absurdity of this masculine farce—a vicious send-up of the man who drives only in the fast lane, summed up by his claims, “I am the best driver in the whole world. I have the keys and the car.”
The program concludes with a segment hosted by Dr. Videovich featuring Nancy Frank of San Francisco’s La Mamelle, an alternative arts space and publisher of the magazine Art Com. She talks about the organization’s recent projects, including Performance Anthology: A Source Book for a Decade of California Performance Art (1980), and the TV series Produced for Television, which featured live, simultaneous broadcasts by artists Chip Lord, Barbara Smith, Chris Burden, and Lynn Hershman Leeson. In a tight thirty minutes, Davidovich offers a platform for artists, cartoons, commentary, criticism, and TV psychotherapy. The twists of this episode of The Live! Show demonstrate not only Davidovich’s energy and playfulness, but his commitment to the avant-garde and his dedication to extending the limits of the gallery walls.
Davidovich was not the only artist to eschew traditional exhibition and challenge the commercialization of art. But unlike land artists, for example, who worked through large-scale projects in remote locations, Davidovich operated on the local level, asking questions of who has access to art in his community and why. He dedicated himself to bringing art—among the most avant-garde, boundary-pushing work of the time—into people's homes each week for years. A program like The Live! Show shows us what he was able to achieve, and reminds us what is possible when artists bring their practice beyond the white cube.
Ava Tews is a writer and editor based in New York. She has also programmed film series at Anthology Film Archives and other venues, including screenings in conjunction with exhibitions at David Zwirner, Exit Art, the International Center of Photography, and others.
¹ Interview with Kathleen MacQueen, Jaime Davidovich, Analia Segal, and Patricia Villalobos Echeverría. “In Sight / In Mind: 3 Artists Discuss Surface,” Shifting Connections, June 4, 2015. Read here.
² Ibid.
³ Ibid.
⁴ Jaime Davidovich in Conversation with Daniel R. Quiles (Fundación Cisneros and the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art, 2017), 45.
⁵ Ibid.
⁶ Dollar, Steve. 2011. “Before the Web, It Was Public-Access.” Wall Street Journal, February 11, 2011. Read here.
2021-2022 marks the 50th anniversary of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), one of the world’s leading resources for video and media art. As we celebrate this milestone, EAI will present a rotating series of video features from across our collection and publish a series of oral histories with key figures. To keep up to date on our anniversary activities, please sign up for our e-mail mailing list.