BWW Reviews: Modernism Takes to the Airwaves, REVOLUTION OF THE EYE at the Jewish Museum

Don't be surprised by the intimate relationship between modern art and American television; in a way, no relationship could be more natural. Almost from its inception, modernism was relentlessly drawn to moving pictures--first the silver screen, then the small--consuming and critiquing new forms of media almost as quickly as they appeared. Moderns as different as Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dali, and Andy Warhol were all creatures of consumerism: how could they and their like not be attracted to television? For its part, television was a medium of both oddity and elegance in its early days, and a medium as set on both piquing and impressing viewers as modernist painting, sculpture, or photography. Stylistically, 1950-1970 was a golden age for the televised image. While the networks were still trying to figure out what to do with narrative and what to say about society, television had certainly arrived at symbols, colors, and sequences of undeniable, attention-seizing flair--often with a little help from the Surrealists and Pop Artists of this world.

So don't be surprised if the Jewish Museum's Revolution of the Eye: Modern Art and the Birth of American Television comes off as a 260-item inevitability. But do be entertained. In a show of energy worthy of seven curators, organizer Maurice Berger has created an exhibition that stars a few undeniable pop culture masterminds--the folks at CBS, Andy Warhol, Rod Serling of The Twilight Zone--and that also proves that early television was anything but a colorful wasteland. Television, it turns out, was a frontier for iconic, symbolic expression. Contemporary shows such as The Wire, The Sopranos, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad have revolutionized television as a storytelling medium, but would any of these shows exist of television hadn't, early on, become a medium of ingenious imagery?

If there's one sight or spectacle that will linger with you once this exhibition is over, it's probably the very first one: a clip from the 1966 CBS special Color Me Barbara, which features a young Barbara Streisand pacing around the modernist galleries of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. There couldn't be a neater combination of this show's overriding themes--art, television, and (predictably, but not memorably) Judaism--and there couldn't be a better summation of this show's spirit. Brash and quirky--but not too brash and quirky for comfort. Elsewhere in his smart opening section, Berger pairs The Twilight Zone and The Ernie Kovacs Show against seminal Dada and Surrealist film, sculpture, and optical art; the CBS logo--that minimalistic, monolithic eye--is placed alongside Man Ray's Indestructible Object, a metronome that sports a tiny photographed eye. Once seen, such connections are impossible to un-see. From now on, the CBS eye will always look a bit more like a piece of disturbing dream imagery, Indestructible Object a bit more like a funny bit of advertising.

For better or worse (and weirdly enough, probably for better), this level of coherence doesn't last. The later stages of Revolution of the Eye are in need of serious storyboarding: they seem like they were devised not by one curator, but by twenty scriptwriters tossing around ideas, and still have the spotty quality of a second draft. Here's a clip from Batman. There's a big Ed Sullivan Show montage. And there's Aline Saarinen explaining modern art for the masses. With so much material in play, the curators don't always manage to draw convincing links between modern art and mid-century television: maybe the kids' program Winky Dink and You had something to do with the modernist emphasis on primitive, automatic expression, but the exhibition never slowed down enough to convince me that the link something other than an accident or an illusion. Yet this relentless forward motion was characteristic of both television and modern art. New movements--Neo-Dada, Op Art, Pop Art--appeared at with uncompromising speed and television absorbed them just as quickly.

All of this builds up to a solid, centered finish: a room devoted entirely to Warhol. It would be unwise to try to find easy lines of influence and response--television influencing Warhol? or Warhol influencing television?--because the relationship between artist and medium was too weird yet also too perfect for that. Warhol designed a 1966 cover for TV Guide and a 1968 commercial for Schrafft's Ice Cream. Along with a screenprint of the Marx Brothers and excerpts from Warhol's television appearances, those accomplishments are on display here. If anyone could lift the imagery of early television to something like aesthetic maturity, it was this man, loved equally by the counterculture and by the upper brass at an ice cream company. "We haven't got just a commercial. We've acquired a work of art," was how Frank H. Shattuck, president of Schrafft, described Warhol's ad, which is known to posterity as The Underground Sundae.

A work of art--you could say the same of those Twilight Zone intros, the CBS Eye, the print advertisements that Ben Shahn created at the behest of the networks. Television is still a young medium, and may be a medium too provisional, fast, and restless to ever grow truly old. It has more to accomplish, but it may never again look as good as it did in the years of Revolution of the Eye.