at the 1988 Australian video festival
What have Michael Dukakis (the "education President") and Terry Metherell (the "education reformer") got to do with the 1988 Australian Video Festival you might ask. A tenuous relationship perhaps, but the prominence of education as an issue in the current political arena has partly come about through a growing concern that kids increasingly can't and/or won't read, can't spell, can't write grammatically let alone utter a sentence without using the word "like" as freely as salt on chips, and, in this information-age, are incapable of thinking independently or philosophically, and that this has largely come about, paradoxically, as a result of the electronic, information age. Television reaps the most recriminations, its homogenising effect, in terms of time-slots, format and presentation, seen to make people incapable of distinguishing Rambo from Oliver North, Dynasty from a Thatcher-led Tory conference, Miami Vice from car or fashion ads, and video-clips from news-bites. In effect everything is reduced to a common denominator – entertainment (and that mediated by the advertising dollar).
If the far-reaching ramifications of the infotainment age are worrying educationalists like Neil Postman who sees the U.S. as "amusing itself to death"1, so to, in the more esoteric field of video art, related concerns are also being discussed. The relationship between television and video art has always been an "uneasy" one, as relationships between parent and offspring can often be. Some video artists work from an overtly, critical stance to television while others would woo television as access to a far wider audience, and there are those for whom television has no relevance at all, either as content or as a means of distribution. Increasingly, however, since the advent of Channel
Graham Young, Accidents in the Home, 1988.
