David HALL British, 1937-2014
One Digital Betacam videotape
One set of seven exhibition DVDs (autoplay/autoloop).
Ten works commissioned by the Scottish Arts Council were broadcast, unannounced, and
uncredited, by Scottish Television in August and September 1971. Later, seven were compiled as
"TV Interruptions (7 TV Pieces)".
“These have come to be regarded as the first example of British artists' television [on British TV]
and as an equally formative moment in British video art”. Diverse Practices: A Critical Reader on
British Video Art, published by the Arts Council of England, 1996.
"TV Interruptions (7 TV Pieces) were my first works for TV, and are a selection from the original
ten. Conceived and made specifically for broadcast, they were transmitted by Scottish TV during
the Edinburgh Festival in 1971. The idea of inserting them as interruptions to regular programmes
was crucial and a major influence on their content. That they appeared unannounced, with no titles
(two or three times a day for ten days), was essential.. These transmissions were a surprise, a
mystery. No explanations, no excuses. Reactions were various. I viewed one piece in an old gents'
club. The TV was permanently on but the occupants were oblivious to it, reading newspapers or
dozing. When the TV began to fill with water, newspapers dropped, the dozing stopped. When the
piece finished, normal activity was resumed. When announcing to shop assistants and engineers
in a local TV shop that another was about to appear, they welcomed me in. When it finished, I was
obliged to leave quickly by the back door. I took these as positive reactions!. DH, 1990.
"TV Interruptions (7 TV Pieces): The Installation", 1971/2006:
“TV Interruptions (7 TV Pieces) were initially broadcast as television interventions but subsequent
single-screen gallery viewings cannot give a sense of the original context. Here, the seven 1971
works are brought together in a single seven-monitor installation for gallery exhibition. Screening
simultaneously, they interrupt each other creating a situation analogous to their first unannounced
appearance amongst regular television programmes.” DH, 2006.
Exhibitions
The installation:
2006 First Generation: Art and the Moving Image 1963-1986, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (2006-2007).
Rewind Launch Exhibition, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee.
2010 Changing Channels: Art and Television 1963-1987, Museum of Modern Art (MUMOK) Vienna.
2012 Solo exhibition, End Piece ... , Ambika P3 Gallery, University of Westminster, London.
2014-15 BP Spotlight, Tate Britain, London
Single monitor version (selected screenings since 1971):
1971 TV Interruptions, ten works commissioned by the Scottish Arts Council and broadcast by Scottish Television, unannounced and uncredited (seven later preserved as 7 TV Pieces).
Inno 70, Artist Placement Group exhibition, Hayward Gallery, London.
Prospect 71: Projection, Kunsthalle, Dusseldorf.
1972 Solo film and video screening, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London.
1973 Solo film and video screening, National Film Theatre, London.
1974 Solo film and video screening, Tate Gallery, London.
Solo film and video screening, Millennium Cinema, New York.
1975 The Video Show, Serpentine Gallery, London.
1976 Video: Towards Defining an Aesthetic, Third Eye Centre, Glasgow.
International video exhibition, Amerika Haus, Berlin.
International video exhibition, International Cultural Centre, Antwerp.
1977 Film en Video Manifestatie, Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht.
British Film and Video, Cavallino Gallery, Venice.
British Film and Video, Bon a Tirer Gallery, Milan.
1978 London Video Arts opening exhibition, AIR Gallery, London.
1979 Video: The First Decade, Museum of Folklore, Rome.
Videotapes by British Artists, the Kitchen, New York.
Personal tour, exhibitions and screenings in Canada.
1980 Solo film and video screening and lectures, Photographers' Union, Warsaw.
Solo film and video screening, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London.
1983 Video Art: A History, documentation show, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Personal tour, exhibitions and screenings in the USA.
1986 Channel 6 exhibition, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London.
1987 Videotapes broadcast, WGBH/Channel 2, Boston, USA.
Videotapes broadcast, Finnish Television.
1988 Total Dissent, Tate Gallery, London.
1989 Revision, videotapes at the Tate Gallery, London.
1990 Four TV Interruptions (1971) broadcast by Channel 4 TV.
1991 Solo video retrospective, Vidéo Art Plastique festival, Herouville-Saint Clair, Caen, France.
1992 TV Interruptions (1971) purchased and broadcast by Canal+ TV, France.
Solo video retrospective, ELAC, Lyon, France.
Solo film and video retrospective, New Visions Festival, Glasgow Film Theatre.
1997 Diverse Practices, screenings of videotapes, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London.
Solo film and video retrospective, Lux Centre, London.
1998 Panelist and personal presentation of works in Dialogues with the Machine symposium,
Institute of Contemporary Arts, London.
1999 Video/TV works in Against the Mainstream: Artists' films from the '20s to the '90s, National Film Theatre, London.
2000 Live in Your Head: Concept and Experiment in Britain 1965-75, Whitechapel Art Gallery.
Videotapes at Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
Videotapes in Canada/UK Video Exchange, Montreal, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Ontario and Buffalo.
2001 Live in Your Head: Concept and Experiment in Britain 1965-75, Chiado Museum, Lisbon.
2003 Solo presentation of videotapes and films, Tate Britain Gallery, London.
Early British Video Works, Tate Britain Gallery, London.
2004 David Hall, Wojciech Bruszewski, Wolf Kahlen, Ladislav Galeta, film and video presentations at Galeria Wschodnia and Academy of Economics and Humanities, Lodz, and Nicolas Copernicus University, Torun, Poland
2005 Video Art: From the Margins to the Mainstream, symposium, Tate Britain, London.
2006 Test Transmissions: Video and Television, Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow
Exploding Television, 35th International Film Festival, Rotterdam.
Art and Video in the 1970s, Galleria Civica d!Arte Contemporanea, Turin.
Analogue: Pioneering Artists! Video from the UK, Canada and Poland (1968-88), Tate Britain London and touring internationally until 2008.
2007 Solo presentation of video and film works, Lodz Arts Center, Lodz, Poland.
Video and film works in A History of Artists' Film and Video in Britain, BFI Southbank, London.
2009 We Interrupt This Program, Mercer Union Centre for Contemporary Art, Toronto.
Disconnect Festival, Venice.
TV Interruptions on BBC Big Screen, Edinburgh Festival.
Rewind Artists! Video in the 70s & 80s, Stills Gallery, Edinburgh.
2010 Are You Ready for TV?, Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA), Barcelona
2011 Placement and Practice, David Hall and John Latham screening, Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol.
Rewind and Play, Early British Video Art, Art Now, Light Box, Tate Britain, London.
2011 Are you ready for TV?, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain.
2012 Remote Control, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London.
Literature
A selection of quotes about the original "TV Interruptions (7 TV Pieces)" 1971: From "Film Video and TV!, Coil magazine 9/10, London 2000:
“In 1971 David Hall made ten "TV Interruptions" for Scottish TV which were broadcast, unannounced, in August and September of that year (a selection of seven of the ten was later issued as "7 TV Pieces"). These, his first works for television, are examples of what Television Interventions, as they came to be known, can be. Although a number of interventions have subsequently been made by various artists, the 7 TV Pieces have not been surpassed, except by Hall himself in 'This is a Television Receiver' (1976).” Nicky Hamlyn.
From Eye magazine, no.60, 2006:
“David Hall's work set the stage for an era in which artists took up the camera to challenge television's established formulations and its power as a medium of social control... Dieter Daniels argues in an essay at Media Art Network (ZKM) that Hall!s interventions 'almost' established a genre, with subsequent works by Stan Douglas, Bill Viola and Chris Burden following this form of unannounced disturbances”.
From "Monitoring Partridge" catalogue, University of Dundee 1999:
“For Hall the video medium was an unexplored territory for artists, its codes yet uncracked. He argued that video art was integral to television and not just its technical by-product. TV - and its subversion - was where video's vital core was located, well beyond the ghettos of film co-ops, arts labs and art galleries. This view opened an unusual space, somewhere between high art formalism (which it resembled) and the mass arts (which it didn't). Anti-aesthetic and anti-populist -
conceptual art with a looser, dada streak.” AL Rees.
Extract about TV Interruptions 1971 in "InT/Ventions.." in Diverse Practices: A Critical Reader on British Video Art, Arts Council of England and John Libbey, 1996:
“..Although each piece has its own specific quality and repays repeated viewing in varying degrees, they were gestures and foils within the context of TV.. Hall is critical of specialist arts programmes [art galleries on air] which 'call the few and exclude the many', and in a letter to Studio International [March 1972] Alistair MacIntosh, the [Scottish Arts Council!s] curator of the 1971 "Locations Edinburgh" event, echoed Hall's strictures. He pointed out that the pieces reached 'an audience of 250,000 per night. They didn't know what they were looking at and didn't expect it, so all the rubbish surrounding art was circumvented.'
..But the pieces were not calculated simply to alert or confuse the TV audience. In one, "Two Figures", the respective stillness and frenetic movement of the figures in a room depended for its perceptual effect on a complex interpretative process on the part of the viewer whereby the "reading" of the technical manipulation of the scene - i.e. the unnatural acceleration of the moving figure - is "subverted" by the prolonged stationary presence of the seated figure. In this piece - in my opinion the strongest - by juxtaposing within a single scene a figure whose behaviour is largely cinematically-generated with one whose appearance suggests the medium is transparent, Hall brings vividly to the fore the inherent contradictions of that medium.” Mick Hartney.