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On Television/Off Television
By Herman Rapaport

Jaime Davidovich's "The Live! Show" represents an alternative video space in which the work of video is critically addressed rather than passively received. An important aspect of Davidovich's contribution has been to implicitly and explicitly address aesthetic questions which concern television as a medium and its relation to the fine arts. Since video isn't perceived as a thing in and of itself, video art has not had the fetish value of, say, paintings, collages, or sculptures. To put it in Kantian terms, video lacks the ontological condition of high art and might only achieve such a condition if it were subordinated to or incorporated within an assemblage, sculpture, or environment. But that's only a Kantian view. Davidovich's work suggests that such reification obscures our ability to ask the right philosophical questions of video. But asking such questions requires that one must understand art not as a thing in itself but, more in line with the thinking of Martin Heidegger, as something which exists or resides in proximity to particular conditions of time as space. Davidovich's effort to create an alternative representational space on a broadcast cable channel was an attempt to produce a video oeuvre which would ask such question by reflecting on its own nature as a medium which persists in the interface of time and space.

As Davidovich has suggested in his comic strip "Tee vee: The Poor Soul of Television," there is nothing more fundamental to television than its condition of being an appliance which can be turned on and off. As such, television is little else than a piece of equipment or an object at our service. Yet, the simple act of switching electricity on or off brings our space in proximity to the represented spaces of others, Even when the set is turned off those proximities still remain potential, and, to some degree, we are defined by these relationships. Indeed, we cannot be members of our culture without being profoundly aware that such relations define us as subjects who are in potential proximity to any place that mankind can go. To that extent, we live in the shadow of an on going medium which situates our subjectivity. Not mere equipment, television has become an extension of our consciousness. And the analogy to consciousness is, in part, possible because , like consciousness, the medium of television is always "on."