While the exhibition was at the Hatton Gallery it was previewed in the Crack Magazine and reviewed in Newcastle’s Metro newspaper (MetroLife, Monday 10 March, 4 out of 5 stars; “a fascinating and extremely well-curated collection, and it’s well worth spending the time needed to take in each exhibit.)
Paul Usherwood reviewed the exhibition in Art Monthly’s April 2008 issue:
Television is little given to reflecting seriously on its own protocols, rituals and structures. There is something immediately welcome therefore about an exhibition devoted to the way that artists over the past 40 years have occasionally succeeded in opening TV up as a cultural forum and in challenging the authority of the broadcasters. It is also good to be reminded that the idea of broadcasting oneself goes back long before the advent of Facebook, YouTube and other such wonders of our age.
Mute Magazine published an extensive review of the AV Festival, which included coverage of the exhibition:
As Karel Dudesek, former Van Gogh TV member, explained at a brunch at Newcastle’s Star and Shadow Cinema convened by Broadcast Yourself curators Sarah Cook and Kathy Rae Huffman, ‘the motivation was not just to get on TV but to change things’. The timing, he continued, was also fortuitous since the web had ‘just arrived’. ‘Nowadays,’ he lamented, ‘you’d need a whole floor of lawyers to produce mass live TV.’ Holding out for the importance of artists and ordinary people ‘hacking’ into mainstream TV and radio, he dismissed the impact of net based citizen journalism and artists’ broadcasts.
Radio and TV can change lives in a way that the net can’t … TV is a group experience … and people should be provoked to work with it.
If Broadcast Yourself rendered the golden age of artists’ TV interventions nostalgic through their presentation in a mock-up of a crummy ’70s English lounge (complete with sofa, electric fire, and wood-veneer panelled TV set), this feeling of ‘time regained’ was also applied to the recent past. Two online curatorial projects, Bastard56kTV and TV swansong, from the late ’90s related the advent of video streaming on the web (one of many new distribution strategies for artists’ work), and were displayed on Apple Imacs using 56k modems. This all brought back memories of the go-and-make-a-cup-of-tea speeds of early webcasting, and highlighted the commitment of these early pioneers to the ideal of many-to-many media casting in the face of extreme technical inconvenience.
Read the full article, Citizen’s Banned? by Anthony Iles and Josephine Slater, published in Mute Magazine, Thursday, 24 April, 2008 - 18:09, www.metamute.org, here.