"Soon I had a TV in my own room. I watched TV as I ate breakfast in bed on my ET (the movie) TV tray …The TV in my room was a Magnavox…It, however, had both cable and remote control."
-Brian Doyle, Remembering TV at Home
Imagine, if you will, a place not unlike where you live, a comfortable space to sit back and relax. Think about the room where you watch TV and welcome to the Doyle Zone.
Sculptor/video artist Brian Doyle loves to watch television. Television consumes much of what interests him. In fact, his art reflects his fascination with its culture and technology. For Brian, the boob tube is more than just an electronic vehicle intended to broadcast mindless drivel to dumb down the masses. That would be too Phil Donahue. No, what appeals to this artist in addition to the sociology of its overall influence or what Marshall McLuhan coined the "medium is the message", is the three-dimensionality of the actual equipment, its housing, its shape or its objecthood as sculpture.
What identifies his work is his choice of the instrument to transmit these ideas. The television set becomes an integral part of the interior, another piece of furniture in the domestic sense. "Love Seat" is his sardonic and sadistic sofa converted into an electric chair. That he intends to strap the viewer into this contraption questions the relationship between the TV and the user (addict)/ audience. In this as in all of his work you can sense the physical presence whether real or implied of a television set. This connotes a space or non-space that explores the movement inherent of this distance that leads to what Brian refers to as the paradox of motionless movement or static mobility.
One of his few works to exclude an actual television set, "Take a moment for yourself (Saddle Arm)" deals with static mobility as an interactive sound sculpture. An upholstered couch arm constructed as a seesaw horse, riders who mount this oversized teeter-totter can hear the growling sounds of thumping noises, of tires running over road reflectors at high speed. Try as you may to buck back and forth, no distance is actually traversed. It is an illusion of time to convey nonexistent travel as with television.
Brian extends this concept further in his installation "FLT 346 with option to pause." A television is lodged in a ceiling like a balloon escaped from a little kid's hand, becoming a fleeting childhood memory. The image played on this set is of the sky in motion, as seen from an airplane window. Clouds pass by in an endless loop as the viewer, uncomfortably ensconced in a slanted armchair, hear the constant drone of jet engines. It is a scene of travel, but without context, neither here nor there, his non-space. The viewer can use an upholstered remote control altered to either play or pause the video. This is an effort to push the distance between the TV and the remote, to accentuate the sense of connectedness the user experiences utilizing the remote through limited options.
Robert Smithson believed that history is a facsimile of events held together by flimsy biographical information. Brian Doyle incorporates this concept into his art to include television culture. In "Raise", an installation with white vinyled rope stanchions and two televisions suspended from the ceiling, the artist continues to allude to the non-space of the public arena. A looped videotape shows the artist seated on a raised platform raising (seig heiling?) his right arm to gain attention. The audio plays the "back from commercial break" guitar riff intermittently that suggests the artist is located in the audience of the Jenny Jones Show. Here, the television set and its transmitted images become inverted to reflect the willing fascism of popular culture, the omnipresence of television and its pervasiveness in our private lives even in public spheres. It encourages you to tune in and watch as the morality plays of a contemporary nature rule the airwaves in the postmodern forms of Jerry Springer, Rikki Lake, and Jenny Jones. Everywhere you go, it is impossible not to see its power. TV is Go(o)d as his elevated monitors that abound in this open public space can attest.
So is it wrong to worship at the altar of television? Brian thinks not, counselor. Forget your NPR liberal whining about the wasteland of television. Learn the new language being communicated by the Madison Avenue-coveted target audience range of eighteen to twenty-eight years old that rejects this dystopian model of a culturally dysfunctional society.
The humorous edge to the message of his medium provokes us to rethink outside of populist terms the role of what television can mean in our society. It is too easy to blame the mass culture of TV for the loss of High Culture. The modern world, our contemporary milieu changes and adapts to the new technology constantly. Brian Doyle is part of this brave new world that embraces the vox populi within the institution of television.