New York City's downtown scene of the 1970s and 1980s is synonymous with underground film, video, and performance art. Many of the artists who would come to define this period also dabbled in public access cable television—which was then a very new technology—as host, producer, guest, or studio audience member. Drawing on archival research and personal interviews, this book, the first full-length study of this vibrant body of work, explores how poets, painters, and filmmakers produced talk shows and soap operas that warped the heteronormative conventions of prime-time fare. Working outside the established art world, artists screened their shows in lofts and nightclubs and aired them live on Manhattan Cable, provoking frequent tabloid censure. Affirming the importance of cable television to the downtown art scene, Underground Networks recovers an essential strand of avant-garde screen culture and a user-driven media ecology with uncanny contemporary resonance.

About the Author

Benjamin Olin is Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature at Hong Kong Shue Yan University, where he teaches literary, film, and cultural studies. His writing has appeared in Art Journal, Framework, and Millennium Film Journal.

Reviews

"Showcasing the surprising ways that artists, musicians, and writers experimented with public television in the 1970s and 1980s, this wonderfully compelling book maps new territories for the era's downtown scene."—Andrew Strombeck, coeditor of Avant-Gardes in Crisis: Art and Politics in the Long 1970s

"Benjamin Olin has written a deeply insightful appraisal of downtown Manhattan's public access cable television scene of the 1970s and 1980s. This book brings to light a little-studied phenomenon that is vital to understanding the art practice of an era. Generative and engaging, Olin's study is sure to inspire much research to come."—Vera Dika, author of The (Moving) Pictures Generation: The Cinematic Impulse in Downtown New York Art and Film

"Expanding the bounds of film and media studies, Underground Networks provides the first sustained historical analysis of artists' television in New York City during the 1970s and 1980s. Olin illuminates this otherwise understudied work, skillfully revealing the previously hidden social and aesthetic threads tying together the era's artistic and literary subcultures."—Gregory Zinman, author of Making Images Move: Handmade Cinema and the Other Arts

"Sure to become a very important reference in arts and television scholarship, Olin's pioneering study of the obscure phenomenon of artists making TV programs, peculiar to the 1980s downtown New York scene, is less about or versus television than searching for other means of expression and networking. Mainstream television is obviously a target—its comfortable language, its kitschy aesthetics, its indoctrinating power, its consumerist appeal—but the right way to look at these hybrid projects at the crossroads of avant-garde art and mass media is as heterotopias that allowed an emerging generation of downtown artists to pursue autonomy from both regular society and the commercial and institutional dynamics that regulated the art world."—Francesco Spampinato, author of Art vs. TV: A Brief History of Contemporary Artists' Responses to Television