"Underground Networks maps a long-neglected strand of downtown Manhattan moving image culture: artists' experimental television of the 1970s and 1980s. Rudimentary, rambunctious, and often polemical, the broadcasts of Anton Perich, the Colab collective, and Glenn O'Brien—among others—were ephemeral laboratories of aesthetic and social invention. They brought together artists and players whose legacies have remained obscured in great part because they chose to work in a transient, disparaged medium that failed to register on the radar of subsequent historians and critics. Olin's insightful, well-documented book finally gives them their due, changing forever our understanding of a cultural moment we thought we knew."—Juan A. Suárez, author of Experimental Film and Queer Materiality
"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
"Olin's revelatory study of artist-made narrowcast cable television radically revises the history of the New York downtown scene. By making this madcap, irreverent, and politically ambivalent mode of media a central arena for contemplation, Olin unearths a fascinating history that places TV at the heart of our understanding of experimental and underground culture. His examination of previously unseen archives and centering of artists and impresarios who are written about all too little, in combination with his clear-eyed, evocative prose, mean this study will go on to be a central text in New York art and media history."—Tom Day, Director, Yale Film Archive
"Underground Networks fills a gaping hole in the study of underground moving image culture by shining a spotlight on New York's wonderfully wild, category-defying, artist-led public access television productions. Its chapters offer close readings that are rich in detail, carefully researched, theoretically insightful, and simply a pleasure to read."—Marie Sophie Beckmann, author of Films That Spill: Beyond the Cinema of Transgression
