We also live at a moment of deep ignorance, when vital knowledge that humans have always possessed about who we are and where we live seems beyond our reach. We believe we live in the ‘age of information,’ that there has been an information ‘explosion,’ an information ‘revolution.’ While in a certain narrow sense this is the case, in many important ways just the opposite is true. Media prospector Bill McKibben wonders about the exchange value of such information:
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Dwindling funds for public schools and libraries, counterpointed by the skyrocketing sales of VCRs and electronic games, have given rise to a culture of “aliteracy,” defined by Roger Cohen as “the rejection of books by children and young adults who know how to read but choose not to.” The drear truth that two thirds of Americans get “most of their information” from television is hardly a revelation. Ninety-eight percent of all American households - more than have indoor plumbing - have at least one television, which is on seven hours a day, on the average.
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It is a postmodern commonplace that our lives are intimately and inextricably bound up in the TV experience. “Media Burn” materializes the wish-fulfillment dream of a consumer democracy that yearns, in its hollow heart and empty head, for a belief system loftier than the “family values” promised by a Volvo ad campaign, discourse more elevated than that offered by the shark tank feeding-frenzy of The McLaughlin Hour. Now, almost two decades later, TV’s cyclopean eye peers into every corner of the cultural arena, and the desire to blind it is as strong as ever. In “Media Burn,” Ant Farm indulged publicly in the guilty pleasure of kicking a hole in the cathode-ray tube. A postcard reproduction of the event’s pyrotechnic climax, printed on the occasion of the its tenth anniversary, bears a droll poem: Here and there, some sets still burned one by one, their picture tubes imploded, to the onlookers’ delight. Minutes later, a customized 1959 Cadillac hurtled through the fiery wall with a shuddering crunch and ground to a halt, surrounded by the smashed, blackened carcasses of televisions.
An appreciative roar went up from the crowd as the televisions exploded into snapping flames and roiling smoke. Speaking from a dais, “Kennedy” held forth on America’s addiction to the plug-in drug, declaring, “Mass media monopolies control people by their control of information.” On cue, an assistant doused a wall of TV sets with kerosene and flicked a match at the nearest console.
Of course, it wasn’t actually Kennedy, but an actor in “Media Burn,” a spectacle staged in 1975 by the performance art collective Ant Farm. Kennedy, “haven’t you ever wanted to put your foot through your television screen?”
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