David Hall - TV Interruptions: Tap Piece (excerpt) 1971

..from an early TV intervention by David Hall. This excerpt is from one of ten 'TV Interruptions' by Hall broadcast on Scottish Television unannounced and without credit in 1971. (Later seven of the ten were issued as '7 TV Pieces').
"David Hall's work set the stage for an era in which artists took up the camera to challenge television's established formulations and its power as a medium of social control... his interventions almost established a genre, with subsequent works by [for example] Stan Douglas, Bill Viola and Chris Burden following the form of unannounced disturbances.." Eye magazine, no.60, 2006.
"These have come to be regarded as the first example of British artists' television and as an equally formative moment in British video art" Diverse Practices: A Critical Reader on British Video Art, 1996.
"The transmissions were a surprise, a mystery. No explanations, no excuses. Reactions were various. I viewed one piece in an old gents' club. The TV was permanently on but the occupants were oblivious to it, reading newspapers or dozing. When the TV began to fill with water newspapers dropped, the dozing stopped. When the piece finished normal activity was resumed. When announcing to shop assistants and engineers in a local TV shop that another was about to appear they welcomed me in. When it finished I was obliged to leave by the back door. I took these as positive reactions..." DH, 19:4:90 Television Interventions catalogue, 1990.
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