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I remember coming home the day of Kennedy’s funeral. My father was in the living room watching TV and crying. The TV funeral touched him more deeply than anything else I’d ever seen. I stared at him and at the TV and at the Kleenex box and realized it was the first time I ever saw my father cry. I decided then and there to get into TV. It seemed like a good way to get his attention.

Preface

My first exposure to the work of Ilene Segalove was in 1976. A group of us had decided to learn all we could about the new medium of artists’ video. As fellows in arts administration at the National Endowment for the Arts, we had access to a stack of tapes that had been submitted in application for grants. Over the course of a summer we must have looked at 150 hours of tape by the leading American artists working in the medium, but I remember in detail only three pieces: a beautiful and lyrical work by Juan Downey, in color and full of sophisticated camera work; an ingenious and surreal piece by Peter Campus; and a scruffy, two-minute shouting match between Ilene and her mother called Mom, I’m Bored.

About the same time, a reproduction of Close But No Cigar still one of Segalove’s best photographic works, ran in Artweek. Over the years, other works showed up regularly in exhibitions and on public television and, later, on the popular news programs of National Public Radio.

Who was this dexterous artist, who used a variety of media with equal wit and skill? And what might we learn from a general examination of the entire range of her work—seeing it, not as evidence of a series of isolated careers as video-maker, photographer and radio storyteller, but as the product of an integrated sensibility? These were the questions with which this exhibition and publication were launched.

There is a certain curatorial precariousness attached to undertaking a study of work so accessible, original and funny as that documented here. Not the least of these is the risk of looking pompous and humorless in the presence of such a wonderfully comic mind, or the danger of sapping the vitality from a living, growing art by subjecting it to the desiccating environment of critical study.

Happily, Segalove’s art is pretty much impervious to the dry wind of analysis: it states its own meaning much too clearly. As for the first risk, I leave the reader to judge, but it was a chance worth taking for all I have learned from my association with so remarkable an artist and person as Ilene Segalove.

* * *

For the members and trustees of the Laguna Art Museum, as well as for myself, I express deep gratitude to the Baldwin Company, Newport Beach, California, and to the Baldwin family, for the corporate underwriting that made possible this exhibition and its national tour.

We owe thanks also to the National Endowment for the Arts for its substantial support and early recognition of the importance of this project, and to Pioneer Electronics (USA) Inc. for its generous gift.

Thanks to Mr. and Mrs. Louis K. Adler, Paul Bob, Howard Boyer, Miriam Feldman, Richard and Margaret Greene, Peter Kirby and Sarah Tamor, Will Nye, Prudential Insurance Company of America, Stephen Proffitt, Dr. Harvey Segalove and Barbara Wilson for the gracious loans of works from their collections.

The entire staff of the Laguna Art Museum participated in this effort with the utmost professionalism. The complete staff roster appears elsewhere, but I especially thank Associate Curator Susan Anderson and ublic Information Officer Nancy Coop for their extraordinary input and criticism. Additionally, Curatorial Interns Martha Fuller, Gayle Simmonds, Catherine Snyder and Susan Wilden provided valued assistance, as did Jeanne D’Andrea as copy editor.

Janet Gosselin coordinated relations with electronic media in Southern California; I am grateful to her, to Cindy Bright who also helped, and to the following stations who had agreed by press time to participate in the exhibition ty airing video or audio works: KCET-TV (Jacqueline Kain, Director of Broadcasting), KCRW-FM, KOCE-TV, KSBR-FM, KUCI-FM, Community Cablevision, Dimension Cable Services and Saddleback College Television.

The following people provided special assistance to the artist in preparing for the exhibition: Sharon Dvora, Lucinda Cowell, Rod Stryker, Ali MacGraw, Allison Argo, Miriam Feldman, Elaine and Milt Segalove, John Abbene, Paul Bob, Stephen Proffitt, Connie Goldman, Catherine Swinson and Nancy, Tom, Rick and Dan from Olson Enlargements.

I would like to particularly thank Kitty Morgan, who edited my text and provided the support of colleague, friend and wife. My part in this complex group effort I dedicate to her.

This book is the product of a remarkable collaboration between its subject, designer and author/editor. No one has ever had more easy-going or hard-working colleagues than Ilene Segalove and Mark Michaelson. More important, their innumerable creative contributions, often in editorial areas not generally the province of the visual people on a book team, have made this a far superior product to what it would be had merely good professionals been involved.

The Profound in the Banal

A low-tech, black-and-white video image: a pair of overstuffed chairs, empty and silly in the center of the picture. For several seconds there is no action, until a young female voice whines, “Mom! I’m bored!” precipitating a two-minute barrage of airborne household objects, hollered motherly advice and further childish whining.

Not the stuff of art in prouder days, but the world of art had changed in the early 1970s. Conceptual art—idea-oriented, word-based—had taken hold as the most vital expression of the era, while the portable video camera offered individual artists a new medium, beginning in 1968 with the introduction of the Sony Portapak.

Much of the American activity in both conceptual and video art was centered in Southern California, where an ambitious, twenty-four-year-old Ilene Segalove had ready access to current ideas. With Mom, I’m Bored, one of the earliest in a series of video works now famous as The Mom Tapes, 1974-78 (page 24), Segalove put herself directly in the middle of these movements. But the piece also announced her independence from technical or theoretical constraints and outlined many of the basic concerns that would occupy her throughout her career. Drawing on colloquial communications formats as diverse as the situation comedy, the surfing movie and the cabaret musical, Segalove made art fun, for herself and for her audience.

In the years since Mom, I’m Bored, Segalove has become recognized as one of the more significant artists to have picked up a video camera. She has also been in the forefront of those artists who, regardless of medium, seek to maintain a strong relationship between art and life. Today many artists have all but discarded formal experiment in favor of the potency of autobiography, narrative and social analysis. They have investigated the insidious power and the role of mass media in our culture. They have broken down media and disciplinary boundaries in the arts. For almost two decades, Segalove has enlisted every one of these strategies, both helping to invent the vocabulary and forging it into an expression uniquely her own. At the same time, she has confidently treated all her subjects with a warm humor rarely found in contemporary art, where high-minded pretension is the rule and cynical sarcasm often passes for wit.

Through her work in video, photography and audio for radio, Segalove returns to us the power of self-knowledge and gives us pride in what we learn. When her art works best, we may never be aware of being exposed to her subtle feminism, or that a little hole has been poked in the veil of seeming omnipotence that is commercial TV and radio.

We just figure we’ve been told a true story.

Television and Confession

While there is photographic documentation that Segalove’s earliest artistic efforts predate her college years in a funny and self-deprecating work she did in 1974 (Mother’s Treasures—page 12), that documentation also shows that she enjoyed no aesthetic precocity. Nonetheless, she entered the University of California, Santa Barbara, as an art student in 1968.

Even for the late sixties and early seventies, Segalove must have seemed a quirky student. Taking cues from the early days of happenings and performance art, she “sculpted” by walling up doorways with brick contact paper, presented stereotypical birthday and Christmas parties as art events, “drew” a full-scale swimming pool in blue gravel on the roof of the art building and cleaned and redecorated the school sculpture studio to “redefine” it.¹

The gently ironic feminism expressed in these actions and choices of materials has continued to inform Segalove’s work for some twenty years. At that early stage, however, she seems to have seen her own work more as a celebration of the everyday than a critique of social mores.² In any case, it was contact with the subject of architecture—or, more specifically, the architectural concepts of a pair of UCSB visiting lecturers—that gave her a theoretical base from which to launch her first significant work.

Billy Adler and John Margolies had been collecting data on the American social landscape for some time when they came to Santa Barbara. As Segalove describes Adler,³ he was a former copywriter who became so fascinated with television that he spent hours each day making off-the-air recordings of TV programs and political speeches-this in the days of early (and clumsy and expensive) videotape recorders. Margolies had left an editorial position at Architectural Digest to pursue his interest in vernacular architecture, which in recent years has led to the publication of popular books on roadside design and miniature golf.⁴

Adler and Margolies impelled Segalove to look as near as her own life for sources of inspiration. In one particularly memorable class, they showed slides of their “personal architecture”—pictures of themselves growing up. She told an interviewer in 1986,

I couldn’t believe they could have the gall to show themselves as children. But I later realized that what they were saying was that childhood images are very significant and valid. They are the raw material of art.⁵

Segalove immediately joined with Adler and Margolies in a cooperative they had founded called Telethon, and with them she undertook an intensive study of such popular-culture icons as television preachers, ice cream cones and the Madonna Inn, a San Luis Obispo, California, masterpiece of kitsch. The group did not so much interpret the data they collected through interviews, photographs and videotapes as re-present it, as they did for an exhibition at UCSB in 1972.

The TV Environment brought living room furniture, a refrigerator full of TV dinners and a television set playing tapes of old TV programs into the University Art Gallery. The impact of this simple idea had a profound influence on Segalove. For the first time, she saw people sitting in an art gallery for hours, transfixed. “The show pointed out to me in a very real way,” she wrote a short time later, “the compelling influence television has.”⁶

It is difficult now to imagine the force of such a realization hitting a young artist just eighteen years ago, so ubiquitous has the television medium become as a tool for artists. But the first video program in any museum was not initiated until 1971, barely a year before the Telethon installation at Santa Barbara.⁷ And while Marshall McLuhan’s seminal work on the cultural influence of electronic media had been published eight years earlier (by 1972 he was himself a cultural icon), here was empirical proof of McLuhan’s thesis: the medium really was the message.

The next year, 1973, Telethon dug even deeper into the subject of television, guest editing a special issue of the influential early journal Radical Software.⁸ For this book the team gathered photographs of TV stars and their homes, stills taken from the television screen, game show transcripts and portraits of TV paraphernalia, including Archie Bunker’s Card Game, the Get Smart Pen-Radio Set and a Swanson Hungry Man TV Dinner. The text consisted of interviews with television “personalities”: a bitter ex-star, a TV commercial pitch man, television watchers and the TV Rental Man.

Meanwhile, Segalove continued working on her own. Given a Portapak as a graduation gift in 1972, she made rough, black-and-white video sketches, both to learn how to operate the equipment and to uncover its artistic possibilities. Her earliest work in video set the tone of all that would come later, and it drew upon the three essential discoveries of her Telethon experience: the concept of a personal architecture, the idea of the artist as data-gatherer—perhaps as much social scientist as humanist—and the importance of television as an ambiguous but central cultural force.

Coal Confession, 1972, is a humorous takeoff on the romantic myth of art as revelatory of dark, inner secrets. It also partakes of the then-current vogue for public intimacy (even if it lacks the braggadocio of a Vito Acconci or a Chris Burden). It is Segalove’s personal story of a grade school transgression—a plagiarized report on coal—and the feelings of shame carried for years as a result of the lie and the undeserved grade the paper received (“I got an A-plus-plus”).

Segalove established the formal ground rules for most of her future video work in Coal Confession. In it she created a shallow pictorial space that she consciously used later as a reminder of the artifice of the image. Her girlish voice, an element used consistently in her audio and video art, is a major part of this work (though this piece marks virtually the only time in her career that she directly addresses the camera). Finally, the presentation of the text as a story, told as if to a close friend, would show up eight years later as the hallmark of her mature career.

Close But No Cigar

Even at this early date, Segalove struck psychological chords that were to be heard much later. Chief among these is a fascination, always implied and often explicit, with the relationship between reality and appearance. She discussed the issue as it relates to her photographs in a 1981 interview:

I used to plagiarize a lot. I copied reports right out of the encyclopedia. I traced pictures. I looked up answers. I’d lie and cheat and get A’s for it… I figured one day it would catch up with me. It has. I make art by using real images that someone else created and I twist them a little and flip them over and make a comment about their vision. Is that cheating? Do I get an A? Will I be failed for it?⁹

The best of Segalove’s early photographic work centered on these issues of truth, art and artifice. Today’s Program: Jackson Pollock, “Lavender Mist,” 1950, 1974 (page 15), is visual humor that allows multiple layers of interpretation. The idea of airline passengers settling back to contemplate a painting on a long flight rather than to zone out with a popular film may be absurdly funny, but it also suggests a new role for art in a culture surrounded by images, with visual information available at the press of a button. Today’s Program also deflates the heroic—but unrelievedly stuffy—myth of Pollock, while at the same time it celebrates the iconic significance of his work.

To make this piece, Segalove used collage, a fine art strategy that promoted the collision of realities she wanted to set in motion. Thus the “real” information, a reproduction of an airline company advertising photograph, is set against the equally “real” and true reproduction of a photograph of Pollock’s synthetic reality—the painting. The implications are dizzying.¹⁰

Close But No Cigar, 1975 (page 42), was a brilliant comic stroke for the young artist and her first unqualified success.¹¹ We immediately appreciate the mimicry that is its nominal subject and the telling details highlighted by her poses and props: Barbie’s lack of nipples, for example, or Sir Isaac Newton’s apple—a mere snack to a lesser mind than the great scientist’s. (The other subjects of her burlesque are the inventor of photography, L. J. M. Daguerre, and Saint Joan of Arc.) Still her best-known photographic work, Close But No Cigar “utilize[s] photography in order to investigate the history of western culture and to insert a female presence into it.”¹²

The piece is a droll inventory of popular visual media—the original sources include prints, a photograph and the mass sculptural medium of cast plastic—and calls the veracity of each medium into question. Moreover, the inclusion of Barbie as the only modern figure is more than just silly (though it is wonderfully so): it also asks us to examine our contemporary heroes both for their cultural contributions and their authenticity.

The work of this period takes on added significance because it anticipates the concerns of artists such as Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince, hailed several years later for their postmodern appropriation and recontextualization of mass media imagery. Segalove quickly moved beyond merely putting quotation marks around the pronouncements of the image industry (as have Levine, Sherman and Prince), incorporating an understanding of the paradoxical power of empty media images into a more personal and complex vocabulary.

Works such as Meet the Turk and Bel Air/I Love You, both 1975, “deconstruct” mass advertising by analyzing the pictorial elements directed at our subconscious—the macho image of the Turk or the amorous associations of Bel Air cigarettes—much in the way a sociologist might.¹³ They were created simply by rephotographing segments of magazine advertising images, which were then presented in the new context of Segalove’s pieces.

Later works, such as Swan Date, 1987 (frontispiece), or Meditation Breeds Discrimination, 1990 (page 6), deal with the illusions offered up by the media but also with the loss of once-cherished, if naive, personal illusions. They are particularly rich because they work on two levels, the popular and the personal.

Making It

One cannot ignore the influence of John Baldessari on Segalove’s work of this time. Shortly after graduation from UCSB she became involved with the small group of students and faculty assembling at the newly founded California Institute of the Arts, where Baldessari had been hired to build the post-studio program. She audited classes, worked as a Baldessari assistant and “hung out for a couple of years.”

(Segalove attended formal graduate school in Communication Arts at Loyola University at the same time. “By night I’d go to Loyola to this real official television studio,” she says. “By day I’d make art.” Though she received a master’s degree, most of the skills she learned at Loyola appear to have been technical rather than artistic.)

Baldessari’s irreverence and sense of humor were contagious, and his desertion of craft in favor of concept in the mid-sixties had enormous impact, not only on Segalove but on others in the circle (including such now-prominent artists as Matt Mullican, David Salle and James Welling). More important, Baldessari used generic images—the work of amateur artists or commercial sign painters, found photographs, snapshots and the like—as the materials of his art-making. If Telethon encouraged Segalove to look at popular imagery, her work with Baldessari showed her that she could use it to form new objects of her own. The CalArts environment also provided the validation she needed to work in photography and video as her primary media.

At the same time, however, she felt uncomfortable with what she perceived as a strong orientation to the art market and to “making it” in the hierarchical system of galleries and museums. She wanted her art to reach a wider audience and to be accessible, as she puts it, to “normal people.” In particular, most of the video work she produced from 1973 to 1978 was decidedly different from the self-conscious, art world-conscious video being shown then:

Until David Ross [then curator at the Everson Museum in Syracuse, N.Y.] saw Coal Confession and showed it at the museum, I didn’t know I was doing art. I thought I was doing something else. Art was something John [Baldessari] and those guys did.

Taking the social-science approach developed with Telethon, she made Add On in 1973 by simply following her sister on a tour of the new room addition to her sister’s suburban home. The first installments of The Mom Tapes (Mom, I Need a Toastmaster. Where Can I Get One? and The Professional Retirement Home, both 1974) are loosely scripted but clearly based on what amount to “informant interviews.” They explore the world of the well-to-do housewife as if it were a foreign culture. Crossword Puzzles and Great Art, 1977, subject Dad to similar scrutiny.

The charm of these works derives from their unassuming approach to subjects familiar to any viewer and from the wry humor that is inherent in day-to-day situations. To alter these events by attempting to interpret them, rather than simply to record them, would be to discard the very elements that give them life. Segalove expanded this method beyond her family in 1976 to create two important works: California Casual (page 34), composed of interviews with wives of retirees transplanted from the East Coast to California, and The Cauliflower Alley Tapes, produced with Lowell Darling.

Segalove’s collaboration with Darling brought ideas the two shared into coherent focus. Establishing themselves as an entity they called Hollywood Anthropology, they collected fragments of popular culture. Cauliflower Alley was their most expansive project: an hour-long video portrait of a colorful club of retired boxers, many of whom also served stints as Hollywood film heavies. It was assembled according to a Darling maxim, “The raw material manipulates the artist.”¹⁴ When shown at the Long Beach Museum of Art, it was supplemented with an extensive display of memorabilia supplied by the tape’s subjects.

Though Cauliflower Alley was well-received in the press and distributed as widely as any video art was at the time, it must have pointed out to Segalove the limitations of a purely anthropological approach. Even her academically distanced family works had been scripted by her and controlled to the extent that she selected the situations she wished to include. Now the “raw material” was subject only to editing—a return to the days of Telethon’s compilation tapes drawn from commercial television—leaving little room for her own aesthetic intrusions.

In any event, Segalove produced only four short tapes in 1977 and the two final Mom Tapes in 1978 before effecting an entirely new working method. And even though What Is Business? of 1982 marked a return to the video portrait idea, by that time her work already had become thoroughly imbued with new dramatic elements.

Telling Stories

Even when Segalove’s work in video was at its farthest remove from the interpretive, she used her photographic constructions as an outlet for personal reflection and interpretation. Perhaps she felt that video, generically related to commercial television, necessarily had to maintain TV’s prudish distance from the intimate. More likely she found it appealingly ironic to quote from the TV language. Photography, by contrast, was a private medium, more akin to traditional arts such as painting, and thus perhaps more suited to individual statement.

Just Being a Good Daughter, 1975 (page 28), If You Live Near Hollywood, You Can’t Help But Look Like Some 8 x 10 Glossy, 1976 (page 30), and Secret Places, 1977 (figure 1), are photographic works from the same time as The Mom Tapes and other family videos. The first of these tells a touchingly sensitive story about father-daughter relationships. The text reads “My dad/admires Oriental women/and Roquefort cheese./In the past he ate alone. /Just being a good daughter.” In the primary photograph we see Segalove, dressed as a Japanese woman, and her father eating cheese with chopsticks. A separate panel of passport-type photographs presents an array of Asian women, among whom the artist includes herself. Gentle criticism of the overtones of racism and sexism in her father’s attitudes mingle with bittersweet memories of the desire to please more, to be loved more, to be the better person we are sure our parents wish we were.

If You Live Near Hollywood is a playful attempt to reconstruct out of the artist’s own world and family an artificially constructed event, and thus to claim it for real life. Secret Places (originally titled, tellingly, I Hid. I Lived. I Loved.) conveys enough personal information to be believable, yet it creates a compelling air of mystery by the inclusion in installation of a gaudy dining chair and a girl’s sweater, and by the dark printing and borders of the photographs.

The subtlety of these works, their visual sophistication and psychological intricacy, place them among the best of Segalove’s career—a surprising position given their early dates. But it is no surprise that she resolved the relatively limited complexities of a static, soundless medium with more than a century of historical precedent before she figured out exactly how she would best use the newer technology of video. The answer, worked out with these and other photographs less personal but equally refined, was the story form.

A glimmer of narrative shows up in the videotape Why Is the Sky Blue?, 1978 (made as part of a large series of works investigating the line between art and science, produced for the exhibition Fetish to Physics).¹⁵ But it was not until 1980 that Segalove developed a kind of short short story format, which has since become a signature of her video and audio works.

I Remember Beverly Hills (page 35) is an important transitional work. It introduced a scripted, voice-over text read by Segalove, a device she has used in all subsequent works involving sound. Combined with documentary video footage, the text tells the artist’s own story of growing up in one of the richest, cleanest and most artificial communities anywhere.

Beverly Hills is also the first piece in which the artist, as a narrator with apparent control over camera movements and point of view, makes herself and her opinions and musings the focus of the work. But it is not an entirely successful tape (if not for the reasons cited by a public library reviewer who entirely missed the point, criticizing the work as “a narration of a young adult who really cannot provide the historical depth… expected”).¹⁶ Though purposely leisurely in pace, in an attempt to overcome the limitations of TV’s ever-less-patient editorial style, by today’s standards the work drags. More important, when Segalove most forcefully reveals her personal feelings—in a segment about the loss of the only dime store in town—her anger seems to come out of nowhere, because the rest of the narrative implies rather than states its criticism.

The second work completed in 1980 brought together all the basic elements of Segalove’s mature video style, and it beautifully resolved the imperfections of Beverly Hills. Five True Stories is an anthology of very short pieces (the entire collection is less than seven minutes long) that bring us, for the first time, inside the head of the narrator/artist. Each vignette is shot as if seen through her eyes—or, more accurately, through her mind’s eye, since the pieces deal with events remembered from childhood.

Five True Stories is a milestone in the continuing history of video art, quite apart from its major place in Segalove’s own career. For though the filmic technique of narrative voice-over to suggest a character’s memory or inner thoughts is older than Philip Marlowe, Segalove borrowed it to twist it into something unique. Her longtime enchantment with the boundary between the real and the artificial found its keenest expression in a method that allowed her, as an individual visual artist-cum-author, to obliterate that boundary by telling the truth about her own life through a visual fabrication.

This is what all “true” stories do, of course. When the guy at work recounts his near-accident, an event that happened in real time is simulated through his words and our imaginations: the real and artificial, the abstract truth and the interpretive account of it, exist at the same time. The same goes, say, for a public television documentary.

Segalove, though, cranks up the volume on both sides of the equilibrium. On the one hand she is telling personal truths that we have no reason to doubt. On the other, she presents images heavily tainted with fiction. Presented in her trademark, shadow-box space, they tend toward over-bright, switched-on colors. Montages, verbal texts and strange graphic devices pop up unexpectedly and the narrative is recited in a slightly sing-song, almost childish voice. Most suspect of all, the story comes out of the TV set.

Five True Stories also marked the emergence of a previously underplayed “feminist dimension,” as one critic put it, demonstrated by her interest in “revaluing the denigrated events of ordinary life, especially those which have been traditionally the province of women.”¹⁷ Though women were the subjects of most of her previous video work, two of the True Stories deal directly with experiences particularly relevant to women: The Painter Wagged It at Me Here, a moral about children’s sexual vulnerability “even in Beverly Hills”; and The French Roll, a reminiscence of hair clips and sisterly communion.

TV Is OK

From 1978 to 1980 Segalove produced a number of photographic one-liners mixing visual and verbal puns. Desperate Teacher Uses Hypnosis, Art Classrooms Then and Now, U.S. Treasury Nose (page 40) and Why Can’t Man Fly? (page 66) are among the funniest pictures of her career. Still, like the personalized license plates she had emblazoned with the legend, “TV IS OK,” they were more guerrilla attacks on everyday pretension than the complex and deliberate social satire her later works would become.

In 1981 she was commissioned by the Arco Center for Visual Art—at that time, a major force in contemporary art in Los Angeles—to produce a photographic installation. As if she knew she was announcing a six-year hiatus in photographic work, she produced a massive and hilariously overblown History of the American Twentieth Century.

The twenty-foot-long piece comprises thirty montages of photographs with patterned backgrounds, representing Segalove’s idea of the icons of cultural history. Asked by Arco to avoid identifiable faces for legal reasons, she simply cut the heads off people in the found photographs she used. The resulting panorama suggests an America where content loses out to fashion, substance to style, human presence to rote activity. It is a picture of a worthless legacy to history.

Segalove had been awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in 1979 for her work in video, and she had been included in the video section of the prestigious Whitney Biennial exhibitions in 1975 and 1977. By 1979 her work began to appear on cable television stations and shortly thereafter on the public stations of major television markets nationally.

Given such strong encouragement in the video arena, combined with her interest in reaching wider audiences, it is no wonder that she began to devote less energy to the photographic work—which nonetheless had earned her an enviable exhibition record.

In 1981, having found her way in video, Segalove set aside her work in photography. The 1979 NEA grant was followed by additional awards in 1983 and 1984, plus support from the American Film Institute (AFI), the British Broadcasting Company (BBC), the Contemporary Art Television Fund, the James D. Phelan Award, the Rocky Mountain Film Center and others.

Financial assistance allowed her to experiment with more sophisticated equipment and facilities, which she did in producing What Is Business? A Video Portrait in 1982, (page 34). The twenty-nine-minute piece marked a return to the documentary-narrative mix of I Remember Beverly Hills, examining a range of individual attitudes toward a central social structure.

It is also the piece most like commercial television of her career, probably for several reasons. The availability of professional advice and equipment is a two-edged sword. It allows greater flexibility, but it is also driven by traditions and exigencies an artist would not ordinarily encounter on her own. Moreover, with AFI backing, she may have been encouraged to pursue that relatively conservative organization’s commercial orientation. In any case, she saw What Is Business? as a potential entree to a marketplace: “I had hoped it would find its place in junior colleges and maybe business classes as a fun alternative,” she told an interviewer in 1986.¹⁸

What Is Business? found few takers in the educational film market. The museums and video festivals continued to respond, however, and with that impetus, her improved technical knowledge and the all-important grant funding, she went on in 1983 to make her most important video work.

Why I Got into TV and Other Stories, 1983 (page 54), was Segalove’s breakthrough—the event in which all her talents as writer, visual artist, video producer and actor were put into the service of her ideas about family and culture, fiction and truth. The result is a brilliant sendup of cherished traditional forms of television: the situation comedy, the episode format (à la Alfred Hitchcock or Rod Serling) and the commercial. Segalove returned to the format of Five True Stories, stringing together six independent installments from the story of her life. All have the humor that is her trademark as well as an element of pathos new to the video works (though reminiscent of Just Being a Good Daughter, her major photographic work of eight years earlier).

The title segment, Why I Got into TV, brings together all the fears of nuclear war shared by her generation. It reminds us that the context of those fears, for the children of the Cuban missile crisis, was our imperfect understanding not only of the geopolitical workings of the world but also of the intricacies of familial love.

With Why I Got into TV and Other Stories Segalove settled on a device that she had used only sporadically before that time: the moral. It is an element of the extraordinarily simple, and therefore transparent, story structure she has used for every tape since 1983. Segments, usually no more than two to three minutes long, are strung along a loose narrative. Each begins with a bold, declarative sentence (“The last time I saw my parents kiss was twenty-five years ago,” begins Dragnet Kiss) and each piece ends with a summation, giving us the point of the story (“Almost everything looks better on a tiny TV screen,” she tells us at the close of The Graduate).

Segalove had now distilled her ideas into succinct statements that work much as traditional genre painting does, telling simple stories of the everyday. Or perhaps they are more like parables, ending in mock-serious maxims for leading a contemporary life.

“It is all a question of what to make public and what to keep private,” Segalove typed repeatedly in an obsessive note to herself written sometime in the 1970s. In 1984 she wrestled with that question in producing her most intimate work, The Riot Tapes: A Personal History, 1984 (page 49).

Riot Tapes is set in Segalove’s young adulthood—a time when she discovered sex, drugs and politics. It is embarrassingly confessional (in a long passage about her experiences with LSD) and devastatingly private (her Marxist boyfriend finally starves to death in sympathy with the Third World). Its humor is of the dark sort.

The work introduced Segalove’s first fully-scripted dialogue between characters, in a segment in which an actress plays the young Ilene during college days. Though not entirely convincing as either serious drama or as comedy, the segment provided an opportunity to exploit once again the believability of TV in spite of conflicting information. For the voice of the first-person narrator (Segalove) is clearly not the voice of the actress who plays the narrator’s younger self.

Segalove’s most recent work in video refines and applies the lessons of her earlier work. More TV Stories, 1985, actually moved away temporarily from the strictly personal to stories “as told to” the narrator. My Puberty 1987(page 48), was produced by BBC Channel 4. Along with Whatever Happened to the Future? of the same year (page 63), commissioned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, it ranks as the most sophisticated technical effort of her career.

Examining the contrasts between The Mom Tapes and the recent work, the difference in the level of technical finish becomes obvious. The early Mom Tapes were shot on black-and-white, reel-to-reel equipment with a single hand-held or tripod-mounted camera. The sound was whatever the on-camera microphone picked up, and “editing” was done by turning the recorder on and off. Such was the extent of video technology available to the public in the mid-seventies. Segalove turned these extreme limitations into virtues by subverting the commercial message of network television—using low-tech methods, sending personal messages packaged in talk show or sitcom formats.

By 1987 public access to technology had changed substantially, bringing about an overall rise in standards, while Segalove’s reputation got her into good studios and editing facilities. In the age of MTV and Max Headroom, low-tech mimicry of commercial proficiency was commonplace. Segalove’s new strategy was an ironic use of the tools of commercial trade.

It is tempting to see What Ever Happened to the Future? as a summing up of all the concerns of the fifteen years of video work that preceded it. The basic story line is an obvious fiction: a screwball romance between a landscape painter—he paints black, gray and white speckles on faux-granite boulders—and Corky, a biological illustrator, who Segalove-the-narrator tells us is her alter ego. The entire tape is a marvelously confusing examination of the real and the artificial.

“They call it illusion—I call it deception,” Corky says at one point. But after years of trying real hard not to notice Peter Pan’s supporting wires, then trying to prove to others that the rocket ride’s a fake, Corky ends up making moon-rock replicas. Segalove, however, leaves her TV behind—and goes outdoors to look at the moon in the night sky.

Radio Days

Segalove once told a newspaper reporter that she stopped watching television in the 1960s, a fact the reporter found “startling.”¹⁹ But the instantly accessible, easily assimilated story structure of pre-Vietnam War TV is the model for her mature style. Given the similarities of the early television she so loves to radio as it once was, it is no wonder that Segalove turned to radio in 1985 for some of her work.

Thematically and structurally, Segalove’s audio work is closely related to her video. Some audio pieces—for example, Appliances (page 38) and Bodyparts (page 64), both 1986—combine documentary and scripted material in ways similar to What Is Business? and I Remember Beverly Hills. Others are modern fables along the lines of Why I Got into TV.

Having found the story form so suited to her ideas, Segalove had begun to consider the visual aspect of some of her work as superfluous. Audio was faster and cheaper than video, and National Public Radio and the Canadian Broadcasting Company provided the large audiences she had worked to reach for so long.

Segalove has seen her audio work in several lights, referring to it at times as “radio journalism” or simply as “writing.” The work does have elements of both radio (particularly of the NPR All Things Considered variety) and of journalistic feature writing. But while some audio pieces are clearly journalism (Museum of Jurassic Technology, 1987), most are wrought in more or less the same manner as the videotapes, and they are as surely stamped with the artist’s hand—perhaps more closely resembling some recent performance art than a newspaper article. In any case, it is likely that Segalove will make many more audio works than video pieces in coming years, unless the economics of video change substantially.

The most ambitious audio piece Segalove has yet undertaken is an hour-long program, produced under a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Bodyparts, 1986, weaves Segalove-authored narratives recalling common biological myths with snippets of interviews (“vox” in radio language, for vox populi—voice of the people). The piece is a fast-paced, broadside lampoon of ignorance and self-consciousness, a much more critical work, at root, than most of her work in other media. Though good-natured in its approach, it tweaks our egos in a way her more introspective videotapes never do.

Segalove Vs. the Simulacrum

In 1987 Segalove returned to two-dimensional art with a major exhibition at Saxon-Lee Gallery in Los Angeles. Three large pieces consisted of only framed texts—certainly not journalism but related to the texts of Joseph Kosuth and other conceptualists of the late 1960s, as well as to the work of younger artists such as Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger. Though Segalove had used words in some of her earlier photographic pieces, the presentation of isolated texts was new, and it derived from the work she was doing in video and particularly audio. The works seemed to announce her final satisfaction with the role of storyteller-though, with typical Segalove irreverence, their topics (Jewish summer camp, early boyfriends) mocked the gravity of Holzer, Kosuth and others.

Segalove’s recent work is a virtuoso demonstration of skill in several media and an acknowledgement of the special characteristics of each. Just as audio became an appropriate alternative to video for certain ideas—quickly realized verbal images, suggestive of the visual while not reliant upon actual pictures-so photographic collage and montage have been rediscovered as a potent tool for particular uses.

Video is now Segalove’s dramatic medium, making use of interactive characters such as those seen in My Puberty and Whatever Happened to the Future? Audio is the quasi-journalistic vehicle, a mechanism for social criticism and analysis of popular culture. And photography, in other hands a trusted evidentiary agent, has now become the recorder of dreamlike reminiscence.

“He took me to Niagara Falls,” the text of Swan Date, 1987 (frontispiece), recalls: “I didn’t know the swans weren’t real.” An elegant melancholy suffuses the memories of a formerly brash young satirist. It is a memory—a melancholy—we all share.

A pair of works depicting fifties-style bomb shelters, both dated 1987 and titled Home Entertainment Center (page 41), has been criticized for being more about “nostalgia for an innocent era long dead” than the dread of nuclear annihilation²⁰ and for not pointing up the “strangeness” of mass media.²¹ But both critics miss the point. Segalove’s work may be about memory, but the images she calls forth are not romanticized dreams or nightmares. They are, instead, the stale and half-forgotten slivers of life we thought had been long lost, only to turn up as dust balls under a piece of mental furniture. The nuclear threat may still exist, but bomb shelters are nothing more than anachronistic leftovers. Mass media, to Segalove, is no more strange than the scent of Mom’s perfume: it may not be her own, but it is perfectly familiar.

In her recent photographic works Segalove has found an outlet for the emotions engendered by all she learned in her earlier, more intellectual investigations of past, family and culture. In preparing for this exhibition she completed four new, major pieces.

These are compulsive pictures, overloaded with fragments of our visual environment. Three of them—Amnesia (page 36), No Strings (page 10) and Turn to Appendix—assault our eyes and minds with shards of the image world. The fourth is a six-panel self-portrait called Meditation Breeds Discrimination (page 6).

Meditation catalogues images of the artist, anonymous models and film and television stars, and combines them with pictures of Kirk Douglas as Vincent Van Gogh in the 1956 film Lust for Life. The text on one panel laments, “Start/Off/Slow/Can’t tell Kirk Douglas/From Vincent Van Gogh.” Another says “It hurs. I’m blind./Old TV fills up my mind.” And the final panel: “I give up./ Too tired to fight./Van Gogh’s on my left./And Kirk’s on my right.”

A career of nearly twenty years producing critiques of media, turning it inside out, dissecting it, Segalove tells us, provides no answer to the dilemma that modern culture presents when it depicts itself.

The medium is the message. The map is not the territory. This is not a pipe. The accepted report of an event is of greater importance than the event. Great and true aphorisms of art and philosophy, attempt after attempt to explain the distinction between the real and the abstraction. Add to these Segalove’s effort to find the genuine in a society that places its trust in echoes and adumbrations.

Life amuses me, the result of seeing the profound in the banal every minute.” Ilene Segalove, 1985²²

Notes

Complete information on abbreviated entries will be found in the bibliography.

1. Memorandum by Segalove, Slide Explanation for Ilene Segalove, Graduate Applicant for Fall-Design Program [1972], in the artist’s files. Some seventeen installations and performances are described, several of which were done in collaboration with fellow students Ricki Blau and Linda Pease. ↩︎
2. Ibid. ↩︎
3. Unless otherwise documented, interviews with Segalove during 1989 and early 1990 are the source of direct and indirect quotations used throughout this essay. ↩︎
4. John Margolies, The End of the Road: Vanishing Highway Architecture in America (New York: Viking Press, 1981) and Miniature Golf (New York: Abbeville Press, 1987). ↩︎
5. Reidy, “TV Stories,” 4. ↩︎
6. Notes by Segalove [probably 1973] in the artist’s files. For an excellent contemporary account on Telethon’s activities see John G. Hanhardt, “Television: Videology,” Film Comment 11, no. 3 (May-June 1975): 38-39. ↩︎
7. The Everson Museum, Syracuse, N.Y., created the first curatorial department in video. See David A. Ross, “A Room with a View—The First Years in Long Beach,” in Kathy Rae Huffman, Video: A Retrospective (Long Beach, Calif.: Long Beach Museum of Art 1984), 13. ↩︎
8. Billy Adler, John Margolies, Van Schley and Ilene Segalove, The TV Environment, Published as Radical Software 2, no. 2 (1973). ↩︎
9. Brown and Jason, “What’s Wrong,” 17. ↩︎
10. Segalove employs manipulative techniques in nearly all her photographic works. Throughout this book a distinction is made between collage, in which separate photographs or pieces of photographs are physically combined on the surface of the work, and montage, in which an image composed of multiple photographic elements is combined into an integral surface (generally by rephotographing a collage). ↩︎
11. Dating of Segalove’s work has been problematic. She rarely dates the work at the time it is made and—though extraordinarily professional in most things connected with her work—keeps no systematic record of her artistic production. The problem has been compounded by the appearance of incorrectly dated work in publications, which in turn became Segalove’s source of information on dates. By tracing the first mention of works in reviews and exhibition checklists (see Bibliography and Exhibition History), I have established the latest possible dates by which the works could have been completed. Close But No Cigar, for example, was exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from 14 March through 25 April 1975. It is therefore not possible that 1976, the date used for years by Segalove, is correct. Other works have been as much as four years in error. ↩︎
12. Whitney Museum, Identity, 7. ↩︎
13. Sociologist Erving Goffman did exactly this a year later in his book, Gender Advertisements (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), originally published as a special issue of Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication 2, no. 2 (Fall 1976). Goffman analyzed pictorial conventions in advertising and popular magazines to unearth their inherent prejudices—though, as a scientist, he was more likely to use a term like “the ritualization of subordination,” for example, than “sexism.” ↩︎
14. Darling [Dudley Finds, psued.] in Ross, Southland Video Anthology, 76. ↩︎
15. Segalove’s 1978 exhibition at the Art Gallery of the University of California, Irvine, was part of a larger project developed independently but in conjunction with John Arvanites, whose efforts were presented in a parallel show at California State University, Los Angeles. ↩︎
16. Los Angeles County Public Library System review sheet in artist’s files. What Is Business? fared somewhat better in library review: “Viewpoints of business which seem satirical, whether by intent or otherwise… Initial reaction was ‘What is this?’ Gets interesting and entertaining as you watch. Hold.” ↩︎
17. Podheiser, “‘Girl’ Video Artist,” 12. ↩︎
18. Reidy, “TV Stories,” 5. ↩︎
19. Drohojowska, “Too Much TV,” B6. ↩︎
20. G[ardner], “The Galleries,” 20. ↩︎
21. Knight, “Every Picture,” 11 ↩︎
22. Quoted in Drohojowska, “Too Much TV,” B1. ↩︎