Facing a Family (1971) • VALIE EXPORT

Austrian viewers tuning into their evening television program on February 28, 1971, found themselves faced with a surprising sight: a family, bathed in the light of a TV set, impassively looking back at them. VALIE EXPORT described her video, Facing a Family, as an “imaginary screen,” an “expanded movie,” and a “TV action” in which both families—one on screen, the other presumably at home—were participants. Commissioned by the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation, EXPORT’s meditation on “television in the family; the family in television” tapped into cultural shifts around a medium that was drawing new lines between private and public imagery. In the 1960s, EXPORT approached the still-new medium of video to experiment with performance and gesture, making use of its immediacy and feedback. With Facing a Family, the artist shifted focus to study the social implications of mass communication. Calling attention to the very act of viewership, Facing a Family envisions a pre-Internet means of connecting to each other within the walls of one’s own home while presaging contemporary phenomena like online surveillance and reality television.