Selections from: An Interview with NO-TV founder Bob Doyle, March 2024

 

How did NO-TV start?

When I got here in February of ‘84, there was a grant that needed to be fulfilled that had to do with [VSW]  producing a cable program. […] And I think the original idea that was submitted, like a year before I got here, was that they would do interviews with visiting artists. I think that’s my recollection of what was expected […] I personally didn’t think that was going to be very interesting to watch somebody sitting there flipping through a handmade book or whatever would’ve happened. The other issue was that we didn’t have time to do that because the grant period was coming up and had to be fulfilled. We had to have something down. […] So anyway, there was an amount of money, there was a commitment to do something on cable locally, and I think the original premise wasn’t going to be functional, in my mind. So what I did was I just started informally gathering tapes from people I knew or I was in contact with here. […] I had to put something together. I was grabbing tapes from whoever I could get ’em from. And then in that process I sort of established a structure to do it better the next time. We resubmitted that grant and it got funded again. And then eventually the way it worked out was I would send out an announcement that we’re collecting tapes for this cable program and send it in. And whatever money I had was sort of divided up amongst the amount of time airtime I had to derive at a per minute fee. And then that’s the fee that I paid to the artist based on the duration of their tape. So it could be a five minute tape, it could be a 30 minute tape, and they got some X dollars per minute. […] Which was a surprise to lots of people because these kinds of things showing on public access generally weren’t showing video art and nobody was getting paid for that kind of stuff. It was community television. You made it and you put it on. And most of that stuff around here anyway was churches, church services and things.

 

What was your curatorial agenda? Were you looking to shake up the more traditional programming that you were seeing on cable TV at the time? 

I didn’t have the agenda to challenge that system. I looked at it as a real asset and ally to get this kind of stuff out beyond the walls, and there wasn’t a lot of stuff that you would want to, or even be, I think, tempted to show anyway. I mean, if it’s good and you can contextualize it, then fine. We had screenings in-house [at VSW] with some of the same people, and the work we screened in house was different from what we put on cable. So we had a pretty good relationship with the cable company. I think they saw Visual Studies as a little feather in their cap on some level, at least the people that I dealt with.

 

What was the process for selecting tapes for each episode?

The curatorial process, how does that work? Well, sometimes it’s pretty obvious. You get tapes from people who have been working on their stuff for years, and it looks a certain way and it’s constructed a certain way, and then you get tapes from people who are just starting out. So there’s always that extreme. If you have more than enough stuff and you’re really making comparisons, it’s like: how much video processing stuff do you include? How much documentary? How can you put things together to put three or four pieces together to make a coherent half hour or hour?  Is there a theme that you can put together to make that hour interesting, progressively interesting? Can you contrast things that have nothing to do with each other somehow, so it gets to be sort of a real dance? If you have material to choose from, that’s the real luxury, and then the curatorial process becomes an art form, I think, trying to make it work together.[…]

 

How did the artists respond to having their work shown on Cable TV?

Like I said earlier, initially people were surprised they were getting paid for airing. Cable as a phenomenon was relatively new. It hadn’t really been codified at all. Getting your work shown anywhere was a plus. It was a different world and different attitudes towards things.