Underground Networks

New York City’s downtown scene of the 1970s and 1980s is synonymous with underground film, video, and performance art. Many of the artists who would come to define this period also dabbled in the then-new technology of public access cable television, as host, producer, guest, or studio audience member. Drawing on archival research and personal interviews, this book—the first full-length study of this vibrant body of work—explores how poets, painters, and filmmakers produced talk shows and soap operas that warped the heteronormative conventions of primetime fare. Working outside the established art world, artists screened their shows in lofts and nightclubs, airing them live on Manhattan Cable and provoking frequent tabloid censure. Underground Networks affirms the importance of cable television to the downtown art scene and recovers an essential strand of avant-garde screen culture and a user-driven media ecology with uncanny contemporary resonance.