Munich. How did television find its way into exhibition spaces? Parallel to Nixon’s henchmen bugging the Watergate Hotel, another surveillance operation also caused a stir in 1973. Broadcaster PBS showed a twelve-part series, directed by Alan und Susan Raymond, which aimed to reproduce everyday life in a Californian family as precisely as possible. »An American Family«, the mother of the reality-soap principle. The format was a hit with audiences and the Loud family, observed for seven months, became »famous across the nation«.
The Munich Kunstverein has now been showing the twelve episodes, which are virtually unknown in the German-speaking world, as a loop on twelve monitors, as well as organising a congress with Alan Raymond as guest speaker. The works were displayed together with two documentary films produced later »An American Family Revisited: The Louds 10 Years Later« and »Lance Loud! A Death in an American Family. « Television institutionalised in the art context with numerous connections to topical issues: omnipresent voyeurism, how the private seeps by osmosis into the public sphere and the resurgence of the nuclear family against our better judgement. Yet alongside all the relevant aspects informed by theoretical considerations, a large part of the fascination of »An American Family« lies in filmic considerations, its status as a shifting and moving image of a family. Invoking the important documentary schools of the sixties, Raymond’s inspiration stems from direct cinema. The attempt to make films without anyone noticing. However, the famous »fly on the wall« is no such thing – as is clear at once if you look at the numerous still photos that are accessible – but instead constitutes a cardinal physical intervention in the Louds’ living space. Relatively elaborate lighting assemblies, cameramen and sound engineers hunting for usable dialogue squeeze the atmosphere over breakfast into something between a film studio and an experimental scientific set-up. The presence of the production cannot be denied.
The much-invoked reticence is created in the editing room – where the actual drama also comes together. Three hundred hours of material were to be divided over twelve one-hour episodes. Condensing months of the Louds’ life to a standard consumable television format.
In the process, »An American Family« developed a highly idiosyncratic and - for contemporary sensibilities - almost agonising slowness. The Raymonds leave a lot of room for details, for long, apparently trivial shots. For daily life in a family, sited somewhere between the daughter’s dance class and having dinner together. The simple passage of time creates a remarkable affinity with Warhol’s film works. This proximity finds it physical pendant in the figure of Lace Loud, the oldest son, a friend and admirer of Warhol, who moved to New York to secure his 15 minutes of fame. This also creates one of the threads of narrative tension, the story of the prodigal son. Another such thread, the parents’ divorce, is already revealed in the first episode and unfolds for the viewer, who knows more than the figures on screen, as a menacing calamity superimposed over all the other events.
However, the real puzzle remains the 288 hours that are not shown. The dynamic of their non-visible existence also contains the last great secret on the path to the utter privatisation of the public sphere that we are currently observing: the question of how we select what is perceived and the possibility of maintaining some place to which we can withdraw. And above all the nagging certainty that everything really relevant must inevitably be in these 288 remaining hours. To somewhat paraphrase Alexander Kluge: an attack of the Unshown on the Shown.
For all its pioneering historical relevance, for all the scandal and breaking of taboos, the truth of the construct »An American Family« remains banal, redundant - and not any less illuminating for that. The Louds are in essence also a construct, an involuntary aggregation, and precisely because of this are exemplary of the fundamental impossibility of existing either within or outside of one’s own nuclear family. Repetition, the serial nature of one’s own behaviour, proves to be the only reference point for both the audience and the protagonists. Be it in gestures, language, facial expressions or emotional constellations, the Louds are condemned to constantly produce copies of themselves for twelve hours despite all the dramatic changes. Tearaway Lance Loud’s scandalous achievement lay in consciously making use of this serial machine; and the achievement of the exhibition situation in Munich’s Kunstverein lies in exposing this inherent seriality. A moment of distraction, a brief glance at one of the other monitors dutifully looping their episodes suffices to realise, astonished, that the people are just like themselves in every detail even weeks and months later. To see how an expression, a turn of speech, a particular movement has replicated itself into the future, apparently unaffected by the surrounding catastrophes. That is why the Louds only function on television, as a familiar product with a high recognition factor. But not in real life, in the 288 remaining hours of the idyll of life in a nuclear family.
Translated by Helen Ferguson