Visual Culture And Public Space By Anna Mccarthy: Book Review

Anna McCarthy is the professor, chair, and director of graduate studies at NYU’s Tisch School of Arts’ Department of FIlm Studies, as well as an editor for Duke University’s Social Text, an academic “quarterly scholarly journal forging creative connections between critical theory and political practice”. Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space, the book that is reviewed below, was her first book, published in May 2001, and received critical acclaim.

Anna McCarthy’s central theme in Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space is that T.V.’s significance and properties are vastly and site-specifically pervasive, having spatial, social, economical, aesthetic, cultural, and political influences and impacts. In the “Introduction”,

This way of thinking about the TV is a central theme. TVs are “site-specific” and materialize the “wider institutional ideas about the subject and tracking the subject’s individual itineraries within diverse, micro level sociological terrains of everyday life”. Firstly, for this use of ‘site-specificity’, McCarthy references Miwon Kwon’s definition claiming it is also useful in acknowledging/understanding the social and spatial operations of the TV set, the ways in which it merges with the site/locale, in many cases, seamlessly and unconsciously. Furthermore, to better understand what means to be ‘site-specific’, McCarthy references David Harvey’s dialectical approach to sites - or places - as “relations and flows that are manifest”. In other words, a television is site-specific because it’s the materialization - audiovisual as well as physical object - of many different site/place-specific processes. This materialization, then, can only be understood by understanding it as the result of institutional, regional, cultural, economic, political, social, and historical forces, as well as “generic” and “orographic” (in the Entriken sense) qualities of the site/place. And, McCarthy argues, most of this materialization is ultimately derived from economically driven institutions whose goals are (and have been) to capitalize off spectators by tracking, comforting, isolating, studying, enforcing, influencing, directing, manipulating, and/or controlling them. By paying attention to the forms that TV materializes as, we can understand a “great deal about the power politics of spectatorship and commerce in contemporary public space.” In other words, by paying attention to the ways in which ambient television has and does materialize and the ways in which it has and does affect us spatially and socially, we can better grasp the political actions and power dynamics