[John Cage, Nam June Paik, Julia Heyward, Jean Dupuy...]

Soho Television Celebrates the Premier of the Second Season [with] two postcards for Soho Television

New York: The Artists Television Network, 1978. One press packet, clip-bound in card folder. 8 ¾ x 11 ¼ in. [33] pp. Very good. [with] two postcards, 5 ¾ x 3 ¾ in. & 7 x 5 in. Item #10568

Rare promotional material from Soho Television, the avant-garde public television project that filmed, financed, promoted, and distributed video art by John Cage, Nam June Paik, Laurie Anderson, Richard Kostelanetz, Merce Cunningham, and Jean Dupuy.

In 1976, exhibition facilities, the Kitchen, Global Village, and Anthology Film Archives joined with a number of individuals to organize Cable SoHo in an attempt to place video art on Manhattan Cable Television. Later that year, the Artists’ Television Network (ATN) was incorporated, and the first season began in 1977. The non-profit corporation provided production and post-production facilities, and paid expenses incurred during production. Programming started on December 9, 1976, and by 1983 regular programming came to an end and the activities of ATN were discontinued. 

While video art is most often confined to the exhibition arena, the Artists Television Network was committed to developing television as an artistic medium, and to distributing contemporary arts programming to a broad-based television viewing audience. This packet, created as a promotional and fundraising tool, includes press releases promoting new video work premiering on Soho TV that season, as well as numerous reproductions of press-clippings from their first season, providing detailed descriptions of new works by Merce Cunningha, John Cage, Nam June Paik, and others. 

Included are two postcards promoting the second season. One advertises a celebration of the first season’s anniversary, and the premiere of the second season of Soho Television, with a full listing of related video programming, December 4-December 23, including John Cage, John Sanborn, Kit Fitzgerald, Julia Heyward, Jean Dupuy, Nam Juin Paik, and others. The other smaller card promotes the watch party for the “cablecast” premiere of Soho Television’s Second Season. 

Records of Soho Television are notably scarce; we find no record of this packet on OCLC, nor many other paper traces of the short-lived project, which brought video art out of exhibition spaces and into living rooms.

“Soho Television offers the avant-garde in the afternoon.”

Price: $450.00