November 2019 | Sight&Sound | 19Armchair activism: Marion Stokes in Matt Wolf’s film about her life and workJeremy Deller’s Everybody in the PlaceBy Matthew Harle
One day in November 1979, midway through
television news coverage of the Iranian hostage
crisis, Marion Stokes, an African-American
civil rights activist, public access television
personality, librarian, communist, community
organiser, early investor in Apple Macintosh and,
crucially, radical TV archivist, switched on her
VCR and started recording. By the time of her
death in December 2012, when the last of her
now extensive rig of VCRs was finally switched
off, she had become a near-recluse and amassed
an archive of more than 70,000 VHS tapes.
Matt Wolf’s new film Recorder: The Marion
Stokes Project (2019) documents her life and work.
Stokes was recording what she knew would slip
off the record. As her son Michael Metelits notes,
“Taping these programmes for my mother was a
form of activism – she wanted people to be able to
seek the truth and check facts.” In the 1970s, this
was pure praxis; Stokes was attempting to capture
a process that the theorist Stuart Hall had termed
only a few years earlier “encoding and decoding”- the encryption of ideological principles into
mass communications as they were transmitted,
mediated and consumed. Stokes, the elderly
archivist-activist, was still campaigning from her
armchair, maintaining an unbroken flow of mass
media, so that each new moral panic around race,
class and culture was laid bare and on the record.
There’s more to glean from the 71,716 tapes
that Stokes stockpiled over the 33 years she was
recording. Now stored at the Internet Archive in
San Francisco, where the collection is gradually
being digitised, the stacks upon stacks of tapes
form a miniature mountain range of VHS – a
rolling landscape of TV time, which brings a vivid
sense of scale to her operation. Viewed en masse,
the collection captures her obsession and deeply
introverted attention to the social world that she
had gradually left behind, but it also represents
an immense sense of duration: the tapes are the
physical manifestation of the ceaseless cultural
production of news media – a sensation not
totally unique to Marion Stokes’s collection.
Just a few years earlier than Stokes’s project, the
artist Mochizuki Masao had begun a smaller
archival venture with Japanese television.
Between 1975-76, Mochizuki systematically
documented a year of Japanese broadcasting,
assembling an archive that in his eyes was to
become truly representative of his nation’s media.
Mochizuki was looking for different cultural
forms to Stokes: though no less political, he
wanted to focus on creating a system that would
offer chance encounters with Japan’s flourishing
light-entertainment shows, and to capture them
in fixed images. As Stokes was pioneering a new
form of cultural studies-cum-mass observation,
Mochizuki’s finished photo-works, which
resemble outsized contact sheets of hundreds of
television stills, call to mind the cultural critic and
film theorist Siegfried Kracauer’s classic
observation in The Mass Ornament (1927) that “an
analysis of [an era’s] inconspicuous surface-level
expressions... by virtue of their unconscious
nature, provide unmediated access to the
fundamental substance of the state of things.”
It is artists like Mochizuki who have usually
paid the form of broadcast television closest
attention, and for good reason: our TV archives
provide artists with a ready-made durational
medium whose logic is an intoxicating swill
of asinine capitalism and, more poignantly,
the recent history of our everyday lives. Artists
and filmmakers have played with TV archives
intermittently over the years, from early examples
such as David Hall’s TV Interruptions (1971),
which provided rebellious interventions in the
daily flow of broadcast; right up to the present,with Alia Syed’s Points of Departure (2014), which
examines her relationship to her hometown of
Glasgow through local TV; or Anthony Wall’s
continuous edit of Arena arts documentaries in
his installation Night and Day: The Arena Time
Machine (2016), which is cut and pasted together
to last for 24 hours at a time; or even Jeremy
Deller’s recent history of rave culture, Everybody
in the Place: An Incomplete History of Britain 1984-
1992 , which used television news footage to
bring an immediate sense of vitality and history
to a classroom of bemused schoolchildren.
In their separate ways, Stokes’s and Mochizuki’s
screen archives both use continuous broadcast
to accumulate panoramas of a particular kind
of everyday life; reminding us of the shift from
the monoculture of broadcast media in the 20th
century to the fragmented digital landscape
of our present. This older form of broadcast
television was a synchronous experience that
provided companionship in its programmed
rhythm: we would schedule our evenings to it,
run home to catch our favourite programmes
and assemble to watch the television together.
The monoculture, for better or worse, possessed
what critic Stephen Heath once described as a
“seamless equivalence with social life”. Explored
as durational streams of programmes, television
archives offer us the shape of these evenings
spent indoors, our down-time, while providing
us with a forensic view of social norms and
attitudes. All of which means that considering
their value for activism and art-making, broadcast
archives are woefully neglected entry points into
the everyday lives and popular emotion of our
recent past. Stokes knew this, as the TV was not
just her window out to the world; she began to
archive because she knew her collection would
eventually become a window into hers.THE REVOLUTION, TELEVISED
TV archive material, like the 70,000
VHS tapes recorded by an activist in
the US, offers artists a fascinating
window on the recent pastThe stacks upon stacks of MarionStokes’s tapes form a miniaturemountain range of VHS – arolling landscape of TV timeARTISTS’ MOVING IMAGE
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