tailieunhanh - TELEVISION, FURNITURE, AND SCULPTURE: THE ROOM WITH THE AMERICAN VIEW

Charles Kingsley makes this point in his 1873 lecture “Nausicaa in London: Or, the Lower Education of Woman,” in which he quotes the passage in The Odyssey in which Nausicaa plays ball with her female companions on the beach(62). J. Moyr Smith makes this explicit with regard to Greek clothing in his book Ancient Greek Female Costume in 1882: “Though more fully clad in most parts of Greece than in Sparta, the costume of the young girls and women was such as allowed the body to develop its natural beauty, and permitted a graceful freedom of motion” (17) | Television Furniture and Sculpture The Room with the American View VITOACCONC I Television space is fishbowl space. There s a world going on in there that exclamation might be made by a child-person looking from out of the large world he she is in into the small world behind either the aquarium glass or the TV screen. In the case of TV the world is on something on-screen not as in the case of the aquarium in something in the bowl but unlike movies the TV screen isn t all there s something behind it something underneath it all the TV tube lies behind the screen. We know that the screen is only the facade of the box even now that the screen can be drastically reduced in size as in the two-inch watchman there still has to be room for the TV tube. The TV box still has to have depth which remains the largest dimension of the box. The TV screen might be thought of as the window into the box except that we probably can t tn 1990s be innocent enough to believe we re really looking through a window really peering inside the box. Rather the screen might be seen as some kind of distorting inside-out mirror which the power inside the box holds up to the world at large. Inside the box the world or the power-to-be-a-world is condensed it s the size of a conventional package a gift it s power made handleable. The viewer might be led to believe then that the world is in his or her hands. The close-up literalizes television. The close-up face is the same size as the TV screen the face on-screen then is a fact just as the TV set is a fact in the living room. Whereas on a movie screen a close-up face is at least fifteen times the size of an actual face so that the face on film is a landscape like John Wayne s face a face to walk around on the face is distant out-of-reach like a landscape outside a train window untouchable like Greta Garbo s face or the face is a monument or a monster it comes up from the ground or the grave it comes from another time on-a TV screen a close-up face .