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A Feedback Situation: Dennis Oppenheim's Cybernetics of the Family

A Feedback Situation: Dennis Oppenheim's Cybernetics of the Family VALIE EXPORT. Facing a Family, 1971. © VALIE EXPORT, Bildrecht Wien, 2020. Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London/Paris/Salzburg. 98 https://doi.org/10.1162/grey_a_00305 A Feedback Situation: Dennis Oppenheim’s Cybernetics of the Family ANNA LOVATT “Are you ready for An American Family?” asked an advertisement in the New York Times on January 11, 1973. Over the next twelve weeks, tele- vision audiences would be gripped by the daily interactions of the Louds, a Santa Barbara family that allowed a film crew to record their coexistence over a seven-month period in 1971. In contrast to the vision of familial togetherness offered by postwar soap operas and sitcoms, An American Family captured the Louds’ home almost burning down in a wildfire, the drinking and infidelities of the father, Bill, and the mother, Pat, asking him for a divorce, which was finalized by the time the series aired. Their twenty-year-old son, Lance, was filmed living in New York’s Chelsea Hotel and participating in the city’s LGBTQ community, making him the first openly gay person to appear on U.S. television. When his mother visited the hotel in episode two, their “uneasy small talk, telling glances and painful silences” signaled a theme of communicational breakdown that extended throughout the http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Grey Room MIT Press

A Feedback Situation: Dennis Oppenheim's Cybernetics of the Family

Lovatt, Anna
Grey Room : 26 – Aug 1, 2020
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Publisher
MIT Press
Copyright
Copyright © MIT Press
ISSN
1526-3819
eISSN
1536-0105
DOI
10.1162/grey_a_00305
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Abstract

VALIE EXPORT. Facing a Family, 1971. © VALIE EXPORT, Bildrecht Wien, 2020. Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London/Paris/Salzburg. 98 https://doi.org/10.1162/grey_a_00305 A Feedback Situation: Dennis Oppenheim’s Cybernetics of the Family ANNA LOVATT “Are you ready for An American Family?” asked an advertisement in the New York Times on January 11, 1973. Over the next twelve weeks, tele- vision audiences would be gripped by the daily interactions of the Louds, a Santa Barbara family that allowed a film crew to record their coexistence over a seven-month period in 1971. In contrast to the vision of familial togetherness offered by postwar soap operas and sitcoms, An American Family captured the Louds’ home almost burning down in a wildfire, the drinking and infidelities of the father, Bill, and the mother, Pat, asking him for a divorce, which was finalized by the time the series aired. Their twenty-year-old son, Lance, was filmed living in New York’s Chelsea Hotel and participating in the city’s LGBTQ community, making him the first openly gay person to appear on U.S. television. When his mother visited the hotel in episode two, their “uneasy small talk, telling glances and painful silences” signaled a theme of communicational breakdown that extended throughout the

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Grey Room – MIT Press

Published: Aug 1, 2020

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