Steven Baskin and Diane Bush
You Stole My Baby, 2023
Vintage commercial voice frames

This work was on loan for the exhibition, In Relation, at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, April 19 - November 23, 2024

As the 1980s drew to a close, Diane Bush and Steven Baskin set out to satirize the growing number of content-light cable TV channels with an ambitious project titled Five Hundred Channels. By playing back videotaped soap operas they were able to photograph the characters at crucial moments, breaking apart the narrative flow of the drama and allowing the curve of the CRT screen to stretch the actors’ faces into ridiculous distortions. They decontextualized the dialogue by recording combinations of lines and background noise directly from the TV with a novelty picture frame device. Visitors are invited to gently press all of the red buttons in rapid succession to hear the mother’s cry of anguish—“I know the truth! You stole my baby!”—trivialized by repetition into a cacophony of gibberish.

Item description: Laying within a black backdrop are six images stacked in two rows, each displaying the distorted face of a woman in various stages of distress while on the phone. Beneath each image is a small speaker which can be toggled by a red button on its right.