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Jaime Davidovich, Artist Whose Videos Bypassed the ‘Gatekeepers of Culture,’ Dies at 79

Jaime Davidovich in an undated photo. He helped create the Artists’ Television Network, which broadcast “The Live! Show.”

Jaime Davidovich, an Argentine-born conceptual artist who brought the downtown New York art scene to television viewers in the early 1980s on his cable-access program “The Live! Show,” died on Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 79.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, Henrique Faria, his art dealer, said.

Mr. Davidovich, a fervent avant-gardist who had moved to New York from Buenos Aires in 1963, embraced video technology as an ideal medium for disrupting the gallery system and reaching new audiences.

In 1976, he and several other artists formed Cable SoHo, a nonprofit consortium of artists and arts organizations interested in public-access broadcasting that evolved into the Artists’ Television Network. With Mr. Davidovich as president and executive producer, the network began broadcasting “SoHo TV”, a weekly arts magazine, on Manhattan Cable Television, which at the time had 80,000 subscribers. “The Live! Show” premiered in 1979.

“We were artists trying to get around the gatekeepers of culture and the art market by putting our work out there for public consumption for free,” Mr. Davidovich said in an oral history interview for the Museum of the Moving Image in 2011. “Now a lot of people work that way.”

“The Live! Show” was inspired, Mr. Davidovich said, by Cabaret Voltaire, the Dadaist nightclub in Zurich, and the media meta-comedy of Ernie Kovacs. It featured skits, cartoons, music videos, performances and interviews with artists like Laurie Anderson, John Cage and the theater director Richard Foreman.

As Dr. Videovich, “specialist in curing television addiction,” Mr. Davidovich, dressed in a white lab coat, fielded calls from viewers, introduced ersatz commercials and, in a segment called “Videokitsch,” sold odd pieces of store-bought merchandise and limited-edition objects of his own design, like television sets in the form of savings banks, cookie jars, planters and windup toys. The New York Times television critic John J. O’Connor described Mr. Davidovich’s alter ego as “a persona somewhere between Bela Lugosi and Andy Kaufman.”

In an interview, Daniel R. Quiles, the curator of “Outreach: Jaime Davidovich, 1974-1984” at the Threewalls Gallery in Chicago in 2015, called him “one of the really key pioneers of public access cable, and its relationship to advanced art in the 1970s.”

Image
As Dr. Videovich, Mr. Davidovich portrayed a “specialist in curing television addiction” on the “The Live! Show.”Credit...Via the Jaime Davidovich Foundation and Henrique Faria, New York & Buenos Aires

Jaime Davidovich was born on Sept. 29, 1936, in Buenos Aires. His parents, Lucio Davidovich and the former Clara Jacif, were Jews who had been brought from what is now Ukraine when they were children. He studied art at the National College in Buenos Aires and the University of the Republic in Montevideo, Uruguay, before moving to New York, where he studied painting at the School of Visual Arts.

He explored texture and surface in his canvases, notably in his “Pizarrónes Negros” (“Blackboards”) paintings, a series of large canvases covered in black, brushy planes of color.

“What I wanted to do was to capture an instant in painting that does not have a beginning or an end,” he later said. “When I began to work with video this translated into the delimiting of a frame for something that keeps moving but never ends.”

In 1965 he married the artist Judith Henry, with whom he founded Wooster Enterprises, a stationery design studio affiliated with the Fluxus group. The marriage ended in divorce. He is survived by two sisters, Leda Davidovich and Celia Nesis; two daughters, Nina Litvak and Carla Davidovich; and five grandchildren.

From the outset, he showed a conceptual bent. To integrate his paintings into the conceptual space of the gallery, he removed their frames and applied them directly to the wall with tape. Then, in a series of site-specific works called the Tapes Projects, he began using tape itself as his medium. For the 1973 Whitney Biennial he connected the floors of the museum by running wide swaths of adhesive tape up and down the museum’s stairway walls.

By then he had already made his first foray into video. His first work in the medium, “Road” (1972), put the tape aesthetic into motion, following a highway dividing line for 20 minutes. In “Blue, Red, Yellow,” a hand reached out to cover television screens in colored tape.

“The Live! Show” ended its run in 1984 when Manhattan Cable raised the price of broadcast time. It was the subject of a retrospective at the American Museum of the Moving Image (now the Museum of the Moving Image) in 1991.

Mr. Davidovich then returned to his own art. He addressed politics in Argentina in “Evita: A Video Scrapbook” (1984) and “Eva Perón, Then and Now” (1990), and constructed temporary video theaters within museums and galleries, notably Exit Art and El Museo del Barrio in Manhattan.

Mr. Davidovich, who was represented by Henrique Faria Fine Art in Manhattan and Buenos Aires, was given a retrospective at Artium, the contemporary art museum in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain, in 2010. Last year, the Bronx Museum of the Arts featured his work in “Jaime Davidovich: Adventures of the Avant-Garde.”

A correction was made on 
Aug. 30, 2016

An earlier version of this obituary misspelled the name of a character Mr. Davidovich played on television. He was Dr. Videovich, not Dr. Videovitch. The error was repeated in an accompanying picture caption.

How we handle corrections

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 14 of the New York edition with the headline: Jaime Davidovich, 79, Public-Access TV Avant-Gardist. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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