Doing Nothing : Satirist Harry Shearer’s Videotape Collection Lets Famous Faces Stare Back From the Screen

Peter Jennings yawns, leans back in his anchor’s seat and looks at the ceiling, holding his pen between his hands. Jesse Jackson leans into the camera with an unflinching boxer’s glare, even as a hand comes from off-screen to pick a piece of lint off his jacket. The slack, disengaged features of Henry Kissinger’s face turn suddenly menacing as the lights around him go out, leaving visible only the eerie outline of his visage.

These and 17 other familiar faces stare out silently from the walls of the Fullerton Museum Center’s main gallery via a videotape installation by Harry Shearer, the Los Angeles satirist, actor, columnist and radio host. The tapes are just a small sample of Shearer’s unusual hobby--collecting video snippets of famous people doing, well, nothing.

“It’s so startling to see these people, who are always nattering at you or doing something, just sitting stock-still,” Shearer said during an interview at the museum last week. “It’s so damned peculiar.”

Most of the tapes show subjects waiting to be interviewed, or TV hosts and anchors waiting for their broadcasts to begin. The studio lights are on, the tape is rolling--but there’s nothing to do; it’s all part of the television waiting game. The footage is never broadcast, and Shearer isn’t saying how he gets his hands on it.

It was during his 1979 stint as a “Saturday Night Live” cast member, Shearer said, that he first became aware that much of television’s vast resources were being “amassed for the purpose of documenting nothing.”

While most television aggressively “slams you against the back wall,” Shearer believes that the unguarded moments captured in his collection have a different effect: “This stuff sort of draws you into studying tiny little aspects of these people that maybe aren’t so tiny after all.”

He became fascinated with what he calls the “hypnotic power of staring at a person’s face.” His tapes afforded an opportunity for a kind of careful scrutiny that would be considered improper in polite society. “That’s why I love television,” he said. “You can focus your attention on observing.”

Shearer had assumed that his interest in the tapes reflected a personal quirk but discovered otherwise during a series of live performances in 1987 and ’88. During breaks in the shows, tapes of five uncharacteristically silent presidential candidates were screened for the audience. From his dressing room, “you could hear the laughter rise and fall,” Shearer recalls.

He decided to stage a “silent debate” between the candidates for an HBO special. Slowly, he began to conceive of displaying some of the tapes in a gallery setting. A proposed exhibit with one museum had fallen through when he was contacted by Joe Felz and Lynn LaBate of the Fullerton Museum Center, who were planning a TV-themed exhibition and had read about Shearer’s collection in a Spy magazine article.

“I showed them some goofy stuff,” including, Shearer said, a tape of Ronald Reagan rehearsing for a Super Bowl coin toss (which didn’t make it into the exhibit). Shearer selected 20 video portraits, starting with the three network anchors and working from there.

“There’s an obvious emphasis on creatures of the tube”--the exhibit runs the gamut from Milton Berle to Geraldo Rivera--”but there are other kinds of people too,” Shearer noted: Tom Bradley, Ralph Nader, Ferdinand Marcos, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Marilyn Quayle. The last two screens feature the Rev. Robert H. Schuller and Donald Trump representing, as Shearer puts it, “the twin benedictions of religion and money.”

Asked if he has any favorites, Shearer exclaimed in mock exultation: “These are my children. They are all my favorites.” Later, he admitted that there is a “goofy kernel of truth to that.”

Besides being funny, the clips and their “unpackaged” look help strip away some of the carefully constructed artifice of celebrity, especially with the television figures. “My whole business,” Shearer agreed, “is sort of counter-mythologizing, if not de-mythologizing.”

Richard Bolton, a Boston-based artist and media critic, takes a decidedly different approach with “One Hour of TV,” his installation in the Fullerton exhibit, a painstakingly detailed post-mortem of an hour of prime-time television he watched on Feb. 23 of this year.

Visitors to the exhibit can view the entire hour--in which Bolton switches from “Dallas” to reruns of “Green Acres,” “The Dick Van Dyke Show” and “McMillan and Wife”--on a wide-screen TV, or they can watch a selection of highlights on another monitor. On the walls of the exhibit are still pictures from the shows, along with text in which Bolton analyzes the economic, political, social and personal aspects and implications of the programs and advertising.

“I like to create spaces for people to come and think in detail about things they’re already familiar with,” Bolton said. “I’m interested in using museum space to examine everyday experience.”

He describes the exhibit as a “reading room” where visitors can spend “10 minutes or 10 hours.” He even provides corporate reports of the media companies and distributors he mentions.

Much of Bolton’s analysis details the effects of deregulation on television programming, with the resulting concentration of media sources into fewer and fewer hands. He also discusses content, dissecting the depiction of family relationships and how “personal experience is used for marketing purposes.”

In an interview, Bolton talked about the ways networks are responding as they lose viewers to cable TV, mentioning the new series “Twin Peaks” as an example: “They’re so desperate, they’ll try anything--even good programming.”

“Television: Off the Air and Behind the Screen” continues through June 24 at the Fullerton Museum Center, 301 N. Pomona Ave., Fullerton. Hours: 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays; 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursdays and Fridays. Admission: $1 to $2. Information: (714) 738-6545.