In the late 1970s and throughout the '80s, Winnipeg experienced a "golden age" of public access television. Anyone with a creative dream, concept or politic would be endowed with airtime and professional production services. A precedent was set in the late '70s when the infamous performance artist Glen Meadmore sat in front of a television camera and silently picked at his acne for 30 minutes in a program called The Goofers. Winnipeg Babysitter traces this and other unique vignettes from a brief synapse in broadcasting history when Winnipeg cable companies were mandated to provide public access as a condition of their broadcasting license.

The local public access archives were destroyed when larger cable companies gradually bought the smaller ones, and consequently the programs could only be found in the VHS collections of the original producers. In cases where these producers did not save their own work, curator Daniel Barrow had to rely on television collectors, fans and enthusiasts. In this regard, Winnipeg Babysitter is an archival project that restores a previously lost history.

The work from this program can be located in an under-recognized zone outside the mainstream of art and video circulation. While some of the artists from the program have since established tremendous critical success (notably Guy Maddin, Kyle McCulloch, and members of the Royal Art Lodge), it should be noted that every producer included in this program was driven entirely by creativity and enthusiasm without any commercial participation in either the art world or the television industry. The artists of Winnipeg Babysitter are unified by the idea of presenting work voluntarily in a public realm.

This program provides a critical framework for work that has often been misunderstood by the general public and overlooked by the art world. Winnipeg Babysitter addresses histories of open airwaves, grassroots and D.I.Y. culture, 1980s queer politics, and the Winnipeg “prairie gothic” sensibility. Many of the featured programs were designed to provoke and were, as a consequence, maligned or censored in the 1980s for their experimental or transgressive content. Most Winnipeg public access programming, however, was created specifically to delight and entertain a diverse audience.

Winnipeg Babysitter features work made by:
•  Teenagers (The Hardy Weinberg Comedy Show)
•  Senior citizens (The Cosmopolitan Time, Cooking With Fran , What's New Pussycat)
•  World-renowned artists (sketch comedy by the Royal Art Lodge; Survival by Greg Klymkiw, featuring Guy Maddin's earliest recorded performances, never before screened outside of Winnipeg)
•  Radical queers (The Glen Meadmore Show , The Pollock & Pollock Gossip Show)
•  A host of other cult classics that subsequently became urban legends when the Winnipeg public access paradigm was axed in the 1990s.

STILLS + DOWNLOADS:

- Press Release.


Excerpt from Winnipeg Babysitter. Large file.


Excerpt from Winnipeg Babysitter. Large file.