In 2007, while still in art college, in the first year of his major in Sculpture & Combined Media, O’Brien brought the old family home television to the Georges Quay campus of the Limerick School of Art & Design.
He then gutted it hollow and politely asked the course technician Pat Beasley to help him build a harness that would allow the artist to walk around with a TV on his head.
Soon enough the vision came to life. On a scorching hot summers day in June, the artist dressed up in the best ‘fancy pants’ outfit he could muster and recruited fellow artists & course students;
Steve Maher (photographer of the publicly engaged performance),
Beth Fox & Sarah Feehily (distributors of O’Briens prophetic flyers).
Feehily also assisted in guiding the artist who was rendered blind to his environment, apart from being able to peek through some tiny air holes on the left and right sides of his newly attention grabbing comical helmet, an iconic symbol of entertainment, culture and propaganda.
At the moment of this performance, before social media was really a thing (Facebook opened to the general public just one year earlier in 2006), the artist was inspired by both the culture he grew up on (90’s and 2000’s, with 9 older siblings from prior generations);
and the critical theory and art he was freshly discovering, including books such as ‘Society of the Spectacle’ (1967) by Guy Debord, South Korean multimedia artist Nam June Paik and provocative performance artists such as Vito Acconci.
For many of you, the name ‘Mike TV’ might also ring a bell.
Actor Paris Themmen played the same named character in the 1971 film “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory” and its 2005 remake “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”.
He is one of the five children who find a Golden Ticket in a Wonka chocolate bar, granting them a tour of Willy Wonka’s mysterious and magical chocolate factory.
In the original movie, he is a spoiled and television-obsessed boy who is more interested in watching TV than participating in the tour.
He is often seen glued to the screen, and his love for television is a recurring theme throughout the story. His fixation on TV ultimately leads to his downfall when he becomes trapped in the Wonkavision room, a room filled with television screens and gadgets.
Notice the interesting parallels between the Wonkavision room, Guy Debord’s descriptions of the spectacle as ‘a social relation among people, mediated by images’ and the new ‘social’ media we use (or get used by?) today.
O’Brien performed MIKE TV (2), live on stage in the Baker’s Place Underground venue in Tait’s Square, Limerick city centre. This time the artist delivered the same message in an obnoxious priest like ceremony style to an enthralled crowd of bewildered art students and unsuspecting visitors.
Will the contemporary art world ‘Mike TV’ make a reappearance in the 2020’s and beyond? Time will only tell…
For now, enjoy the same sight that the public enjoyed (or were potentially horrified by)… when they were handed the artists warning-bell like prophecy of cultural distortion and spiritual depravity, for the reader to do what they will with.
Before this public performance, O’Brien had experimented with the television as an art medium in public performance on stage and with a public engagement installation using the TV as a collaborative sound instrument.
