Jaime Davidovich (1936-2016) was an Argentine-American visual artist and a pioneer in the use of television as an artistic medium. Harnessing the emergence of cable TV in the 1970s as a broadcasting tool that bypassed the conventional gallery system, Davidovich helped catalyze a revolution in how art was disseminated. Television provided the perfect vehicle for “get[ting] out of the claustrophobic traditional art world,” Davidovich told the New York Times in 1979.

As an active participant of the SoHo-based experimental art scene of the 1970s and 1980s, Davidovich produced a variety of conceptually-driven Video Works. In the late 1970s he became involved in public-access television. His enthusiasm for cable’s potential as a medium of art and artists and foundational involvement with Cable SoHo and the Artist’s Television Network lead to the launch in 1979 of his own weekly variety program The Live! Show, which parodied commercial television while seizing upon its ability to bring artists’ work directly into people’s homes.

Prior to expanding the uses of video as art, Davidovich created a series of Monochrome Paintings in line with the Informalist movement in post-WWII Argentina. In these works, he left subtle traces of composition within the midst a uniform color plane. When displaying them in a gallery, he removed their frames and affixed them directly to the wall with tape.

It was his use of tape, Davidovich said, that gave rise to his groundbreaking work with video. As he stated in an interview with the Joan Mitchell Foundation in 2016: “for me videotape was similar to packing tape..., the reel, going on and on, the sense of time… I got involved in video because of the tape.”

Adhesive tape gradually came to replace paint in his work altogether, best demonstrated in his Tape Projects. These works are several monochromatic packing tape interventions on photographs, walls, public sidewalks, and within museum spaces, including the staircase of the Whitney Biennial in 1973. The placement of these tape works altered viewers’ perception of everyday structures, prompting reflection on the institutional and material limits of art.

In 2013, Davidovich was selected by the Joan Mitchell Foundation as a recipient for the Creating a Living Legacy (CALL) initiative, designed to create comprehensive documentation of an artist's life-work by providing support in the areas of studio organization, archiving, and inventory management.

Throughout his career, he participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions. His work is part of the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art,  The J. Paul Getty Museum, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Blanton Museum of Art, The Morgan Library & Museum, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Dallas Museum of Art, and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in the United States, as well as the Museo Reina Sofia, and the Museu D’art Contemporani de Barcelona in Spain and The National Gallery of Canada, among others.