High on the list of television's evils--right after stupidity and crassness--is passivity. Everyone knows that sitting for hours being spoon-fed stereotypes and sound bites and advertising creates a cognitive vacuum. Thought and judgment cease; you are emptied out not in a fashion associated with any kind of Zen, but simply sucked dry. Television leaves you less than you were.

We all know it, and yet we still watch it. But even an awareness of television's great lie isn't enough to combat the way it chips away at our other, less obvious parts. Marshall McLuhan wrote, way back in 1963, "The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without resistance." Get it? If not, I recommend you run down to the Tacoma Art Museum to see The New Frontier: Art and Television 1960-65.

This show does not aim to preach. It assumes that we know already. Its focus is how artists have confronted and appropriated and critiqued the idea of television, and the surprise is not that artists do this very well indeed, but that they sensed television's power so early in the game. The seminal event--though not, by any means, the first--around which The New Frontier builds its argument is the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The point at which all the artists jab is not the tragedy's overfamiliar images--hysterical Jackie climbing over the back of the car; an overcome Walter Cronkite--but the way it was mediated for us, how it was decided what we should see and think and, ultimately, feel. The best example of this is Report, a film by Bruce Conner cobbled together out of television footage intercut with found images (a bullfight, scenes from The Bride of Frank-enstein), with a reportage soundtrack that isn't synched to the visuals. At the point when the commentator realizes that something has gone wrong, the film blanks out, the images replaced with film static and darkness. Without visuals, we're left to imagine the scene, and the actual horror of it returns. (Of course, I'm speculating here, since at the time of the assassination I wasn't yet a gleam in anyone's eye.)

A section of the exhibition is devoted to the artists of the Fluxus movement, a neo-Dada group that sought to undermine the passivity demanded by television through work and events that made the viewer complicit in the act of viewing. Nam June Paik's Zen for TV, a television set reconfigured to show only a single bright vertical line on a dark screen, throws you back on yourself as you look at it; denied narrative or images, you become the content. Sky TV, an installation by Yoko Ono (one of Fluxus' great thinkers), also reduces viewing options by providing only an image of the changing sky above the museum--declaring, in a way, freedom from the broadcasting choices made by big corporate networks. I was disappointed that none of Paik's large installations made it into the show; instead, we're shown documentation of some of those works, including photographs from his 1963 happening, Exposition of Music Electronic Television. Showing his work this way makes the point removed from the immediacy of Paik's actual installments, which provided the ground on which much current new media work has been built.

The absolute best reason to make the arduous journey to Tacoma is Andy Warhol's stunning Outer and Inner Space. This film, which is rarely shown, is a double image of Warhol superstar Edie Sedgwick, all big dark eyes, cropped blond hair, and dangling earrings. Warhol videotaped Sedgwick in profile, speaking, and then put her in front of the video and had her watch it, filming her all the while. Sedgwick grows increasingly uncomfortable as she watches, and her gestures become more nervous and fraught. The soundtrack is incomprehensible, due to age and retro technology, which forces you to watch her carefully. And you can't take your eyes off her: luminous and tragic, unable to watch herself.

There's no great surprise in the philosophy presented here. We consider ourselves savvy viewers; we know that reality TV is at least a modicum less than real, and we know that our lives probably won't be changed by switching hair color or watching Oprah. But it doesn't hurt to be reminded--as this show does, again and again--to question what we see. If we're going to watch, it's pretty much the least we can do.