The mythological machine - images in the media (29 Sept. - 30 Oct.)

Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, Warwick University, Coventry, England
Curator: Francesco Manacorda. Link to museum:

Artists:
Erik Beltran (MX) lives and works in Amsterdam
Phil Collins (UK) lives and works in Bristol
Maria Friberg (S) lives and works in Stockholm
Rainer Ganahl (Au) lives and works in New York
Alasdair Hopwood (UK) lives and works in London
Cristobal Leyth (Chile) lives and works in New York
Mark Lombardi (USA) lived and worked in New York
Daniel Pflumm (D) lives and works in Berlin
Sean Snyder (USA) lives and works in Berlin
Cesare Veil (I) lives and works in Genova
Olav Westphallen (D) lives and works in New York
Nate Lowe (USA) Lives and work in New York
Jim Shaw (USA) Lives and work in Los Angeles

More info:
In the beginning of the 60s, Theodor Adorno dismissed in his essay Commitment any art that engaged with a literal political content: "it is not the office of the art to spotlight alternatives, but to resist by its form alone the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men's head". Often the immediacy of the political message, which Adorno was opposing, reduces works of art to socio-political commentary without aesthetic connotations. Some artists are trying to articulate their political concerns not only by assuming a bare literal message, but rather by transfiguring it into a research enriched by the manipulation of visual and informative materials. It is difficult not to think of Hirschhorn's ambivalent motto "I refuse to make political art, I want to make art politically".

Times are now more mature to comment on a devastating event such as 9/11. The most compelling interest for contemporary artists seems nonetheless to be more focused on the way the trauma has been elaborated rather than on the event itself. The way in which the US reacted to the attack has deeply changed the nation"s whole identity. This trauma was mainly elaborated by the information "industry", which strategically monitored the official reaction. As a consequence those changes have brought about similar adaptations in the entire world. In the US the concepts of security and homeland have been rehabilitated as a vehicle of cohesiveness and therefore exclusion. Information media such as newspapers and TV have become a source and a generator of visuals similar to the entertainment industry, drawing on the emotive and unconscious effects of a vast repertoire of images used as a propaganda vocabulary.

Rather than spreading a political message of revolt, commenting on a situation or proposing solutions or "micro-utopias" the artists selected for this exhibition are keen to question or to generate a position of doubt, putting the viewer in an uncomfortable circumstance. Often uncanny correspondences or uneasy correlations between official information and subtle manipulations of facts are the fil rouge that links these artistic practices. The empire of information is one of the subjects of their research; the presentation of the real is questioned as crucial ideological propaganda that takes place in newspapers and television. Several international artists have been taking the subject of the terrorist attack and its consequences as a pretext to unveil the unquestioned assumptions that the news system generates. This is the material assembled in this exhibition whose aim, akin to the goal of some of the artworks included in it, is to generate ideological and aesthetical short circuits.

The works of art investigate how increasingly the repertoire of images used by the press and on TV are visually seductive and emotive to a point where they are not easily differentiated from those found in the entertainment industry. These pictures retain a relationship to the event reported, but are loaded with irrational investments; as such they surreptitiously create a new type of collective unconscious, artificially induced and highly manipulable. They become signs that exceed their original referent; the images are used to implant a mythological second meaning. When used repeatedly, this reservoir of images forms a silent vocabulary whose rhetorical value may have unprecedented results, since its impact is unperceived. In this instance, art becomes a tool to generate scepticism and awareness more than an articulated utopian proposal or a practical programme. The media strategies become targets and their procedures are investigated in order to unveil how news, and therefore our perception of the real, can be easily altered. The artificially constructed narratives of many news formats hinge upon very subtle mechanisms, doubling their perverse efficacy.

The exhibition itself aspires to become a tool where art is organised and displayed as news would be in the information industry. This strategy would replicate the artists' intention to collect published information and reorganize them on a platform in order to expose occult mechanisms and significations. The layout of the show will also act as well as an interface where material is organised rhetorically. For this reason videos will be screened in monitors and all the installation of the works will evoke the display and organization of material on screen or in the press. The exhibition design would stand on a line between curating, information organisation and display.

WORKS - Short descriptions

Rainer Ganahl, Afghan Dialogs, 2002
The artist has isolated the graphic tags used by big news broadcasters and then asked Afghan friends to fill the void left by the images. The result has been embroidered in the tradition of Alighiero Boetti.

Olav Westphallen, Untitled, 2003
Westphallen redraws images that grab his attention, in particular from newspapers and tabloids. In this work an image of the second Gulf War has been juxtaposed with one from a Hollywood film. The similarity of the images exposes the complicity between the two industries.

Cristobal Lehyt, Arrest, 2003
Arrest consists of a wall drawing of news images whose elements have been reduced to the graphical minimum. Underneath the images there is a shelf with print-outs of the titles of the related articles. The information format is unpacked and offered to the reader/viewer.

Mark Lombardi, George W. Bush, Harken Energy and Jackson Stephens
ca. 1979-90
This work is a diagram illustrating one of the research projects that the artist conducted as part of his practice. It relates the Bush family to interests in the Middle East and links them to Bin Laden.

Sean Snyder, Analepsys, 2002
In this video Snyder has isolated images from news broadcast from all over the world displaying urban scenes just before or after a violent action has taken place. This gesture reveals how news reports are constructed like fiction and how architecture becomes part of the conflict.

Daniel Pflumm, CNN Questions and Answers 1997
This video is a sampling of collected silences between questions and answers of CNN interviews during the first Gulf War. The montage is purposly remixed to sound like experimental electronic music.

Phil Collins, How to Make a Refugee, 2000
This video was shot via a hidden camera when the artist went to the Serbian border with a British journalist who was interviewing a young boy. Collins shows how the representation of the refugee is staged by the interviewer beforehand.

Maria Friberg, No Time to Fall, 2001
This work, done just after the election of G. W. Bush, appropriates only the reactions of the president under pressure. Bush appears smirking and his authority is effectively undermines by a simple manipulation of official footage.

Alasdair Hopwood, Works in The Home, 2004
This website marketed project entangles the contradictions shared by art and business, with an ironic view on the media language. Among a series of absurd and apparently undesirable products and services, the artist has devised a Traumaformer - a programme to stage and sell to interested
clients a convincing traumatic past - alongside other products such as the miraclemaker and the terror isn't.

Erick Bertran, New Commission
Bertran's work questions the assumptions we usually take for granted in any printed matter. His newspaper projects intervene directly on cover pages from the press, such as removing all punctuation from a Brazilian newspaper or omitting the letter "o" from the whole page. He is now about to publish the first page of a Dutch newspaper printed in negative. The commission would involve a London newspaper as part of the show and the design of the catalogue, which will take the shape of a newspaper

Cesare Veil, Diary, 2004
The work consists of a collection of 40 drawings depicting famous globally spread newspaper photographs. The artist has added a line underneath the image that bears no connection with the event. It usually evokes a more substantial meditation that clashes with the transitory character of the images.

Nate Lowman (USA), New work
Lowman's work addresses the overload of visual information coming from traditional and new media. His installations, suspended between sculpture printmaking and display strategies, obey to weird taxonomies such as "Men with Beard" (2003).

Jim Shaw (USA), Drawings, 2001
The series of four drawing realized in 2001 clearly illustrate the artist's obsession with dreams that merge imagery coming form well-known news images. In those works personal unconscious issues come out as collective.