Media Analysis

After an all-night session of editing Free Society, Garrin headed home with video-8 camera in-hand, only to happen upon the Tompkins Square riots. As police tried to enforce a curfew aimed at removing homeless people from the park, Garrin began gathering footage of cops beating up protesters. He was then attacked by police himself, as the camera continued to roll. The footage was subsequently incorporated into Free Society, in which the military myth of "protect and serve" is dismantled by first-hand experience.

This tape was shot in August 1972 by the same crew that had convened for pioneer video collective TVTV’s (Top Value Television) project Four More Years. Videotaped at the 1972 Republican Convention, it begins with the cameraman taping from inside the press area, with protestors from the People’s Band outside at the fence. There is footage of girl- and boyscout groups. A group of protestors are shown calling for non-violent blockades of the delegates' entrance. Tear gas is feared, and there are interviews with tear-gassed people and medics.

The latest in Muntadas and Reese's series documenting the selling of the American presidency features political ads from the 1950s to ads from the 2012 campaigns, and highlights the development of the political strategy and marketing techniques of the TV campaign process.

TVTV's inside view of the 1972 Republican National Convention made broadcast history. While network cameras focused on the orchestrated renomination of Richard Nixon, TVTV's rag-tag army of guerrilla television activists turned their cameras on to the cocktail parties, anti-war demonstrations, hype and hoopla that accompanied the show.

In part a remake of Hollis Frampton’s Gloria! (1979), in part a repurposing of hacked, 16-bit video game technology, The Well of Representation asks us to reconsider our fear of the liminal. Following the convergent narratives of several voices, ranging from the linearly historical to the cybernetically personal, we come to understand the journey ahead: searching from interface to interface, knowing that whatever home we find will be a collaborative compromise. One where we might live beyond our representations and finally come to say what we mean.

The artists of the future and the past converge and converse as the funding dries up and extrapolation envisions extinction.

The latest in Muntadas and Reese's series documenting the selling of the American presidency features political ads from the 1950s to ads from the 2004 campaigns, and highlights the development of the political strategy and marketing techniques of the TV campaign process.

Edited without commentary, the artists show an endless stream of candidates, from Eisenhower to Kerry, who are marketed like commercial products. As Muntadas and Reese trace the development of the campaign TV spot, what becomes apparent is a consistent sameness of political issues amid complex, changing visuals.

Credits is about re-reading information. Recycling. Image-making. Wallpaper TV. Zen. Money. Labor. And of course, credits. Through all their aspects and characteristics, credits reflect the way that programs, productions and institutions select to present themselves.… Muntadas is again dealing with the 'invisible' information that lies behind mass media production and transmission.”

--Kathy Rae Huffman, Video: A Retrospective (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1984)

This tape is a critique of the blockbuster film Top Gun and the attitudes of macho militarism that it embodies. The tape uses the unpopulated space of a fast food chain parking lot and the runway at Miramar Naval Air Station to present facts about the vast wasteland of American military spending. These segments are contrasted with promotional clips from Top Gun that condense the ideas of the film into 30-second spots.

Award winning documentary filmmaker and cultural critic Joan Braderman takes a look at the National Enquirer and demolishes the newspaper's ideology and content. Analyzing the fact that the Enquirer is the tabloid that everybody reads but nobody admits to. Braderman shows how it's agenda of reporting gossip and the lowest common denominator of news has influenced even the so called intellectual progressive media such as the "New Yorker" and the "New York Times". Braderman has recently finished her documentary The Heretics about a seventies feminist art group based in NYC.

Irreverent yet poignant, The Eternal Frame is a re-enactment of the assassination of John F. Kennedy as seen in the famous Zapruder film. This home movie was immediately confiscated by the FBI, yet found its way into the visual subconscious of the nation. The Eternal Frame concentrates on this event as a crucial site of fascination and repression in the American mindset.

"The intent of this work was to examine and demystify the notion of the presidency, particularly Kennedy, as image archetype...."

— Doug Hall, 1984 

“Take back the airwaves: Mexico’s video art doyenne Ximena Cuevas books herself onto the tabloid talk show Tombola (Raffle), toying at first with whimsical deconstruction until she turns the whole affair on its head by seizing the televisual flow itself.”

Paul Schrader’s Bag is an inventory of fame. Playing the anonymous Every Man in a brush with celebrity, Simon presents a Hollywood peerage as our cultural patrimony.

This title is also available on Jason Simon: Three Videos.

What are all of these photographers trying to capture, and just who is collaborating with whom? This short piece could be a take on fame and the cult of the personality — or a tourist portrait with the audience as subject.

This title is also available on Animal Charm Videoworks: Volume 1.

Pirated satellite feeds revealing U.S. media personalities’ contempt for their viewers come full circle in Spin. TV out-takes appropriated from network satellite feeds unravel the tightly-spun fabric of television—a system that silences public debate and enforces the exclusion of anyone outside the pack of journalists, politicians, spin doctors, and televangelists who manufacture the news. Spin moves through the L.A. riots and the floating TV talk-show called the 1992 U.S. presidential election.

A hyper-collage endurance test of sado-masochistic proportions, mixing an anthology of corporate video music with a feng shui video.

This title is also available on Animal Charm Videoworks: Volume 2, Hot Mirror Mix.

At one point in END-LESSsestina, several men linking arms are made to walk, blindfolded, into a pool of water. We see thrashing and an expanse of blue, and finally, a lone tennis ball bobbing largely in the frame. Leading into this scene we hear a sports commentator contend, “it’s not just her out there, she’s representing America.” This line repeats itself throughout the video like a refrain; a pervasive echo of the American media’s criminalization of Serena Williams’ celebratory dance at the 2012 Olympics.

Removing keyframes from a digital version of John Ford's The Searchers, Baron and Goodwin attack the film's temporal structuring to render a kinetic “painted desert” of the West. The dust kicked up by the movement in the film is pure pixel, unanchored from the photographic realism that used to constrain it.

Displaying a broad range of Golden Age Hollywood animation, Manifestoon is an homage to the latent subversiveness of cartoons. Though U.S. cartoons are usually thought of as conveyors of capitalist ideologies of consumerism and individualism, Drew observes: "Somehow as an avid childhood fan of cartoons, these ideas were secondary to a more important lesson—that of the 'trickster' nature of many characters as they mocked, outwitted and defeated their more powerful adversaries.

This tape is, in effect, a ready-made. Produced by the Pepsi Cola Company for its own use, it was accidentally substituted for one of my tapes in 1974. The mistake in the transfer was a communications mishap that involved a series of people and corporations... I wonder what accidents of this sort might reveal about secret channels of information. I see the material on this tape, innocuous as it may be, as a phenomenon that affects us without our being aware of its existence.

—Antonio Muntadas

1! is part of the Pop Manifestos series, a five video project realized in collaboration with Cokes' former students Seth Price and Damian Kulash, and originally conceived as part of a series for the conceptual band SWIPE. “I closed the Pop Manifestos series as originally conceived with 1! (2004) where I present the titles of 100 CDs I've valued most from the years 1997-2002 set to music composed by Michael Bell-Smith.

The latest in Muntadas and Reese's series documenting the selling of the American presidency features political ads from the 1950s to ads from the 2012 campaigns, and highlights the development of the political strategy and marketing techniques of the TV campaign process.

Baldessari has Ed Henderson examine obscure movie stills and attempt to reconstruct the films’ narratives. By removing the image from its ordinary context—in this instance the chronological flow of film time—the process of interpretation itself and the contextual meaning carried by images is examined. During these interpretative exercises, Ed Henderson urges the viewer to question where the meaning of an image lies: within the image itself or within the spectators’ reading of the image.

This title was in the original Castelli-Sonnabend video art collection.

®™ark is an organization dedicated to bringing anti-corporate subversion and sabotage into the public marketplace. This updated video compilation includes a glitzy promotion for the ®™ark system (Bringing It All to You!); a behind-the-scenes look at some ®™ark propaganda efforts; an ®™ark PowerPoint presentation concerning "the Y2K bug”; a Danish television report about ®™ark and Hitler; a Boston news report about ®™ark; and, finally, the grand prize winner of ®™ark 1998 Corporate Poetry Contest, reading his winning entry.

Animal Charm's Ashley seems to develop a conventional story about a modern mother and wife with typically modern desires. But the insertion of incongruous soap opera scenes soon ensures that the seductive images take on an absurd and oppressive charge. “The antiseptic cleanliness of the imagery has a superficial appeal, but begins to feel claustrophobic — or toxic — after prolonged exposure.”