Video Club: Glued to the Tube

Like most things in the White West, news outlets follow the laws of capitalism. Whereas the intentions of some of the competing networks and platforms may be charitable, it is known that spectacle sells, and above all, the spectacle of violence. Suffering can be capitalized on, and especially when it comes to people from “far-away countries” or people of color, suffering is shown more explicitly and without any concern for the subjects depicted. Add some patriotism and nationalism to that Molotov cocktail, and all sense of humanity disappears from pictured violence. Well-intended or not, what is the difference between entertainment and mediated violence when it is made sensational and constantly available? Are we horrified by these gruesome documents of reality or are we captivated by them?

The philosopher Marshall McLuhan was one of the first to recognize that we can only dislodge ourselves from this hypnotic media trance, when the medium itself, more than its intended content, becomes explicitly visible.^[1] Visual artists have historically been excellent at questioning the boundaries of different mediums, and digital and televised media are no exception to this rule. The artists in this Video Club reflect on the way we consume violence through mass media, by imitating the very way in which we consume these media: continuously and fragmentarily—or as performed entertainment.

The media circus can appear somewhat ludicrous in its attempts to make an event out of everything, but at the same time, one could argue that events and issues are only remembered collectively when they are mediatized. Chip Lord and Doug Michels, the two geniuses behind the artist group Ant Farm, playfully responded to this notion by staging a satirical event and performance called Media Burn (1975): the work does not specifically comment on violence in media, but rather violently attacks the constant stream of media coverage and the pervasive presence of television in American everyday life (fig. 1). In the performance, the artists drive a Cadillac at full speed into a wall of flaming television sets, an affront to the same media they had invited to cover the event. Ironically and unintentionally, the event ends up being broadcasted on national television, where news presenters repeat the sentence “the message is for the media”.

Another method that has been eagerly put to use to dissect the connection between violence and spectacle in mass media is sampling: the reuse of image and sound fragments to generate new meaning. The artist duos Sluik/Kurpershoek, Persijn Broersen & Margit Lukács, and the artists Gary Hill and Dara Birnbaum, all turned to sampling to create suggestive collages between television and found footage. In Hill’s Air Raid (1974), loud and aggressive sounds taken from the everyday rupture the image flow of the video like the crackling static of switching channels on old television sets (fig. 2). In March ENKOR (1985) by Sluik/Kurpershoek, music is used to alienate content from context; this video collage highlights the similarities between the viewer’s experience of entertainment and war (fig. 3). Spectacular images of falling bombs at the battlefront are mixed with images from the home front sourced from found footage of televised entertainment and home videos. Neither selection of images represents the gruesome realities of war, but both point to how violence as a spectacle can be joyfully consumed from the safety of our homes. Thematically, the title of the work refers to the verb “encore”, which means to call for another performance or repetition after a show has ended. Similarly to the way people increase the tempo of their joint applause and yell “We want more!” to call performers back to the stage, the shots of marching soldiers, dancing crowds, and falling bombs are intensively repeated. With this, March ENKOR indicates television’s political power to formalize violence and turn war into a patriotic spectacle for its viewers, rather than for its participants.

But while mediatization is a great means to justify war and pacify viewers, pacification is not merely a gleeful experience. Broersen & Lukács took this sense of media hypnosis as the starting point of their first collaborative work, Prime Time Paradise (2004)(fig.4). In an anatomizing approach to the medium of video, the duo quite literally dissects the endless stream of televised news that we take in on a daily basis. Innumerable cutout stills from moving television footage are repositioned into a diorama-like composition. The camera slowly snakes through this motionless and layered coulisse landscape of two-dimensional images, without lingering long enough on anything for viewers to be able to “stand still” and take in this endless news cycle. The main event is deliberately left out of the frame, but its “extras” and the “décor” are still visible in this pixelated theater of the media landscape. Attentive viewers may recognize the décor of 9/11, among other visual cues, but will not get to see the spectacle of the actual planes crashing into the Twin Towers.

In a conversation with Broersen & Lukács, the artists reflect on how Prime Time Paradise was made in the wake of 9/11, a period in which they followed the news more closely than ever before. It does not happen very often that we are truly paralyzed by a televised event. Somehow, most people still remember where they were when they first saw the attacks. It is exactly this notion—that personal history and collective memory collide through mediated images—that is central to the last work in this Video Club: Birnbaum’s Damnation of Faust—Charming Landscape (1987) (fig.5). Two teenage girls reflect on their lives as young adults while television footage of anti-war demonstrations and street protests from the Civil Rights Movement are juxtaposed with one another. As the two girls remark, it is extremely alienating to live a life wherein you learn to care for each other, while at the same time, images of police violence against people of color and protestors constantly circulate in mass media.

We have certainly seen images of uncensored aggression against Black Americans in the past, but the conventional thought was that these were documents and not entertainment. Nowadays we carry tiny cameras with us wherever we go, and in an attempt to document what would otherwise remain unseen, horrific imagery of police brutality is continuously available on demand, while murders become #hastags. Looking back, what change did Ant Farm’s attack on the media bring about? For one thing, corporate media and social networks have picked up on the value, if not the consumer appeal, of explicit aggression. Surely, filmed deaths gain more press coverage and incite more civil protests than those that weren’t captured on camera, but rates of police killings have not diminished, and instead, society has become increasingly desensitized to the videotaped spectacle of death by violence.

Works like that of Birnbaum seemingly have not lost any of their relevance and immediate necessity. Mediatization cuts like a double-edged sword. As Ant Farm comically demonstrates, anything can become a news item once it is documented. Mediatization greatly determines what is put on the political agenda and what is remembered collectively. On the other hand, it seems that constantly and fragmentarily available content can lead to a deadening desensitization of violence, so that a consuming public may be entertained by it. As the works in this Video Club demonstrate so vividly, we can only break free of the never-ending cycle of violence consumption if the medium itself, and not its intended content, becomes explicitly visible.