Weapons of Mass Deception
Lyra Kilston
"A modern revolutionary group heads for the television station," declared 1960s prankster Abbie Hoffman. Today it heads for the internet. The control of information is pure politics–it determines public awareness, which in turn produces approval, ambivalence or outrage. Currently, our access to information supports an unprecedented cacophony of opinions, which feels like democracy, but may in fact produce a fatigue of choice, a resignation to read what is most accessible. Exposing the politics of what our media perpetuates (or obscures) demands paying extremely close attention.
Ironically, perhaps with such an explosion of information, one can more easily validate ignorance. Can you really be expected to wade through the entire paper and five online sources to get to that little discrepancy? Can we really blame a journalist for getting one fact mixed up when there is so much to cover in the world every day? As the political philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote: "The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, and the distinction between true and false no longer exists." The parties might have different names today, but the bottom line remains.
On the day the Saddam Hussein trial began, I went to see "If It’s Too Bad To Be True, It Could Be DISINFORMATION," a smart, provocative exhibit about media and resistance, at apexart. Curated by Mercedes Vicente, it brings together Marcelo Exposito, Martha Rosler, the Yes Men, Paul Chan, neuroTransmitter, the Speculative Archive (Julia Metzler and David Thorne) and European pranksters 0100101110101101.ORG (Eva and Franco Mattes), artists whose works hover between galvanizing awareness, or, by their very form, are already the resistance they promote.
The medium is still the message, and the adage that "to counteract the media you must do it yourself" reigns strong here with pirate radio broadcasts, counterfeit corporate websites and fake news. For a show about disinformation, falsities, misquotes, cover-ups, convenient elisions and general media complicity, some of the works are, as expected, visually dull, consisting of Xeroxed articles or emails mounted on the wall. However, if the scales are tipped towards the overt and away from the oblique, it’s a refreshing change from the candied and nostalgic politics of 2004’s Whitney Biennial.
This exhibit borrows its title from a 1985 work by Martha Rosler, which is the linchpin (and oldest; all other works were made since 2003). If it’s too Bad… consists of enlarged New York Times articles from one of Reagan’s Central American Cold War fiascos, with particular turns of phrases underlined and stamped with "DISINFORMATION" in red ink. These are accompanied by a video of manipulated television news footage. We may be a generation better at hacking, culture-jamming or organizing with the instantaneity of cellphones and mass emails at hand, but a good grasp of history is often our weak spot, which is precisely why the Rosler piece was so striking. This work was first shown in a 1985 exhibit at the Alternative Museum called "Disinformation: The Manufacture of Consent," including the work of 32 artists. Wait–you mean that pointing out the gross exaggerations and blunders of the media wasn’t invented by Jon Stewart?
Historical context becomes all the more crucial when the focus of an exhibit is politics. Paul Chan skillfully and subtly illustrates the intersection of propaganda, corruption and selective memory with a large portrait of the young Saddam Hussein rendered in charcoal, placed over a simple table with two chairs. Hussein’s portrait is based on a Xeroxed photo taken at a more innocent time before his menacing visage was plastered all over Baghdad, and Chan replicates the border of the Xerox, alluding to the history of this image’s duplication and dispersal. On the table is a Xeroxed, stapled excerpt of "The Collected Works of Saddam Hussein, Vol. II" (1977). The first line reads: "The question of democracy is an extremely complicated one," also the title of Chan’s portrait of Hussein. The table, chairs, and text are titled forebodingly Untitled (for a long time to come). Chan has created a simple, but potent space: the viewer sits beneath the portrait and reads an alarming essay in which Hussein ponders this complicated question. Such an experience almost feels transgressive; it goes against everything we’ve been told about him. The more surprising passages are underlined, revealing a young thinker who once lauded the benefits of democratic societies. But as Chan’s titles suggest, a resolution, much less a real name for our current situation is a long way off.
The Yes Men are represented by a three-channel video, each playing different segments of their brilliant Dow Chemical hoax. When the BBC mistakenly contacted the Yes Men’s fake Dow website last December to request an interview on the 20th anniversary of the Bhopal gas disaster, the Yes Men stepped up as faux Dow representatives, announcing that all of the victims in Bhopal would finally receive the full amount of money and health care they had been fighting for. When the real Dow received wind of this massive prank, they had to come forward and say no, actually, we’re not paying out a dime. Although the prank caused a disastrous emotional swell and crash in Bhopal, the fact remains that it attracted much more media attention to the tragic anniversary than would have occurred otherwise. Much has been written recently about tactically using shame in order to force culpability; this applies both to the imitative antics of the Yes Men, as well as the importance of circulating images such as the Abu Ghraib photographs.
The Italian collective 0100101110101101.ORG also practice the facsimile approach to corporate harassment. In a project titled Nikeground (2003), 010, in the guise of a fake Nike website, announced that the central Karlsplatz square in Vienna was going to be renamed Nikeplatz. As Vicente points out in her curatorial statement, these kinds of interventions prove "a reverse of fortune that the more corporations rely on media the greater their vulnerability." Identity theft has never been so easy.
neuroTransmitter’s Frequency Allocations (in 3 parts), includes video footage of the protests at the 2004 Republican National Convention, where they "mini-cast" information about the corporate media partnerships. Slow pans up the length of the skyscraping media headquarters are scrolled by the names of the television and radio stations belonging to each, floating up and down the screen like unending credits.
In Marcelo Exposito’s video Radical Imagination (Carnivals of Resistance), the camera lingers on the following bit of text by Alice Walker: "Resistance is the secret of joy." The video, an hour of footage showing recent protests, nudists on a merry-go-round, shadow puppetry and text, links the lawless and ecstatic experiences of protests and Carnival. In each situation, defying normality becomes, if not the purpose, the result. What is protest if not the roar of "this is not, and should not be considered normal?" The "normalcy" of corruption demands constant resistance. As our media outlets evolve, disinformation becomes a much more sly and sophisticated machine, and as this exhibit attests, so will its opponents.
