Martha Rosler, with Paper Tiger Television, still from 'Martha Rosler Reads Vogue: Wishing, Dreaming, Winning, Spending', 1982, video transferred to digital, 25:22 mins, colour/sound, courtesy of the artist and Video Data Bank at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Photo Credit
Image Processors surveys a history of artists’ moving-image works that take the mass media as their target. Working back in time from Australian artist Matthew Griffin’s compilation of 133 short videos, Unchained Malady, 2020 – which irreverently repurposes imagery from online news and social media– the exhibition presents a range of works that likewise appropriate found footage, restage familiar genres or scrutinise the mechanisms of the information and entertainment industries. These include American artist Arthur Jafa’s hugely influential Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death (2016), Lisa Reihana’s breakout Wog Features (1990), Dara Birnbaum’s Technology/ Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978–79), and Italian-American ‘electromedia’ pioneer Aldo Tambellini’s Black TV (1968-69), amongst others.
Shaped by artist and theorist Judith Barry’s insight that ‘It is only by producing images that the subject of mass culture begins to feel some measure of control over the alienation produced by this condition” (1986), Image Processors provides a compelling bridge that links the critical aspirations of an artistic avant-garde to the manipulations and blandishments of quotidian entertainment.
Image Processors surveys a history of artists’ moving-image works that take the mass media as their target. Working back in time from Australian artist Matthew Griffin’s compilation of 133 short videos, Unchained Malady, 2020 – which irreverently repurposes imagery from online news and social media– the exhibition presents a range of works that likewise appropriate found footage, restage familiar genres or scrutinise the mechanisms of the information and entertainment industries. These include American artist Arthur Jafa’s hugely influential Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death (2016), Lisa Reihana’s breakout Wog Features (1990), Dara Birnbaum’s Technology/ Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978–79), and Italian-American ‘electromedia’ pioneer Aldo Tambellini’s Black TV (1968-69), amongst others.
Shaped by artist and theorist Judith Barry’s insight that ‘It is only by producing images that the subject of mass culture begins to feel some measure of control over the alienation produced by this condition” (1986), Image Processors provides a compelling bridge that links the critical aspirations of an artistic avant-garde to the manipulations and blandishments of quotidian entertainment.
