Obsolescence

About

Through 2015/16, the School of Fine Art at the RCA will invite collaborating curators and curatorial agencies to present projects in the Dyson Gallery, Battersea, relating to the themes of the Visual Cultures Lecture Series, Rise Up & Envision.

Obsolescence, presented by A- - -Z  is the first in this series.

Ob.so.les.cence : being in the process of passing out of use or usefulness; becoming obsolete 

Obsolescence presents films by Harun Farocki, Martha Rosler & John Smith - Looking at the adoption of broadcast media within current art practice and their critical and political impact.

Boris Groys in The Fate of Art in the Age of Terror, 2005, explores the displacement of media imageries and its impact as a discursive and critical once exhibited within an art space.

“The fascination with the images of the political sublime that we can now watch almost everywhere can be interpreted as a specific case of this nostalgia for a masterpiece, for a true, real image. The media – and not the museum, not the art system – seems to be now the place where the longing for such an overwhelming, immediately persuasive image is expected to be satisfied. We have here a certain form of a reality show that has a claim to be a representation of the political reality itself – in its most radical forms. But this claim can only be sustained by the fact that we are not able to practice the critique of representation in the context of the contemporary media. The reason for that is quite simple: the media shows us only the image of what happens now. In contrast to the mass media, art institutions are places of historical comparison between past and present, between original promise and contemporary realisation of this promise and, thus, they possess the means and possibilities to be sites of critical discourse. Because every such discourse needs a comparison, needs a framework and a technique of comparison.” (B.Groys, The Fate of Art in the Age of Terror, 2005

The selection of these three videos has been directed by this text and give an insights of artists working with broadcast imagery and its relation to the political and critical. Obsolescence is part of A- - -Z 
 

•   Harun Farocki, War at a Distance, 2003, 55min06

In 1991, when images of the Gulf War flooded the international media, it was virtually impossible to distinguish between real pictures and those generated on computer. This loss of bearings was to change forever our way of deciphering what we see.

The image is no longer used only as testimony, but also as an indispensable link in a process of production and destruction. This is the central premise of War at a Distance, which continues the deconstruction of claims to visual objectivity Harun Farocki developed in his earlier work.

With the help of archival and original material, Farocki sets out in effect to define the relationship between military strategy and industrial production and sheds light on how the technology of war finds applications in everyday life. (Antje Ehmann)

Since the Gulf War in 1991, warfare and reporting it have become hyper-technological affairs, in which real and computer-generated images cannot be distinguished any more. With the aid of new and also unique archive material, Farocki sketches a picture of the relationship between military strategy and industrial production and shows how war technology finds its way into everyday use.

– International Film Festival catalogue, Rotterdam (2004)
 

•   Martha Rosler, Because This Is Britain, 2012, 3min 

Originally Part of Random Acts - Commissioned by JACQUI DAVIES and FACT

Curated by Jacqui Davies and Mike Stubbs

Produced by Jacqui Davies

A visualization of phrases used by Prime Minister David Cameron during his Oxfordshire speech addressing the events of August 2011. Selected phrases emerge from the stream of his speech, punctuated by images of ordinary passersby, teenagers, youths at a job centre, looters, the Bullingdon Club, ‘riot wombles’ and an Occupy sign.
 

•    John Smith, Frozen War, (Ireland, October 8th 2001), SD video, 11 min25

A disorientating experience while attempting to watch the TV news in an Irish hotel room triggers a spontaneous response to the bombing of Afghanistan.

“In Frozen War, UK artist John Smith, holed up in a hotel room far from home, turns the tables on the TV news as he starts to ask the questions they never do.” Abina Manning, programme notes for Video Mundi Film Festival, Chicago.

Frozen War is the first part of the Hotel Diaries series (2001-07), a collection of seven SD video works that can be shown either individually or as a single feature length work. Made over six years in the hotels of six different countries, Hotel Diaries charts the ‘War on Terror’ era of Bush and Blair through a series of video recordings that relate personal experiences to the ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Israel/Palestine. In these works, which play upon chance and coincidence, the hotel room is employed as a ‘found’ film set, where the architecture, furnishing and decoration become the means by which the filmmaker’s small adventures are linked to major world events. Other works in the series include  Museum Piece (Germany, 2004), Throwing Stones (Switzerland, 2004), B & B (England, 2005), Pyramids/Skunk (The Netherlands 2006/7), Dirty Pictures (Palestine 2007) and Six Years Later (Ireland 2007).
 

With the kind support of the Goethe-Institut and the Royal College of Art