![]() ![]() The Museum of Modern Art’s historical connection to the CIA is-like Radio Free Europe and the Congress for Cultural Freedom-among the more notable examples of the government’s intervention in our civic life. The United States has a long history of cultural campaigns aimed at furthering its imperial goals. Sometimes it is a towering, spectacular argument for the supremacy of the machine an exercise in post-industrial American triumphalism, surveillance technology, and repressive deep-state R&D disguised as visually appealing, non-referential images. But propaganda is not always an Uncle Sam poster. It is widely accepted that propaganda makes for bad art. Like a Palace is a premiere, yet the complexity of. In Like a Palace (2022) a group of time travelers hop between epochs-the Stone Age Ancient Greece the Industrial Revolution Late Capitalism.Īll of these works, except the last, have circulated widely in museums and galleries. In 2018’s Untitled (Clouds), a quirky dragon with a cutesy straw hat flies about a landscape reminiscent of Conan the Barbarian. All we are offered by way of context is a single, hand-drawn shot of the rat’s proletarian room. In 2013’s animation Untitled (Rat), an anthropomorphic rat repeatedly wakes up in its bed, leaves, presumably goes about its life, and returns back home in the evening. In Untitled (Vampire) (2019)-one of four such works on show alongside a series of gesso and bronze sculptures of planes and animals in his first exhibition in Portugal-a Nosferatu copycat, living within the dusty and humid confines of a mountain castle, spends his time writing letters to be delivered at the nearby village kisses his undead wife on a balcony at night sleeps with his arms folded over his chest then goes back to writing letters. Throughout the piece, humans are placed in three essential relations to the technological society: blind acceptance, seen through a trio of characters (Londa Lake, Ted, and Bill) dressed in uniform-like dark blue business suits active rebellion, personified The world of Socud Amnesia is one in which numbers are everything, and human individuality is all but erased.In many of Peter Wächtler’s video works, nothing much seems to happen. This is dangerous territory, though, since the sheer fascination of flashing projections and synthesized sound can overpower the social agenda they are supposed to be propounding. ![]() The Impossible Theatre usually avoids but occasionally succumbs to what might be called the technological paradox. In the opening sequence of Social Amnesia, a woman sits at a computer terminal. ![]() tell us your American Express Card number.Ī loud, insistent taped voice demands from her a series of modern-age data: âTell us your social security number. â As she types, her answers appear in computer-generated graphics on a screen above her. Finally the reason for this numerical inquiry becomes clear: the taped voice rewards her with a âP.I. The world of Socud Amnesia is one in which numbers are everything, and human individuality is all but erased.Social Amnesia and American Corrections and Rehabilitation ,â a personal identification number like those used widely today in automated bank-teller machines. Just as individuals have mechanisms to forget inconvenient truths or traumatic events from the past, so does the community, nation and globe. Just as the child violently abused might loose recall, so may a society loose the truth of its past. So can institutions.īecause I throw the term “social amnesia” around so freely, I want to take a little time to give it a chance to become part of your tool-set for interpreting the world at large. As amnesia is one of the defense mechanisms of man (or woman) so social amnesia is a defense against collective traumas. Perhaps it is most like our reactions to vicarious trauma which is at some distance from the individual. Perhaps its course is like the background violence that (still) surrounds life in many settings too much like the “nasty, brutish and short” Hobbes supposed of earlier times. ![]()
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