Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of the West of England, Bristol
Who, What, Where, When, Why and How
This project, made in collaboration with artist Steve Rushton and funded by a £9,000 grant from Arts Council England, is a three channel video installation that simulates a government press briefing as it unfolds. The words spoken were composed entirely of actual speeches and statements from 1946-2008, the sources of which are revealed simultaneously using video projection. By splitting word and image, the installation reveals the fragmented, recurrent nature of political rhetoric and the theatrical and representational strategies deployed by these deeply familiar events that often serve to legitimate armed conflict. It creates a fresh understanding of the deployment of the press briefing throughout the second half of the twentieth century as a televised spectacle that shapes social and political reality. It forms part of Dickinson’s ongoing research into the forms and mechanisms of social control, extending strategies of repetition and reconstruction used in contemporary art video practice, including the international touring exhibition ‘History Will Repeat Itself: Strategies of Re-enactment in Contemporary (Media) Art and Performance’ (2007-2008) in which Dickinson participated.
The installation was included (by invitation) at SMART project space in Amsterdam, in the context of an exhibition, Performing Evidence (July-August 2009) and subsequently exhibited at the Bard College, Center for Curatorial Studies and Art in Contemporary Culture, New York (Beyond the White Cube, November-December 2009); Alma Enterprises (solo show) London (November 2009-January 2010); and at the Haifa Museum of Art, Israel (The Coming Community, January-May 2011). Dickinson presented the project as part of a discussion and screening of his work with Bruno Latour (Pompidou Centre, Paris, 23 June 2010) and in discussion with architectural historian Christine Stevenson and architect Ian Ritchie in a series of presentations entitled ‘Monuments and Forgetting’ at the Royal Academy, London (21 February 2011).
