One of Rainer GanahlÕs main obsessions
aims to identify the process of news ÔdigestionÕ and the impact that
information has on our everyday life. His targets include the unperceived
influence exerted by its formal presentation in order to investigate the
implied signification carried through by mediaÕs graphic aspects. This critical
practice aims to unveil the implication of the conceptual design of news, as
the mechanisms of filtered presentation embody for the artist a hidden
meta-language operating on a level whose ideological consequences are often overlooked.
GanahlÕs works do not hold the artistÕs direct opinions; he does not suggest
alternatives, nor does he formulate accusations. His art rather indicates,
through its formal component acquired in the process of its making, an
unconventional way of looking at what is generally conceived as democratic.
Such a practice mimics, to a certain extent, the structural procedures of
academic research, picking elements from the artistÕs understanding of reality
that drawn together constitute the principle of an experimental study, a
constellation that generates criticality by way of their interaction.
In his series Afghan Dialogues, the artist has explored his interest in
the headlines and graphic banners used in television news bulletins,
questioning the supposedly uninvolved position of those who compose them. The
creation of these artworks follows quite a complicated production chain, in
which every passage adds a new layer of meaning through cultural, political and
social references. Such mode of production paradoxically mirrors in a more
visible fashion the passages of increased manipulation that occurs during the
process of refining any event while it is turned into the newscast. As a point
of departure, Ganahl has taken pictures of a television screening international
news and then he has removed from these the images depicting the event, the
indexical component that is used to validate the narrative. What remains
represents the disregarded and complex apparatus of signification in operation
during news reception. The graphic elements contain ideologically charged
tropes such as ÒNext TargetÓ, ÒAmerica Strikes Back Ò or ÒHomeland SecurityÓ,
embedding US government propaganda within the reported event. The visual result
takes on a subliminal status on the border between language and image, allowing
them to efficaciously operate on a semi-conscious level. This occurs thanks to
the use of repetition, as the viewer, after continual exposure to them, stops
perceiving them as influential elements on the TV screen that contribute
together with images and narratives to the construction of our understanding of
the story reported.
The second phase of GanahlÕs process
consists of sending those isolated graphic elements printed on sheet of paper
that maintains the original proportion of the TV screen to professional
embroiderers in Afghanistan (the country under US attack during that period),
with a set of instructions. The artist asked them to make embroideries
containing each one of these graphics, keeping the white space left by the
removal of the images. The dialogue invoked in the title occurs as Ganahl
invited the craftsmen to add a comment to the graphic they received in this
blank area. This symbolic gesture confers to the Afghans a space of visibility
that brings to mind the long commentaries that the same people used to inscribe
in the frame of Alighiero BoettiÕs maps of the world.
This operation assumes a paradigmatic
status that indicates an alternative conception of the multifaceted aspects
that divide an event from its reportage, oscillating between personal memory
and collective elaboration. The cooperative production that generates the
artwork is not only part of the well-rehearsed poststudio strategy in which
external professionals are used for their specific skills only. Every
individual involved is in fact asked to leave a sign, a contribution to the
multilayered writing of what could be considered as a sequentially fabricated
document. This has particular significance
as the artist juxtaposes the ÔundeclaredÕ opinion of powerful information
industries with the otherwise inaudible voice of the individuals upon which
such events act with devastating effects. Bringing together the personal
response of Afghans and the symbols of a televised event taking place in their
country brings into question the notions of collective and personal memory as
opposed but inherently linked within the most recent notion of historiography.
Conceived in opposition to the kind of Ôpolitical historyÕ that shapes the
accepted narrative of global events, the embroidery series paradigmatically
includes both the subliminal signification mechanisms and personal opinions
equating them on the same surface. This intends to problematise the relation
between the memories originated by the media representation of a conflict and
the personal perception of people directly involved within it. Are they both
valuable for the historians to come? What would be more reliable as a source?
What would result from their dialogue?
As Jacques Le Goff explains, the work of
the historian often consists of correcting through the study of documents, the
altered perceptions that have sedimented in the so-called collective memory:
ÒThere are at least two histories: that of collective memory and that of
historians. The first appears as essentially mythic, deformed, and
anachronistic. But it constitutes the lived reality of the never completed
relation between present and past. It is desirable that historical information
corrects this false traditional history. History must illuminate memory and
help it rectify its errors.Ó[1]
What Le Goff aims to rescue professionally, Ganahl aspires to show in the
process of its formation by questioning the apparatuses that condition such
recollections and their mechanisms of ideological distortion.
In this context, the notion of shared
memory has been repeatedly contested and visual imagery represents one of the
trickiest tools in the hands of newspaper and TV. [2]
The way mass media contributes to the staging of what is perceived as the
evolution of contemporary events can be conceived as no less compromised than
the subjective response of a single individual from the other side of the same
conflict. Although unbalanced on the scale of power and sophistication the two
factors juxtaposed in the embroidery are plausibly compared as voices whose
partiality is surprisingly similar. Through this gesture, Ganahl acts as an
illegitimate historian who uses facts and documents as metaphors in order to
put into focus the gaps that separate the present from the past, personal from
relevant information. This sheds light on the transient moment during which the
sedimentation of interpretation converts narrative into the memory that
historians consume their life correcting.
The series News Paintings explores further the idea of memory,
putting it in relation to the new media. Hung from the ceiling as a
three-dimensional succession of materialised windows of an Internet browser,
these big unframed canvases depict several Web pages from Yahoo news or Fox
news channels. Their size and quantity evoke the amount of information waste
that is generated every day. The works are pervaded by a sense of instant
obsolescence: looking at old pages of a constantly updated information platform
hints to the strategic overload of material as the way to avoid the perception
of decline. Such an idea was
sketched by Walter Benjamin in his Arcades Project as the modern temporality of hell, in
which the rhythm of news is a means used to avoid addressing death. Like fashion,
news pages are the opposite of considered knowledge over an event as their flow
rather than their content tends to get the lead role.[3]
Ganahl deliberately references in this series the genre of history painting as
a spectre - presenting us with the
return of the repressed news Ð in order for it to assume a distorted
configuration the artist paid professional painters to depict his selection of
Ônews stillsÕ.
The fleeting moment between event and
memory is frozen in the News Paintings thereby obtaining a picture of one of the first
phases of the conversion of the actuality into what Sontag defines as
Òcollective instructionÓ.[4]
One of the outputs of this process is arguably traditionally connected to the
realm of aesthetics in the genre of history painting. One way of understanding
Jeff WallÕs conceptual programme to merge such a genre with photographic
recording and manipulation is to see it addressing the idea of staging
representation for ideological and spectacularised consumption, Ganahl aims to break
down the process of writing history by catching it a step beforehand, while
information is turning into shared understanding. The artist aspires to address
the content rather than the formal construction of history paintingÕs pictorial
tradition. The composition of the text and images depicted is in fact the
result of the work of an anonymous painter depicting the graphic layout managed
by a news editor. The suffocating quantity of documents produced to disseminate
news, and their new identity as icons of the transition between information and
history, generate a sense of discomfort towards the speed of information
construction and decay. Ganahl here aims to represent the fading flow of
information that today substitutes the instructive role that history painting
performed, the void left by the disappearance of this genre is filled with an
accelerated stream aiming to keep us permanently engaged on the detail so that
we are distracted from the construction of a bigger picture.
In News Paintings the Internet pages replace the picture of
historical event, as if the responsibility of deciding what memory retains had
to be given back to the reader. This gesture implies that the process of
selection and linking of information should be practiced as a critical
resistance to the conventional ways in which events are processed into
narratives. News substitutes history in paintings that depict the Benjaminian
notion of the Ôjust-pastÕ, thereby raising awareness of the process by which
the machine that filters news to distil memory operates. Ganahl places himself
in the cusp of this metamorphosis, often undertaking a path backwards in order
to denounce through the rhetorical device of absurdity the canonised procedures
of filing conflicts and tragedies in our memory under the category of the
fading news.
[1] Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory, Columbia University Press, 1992, p. 111
[2] Talking about the visual component of
media, Sontag clarifies how their apparatus instructs us rather than reporting
information: ÒPhotographs that everyone recognises are now constituent part of
what a society chooses to think about, or declares that it has chosen to think
about. It calls these ideas Ômemories,Õ and that is, over the long run, a
fiction. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a collective memory Ð
part of the same family of spurious notions as collective guilt. But there is
collective instruction.Ó Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, Picador, 2003, p.85
[3] Referring to the quote by Balzac on the idea that nothing dies but everything is transformed, Benjamin comments: ÒThe epigraph from Balzac is well suited to the temporality of hell: to showing how this time does not recognize death, and how fashion mocks death; how the acceleration of traffic and the tempo of news reporting (which conditions the quick succession of the newspapers editions) aim at eliminating all discontinuities and sudden ends; and how death as caesura bolongs together with all the straight lines of divine temporality.Ó Walter Banjamin, The Arcades Project, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999, p. 66
[4] Cfr. Susan Sontag, Op. Cit. see note 2 above