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30/10/2003

Nothing Special

Foundation for Art and Creative Technology - FACT, Liverpool

Artists' Video, Media & Reality

Ant Farm & T.R. Uthco, David Blandy, Mel Chin & Gala Committee, Christoph Draeger / Reynold Reynolds and Gary Breslin, Gorilla Tapes, Leon Grodski, David Hall, Christian Jankowski, Dorit Margreiter, Chris Morris & Armando Iannucci, Antonio Muntadas, Nam June Paik, Ilene Segalove, Brian Springer, William Wegman

Way before cable and satellite television were part of our everyday lives Andy Warhol wanted to stage his own non-stop tv show. It was his great unfulfilled ambition and he wanted to call it 'Nothing Special'.

By 1975, television was fifty years old and artists such as Warhol, Nam June Paik and Ant Farm were recognising the medium's inherent contradiction: as TV began to dominate our experience of the world, so mediated reality (however banal) became more desirable ­ more real - than everyday life.

For 'Nothing Special', curator, Claire Doherty, has brought together historical and contemporary works for the first group exhibition at the FACT Centre. The show will examine the ways in which artists have used video to disrupt or recreate their own versions of the mediated real.

David Hall's influential work 'Stooky Bill TV' (1990) recreates the first televised transmission in 1925 using a system almost identical to John Logie Baird's original device. It offers a cautionary introductory note counterbalanced by David Blandy's haunting recent work 'Ghost' (2001), in which the viewer has come to exist only through the reflected light of a late-night movie.

Throughout the exhibition, artists mimic or disrupt the blending of news with entertainment, questioning our mediated memories of historical events such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy or September 11. Ant Farm's 1975 work 'The Eternal Frame' is at once a taped re-enactment of the assassination, a 'mock-umentary' and a simulation of the now famous home movie by Abraham Zapruder. Leon Grodski's award-winning 'Great Balls of Fire' (2001) presents a disquieting modern-day soothsayer against the background of the still smouldering World Trade Centre days after the terrorist attack.

You might catch yourself laughing at what seems like an inappropriate moment in 'Nothing Special'. There's undeniable satirical humour here from Ronald Reagan's love tryst with Margaret Thatcher in Gorilla Tapes' scratch- video work 'Death Valley Days' (1984) to Chris Morris' first broadcast episode of 'The Day Today' (1994)). This gives way to moments of pure surrealism in William Wegman's 'Dog Baseball' (1986), produced for the legendary Saturday Night Live.

America predominates throughout 'Nothing Special' in the stereotypes and clichés of global media. Whilst many of the works have been broadcast themselves, such as Christian Jankowski's 'The Holy Art Work' (2001) which was filmed and broadcast as part of a Televangelist's weekly TV show, this exhibition is not primarily concerned with visual art on television. Rather, as Nam June Paik's seminal video work 'Global Groove' (1973) indicates, this exhibition presents the subversion of the language of television and asks what is the reality of this fiction?

'Nothing Special' is part of the Eternal Frame strand of projects which are being presented at FACT during the next 12 months. It includes symposia and exhibitions, curated by Claire Doherty, which seek to examine significant ideas about moving image culture which have emerged through artists' use of video. The second exhibition in the Eternal Frame series, 'Nothing Personal', will open in March 2004.

For further information please call Joanna Rowlands on 0151 707 4401

Works are screened courtesy the artists, the following individuals and organisations: Galerie Beckers; Christine Burgin; Electronic Arts Intermix, New York; Illuminations; Klosterfelde; Galerie Krobath Wimmer; Netherlands Media Art Institute and Videoart Databank and BBC Worldwide.

FACT is proud to be in LIVERPOOL, EUROPEAN CAPITAL OF CULTURE 2008

FACT, the Foundation for Art & Creative Technology
88 Wood Street
Liverpool, L1 4DQ
t: + 44 (0)151 707 4422
f: + 44 (0)151 707 4445

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