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Meltdown! What Is Left Over by Carlos Andrade and Todd Ayoung
Art Journal, Spring, 2002 by Betti-Sue Hertz
On September 11, 2001 the images of the attack on the WorldTrade Center instantly joined the ranks of photos and footage of visually impressive catastrophes that circulate globally Still and moving pictures broadcast in real time around the world showed the dance of morbid beauty set against the blue sky, with the slow-motion plane piercing and exploding in the upper reaches of the second tower. This image is only slightly less perfect than the emblematic pictures of the cloud formations sent up by the atom bombs after they were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. For those of us living in the United States, the assault on the towers, the monumental architectural achievement of capitalism, has had a chilling effect on the scale of a major war or natural disaster. This view and the ones that followed--the collapse of the towers and other nearby buildings, and the rescue efforts of heroic disaster workers-- are now seared into our collective memory The senseless toppling of buildings and the loss of huma n lives in overwhelming numbers have struck home. Our proximity to these horrific events has, we hope, brought us closer to a thoughtful understanding of the uncontrollable nature of other tragedies.
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Almost a full year before the events of September 11, Cabs Andrade and Todd Ayoung created a three-part multimedia piece that uses natural disasters as a metaphor for the interpenetration of nature and culture. The project was shown at North-Udstillingssted Gallery, an exhibition space in Cophenhagen. (1) It features sculptural installations, slide projections, and blinking lights. The artists relied on images of historic events to explore the tenuous relationship among beauty, destruction, and humanity in a media-saturated society. The source photographs are a jumping-off point for their strategies of intervention, and the pair's renditions of media images are direct and physical. What Is Left Over (2000) reveals the contradictory status of the media's interception of the unfolding of horrific events by endlessly reproducible visual means. As images flow from a site of terror, disaster, or misfortune onto the Internet, radio, television, and into print, the global audience receives instant yet removed conta ct with the scene of the event and its aftermath. The translation from incident to document takes place in such a short time that the memory of it cannot even form within those who have been witnesses before the image is broadcast to distant locations. The reportage reveals the attraction for these "brought to you by... you are lucky if you are not here" transmissions that replace the solid experience with mediated imagery, and the traumatic nature of the situation with distancing mechanisms of immediate analysis and exhaustive repetition. Instant streaming pictures collapse the space between distance and proximity, but also place viewers in the safety of virtual space. Through the manipulation and/or repetition of video footage or still photography, the "original document" is reshaped to compete in the over-productive field of consumable images. Since it is difficult to digest destruction--twisted rubble, splatters of blood, or cold corpses--before the next equally horrific event unfolds before our eyes, the distancing techniques of corporate media machines act to temper these harsh realities with graphics, music, or other entertaining distractions.
Although Andrade and Ayoung focus on the effects of natural disasters, which are typically perceived as being politically neutral, the source photographs that they mine resemble pictures of war. For example, if the image for part one of the installation, Night of the World--a shot of a group of people wearing medical masks looking at corpses covered by a mound of icebags--had a different caption it could easily be read as a photograph of war dead instead of earthquake victims. The most recent trend of artfully designed and neutralizing instant replays of The Tragic is now in full bloom. It was initiated with the handling of the representation of the Persian Gulf War, a conflict that was conducted before the eyes of a global television audience. The photographs of stealth bombers and Hawk surface-to-air missiles in the night sky over Baghdad on January 16, 1991, circulated by the Grazia Neri news agency, were no less than elegant, enticing audiences with an aestheticized treatment of war. What was almost tota lly blocked from public consumption at the time was the views of twisted and burnt bodies of people caught in fires in the desert, often flanked by oil tanks or dredges. Abbas, a Magnum photographer who was born in Iran, was one of the few who depicted the war from a humanist perspective. Breaking with the censorious demands of the press corps during Operation Desert Storm, he photographed burnt corpses of Iraqi soldiers, producing pictures such as Soldier on the Basra Road (1991). Abbas and other photojournalists such as Kenneth Jarecke, who also dared to record the charred bodies, were eventually able to circulate the very types of images that the United States government wanted to suppress. (2)
