Artifacts of artifice

Art in America, July, 1998 by Kate Linker

The Rhetoric of Images: "Modern History"

Charlesworth's first works exhibited in an art context take their cue from a cryptic comment tucked into the pages of The Fox: "Twentieth century battles cannot be fought, I suspect, according to Victorian battle plans."(3) Developed as an extended series and collectively titled "Modem History," the works operate through a simple displacement -- newspaper images and graphics transferred into an art context -- that is seconded by the replacement of written texts by white space, so as to emphasize the visual rhetoric of the images. These pieces can be seen as tactical interventions defined by a broader strategy: to examine and re-present the role played by photographic culture in the making of contemporary history. Here, the quotational approach of Charlesworth's earlier daguerreotype experiment is set in motion.

"Modem History" reflects the view, widely held during the late '70s and early '80s, that history is a kind of fiction, its meaning dependent on the countless factors that surround the interpretation of any event. April 21, 1978 (1978) is one of the best-known works in the series, part of the so-called "Moro Trilogy." Composed of 45 black-and-white prints, it is a relentless chronicling of the media representation of a specific event: the kidnapping and assassination of the Italian prime minister, Aldo Moro, by a terrorist group, the Red Brigades. During one day of Moro's 55-day captivity, Charlesworth collected the front pages of many international publications then excised everything but the mastheads and photographs, retaining their size and disposition on the pages. Charlesworth's prints keep the scale of the newspapers, with pictures and boldly accented typography visible in syncopated rhythms against white grounds. The result is a striking demonstration of the varying emphasis that the media accords to specific news events, and of the way that emphasis can shape the opinion of the reader/viewer. By examining the role of specific editorial decisions -- placement of images, cropping, sizing and so forth -- in establishing the official record and meaning of an event, April 21, 1978 undermines the presumed factuality of the photographic document. Charlesworth's intentions are underscored by the internal play of the historical narrative. The previous piece in the trilogy, April 20, 1978, details the fake announcement of Moro's assassination that the Red Brigades had purveyed to the press on Apr. 20. The panels from the following day's newspapers bear an image provided by Moro's captors: it shows the politician himself holding the previous day's edition, its headline proclaiming his death. The Red Brigades' message -- "Just kidding. . ." -- demonstrates the manipulation of meaning that inevitably surrounds the use of any photographic image.

The "Modern History" series offers a sharp retort to the modernist view that meaning is somehow as resident "in" an art work, as its inhering attribute or core. In this, Charlesworth shares much with other artists of the period -- Sherrie Levine, Louise Lawler, Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince among them -- who were examining the conceptual dimensions of the use of images. However, Charlesworth's early work is distinguished by its near-obsessional character and by the rigor of its internal structure, with each group of works in "Modern History" having an individual set of rules or game plan.