FUSO 2019

“FUSO 2019 – August 27 to Septembre 1“

August 28, 10pm > 11-15pm 
Claustro do Museu Nacional de História Natural e da Ciência

Program by ANTONI MUNTADAS (Spain)
MUNTADAS’ SURVEY
Running Time: 46’

«Muntadas is a passionate ‘media investigator’ of both public and private communications methods. He probes and examines every aspect of information with concern, reporting his findings in artworks that are sincere and truthful assertions of the ways in which communication and control equate. Although his evidence is available to each of us daily through the various electronic and print media, including newspapers, television and radio (to name only a few), most of us are not in the habit of evaluating the information we receive Muntadas trains his investigative eye on this deluge of facts and figures and concepts and reveals to us those provocative situations which highlight the impact of the media on society and on individual consciousness. He delights in transforming this accessible, public information into a personal statement and a work of art, which he accomplishes by manipulating and reassembling images that have different meanings in other contexts. Muntadas utilizes a variety of resources, and his total body of work may take the form of videotape, installation and/or printed material. His work always involves the flood of information that engulfs us daily. We believe we can control this flood, but, according to Muntadas, it actually controls us.
The deductive search that Muntadas conducts requires that all forms of mass communication be scrutinized. His ‘proof’ is presented in a systematic series of media experiences that expose the power of the media – its capacity to impose values rather than merely to inform. Muntadas challenges the reader/viewer to “wake up” and realize that the mass media and its many messages should never be taken as simple information exchange.»

Extract of the text Muntadas Selected Video Works 1974 – 1984, Kathy Rae Huffman
Huffman, Kathy Rae. Muntadas. In: Muntadas: Selected video works, 1974-1984. Los Angeles: LAICA, 1985, 3-4.

BIO

Antoni Muntadas (Barcelona, 1942) has been a professor of the practice at the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology in Cambridge. He is currently professor at the School of Architecture IUAV in Venice. Through his works he addresses social, political and communications issues, the relationship between public and private space within social frameworks, and investigations of channels of information and the ways they may be used to censor central information or promulgate ideas.

He works on projects in different media such as photography, video, publications, Internet and multi-media installations. Since 1995, Muntadas has grouped together a set of works and projects titled ‘On Translation’. Their content, dimensions and materials are highly diverse, and they all focus on the author’s personal experience and artistic activity in numerous countries over a period of thirty years. By grouping such works together under this epigraph, Muntadas places them within a body of experience and concrete concerns regarding communication, the culture of our times and the role of the artist and art in contemporary society.

_ANTONI MUNTADAS (ES) // Watching the Press/Reading Television, 1981, 11’20’’

Writes Muntadas of this work, “It’s about fragmentation. How media — in this case, magazines (People, Money, U.S. News & World Report) and television — reduces information.” Continuing his investigation into the process of reading/viewing information, he contrasts blurred television images with close-ups of printed words from magazine pages being turned. Reframed, the images demonstrate the media’s ability to manipulate, limit and restrict information. The title contrasts the reception of a written text with that of a television text.

Technical Assistance: John Barnett | Music: Marianne Faithfull

ANTONI MUNTADAS (ES) // Slowdown (from Media Ecology Ads), 1982, 3’22’’

Muntadas subverts the language of commercial advertisements in his witty visual critique of the production and consumption of television images. The three segments — Fuse, Time and Slow Down — are visual commentaries that challenge specific formal elements of TV advertising: edited time, visual speed, the relation of text and image, narration and format. Physical events evolving in real time — a burning fuse, a timer, a slowly dripping faucet — unfold in leisurely contrast to the fragmentation and speed of edited TV time, which signifies the “time is money” equation that dominates the market ideology of television’s media landscape.

Technical Assistance/Editor: John Barnett

_ANTONI MUNTADAS (ES) // On Translation: Fear/Miedo, 2005, 30’27’’

On Translation: Fear/Miedo is a televised intervention that is based on the production of a video work that weaves together interviews with people who experience the tensions of the border zone on a daily basis, archival televised footage that refers to the idea of fear on the border between Mexico and the United States, and other documentary and journalistic material. The video aims to reveal how fear is a translated emotion, revealing itself in differing ways on both sides of the border as a cultural/sociological construction based on politics and economics.
On Translation: Fear/Miedo was broadcasted between August and November 2005 in four distinct locations that connect the centres of power/decision making with the places where these policies are evident everyday: Tijuana, San Diego, Mexico City, and Washington, DC.

This project was created for In Site_05 / Interventions and was sponsored by Fundación Televisa.

August 28, 11:15pm 
Claustro do Museu Nacional de História Natural e da Ciência

Program by ANTONI MUNTADAS (Spain)
MUNTADAS’ SURVEY
Running Time: 46’

_ANTONI MUNTADAS (ES) // The Limousine Project, 1991, 6’30’’

Muntadas writes, “The Limousine Project is a city-specific project for New York, where the ‘limo’ is an everyday symbol of power and media in our society. The projections display words and images decontextualized from advertisements, headlines, and political slogans. The selection of these words and images is aimed at the reformulation of discourse on current events and the media.”

In this project, Muntadas projected fragmented images from advertisements and words — including corruption, gender, violence, gentrified — onto the limousine’s windows.

_ANTONI MUNTADAS (ES) // Video is Television?, 1989, 5’34’’

In a collision of media images and images of the media, Muntadas fuses films, video and television as a hall of mirrors that reflects contemporary culture. Seen in close-up fragments, television and video images from cinematic sources — Poltergeist, Videodrome, Network, The Candidate — and video art tapes are rendered as illegible, abstracted fields. Against this ground of scanlines and shadowy images, a series of isolated words — “manipulation,” “context,” “audience,” “fragment” — comprise an index of the tactics of the television apparatus, as well as Muntadas’ (video’s) reflexive strategies of critiquing the media. As Glenn Branca’s tense musical score accelerates to a climax, the final video image, which depicts television sets in a consumer display, fragments and disintegrates.

Music: “Symphony No. 1,” Glenn Branca | Executive Producer: Caterina Borelli | CMX Editors: Rick Feist, Marshall Reese | Produced by IMATCO/ATANOR for Television Espanola S.A. El Arte del Video

ANTONI MUNTADAS (ES) // On Translation: Celebracions, 2009, 9’36’’

On Translation: Celebracions belongs to the series On Translation initiated in 1995 and explores the phenomenon of translation, interpretation and transcription with the aim to dig deep into linguistic, political, economical and cultural issues. According to Muntadas, this work “is a compilation of reactions found in footballistic surroundings and more precisely related to the celebration of a goal. Reactions that being public are linked to the phenomenology of mass spectacles and also being private are related to rituals of celebration and eroticism.”