[-empyre-] Speaking of Fake...

[Timothy Conway Murray]

Hi, everyone,
 
The posts of the past 2 weeks have me thinking about artistic performances of the fakery of news.  One of my favorites is the well-known 1975 San Francisco performance, “Media Burn,” by Ant Farm.  Chip Lord and Doug Michels drove their Cadillac, transformed into something of a surreal space machine, into a wall of flaming television sets.  Prior to the event, Doug Hall arrived in the guise of John F. Kennedy and delivered a speech critical of the control assumed by the mainstream media.  What’s interesting in view of the current demonization of the media by Trump is that Ant Farm’s idea for the speech derived from a Rolling Stone article written by former presidential candidate George McGovern, who decried the power being accrued by the mass media.  Another delight was that the San Francisco television media become befuddled by the parody as they covered the news story of “Media Burn.”  For those of you who would like to relive this fantastical performance, you can view it at: http://mediaburn.org/video/media-burn-by-ant-farm-1975-edit/
 
All my best,
 
Tim


Timothy Murray
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
Taylor Family Director, Society for the Humanities
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art 
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu <http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu/>
A D White House
Cornell University,
Ithaca, New York 14853
2017-18 International Sea-Sky Scholar, School of Architecture and Fine Art, Dalian University of Technology, China
 

On 6/12/17, 8:43 PM, "empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of Randall Packer" <empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of rpacker at zakros.com> wrote:

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