Talking to her,
he realised how easy it was to present an appearance of
orthodoxy while having no grasp whatever of what orthodoxy
meant. In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself
most successfully on people incapable of understanding
it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations
of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity
of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently
interested in public events to notice what was happening.
By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply
swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them
no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain
of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.
1
As I write,
the armed forces of the United States, in close collaboration
with Great Britain, are poised to go to war in Iraq and
it remains to be seen whether or not they will seek a
second United Nations resolution before they proceed.
As a British curator invited to organise a visual art
exhibition within a mile of the former World Trade Center,
I feel I have a moral obligation to address this situation
in a wider context.
America is not
just the lone hyperpower -- it has become the defining power
of the world. America defines what is democracy, justice,
freedom; what are human rights and what is multiculturalism;
who is a 'fundamentalist', a 'terrorist' or simply 'evil'.
In short, what it means to be human. The rest of the world,
including Europe, must simply accept these definitions
and follow the American lead (which, in most cases, Britain
does exceptionally faithfully). But America defines all
these things in singular terms -- in terms of American self-identity,
history, experience and culture, and, more often than not,
in terms of American self-interest.2
It is clear that
the American government has its own motives for fighting
this war, just as it did during previous conflicts in El
Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Panama and Vietnam. However,
it is doubtful that the real reasons why the government
enters this or any other war will be made explicit and
it is this process of mediation that concerns me now. The
media generally only provides us with access to certain
information, depending on individual political agendas,
with profit as the primary motive. Perhaps the most transparent
link with politics is in Italy where the man controlling
most of the media, Silvio Berlusconi, is also the prime
minister and foreign minister. In Britain, media mogul
Rupert Murdoch controls a large proportion of the "information" provision.
Chairman and chief executive of News Corporation, which
is prolific in the United States, he controls no less than
175 publishing titles world-wide, wields an even greater
influence over broadcast media and has an explicitly pro-war
stance. In America, the media industry is also in the hands
of the privileged few:
The American public
gets less access to foreign news, less exposure to foreign
popular culture, and is governed by elected representatives
who increasingly have never ventured beyond America. [...]Why,
people around the world keep asking, is the American public,
in a country with the world's most advanced education system
and institutions of learning, so exceedingly ignorant of
world affairs?
In 2002, only
nine trans-national firms dominate US and global media:
AOL Time Warner, Disney, Bertelsmann, Viacom, News Corporation,
TCI, General Electric (owner of NBC), Sony (owner of Columbia
and TriStar Pictures and major recording interests), and
Seagram (owner of Universal film and music interests).
So one global super-industry now provides virtually everything
that Americans see and hear on the screen, over the airwaves,
in print and on the Web.3
The fact that,
more so than any other nation, the mainstream US media
is controlled by huge multi-national corporations is the
key to understanding its reluctance to give an objective
perspective on internal politics, foreign affairs or any
subject that would affect the commercial interests of those
big business allies which provide its advertising revenue.
The process of conglomeration that created this situation
through mergers and acquisitions accelerated throughout
the 1990s, largely at the expense of independent titles.
Media corporations now preside over different media forms
- television, radio, newspapers - and increasingly have
the means to produce, distribute and cross-publicise their
own products and related spin-offs. There is also clear
evidence of links between the media giants, with most of
the directors serving on the board of more than one of
the companies. 4
In addition to
co-operating with each other to ensure that this oligopoly
persists, the media companies also lobby the government
to deregulate the industry and allow empire-building to
continue, often in return for electoral support. As Robert
McChesney has noted, a "sustained examination of the
way media and telecommunication policies are produced behind
closed doors in Washington [is] arguably the most off-limits
story in U.S. journalism in our times. [...]The issue isn't
one of private media versus government regulation, because
the private media system is the direct result of aggressive
regulation and massive subsidies made by the government."5
The American intellectual left has assayed the media as
a key part of a doctrinal system (which also includes education)
that produces propaganda to reinforce the government message:
These sectors
of the doctrinal system serve to divert the unwashed masses
and reinforce the basic social values: passivity, submissiveness
to authority, the overriding virtue of greed and personal
gain, lack of concern for others, fear of real or imagined
enemies, etc. The goal is to keep the bewildered herd bewildered.
It's unnecessary for them to trouble themselves with what's
happening in the world. In fact, it's undesirable – if
they see too much of reality they may set themselves to
change it.6
At the start of
this text is a passage from George Orwell's notoriously
dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-four. Ironically
enough, it was to Communist Russia that Orwell alluded,
the Soviet threat that once loomed so large in the American
consciousness and which has now been replaced with the
war on terror. Noam Chomsky has observed:
So magnificently
has the doctrinal system risen to its task that to this
day, 30 years later, the idea that the US attacked Vietnam
is unmentionable, even unthinkable, in the mainstream.
The essential issues of the war are, correspondingly, beyond
any possibility of discussion now. The guardians of political
correctness (the real PC) can be quite proud of an achievement
that would be hard to duplicate in a well-run totalitarian
state. 7
Freedom of
Speech vs. Freedom of Thought
How many people
are proud to be citizens of this beautiful country of ours?
The stripes and the stars for the rights that men have died for to protect
The men and women who have broke their necks for the freedom of speech the
United States government has sworn to uphold.
Or so we're told.8
The extent to
which the freedom of speech or freedom of the press advocated
in the American constitution is permitted in practice is
at best questionable and at worst detracts from a capacity
for freedom of thought. Professional journalism is in a
state of crisis, with pressure and censorship from above
dictating content. In what is explicitly referred to as
'dumbing down' in some of the marginally more enlightened
British media, vocabularies become reduced and ideas less
sophisticated.
Most people who
bother with the matter at all would admit that the English
language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that
we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our
civilization is decadent, and our language - so the argument
runs - must inevitably share in the general collapse. It
follows that any struggle against the abuse of language
is a sentimental archaism. [...] But if thought corrupts
language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage
can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people
who should and do know better. [...] Political language
- and with variations this is true of all political parties,
from Conservatives to Anarchists - is designed to make
lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give
an appearance of solidity to pure wind.9
Another trend,
predicted by Orwell and consolidated by Chomsky:
[...] to make
sense of political discourse, it's necessary to give a
running translation into English, decoding the doublespeak
of the media, academic social scientists and the secular
priesthood generally. Its function is not obscure: the
effect is to make it impossible to find words to talk about
matters of human significance in a coherent way. We can
then be sure that little will be understood about how our
society works and what is happening in the world - a major
contribution to democracy in the PC sense of the word.10
Between the
Lines
In parallel to
activities in the Gulf, a frenzied propaganda war is being
waged on all fronts, suppressing information that would
harm the interests of big business and garnering support
for crusades in the name of 'freedom and democracy'.
People rarely
win wars, governments rarely lose them. People get killed.
Governments molt and regroup, hydra-headed. They use flags
to shrink-wrap people's minds and smother real thought,
and then as ceremonial shrouds to cover the mangled remains
of the willing dead.11
Maybe it was a
curious premonition that caused Scottish artist Ross Birrell
to cross the Atlantic in November, 2000 to bequeath a copy
of Utopia to the United Nations library and take
the first step towards Thomas Moore's vision by throwing
the American logo, the stars and stripes, from the Staten
Island ferry.
In the process
of gathering cuttings from the centre left British press
to form a backdrop to this project, it has become increasingly
difficult to get beyond the thousands of column inches
dedicated to a discussion of impending war in Iraq. Conflict
is the most obvious example of misinformation and propaganda.
The documentaries of John Pilger close the information
gap by taking a closer look at the Israeli occupation of
Palestine, the effect of international politics on the
children of Iraq, conditions in Burma and the impact of
globalisation on Indonesia.
Aside from this, there are many other contemporary issues
- human rights, the environment and biotechnology to name
but a few - that are being neglected in a large part by
the media. Between the Lines aims to redress the
balance somewhat, creating an information overload by offering
access to news and publications that present an alternative
and more comprehensive world view for an American audience
than that offered by the mainstream media.
The Scandinavian
collective N55 has collaborated on a bookshop, realised
at apexart, based on their SHOP system,
which provides a framework for the provision of information.
Crucially, SHOP also aims to create a new economy based
on sharing and exchange that resists the use of money.
Several artists have contributed to Between the Lines with
their own self-published books and pamphlets, including
Regina Müller with her alternative women's magazine Regina
(www.regina-magazine.de).
Gardar Eide Einarsson and Oscar Tuazon have collaborated
to reproduce an edition of Scanlan magazine from January
1971 (originally published by Warren Hinckle III and Sidney
E. Zion) which charts terrorist activities in the US in
the late 1960s and early 1970s, a publication which is
almost unthinkable in today's climate. Steven Duval has
consistently been dealing with a range of issues in a series
of pamphlets and has produced a specially commissioned
booklet for this project, highlighting some themes - from
food to weapons - of immediate relevance. His aesthetics
also permeate the publicity material surrounding the project,
including this brochure.
The bookshop has
further been stocked with titles recommended by those participating
in the project and their networks and special thanks are
due to Brett Bloom. Satire characterises some of the publications
on offer and is used as a vehicle for Danish artist Jakob
Boeskov to express his concern about the future of the
biotechnology industry, particularly human cloning. On
this subject, Jeremy Rifkin, one of the few voices of dissent
in a burgeoning and lucrative industry, has written:
Customised human
cloning offers the spectre of a new kind of immortality.
Each generation of a particular genotype can become the
ultimate artist, continually customising and upgrading
new genetic traits into the model with the goal of both
perfecting and perpetuating the genotype forever.[...]
The real threat that human cloning represents is one that,
as far as I know, is never talked about by scientists,
ethicists, biotech entrepreneurs, or politicians. In a
society where more and more people clone and eventually
customise their genotype to design specifications and engineering
standards, how are we likely to regard the child who isn't
cloned or customised? What about the child who is born
with a 'disability'? Will the rest of society view that
child with tolerance or come to see the child as an error
in the genetic code - in short a defective product? 12
Between the
Lines is just the tip of a rapidly melting iceberg,
an attempt to expose the media as anything but objective
and to offer a glimpse of a few perspectives worthy of
serious consideration.
Rebecca Gordon
Nesbitt, February, 2003
Notes:
1. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four (London: Secker & Warburg,
1949). P. 157
2. Ziauddin Sardar and Meryl Wyn Davies, Why do People Hate America? (Cambridge:
Icon Books, 2002). P. 201
3. Sardar & Davies, loc cit. pp. 59, 200 & 88
4. For a full exploration of this, see Robert W. McChesney, Rich Media, Poor
Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times (New York: The New Press,
2000)
5. Robert W. McChesney, 'The Media Crisis of Our Times', Introduction to Peter
Phillips and Projects Censored, Censored 2003: The Year's Top 25 Censored Stories
(New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003)
6. Noam Chomsky, What Uncle Sam Really Wants (Tuscon, AZ: Odonian Press, 1997).
P. 95
7. Chomsky, loc. cit. P. 88
8. Eminem, "White America", The Eminem Show, Aftermath Records, 2002
9. George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language", Horizon, April, 1946
10. Chomsky op cit. p. 91
11. Arundhati Roy, "New World Disorder: War is peace. So now we know", In These
Times magazine, November, 2001.
12. Jeremy Rifkin, "The Second Coming: The Cloning of a Human Being",
published on the internet to coincide with the launch of Jakob Boeskov's Body
Deluxe.
A
color brochure containing an essay by the curator is available.
Please contact apexart for further information. Gallery hours are Tuesday to
Saturday, 11-6.
This
exhibition is supported in part by The Andy Warhol Foundation
for the Visual Arts.
*Rebecca
Gordon Nesbitt, co-founder of salon3 (with Hans Ulrich
Obrist & Maria Lind) and former curator at Nordic Institute
for Contemporary Art (Helsinki, Finland). NIFCA is an organisation
funded by the governments of Denmark, Finland, Iceland,
Norway and Sweden. In addition to co-ordinating a comprehensive
programme of residency and travel opportunities for artists
in the region, NIFCA initiates exhibitions, seminars and
publications centred on visual art, architecture and design,
in collaboration with others where possible. Formerly based
in London, Rebecca Gordon Nesbitt was a co-founder of salon3
(an international forum for projects and discussions) and
editor of make, the magazine of women's art. In 2000, she
curated Continuum 001, an exhibition examining the impact
of digital technology on art and architecture that included,
amongst others, net artist Vuk Cosic and architect Greg
Lynn. In the past year at NIFCA, she has initiated a project
in the pages of a Norwegian newspaper, a touring programme
of new Nordic film and video, a site on the Internet TV
station Superchannel and is coordinating a series of projects
aimed at consolidating dialogues between the Nordic region,
Scotland and Ireland. She currently lives and works independently
in Glasgow, Scotland. |