Light Industry: Anthony Ramos - About Media
Tuesday, September 14, 2010, 19:30h, 7$
177 Livingston Street, Brooklyn, NY, USA
Presented with Electronic Arts Intermix
EAI is pleased to present a special screening and conversation with pioneering media artist Anthony Ramos at Light Industry.
Ramos belonged to the first generation of artists who used video as a tool to critique mass media, give voice to marginalized individuals and communities, and produce radically new forms of cultural documentation, combining art and activism in a series of potent but now rarely seen works.
His 1977 video About Media is an astute deconstruction of television news, focusing on the media coverage of President Jimmy Carter's declaration of amnesty for Vietnam War draft evaders as well as an interview conducted by New York reporter Gabe Pressman about Ramos's own eighteen-month prison term for conscientious objection. Through repetition and juxtaposition, he contrasts the unedited interview footage—and patronizing comments of the news crew—with Pressman's final televised report. In his ironic manipulation of the material, Ramos exposes the illusion of "objective" television news.
“Ramos had been a teaching assistant to Allan Kaprow, an artist known for ‘the happening,’ a spontaneous art event with no predetermined conclusion, which encouraged audience participation—the polar opposite of the newscasts' tightly scripted event,” EAI’s Rebecca Cleman writes. “If the newscast robbed Ramos of his agency, in his own tape he put himself back in the picture, in ways that playfully undermine the canned solemnity of television news and transform it into a kind of happening”
Raised in Rhode Island, Ramos received an M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts. In the 1970s, he was a video consultant for the United Nations and traveled extensively throughout Africa, China, Europe, and the Middle East. Ramos videotaped the end of Portugal's colonial rule in Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau, Tehran during the 1980 hostage crisis and Beijing just prior to the Tiananmen Square massacre, continuing to explore the relationships between mass cultural imagery and subaltern identity. In the 1980s he lived in Paris, where he was a Professor at the American Center and oversaw the television cabling of ten blocks of the city for the first time, and is now based in southern France.
At Light Industry, Ramos will introduce About Media and a selection of excerpts from his work in video. Following the screening, he will appear in conversation with Rebecca Cleman.
About EAI:
Founded in 1971, Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is one of the world's leading nonprofit resources for video art. A pioneering advocate for media art and artists, EAI's core program is the distribution and preservation of a major collection of over 3,500 new and historical media works by artists. EAI fosters the creation, exhibition, distribution and preservation of video art and digital art. EAI's activities include a preservation program, viewing access, educational services, extensive online resources, and public programs such as artists' talks, exhibitions and panels. The Online Catalogue is a comprehensive resource on the artists and works in the EAI collection, and also features extensive materials on exhibiting, collecting and preserving media art.