T. R. Uthco & Ant Farm: Doug Hall, Chip Lord, Doug Michels, Jody Procter
The Eternal Frame Video, transferred to DVD, 23:50 min., colour and black-and-white, English, 1975
The Eternal Frame
by the artist collective Ant Farm (1) and T.R.Uthco (1) is a very early
video work and because of its self-reflective use of media is regarded
as an exemplary artistic critique of media.
The main focus of the work is a re-enactment, which reconstructs the
assassination of the President of the United States, John. F. Kennedy
in 1963 in Dallas in the way in which it engraved itself on our
collective image-memory. In 1975, the artists staged the scene in which
J.F.K. was hit by the fatal shots at exactly the same place in Dallas
where it actually happened. Starting point and model for the
re-enactment were the only existing ‘authentic’ images of the tragedy:
coarse-grained super-8 footage, recorded by an onlooker on the street.
For T.R.Uthco and Ant Farm, the structures of the historic formation of
myths, political power, and western media reporting converge in this
iconographic event. The formal, many-facetted characteristics of this
work demonstrate this: at the same time we see a live performance, a
‘making of ’, a social experiment, and a filmic simulation. Apart from
the reproduction of the historic event (and of the super-8 material), a
random selection of people have their say, who can scarcely hide their
emotions. Their reactions reveal the mechanisms, the mode of action of
media transformations of real events, thus interrogating the
manipulative strategies of media images.
When Doug Hall alias
J.F.K. says, “I am in reality only an image on your TV screen”, it can
be read as a foresightful look at contemporary everyday media coverage:
images of the Gulf War, Osama Bin Laden, Pope John Paul or Lady Di make
it clear that the media-controlled formation of myths is an integral
part of post-modern political and quasi-political systems.
Anke Hoffmann
(1) Ant Farm: 1968–1978; members included Chip Lord and Doug Michels
(2) T.R.Uthco: 1970–1978; members included Doug Hall and Jody Procter
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