Screening + Conversation
Tuesday, September 14, 2010, 7:30 pm
Light Industry, 177 Livingston Street, Brooklyn
Performance and media artist Anthony Ramos was among the first generation of artists to use video as a tool for a critique of mass media, and for giving agency to marginalized individuals and communities. In his potent but rarely seen video works of the 1970s, Ramos sought to combine art and activism. His 1977 video About Media, included in the screening program, is an incisive deconstruction of television news. It documents an interview Ramos gave to news reporter Gabe Pressman on the subject of Ramos's eighteen-month prison term for draft evasion during the Vietnam War. Ramos appropriates the interview, contrasting the unedited interview footage with the final televised news report, exposing the artifice of television news. He also interjects footage of his extraordinary and unnerving early performances, which speak to the influence of Allan Kaprow, with whom Ramos had studied and worked in California.
Ramos traveled extensively throughout Africa, China, Europe, and the Middle East in the 1970s and '80s. He 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. Ramos has produced a number of videos that critique the media through deconstruction and appropriation, and explore the relation of mass cultural imagery and subaltern identity.
At Light Industry, Ramos will introduce About Media and a selection of excerpts from his work in video. Following the screening, Ramos will appear in conversation with EAI's Rebecca Cleman.
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