John Anderson Dying Is Hard/ No One Has Ever Looked So Dead at XENO Gallery, 183 East Broadway, Vancouver, BC, March 21 - May 11 2003
Book-ended by retail and other businesses the narrow passage of hall that constitutes the XENO Gallery appropriately provides the spatial medium, the conduit as it were, by which Anderson tunes us into contemporary mutations on the tail-chasing McLuhan formula "the medium is the message" As tidy fusion of medium and message, a photographic triptych portraying the otherworldly ecstasy of a pop singer, a computer generated sign chain of aggression which ranges from action film poster slogans to screaming t-shirts and a subliminally reconstituted European Union flag combine to echo the totalizing machinations of corporate culture propaganda. The consumer of mass culture, coddled within the yoke of the nation-state, comforted by the ever-presence of their ubiquitous pop entertainment god, through the pret a porter of popularized slogans, instantly, is free to acquire an identity. Via his channeling of varying cultural modulations into a singular media-stream, Anderson, in slick fashion, re-broadcasts our cultural state apparatus' unabated seamless marketing of violence. The show's transmissions, though appearing to subvert the products of a capitalist media, oscillate in the ether of white noise as a question suspending verdict on whether contemporary artistic practice generates counter-culture or merely reinforces media culture and its varying subsets.
Dylan Cree is a Vancouver filmmaker and writer.