Antoni Muntadas

The Surrealist, "Exquisite Corpse" was a French Café parlor game. "Exquisite Moving Corpse" is more of an artist chain letter. 60 artists participated over a two-year period, beginning in March 2020. Each invited artist made a one minute video in response to the last frame of the previous minute.

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The Political Advertisement project began in 1984, when New York-based media artists Muntadas and Reese produced their first compilation of American presidential commercials, beginning with Eisenhower in the 1950s. Every four years since — aligned to the national election cycle — they’ve updated the collection to reflect the current moment, presenting the clips in chronological order, with no voice-over editorializing, a tour-de-force of witty and incisive editing. Consisting of rare as well as notorious footage, Political Advertisement argues for television’s enormous importance in selling the presidency — a force that transforms citizens into consumers, and the presidency into the ultimate product.

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An homage to the city of Venice—a nighttime boat ride through the hidden, the unknown, the mysterious—inspired by the Situationists’ theory of the dérive.

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On Translation: Açik Radyo is part of Muntadas' ongoing series of works and projects about communication, culture, and the role of art and the artist in contemporary life. This piece is the result of a two-year project created in the context of "Lives and Works in Istanbul," a program that invites artists from European countries to work in—and create works about—the city. Açik Radyo is an alternative, independent radio station that broadcasts throughout the metropolitan area of Istanbul. Writes Muntadas: "Açik Radyo is a translation filter and interface between me and the city of Istanbul. With them we dialogued and interviewed in order to create four radio programs aiming at questioning and interrogating the representation of Istanbul."

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Muntadas writes, "The Limousine Project is a city-specific project for New York, where the 'limo' is an everyday symbol of power and media in our society. The projections display words and images decontextualized from advertisements, headlines, and political slogans. The selection of these words and images is aimed at the reformulation of discourse on current events and the media." In this project, Muntadas projected fragmented images from advertisements and words — including corruption, gender, violence, gentrified — onto the limousine's windows.

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In a collision of media images and images of the media, Muntadas fuses films, video and television as a hall of mirrors that reflects contemporary culture. Seen in close-up fragments, television and video images from cinematic sources — Poltergeist, Videodrome, Network, The Candidate — and video art tapes are rendered as illegible, abstracted fields. Against this ground of scanlines and shadowy images, a series of isolated words — "manipulation," "context," "audience," "fragment" — comprise an index of the tactics of the television apparatus, as well as Muntadas' (video's) reflexive strategies of critiquing the media. As Glenn Branca's tense musical score accelerates to a climax, the final video image, which depicts television sets in a consumer display, fragments and disintegrates.

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In December of 1984, a "living" billboard was erected on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles as a promotion for a line of jewelry. A group of aspiring actors took up residence on it, each competing to outlast the others and win a screen test. Artists Chip Lord, Branda Miller and Antonio Muntadas collaborated to produce three views of this public spectacle, creating a work collectively titled Media Hostages. Muntadas' S.S.S. is a personal, visual commentary using the billboard as a "Media Case" in the larger context of America, circa 1985.

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In a project sponsored by the Public Art Fund, Muntadas installed the fifty-second message This is not an Advertisement on the electronic Spectacolor lightboard that then dominated New York's Times Square. Every twenty minutes, between commercial advertisements, the sign broadcast the text: "This is not an advertisement... subliminal... speed... fragmentation," alluding to the surrounding media environment of marketing and billboards. With each successive signal, the message became more distorted and abstract, until it was rendered virtually illegible.

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Muntadas writes: "This tape is in effect a readymade. It was produced by the Pepsi Cola Co. for its own use. It was accidentally substituted for a tape of mine in 1974. The mistake in the transfer was a communications mishap which involved a series of people and corporations. Because of the type of material involved — which directly affects our lives — because the tape itself proposes many questions and is open to more than one interpretation, and it was to me an unusual use of video, I decided to recycle this tape through public showings."

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Between the Lines examines the "invisible mechanisms" that control and contextualize media information. Analyzing a news report to demonstrate how facts are mediated by television's limits, Muntadas focuses on the role and responsibility of the reporter — the person between the facts and the audience. Following a reporter for WGBH-TV, Boston, as she covers a meeting between Mayor Kevin White and a community development group, Muntadas observes the decisions, selections, schedules and editing that determine how the "news" is transmitted on TV. He states: "When we say we are 'reading between the lines' we are completing information from the text with our own process of thinking, knowledge, information, subtlety. With television, words and images are experienced together; there is no time to stop and think while we absorb information from a moving image." - EAI

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