Atrocity Exhibition: Assassination and Its Fascinations

eye Weekly magazine
June 11, 1992

Report

Americans have a complex relationship with their head of state. In the same person, they want elements of Jason Priestley, Mao Zedong and the Pope. The boy next door meets the great visionary meets the sex drive of a sloth. Fine work ethic, but is he fun at parties? And even when the president doesn’t live up to these standards, he is meant to represent them. As ludicrous as it may seem, a majority of Americans continue to view the president as a moral beacon. This becomes painfully obvious when someone pumps him full of lead. Shooting the president is not only a political act (treason): it’s a deeply (im)moral act as well. Every pierce of his flesh, it seems, is a tear in society’s ethical fabric: every blood-smeared Brooks Brothers shirt another defiled Bible. Ergo Oliver Stone’s lose-lose gambit with JFK; ergo the gnostic mutterings of Kennedy assassination theories, deranged and committed enough to mimic St. Paul at his best; ergo Jerry Palwell’s fervent prayers for his buddy, Ronald Reagan, when the latter was felled by a bullet. This collective American pathology will be put under the microscope at Pleasure Dome’s newest spectacle: Atrocity Exhibition: Assassination and its Fascinations. Six films and tapes will be shown tomorrow (June 12). The work focuses on media imaging of presidential assassinations and attempted assassinations (three Kennedy, three Reagan). The program notes accompanying the series speak of the works as revealing “not a singular ‘truth’ of events but, more tellingly, a seductive and lingering state of fascination that has attained mythic proportions.” The writer doesn’t say how this fascination operates. My unoriginal theory is that people are irresistibly attracted to things they find morally repugnant. (Did anyone say “gay serial killers in Hollywood”?) With presidential assassinations being both a politically and morally charged exercise, the titillation factor goes through the roof.

This connection is most explicitly drawn in Report, a 13-minute tape by Bruce Conner, in which JFK assassination footage is presented alongside images of violence from popular culture and advertising. Conner manages to at once show us the inherent brutality of daily media consumption and the way its violence is so deviously attractive. Deconstructing the attractiveness of this violence seems to be the key goal of Keith Sanborn’s A Public Appearance and a Statement and, less so and less successfully, in Ed Mowbray’s Excerpts and Euphoria. Public Appearance is a reworking of a kinescope of a body arriving at Andrews Air Force Base. Sanborn doesn’t tamper much with his source material because the spectacle is so horrifying in its own right: no fancy editing is necessary to see the media jockeying for position and running out of things to say. Suddenly, instead of looking sexy, the (dead) emperor has no clothes. Excerpts and Euphoria goes through innumerable variations of the John Hinckley shooting. Showing it from every angle, slowing it down, speeding it up. The last half of the tape is silent (more dramatic?); the first half uses news commentary in which the anchor says something completely false and then finds images to make the newsman look stupid. The result is, I’m afraid, less about challenging media perceptions than snarky video production. The most complex and hilarious work in the series is The Eternal Frame, a production by anarchist goofballs Ant Farm, who go to Dealey Plaza in Dallas, re-enact the Kennedy assassination and tape it. That in itself would be a clever and profoundly subversive project, but they also taped the reactions of the substantial crowd of people gathered around the re-enactment sight. Their comments on the project are sublime, with one heavily bouffanted Southern woman breaking down into tears at the (I quote) “beauty of it all.” What? Did they send away to a post-modern mail-order house? The line between prank and “tribute” is all but erased. An initial attempt at subversion is overwhelmed by nothing less than the foundation of American ethics—presidential penance—which in turn utterly subverts the whole game of presidential assassination representation. Wow. Also showing is Sanborn’s charming JFK/Reagan social history collage Man with a Movie Camera and Brian Goldberg and Jackie Goss’s more technical Perfect Video.