Nancy Chunn
Scandal, acrylic on canvas, 1999
Nancy Chunn: In the News
January 20-February 27, 200
The daily news-whether broadcast or print media-tends to be formulaic and repetitive, and its one-way address generally precludes our response. Excepting our limited choice of increasingly homogenized media venues, we have little control over how we experience the world. In her Front Pages series, a personal notation of each of The New York Times front pages from 1996, Nancy Chunn gives herself the permission to "talk back" to news events and their representation through an extended daily act of mark-making, using primarily pastels and stamps. As the year unfolded, Chunn was driven cathartically by the perverse ebb and flow of news events, increasingly exceeding the decorum and boundaries of the page. Chunn's quick notations may be thought of as a kind of graffiti, for she subversively adds her voice to a public forum not intended for comment, registering, alternately, her approval, skepticism and dissent.
The importance and appeal of Chunn's Front Pages--the full months of April, July and August are exhibited here-is, indeed, her transgression of the seamless "canvas" of the daily newspaper, a playful and serious puncturing of the sanctified space of newspaper reportage, a personal appropriation of one of our most prominent public papers of record. Chunn's responses may not always be ours, but her immersion in the process, her commitment to a full year of close and impassioned reading, helps to open a passage beyond our customary role as passive consumers of newspapers' presumably objective narratives. Looking back and tracking media affords the opportunity to identify generic categories of news stories and their patterns of representation, of picturing, of editorial decision-making, of social significance, perhaps not realized by editorial staffs or their daily readership. Chunn suggests that especially incongruous correspondences can occur between news and advertising copy-inside the Times' pages. For example, the juxtaposition of Tiffany display ads and depictions of international famine have meaning for the viewer open to considering the comparative inequities of capitalist extravagance and accounts of third world privation.
The excess of the media's feverish recycling of news events was perhaps most in evidence in 1996 on the occasion of news spectacles such as the crash of Flight 800, the 1996 Presidential Election and the capture of Theodore Kaczynksi the Unabomber-all of which transpired during the months on view in this exhibition. Chunn's colorization, alteration of images and headlines, and her patterned repetition of talismanic symbols, underscores the complex, fractured and promiscuous nature of the media's incessant flow of images and information. As consumers addicted to this repetitive onslaught, we are, like Chunn, voyeurs-caught between "reality and appearance, information and entertainment, seriousness and joking, and intimacy and detachment." Evolving repeating signatures, especially for the trauma of events that most rivet us collectively, Chunn, for example, adopts the iconography of Giotto- or Botticelli-like angels floating upon a looming field of blue for the tragic crash of Flight 800. Appearing almost daily for more than a month, these repeated iconic overlays strike a chilling, familiar chord in the viewer. The amplitude of the media's fixation and our appetite for spectacle is evidenced in the amount of column space devoted to the Flight 800 story. Susan D. Moeller has argued recently that despite viewer fascination with the spectacles of tragedy, "compassion fatigue" is the end result of the sheer volume and sameness of arresting pictures and narratives offered up by the media. The media's slickly coded standardization of types of news stories too often encourages glib simplification. Chunn's snappy notations--their brevity--may remind us of the media's own shorthand: sound bites and easily read graphic icons. Yet, the visual language that she has evolved is an ironically stylized caricature of the media's formulaic approach; her interventions aid us in recognizing our easy, numbed responses.
Nancy Chunn's often politicized cooptation of The New York Times front pages recalls the cultural practice of photo montage artists John Heartfield, Hannah Hoch and others in the early twentieth century. Heartfield, influenced by the Berlin-based Dada movement and the Marxist-Leninist vanguard, is well known for his scathing photo montage-based parodies of Hitler and other Nazi officials during the 1930s in the pages of the Arbeiter Illustriete Zeitung. Hannah Hoch, known for her playful, kitsch tableau, was one of the first artists to clip imagery from popular periodicals. Although working in a different medium, the spirit of various Dada-inspired photo montage artists suggests important precedents for Chunn and other artists who appropriate media today. Starting around 1916, Dada artists sought to critique the delivery of meaning through a visual parody of formalized media conventions. It was felt that the simple juxtaposition of appearance and reality could dislodge or reveal concealed relationships. Heartfield, in particular, adopted the tactic of mimicry, picturing the very subjects of his critique caught in silly, unseemly or ghastly acts, or anthropomorphically. Similarly, Chunn often presents political figures of the day in a humorous, if unflattering manner. For example, Boris Yeltsin is caricatured as Dracula; Bill Clinton, upon signing the Welfare Reform bill, adopts in Pinnochio-fashion, the trunk and ears of an elephant (the Republican mascot); former New York Senator Alphonse D'Amato personifies the Devil; and the First Family appear as clowns during their on-stage celebration of Clinton's 1996 Democratic nomination. Chunn's use of stamps and pastel over-drawings, in keeping with a broad definition of montage adopted by Dada artists, presents new truths through the adoption and overt manipulation of media-based realities. Founding Dada artists, working in a historic period of media consolidation, sought to engineer new meaning rather than simply rely upon the tyranny of popular mediated sources.
Chunn, who in the course of her critique is by turns playfully mocking, cynical and laudatory, parallels the bittersweet push and pull of the daily news. In spite of the bemused attitude of much of her running commentary, she would not have us miss the seriousness of her project. Chunn's use of colorful levity cannot mask her political conviction and activist will to intervene. Chunn raises her voice in Front Pages to courageously question and poke fun at the social and political meaning of our time and the organs that chronicle it.
Dan Younger
Director
Olin Art Gallery
