SubscribeThe most talked about works in the show is Omer Fast's 18-minute-long CNN Concatenated (2002). The Israel-born New Yorker and Whitney Biennial vet, who first showed at Momenta Art in Williamsburg, has culled footage from CNN and radically edited it together into what sounds like poetry -- much of it like the angst-ridden stuff teenagers write. "Just get near me already you hypocritical opportunist fake phony con-artist sell-out lip-serving limousine-liberal white chickenshit motherfucker!" says one amazingly spliced together passage, in which each word jumps from a different newscaster's mouth. The increasingly mesmerizing, seven-part tape hectors the viewer about its own importance and his or her shallowness, weakness, hypocrisy and self-absorption. [Sherry Wong]Although that's sensational, the poetry from this two-minute clip made me shiver:
Listen to me! I want to tell you something. Come closer. Don't be upset and don't get emotional. Just get near me and pay attention, please? Look, I know that you're scared. I know what you're afraid of. You mistrust your body. Lately, it has been looking more and more foreign. It's been doing strange things. You suspect that it has been keeping something from you. That knowledge of your own death is already programmed inside it somehow, that it's stored in a primitive organ, that in between the crush of blood and digestion, your appendix or spleen sits obliviously still like an overgrown traffic island keeping watch over a terrible secret. You worry that this knowledge will arrive at your very last moment, not as a spiritual revelation accompanied by an overwhelming cascade of sensations, but as a very public and vulgar betrayal. You're afraid of dying alone, but you're even more terrified of dying in public. Look, it's not happening at this very moment, perhaps not as long as you listen and watch. People don't die in front of their televisions. In the meantime, we could probably do something about it together. I could tell you exactly what to expect. I could explain using precise words and heartbreaking imagery.Nice post, vronsky. Thanks.
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THE.
FUCK.
VRONSKY?
posted by clearly at 5:23 PM on August 12, 2008