George Holiday Video March 3, 1991, 2011
Chalk pastel on raw canvas, under clear acrylic with black oil
Large canvas 48x27in
small canvases 8x5in
This work is a reproduction of George Holliday’s home video of the LAPD beating of Rodney King. Compositionally, it emulates the layout of YouTube, showing the 1991 event in a contemporary format, 20 years after it was seen repeatedly on television. The pervasiveness of this footage, in its time, foreshadowed the Information Age. It was seen by the public with a level of accessibility that can be compared to significant national and world events today. Imagine the revolutions and conflicts in Egypt and Libya without mobile devices and digital media. By presenting this historical event in a YouTube format, this work comments on our faith in, and dependency on, instant knowledge.
Through the public eye, this video was seen as a smoking gun. The officers in this video, however, were acquitted in The California State Court, leading to the 1992 Los Angeles riots. Common sayings like “The camera never lies” and “Seeing is believing” allude to our perception of video and our reliance on its ability to tell the truth. Video, like any form of documentation is a part of history. “All of history is an archaeological attempt to construct coherent, finite stories from artifacts, yet artifacts (including pictures) are not simply facts.”1 This is the dilemma, we give visual information more weight than it deserves. Seeing is equated directly to knowing.
In my work, treating the image as an object is very important. These 9 images are drawings, rendered in chalk pastel. This is an unnecessary, arcane and arbitrary way to make an image. The idea is to bring new relevance to the re-creation of images. The source image is not simply a reference, but wholly the work’s model. This work is not solely about the beating of Rodney King nor is it a vehicle to subjectively show the event. It is about how and why those images of the beating were created, and their historical and cultural importance. I am trying to find new ways to recreate images, but still craft these works with traditional materials. I hope to highlight the gravity of these images and, in some cases, their banality.
Note
1. “The Heritage VI, 1996,” in Luc Tuymans, essay by Joshua Shirkey, p.138 (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art/ Wexner Center for the Arts/D.A.P.; First Edition, October 31, 2009)
More information about artist: jasonpattersonart.com
Peer Reviews
1
Jason Patterson’s piece about the Rodney King beating video engages with the matters of concern in this exhibition on multiple levels. First, it challenges our conception of photography and video as representational of reality by reminding the viewer of the discrepancy between the visual nature of the acts caught on video and the conflicting results at trial. But perhaps more importantly, it engages directly with the problems posed by mediation. The original video mediated the actual events, but this work mediates a mediation of that mediation, thereby challenging our conception of what we can know by looking at it. I’d like to see Patterson take this final step of mediation further by painting YouTube comments, ads, and other related interface elements.
2
Jason’s work poses an interesting question in a society in which instant replay dominates many professional sports and surveillance cameras are posted in nearly every store. This has to mean that we no longer trust each others knowledge. But, as Jason suggests, what happens when we do not trust what we see played back to us on the screen either?
