Following the thread from yesterday, another exhibition at the Wex at the same time as Gretchen Bender’s in Gallery B, looked back through its archives on the cusp of the 2020 election was Antoni Muntadas and Marshall Reese’s Political Advertisement X 1952–2020. Here are a couple of trailers:
If it wasn’t for the privacy settings, which means that this video cannot be played here, you would be able to watch a conversation between the artists and Wex Curator-at-Large Bill Horrigan below.
I guess this shell-image and its embedded link will have to suffice:
Anyway, in the spirit of Pamela M. Lee’s interpretation of Bender’s Total Recall, Muntadas and Reese’s anthology of political ads could be read as a library of sorts. Or not. I guess with an artist like Muntadas – whose books have flitted in and out of the library I haunt and I even remember some creeping onto my shelves while I was still alive and well and living in University Hall, hold on I lost my thread. What was I saying? Oh, yes, so with an artist like Muntadas there are more than enough library-esque projects to choose from, such as The File Room (perhaps the most direct equivalent of Total Recall), or Between the Frames (which also appeared in the Wex galleries many years ago and from which this post’s title is taken, again thanks to Horrigan), or even About Academia 1 and About Academia 2 (where the library appears as image but, according to the purple catalog, only as word once). Then there is the Muntadas CD-ROM that my librarian just went to get from his basement – where my (metaphorical) bones lie in plastic boxes – Media Architecture Installations (1997) – which includes the library as one of its levels.
Yet, try as I might, his laptop – this laptop – was not able to enter Muntadas’ archive anymore and so we are left here at its doorway asking ourselves what wonders are to be found within?
But I guess that must be part of the theater of the library from the moment we enter, like the opening credits of some British costume drama, before a word is spoken, we understand that here there be masterpieces. The only question being, masterpieces for whom?
