Who, What, Where, When, Why and How (2009)
Press Release
For immediate release
Visual Arts
SMART Project Space, Rod Dickinson and Steve Rushton would like to invite you to the live performance of:Who, What, Where, When, Why and How
A live art project by Rod Dickinson in collaboration with Steve Rushton
Saturday 11 July 2009, 21.00 hrs - at the opening of the exhibition “Performing Evidence”.
Location: SMART Project Space, Arie Biemondstraat 105-111, Amsterdam
Reservation recommended: info@smartprojectspace.net
Who, What, Where, When, Why and How is a new performative work by Rod Dickinson that interrogates the historical form and role of the presidential speech and press briefing. Set in a meticulously constructed press conference environment, two actors will deliver a simulated 45 minute press briefing.
Television and the moving image have long shaped not only how dramatic events such as conflicts are perceived, but also how and if they happen. The script of Who, What, Where, When, Why and How is composed solely of fragments of press statements from the cold war onward and focuses on the way in which similar declarations and political rhetoric have been repeated and reused by numerous governments across continents and through the decades to justify acts of state sanctioned violence.Mirroring real press briefings, the live address will be filmed and photographed. The footage will form the basis for a subsequent video piece. But the obvious presence of the cameras is also more fundamentally connected with the ways in which the press statement is part of feedback mechanism where it is carefully constructed for the template of television and current affairs programmes which disseminate it, and which in turn shape political and social reality.Rod Dickinson’s work explores ideas of belief and social control. Using detailed research into moments of the past and present, he has made a series of meticulously re-enacted events that represent both the mechanisms that enable belief, and the social systems that underpin much human behaviour.
His previous works include a recreation of Stanley Milgram’s infamous 1961 social psychology experiment Obedience to Authority (The Milgram Re-enactment, 2002), and a recreation of the media surrounding a bomb attack on Greenwich Observatory in 1894 (Greenwich Degree Zero, 2006). He has recently exhibited work at BAK, basis voor actuelle kunst in “The Return of Religion and Other Myths”.
The script Who, What, Where, When, Why and How is co-written by Steve Rushton, a writer and co-founder of Signal:Noise, a research project about the pervasive role of feedback mechanisms in contemporary culture.
Supported by: Arts Council England and BAK basis voor actuele kunst
Editorial note
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tel (+31) 020 427 59 51 or e-mail press@smartprojectspace.net
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