Artforum, 12 October 2005

"If It's Too Bad to Be True, It Could Be Disinformation"

By Nick Stillman

10.19.05-11.26.05 apexart, New York

 

From Bush's infamous "Mission Accomplished" speech to his cabinet's grave testimonies that WMDs were doubtlessly stockpiled in Iraq, disinformation-dispersal is this administration's special brand of evil genius. Curator Mercedes Vicente's "If It's Too Bad to Be True, It Could Be Disinformation" brings together work by artists and politically-motivated interventionists that reveals how information control is used by the media, corporations, and governmental bodies to, in Chomsky's words, "manufacture consent." Martha Rosler's 1985 installation—which provides the title for the exhibition—combines a video with enlarged newspaper articles documenting Reagan's exasperation with Nicaraguan-Soviet relations. Rosler underlines fragments like "might be" or "some" (as in "some say") with a condemning red pen to demonstrate the softness of mainstream "news" that eschews factual reportage. The Italian collective 0100101110101101.ORG and American interventionists the Yes Men each contribute documentation of projects where they employ false websites to perform corporate identity theft. Watching the Yes Men pull the wool over the eyes of a BBC news anchor who assumes "Jude Finisterra" really is a Dow Chemical spokesman, or reading the ludicrously unprofessional emails 0100101110101101.ORG sent to customers under the guise of Nike's "Advanced Specificity Athletic Advisor," these collectives show how identity piracy can be used to turn the joke back on the propagators of propaganda, who shelter the public from facts and bomb them with Weapons of Mass Disinformation.