M + M: Driven by Distraction
M + M Putin Tiger 2008
From smartphones and digital billboards to cinema screens and YouTube, modern life is framed by a blur of moving images. Amidst the flash and bang of this visual hyperactivity, it is often easy to forget these moving image constructions are essentially a set of carefully sequenced photographic stills loaded with a not-always-transparent social or political purpose. After all, the medium is the message—and sometimes, the massage.
In the exhibition “Good Timing/Bad Timing,” currently on view at Lausberg Contemporary in Toronto, the Berlin art duo M + M (also known as Marc Weis and Martin De Mattia) offers the opportunity to slow down and reconsider the powerful distractions of contemporary visual media. Selections from M + M’s ongoing “picture cycle” in front make frame-by-frame use of television news footage in dense, linear collages that, at a distance, register as abstract compositions built on a panoramic barrage of visual information. Each is an eyeful of colour and optical noise.
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M + M Putin Tiger 2008 Detail |
On closer inspection, though, the work’s political punch quickly resolves. Each frame in these news-image sequences adds up to a stop-motion portrait of contentious political figures—one work shows Vladimir Putin hunting Siberian tigers, another the bedraggled and captured Saddam Hussein, and yet another George W. Bush delivering a White House speech. Wallpapered from floor to ceiling behind these abstract portraits are pages from the artists’ newsprint publication Putin 04, which features images and text from the Russian leader’s 2007 speech at the Munich Security Conference. It’s an intervention which further layers the critical edge of M + M’s take on both the manufactured spectacle and the seductive deception of modern media culture. (880 Queen St W, Toronto ON)
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M + M Putin Wall 2008 Installation mock-up |
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