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Document sans nom

Johan Grimonprez

Given the increasingly amorphous and decentred nature of power, and an increasing disillusionment with formal political structures and processes, interventionist tactics appear a viable alternative. And then how is the use of new media more tactical for one group of people than another? In media art circles the language of digital hijack implies the positive (if sometimes naive) meaning of piracy and hacking. Johan Grimonprez's film dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997) charts quite literally the interrelated 1970s phenomena of plane hijacking, narrative and celebrity.

Proof : the Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes, ACMI, Melbourne, 2005. « Black is White », Mike Stubbs. Catalogue

Johan Grimonprez's Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y invites us to meet the romantic skyjackers of the 1960s and 1970s, who by the 1990s were gone and replaced by stories of anonymous bombs in suitcases. It can also be read as foreseeing the 9/11 attack. The film tracks the politics behind this change in the practice of terror attacks and their media coverage by blending archival footage of hijackings with other themes, including fast food, disco, and home movies.

VideoZone 4, 4th International Video Art Biennal in Israel, The speed of light, Center for Digital Art, Holon, 2008. Curators: Galit Eilat et Eyal Danon. Communiqué de presse

Prenant une nouvelle résonance avec les événements du 11 septembre 2001, ces recherches montrent du doigt une culture de la catastrophe envahissant notre salon et fustigent un spectateur qui s'identifie pareillement aux victimes et aux pirates de l'air, héros adulés et détestés représentant une forme de liberté et d'indépendance. [...]

Hardcore - Vers un nouvel activisme, Palais de Tokyo, 2003. Curator : Jérôme Sans. Auteur : Aurélie Voltz. Site web de l’exposition

Known for his ethnographic videos with their effective critique of Western ethnocentrism, Johan Grimonprez carried out two projects about the way the media shape culture, history and reality today. Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1995-97) was a video film structured in two fifty-minute parts, presented in the form of an installation. Collaborating with the critic Herman Asselberghs, Grimonprez created a videolounge, Beware! In playing the phantom you become one, based on the history of television. The video element, Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y blended photographic, electronic, and digital images, interspersing reportage shots, clips from science fiction films, found footage, and reconstituted scenes filmed by the artist. The work denounces the media spectacle and seeks to detect the impact of images on our feelings, our knowledge, our memory. The guiding visual thread of the piece was the almost exhaustive chronology of airplane highjackings in the world. The soundtrack was constituted of a fictive narrative inspired by two Don DeLillo novels - White Noise and Mao II - which, for Grimonprez, "highlight the value of the spectacular in our catastrophe culture". [...]

Documenta X, Cassel, 1997. Curator : Catherine David. Texte : Paul Sztulman.

I'd like to quote Nixon from Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, who, while speaking to an audience of scientists, paraphrased Virilio. He said something like: "if it wouldn't have been for science, there would be no airplane, and if there would be no airplane there wouldn't have been any hijackings, so we could make the argument that it would be better not to have science at all". True, every technology invents its own catastrophe. TV technology has reinvented a way to look at the world and to think about death. That is, in fact, what the film is about. It analyses how the media participates in the construction of reality. We could say that with the reinventing of reality, a culture of catastrophe is also being invented, and with it a new way to look at death. The acceleration of history is also related to technology: the film shows both how TV news has been historically presented, and how it has been accelerated by the new technological means of recording reality.

Proof : the Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes, ACMI, Melbourne, 2005. Johan Grimonprez, interview avec Catherine Bernard. « Supermarket History », Parkett, no. 53, 1998. Reprise dans le catalogue