dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y uses a purposefully global topic - hijacking provided media coverage for some of the more obscure republics and tin-pot dictatorships in the rapidly decolonialising 60s and 70s when even the smallest powers became seemingly strategic. Everywhere, and everyone, becomes complicit. Taking the rather tired theme of the media presentation of violence and attaching it to the now arcane practice of hijacking, Grimonprez injects new life by also tracing the technological advances in news footage. The jump cuts from Cuba to Fukuoka to Somalia to Lockerbie are dizzying, switching from film to video to Steadicam, from black-and-white to colour. We are reminded that history is ultimately a series of stories with as much in the telling as in the content.

There’s some order to Grimonperez’s narrative, with a loose chronology that dates roughly from the 1950s to the early 1990s. All the prime movers of Cold War politics make an appearance: Nixon, Kruschev, Che Guevara, Castro, Arafat; included are the assassination of Sadat, the attempted assassination of Reagan, the Baader Meinhof, the PLO’s Leila Khaled. Passages from Don DeLillo's White Noise and Mao II provide both a literary cross-reference and a theoretical framework, suggesting that art doesn't change the world: terrorists do. Operating deep within culture through violence, they are abetted in their activities by their portrayal by the media.

Projected onto a large screen, there is a certain beauty and majesty to the proceedings as they unfold. And there’s an obvious visual intensity in watching a parade of explosions, for example, three jumbo jets detonated in the middle of the desert. But it is also an immensely disturbing experience as these images of willful political destruction are often accompanied by less sombre disco music.

What makes dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y ultimately so affective is its sense of intimacy within sweeping imagery and history. Real life people involved in the news stories are constantly explored: the shy Red Army terrorist at his trial; the goofy kid gleefully relating his experiences of capture; the screaming mother writhing on the floor of JFK; the crying children, clutching their toys, at a Japanese press conference. And there is also a strong sense of the artist’s role in the production. Embedded in the montage is a vast array of other, seemingly extraneous, material that echoes the flip-flipping of loungeroom channel-changing. Commercials, cartoons, strange film clips (the repeated falling of a house from the sky, for example), interviews and home movies create an intensely personalised vision. We assert our individuality through choice; and it is his choice of images that brings this film home from its far-flung subject.

Russell Storer
1999

© The artists and
Courtesy of ACCA..