Reviewed in High Performance, A Quarterly Magazine for the New Arts #51 Fall 1990.

 Cultural Dysfunction in America

When a large department store sponsors a competition to create artworks for a 32-screen video display unit, the cynic would say that it’s just looking for a style-fodder to chew on and regurgitate. The optimist would say that such a commission is a farsighted gesture, allowing artists entry into an otherwise exclusive technological/commercial sanctum.

Rik Sferra gave the optimists some ammunition in his piece for Intermedia Arts’ Videowall Project, which was funded by the Minneapolis-based Dayton’s and exhibited for a month in its flagship store on the second floor, right by the men’s colognes. (Sferra was one of two winners; the other was Roger Schmitz, whose poetic La Rafana, was shown in conjunction.)

Know primarily as a photographer who creates multi-image text/photo installations, Sferra achieved a technological expansion of his interests with Cultural Dysfunction in America. He avoided many of the commercial clichés already stillborn in the video wall medium: exploding pictures, checkerboard repetitions, immense closeups. Instead, he set up provocative sequences of ideas and images, employing nearly every communications mode possible—spoken word, text, music, icons, visuals.

Some of this material was drawn from the audio/visual environment, but Sferra’s subject wasn't exclusively about media overload. It was instead as clear as its title, implying a sarcastic and invisible protagonist who had once seen things wrong around him, but who then decided it wasn’t worth complaining anymore.

This concept was typically expressed in indirect form: bursts or strings of overlapping phrases, or visual/verbal puns, paralleled imagery drawn from the news (a tank on Tiananmen Square) or consumer culture (the World Series-winning Minnesota Twins on a Wheaties box). A woman’s face appeared regularly, ambiguously addressing either the audience or some unseen friend or ex-lover. Through multiscreen timing (programmed by Jeannine Mellinger), “I RAN” became “IGNORANT”; “DENY” became “DESTINY”; and “VISCIOUS” became “VICARIOUS”. The Wheaties box was covered up by a milk carton with the face of a missing child—a different meeting of product and ideology.

The total effect, lasting three minutes, was the interstitial puns Jean-Luc Godard used to throw into his films if the mid-’60s. Sferra twisted a few words into contradictory but perfectly matched thoughts: “Unnecessary history is redundancy” at the end. Despite the unseen protagonist’s fatigue, it remained a work that nudged and provoked the viewer to rethink culture, media impact and methods.

—Phil Anderson

Exhibited at Intermedia Arts, June 2-10, and at Dayton’s department store in Minneapolis, June 11-30, 1990.

Phil Anderson is a freelance media critic who also teaches at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.