These already-existing-in-the-world-images, spectacle fragments, at the heart of the artworks grouped here––a photograph of Jews scrubbing the streets of Vienna, boys cheering Adolf Hitler, Charles Manson’s hideout ranch between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, Whitewall rubber tires preceding a lynch, Olympia stadium in Berlin, a radar tower in the center of Israel, or a Napoleonic letter of surrender––all simulate a shared history, serving as mediating and unifying objects of seemingly stable social relations.
However, the artworks featured here––by Trisha Donnelly, Gustav Metzger, Cady Noland, Moshe Ninio and David Claerbout––are situated somewhere between this set of spectacular con images, pretending to be the palpable world (while they in fact act as a more powerful substitute), and an art image that strives to perforate and neutralize this substitute image; to destabilize it and thus also the stability of the relations it mediates.

Concurrently, the showcased artworks, created between 1976 and 2020, in the transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first century, reveal different and conflicting time trajectories. These are buried under the already-existing images, or concealed by them: a chronicle of a seemingly manic activity (disaster, war, crime, murder), versus a denial of the passage of time (repressed organic or biological time cycles). Insofar as the question of history is a question of power, then the objective of the spectacle, or at least one of its outcomes, is the paralysis of memory, amnesia. Daily economic cycles seem to unify different concrete places and clash in eternal silence, beyond any activity, time or place. Hence, the span of time is stretched out or compressed in the artworks of Claerbout and Ninio, or completely transformed in space in Donelly’s performances.

  The idea of the spectacle as a meticulous yet deceptive imitation of reality, as a malignant replica that replaces the world with the very means of reality, like an alluring trap disguising its deceit by offering comfort and soothing, brings to mind the “mirror device” mentioned by Cady Noland in her seminal essay “Towards a Metalanguage of Evil” (Noland 2020 [1989]). Noland describes how the male psychopath––a product of the system he also represents––gains his future victims’ trust with the aid of this “mirror device.” Like a mirror, the psychopath reflects the other’s desires, thereby calming and sedating his victims, making them more receptive to his manipulations. According to Noland, malicious use of the “mirror device” was widespread in Nazi Germany. She quotes Hanna Arendt, who described how one of the things that horrified Adolf Eichmann most during the years of extermination, was the train station in Treblinka. It was built like a replica of a train station in Germany, with utmost attention paid to details like clocks and signs.

    Just as the artworks featured here call attention to the relations between an image already existing in the world––one of a set of fabricated images––and an image that is art, so too they allow us to simulate an existential stance (in life) towards different kinds of viewing (an exhibition), from passive spectatorship to involvement and engagement. Thus, Metzger’s “To crawl into – Anschluß, Vienna, March 1938,” forces viewers to decide where they stand: being humiliated or humiliating; Noland’s artworks seduce and subdue those walking among them; Claerbout’s “Olympia” makes the viewers, and even the artist himself, ephemeral humans, redundant in light of the endless software (at least theoretically); and Donnelly obstructs all means of deciphering her various artworks, while hypnotizing the audience.