Given the nature of war imagery today, in its varying amounts of presenting fictions/non-fictions, ESL thought it was appropiate to present APoohcalypse Now. In negotiating in its own position in culture as a block of consumable war and make-believe images, Artemio's work was an appropriate augmentation to the line questioning first put forward by Salvatore Reda and Kurt Foreman's CNN Goes to War.
How are we to understand the conflation of Winnie the Pooh imagery and Marlon Brando's speech about the strength of the Viet Kong, all while Pooh is eating honey? Why do we have to play like children, hiding in a small tent, in order to see the film pastiche?
In previous works, Artemio had engaged in practices of appropriating film footage to extend his political concerns involving framing consumer codes. In one work,he edited Sylvester Stallone's film Rambo by editing out all the violent scenes and reducing it to a short feature where the protagonist ends up crying for no apparent reason. If the Brando/Pooh character is also about to cry in APoohcalypse Now, it is not a coincidence but a symptom of the atmosphere surrounding the entertainment industry- it's fascination with aestheticizing death, redemption and emancipation. While installing Artemio's work, a homeless person passed by and began to watch the almost finished piece through the storefront window. Although we couldn't convince him to sit down and watch the video in full, we thought it was interesting that his shirt read "Piss on this".
In the months following the work's presentation, the US is not only nowhere near any sort of exit strategy in the Middle East, it's mechanisms of distraction, courtesy of Hollywood, have returned full-swing- in a post 9/11 entertainment climate- to creating multi-million explosion movies. With that in my mind, we give you APoohcalypse Now, sans tent.
