Little Private Governments

2006

  • Single-Channel Video
  • 00:06:00
  • Video, sound.
  • Variable 4:3

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Little Private Governments appropriates images and text from a diverse range of documentaries, collapsing the historical narrative of New York’s economic and democratic adventure into a series of metaphysical camera sweeps, hard edits and a transcendental-style textual narrative, which entangle the idealistic language of democratic poetry (such as Walt Whitman) with the corporate mantras of the dot-com venture capitalist boom. Through equating the representational work of documentary realism with the idealism and force of the documentaries’ subject matter in a movie-trailer/MTV-style vignette, the work sweeps us along in a crude and relentless sensory journey. In this way the video makes explicit the pleasure, instability and violence of identifying the languages of truth and idealism as Darwinian-style competitors in the social sphere.

Little Private Governments

2006

  • Paperback
  • 210 x 148 mm
  • 48 pp; 20 color images
  • Published by: University of the West of England
  • Contributors: Amanda Beech, Matthew Poole, Suhail Malik, Roman Vassuer.
  • Still

  • Still

  • Installation image from the exhibition Little Private Governments, University of Essex Gallery, curated by Beech and Poole

  • Little Private Governments, 2006. Installed with Martin Kippenberger and Jenny Holzer as part of the exhibition Little Private Governments, 2006. University gallery, Essex, UK.

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Little Private Governments

2006

  • Paperback
  • 210 x 148 mm
  • 48 pp; 20 color images
  • Published by: University of the West of England
  • Contributors: Amanda Beech, Matthew Poole, Suhail Malik, Roman Vassuer.

Exhibition History

https://www.traditionrolex.com/26