John Di Stefano: Bandiera Nera (2015)

In Martha Rosler’s video, If It’s Too Bad to Be True It Could Be DISINFORMATION (1985), intermittent bouts of static render television coverage of this developing news story nearly indecipherable. Produced in early 1985 as an urgent response to these events, Rosler’s video depicts a broadcast signal under duress. It stages the destabilisation of a media apparatus implicated in an ongoing war of information. That same year, Rosler also published a now widely read essay entitled “Video: Shedding the Utopian Moment”, in which she complained that “museumization” had contained and minimised “the social negativity that was the matrix for the early uses of video”, erasing the critical significance of artists’ engagements with broadcast television, a tactical approach vital to her own political art practice (72).