Westward
Paul Amitai
October 24, 2003 - December 14, 2003
My artistic practice functions as a way to examine how technology and culture intermingle. I use digital recording and sampling technologies to collect artifacts from the cultural dustbins and to document visual/audio spaces found in public locations. This material is re-presented in an installation space, which shifts the original context and forces juxtaposition between elements. Through this collision of disparate events, there is the potential for reexamining that which has somehow been phased out of collective memory. These tactics serve to construct alternate cultural narratives, recontextualize mass media representations, and examine the technological connection to perception, memory, time and decay.
My work is not about any one culture, but rather the construction of culture. It reflects my own struggle to make sense of marginal cultures whose characteristics are mediated by codified representations such as those found in ethnographic displays at natural history museums. The impetus to "edutain", to communicate (and therefore sell) an idea of culture manifests in a kind of simplification suited to meet cultural expectations. Cultural stereotypes are recycled, reconfigured, reinvented, and filtered through a contemporary lens, distilled as something only but a degree from the old, outdated images, yet perceived as less offensive and more palatable to the constantly shifting tastes of mass culture.
I'm also interested in making work that is not only institutionally site-specific (i.e. relates to the architecture and acoustics of the installation site), but is also specific to the sited community. Westward, the multi-channel video installation commissioned by the Saint Louis University Museum of Art, examines the way collective memory and commerce frame the methods by which communities choose to represent themselves, and their attitudes towards change or progress. By documenting visitors' interactions with the historically significant Gateway Arch and the Museum of Westward Expansion, St. Louis' top visitor attractions, the installation reflects on the construction and commodification of historical events for mass consumption.
The title of the installation bears directly on the city's self-identification as the "Gateway to the West." St. Louis finds itself geographically and psychologically located at a site of transition, one step from the river, looking off into the western distance at new possibilities, meditating on what is/was lost in the outward sprawl. The forward-looking thrust of the word "progress" connotes improvement, but, inevitably, something irreplaceable is left behind in the move toward a more "civilized" society. To that end, the installation also considers the "myth of the wild," and the way that progress changes, or tames our natural surroundings for the benefit of advancement. A bison, which used to roam free, now exists for visitors to the museum as an isolated, mounted curiosity, detached from its original context.
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