LS | Attitude Cinema
Geof Oppenheimer | Anthems, 2011
Working with diverse media, Oppenheimer takes the formal manifestation of civic value as his subject, interrogating the ways in which political and social structures are encoded in images and objects. It is a practice situated at the intersection of art and politics, but in such a way that neither art nor politics is reducible to the other term.
This four minute and forty-two second video is an investigation into social mapping and pattern-making. For centuries, the pageantry of military spectacle has been an umbrella for people to come together under one body politic. The drum core is a holdover from this cultural history. In the video, a confrontational situation, both visually and sonically, is set up between groupings of musicians marching in formation on screen. Shifting formation, and with superimposed images, the marchers are simultaneously playing four different national anthems. The audio tracks of the performance are highly edited and mixed so that the sounds of the individual anthems are lost in a wall of sound. Over the course for the video the sound and imagery build to a crescendo of incomprehension and then fades out to pure abstract blur that is devoid of any kind of representational mark. It is a violent imposition of different social structures upon one another. Produced with the drum and marching core of Rickover Naval Academy in Chicago, Illinois, Anthems was commissioned by SITE, Santa Fe for the exhibition Agitated Histories.
Geof Oppenheimer was born in Washington, D.C. in 1973. He received his BFA from the Maryland Institute, College of Art (1996) and his MFA from University of California, Berkeley (2001). He has exhibited at The Project, New York (2006 and 2008), Aspen Art Museum (2010), LAX ART (2009), PS1 Contemporary Arts Center (2006), The Contemporary Museum, Baltimore (2011), and SITE Santa Fe (2011). He currently lives and works in Chicago, where he is an Associate Professor of Practice in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago.
