six_flags

Six Flags

installation view

Six Flags

12-channel audio

Six Flags

12-channel audio (detail)

Six Flags

Six Flags

Six Flags

Six Flags, 2010
,., employs 12-channel audio and 2-channel video elements to blend familiar images and instances into a sensory bomb. Photographs of war and popular culture flash quickly on a television screen, while voices from 12 identical speakers dictate the names of 91 nations, all of which are hosts to an American Military presence. Beside a wall lined with hanging lamps and vintage wallpaper, a video depicts Cowboy and Indian figurines dancing (or fighting) weightlessly in space. By employing scale shifts, the collision of metaphors and the posing of interior versus exterior, Six Flags addresses notions of benevolent imperialism, the pacifying reality of media, and the relative comfort domestic complacency affords.

See essay below by Mark Scala,
Curator, Frist Center for Visual Arts

Six Flags
by Mark Scala
Curator, Frist Center for Visual Arts, Nashville, TN
January 2, 2011

Seed Space, the tiny gallery that contains Derek Coté’s installation Six Flags, is carved out of an artist’s studio in a shabby old building in a desolate part of Nashville. This nondescript chamber --walls within walls within walls—seems nicely shielded from the world.
But the outside intrudes in electronic form. The space is dominated by a plasma screen flashing scenes from around the world that the artist copied from the Internet. Too fast and too many to be identified by content and place, the images make a flickering rhythm, putting the brain on overload and the stomach on quease. The video recalls Nam June Paik montages, with their McLuhanesque idea that the glut of information, however indecipherable, is the defining characteristic of our time.
On the wall opposite the video, a lulling masculine voice comes out of a twelve-channel audio installation. If you put your ear to any of the speakers you will hear “Morocco,” “Germany,” “Pakistan,” etc. in a monotone that sounds like a roll call at the UN. But rather than naming participants in a deliberative body, the list calls out 91 nations in which the United States has a military base. The recitation is not accusatory; it is simply an acknowledgment of a condition of our times, using information readily available from our own online government sources; no WikiLeaks here.
The inference of this audio component is left to the imagination. For people who feel that any U.S. troop presence is inherently intended to control or intimidate, the voice delivers an indictment against jingoism, proven by the sheer number of places in which our troops are posted. Alternately, the rhetoric of democratic capitalism might explain these regional outposts as buffers against threats to our security or trading interests; these are defenders, not aggressors. In either case, the troops are a sign of what Coté calls “benevolent imperialism,” the most visible way that the U.S. tries to influence other regions of the world for its own interests.
As we return our attention to the video, we try to link the meaning of its rapid-fire sequencing to what we hear on the audio. We suspect that these are not wholly random fragments; indeed, Coté found them by Googling certain loaded words, like “disaster” and “war.” The images show a mash-up of references to industry and consumption, Hollywood, advertising, natural disasters, pretty girls. These could possibly be signs of more subtle, ubiquitous, and influential instruments of benevolent imperialism, involving the expansion of free-markets and exportation of cultural productions.
If so, the juxtaposition of sound and image suggests that America’s foreign involvement is responsible for the instability of the world. While a popular position among Marxist critics such as Noam Chomsky and Edward Said, Coté finds this ideological analysis too confining. The images simply move too fast and are too diverse for us to understand them as evidence of American influence or culpability. They are more readily seen to be expressions of the instability that has arisen with globalism, with its vast complex of information generation and consumption making it difficult for an open-minded person to achieve a coherent understanding of international relations.
Just as the recitation of country names may be interpreted differently by different listeners, the video component demonstrates that images are presented and received in contradictory ways. Searching for words that he felt would yield a certain type of image—say, “disaster”—Coté was surprised at the range of meanings and visual links that arose. A disaster can be anything from a bad hair day to genocide in Sudan. In allowing innumerable meanings from multiple perspectives, the Internet enables people, organizations, or governments to shape what is seen and what is edited. Coté notes that he was unable to obtain certain sensitive information and images. As information providers across the spectrum slant or filter its content, the Internet becomes a subtle tool for propaganda, made more effective because it is presumed to function as a neutral stage. So the question of whether the images on the video are indicators of benevolent imperialism is made further unanswerable by the nature of the medium itself—visual information seems evidentiary, but it cannot be trusted to reveal truth.
Six Flags’ conceptual ambivalence is reinforced aesthetically as a sensory split, one to which Robert Wick could be referring when he ascribes to deconstructive practices an “internal oscillation and resistance to stabilization.” Such oscillation is physically felt in the vertiginous effect of the flashing images and the back and forth swing of the viewer’s attention between the video and the audio. It is partially stabilized by other, secondary elements: wallpaper and lamps on one wall transform the setting into a fake living room, reinforcing the illusory feeling of security we might have when surrounded by walls, barriers, or filters, whether physical or electronic.
To the left of the flashing video is a small monitor showing a toy cowboy and Indian spinning slowly in space as if locked in an eternal fight or embrace. The part of the installation that most obviously draws on the history of American imperialism, this brings our attention to the title itself. Six Flags hearkens to an amusement park in Texas, which was named for the countries that once held dominion there—Spain, France, Mexico, the United States, the Confederate States of America, and, of course, the Republic of Texas. With its echoes of colonialism, revolution, slavery, and liberation, the name Six Flags suggests the tumultuous history of the state (and serves as an apt metaphor for the course of empire). It may also be seen as an expression of American multiculturalism, an idea we hold dearly to today. This offers a cheery postscript to the age of imperialism—‘whatever has happened to you in the past, we’re not doing that anymore (just ignore the soldiers over there). Let’s all have fun together today! Buy a hot dog and taco, watch Brad Pitt kick a little Nazi ass, and please help us track down Al Qaeda!’