Public Rituals
Body Politics - Media Reality - Art World
(fragment)
Rainer Fuchs
.....Kuba Bakowski's interpretation of media reality not only deals with the mechanisms for standardizing and literally "flattening" complex realities into cliched images, but also with the possibility
of penetrating into the interstices of this media reality, occupying them and leaving behind creatively anarchistic footnotes. The artists contrasts the mere consumption of prefabricated images and stories with his own production of images and symbols as a potential field of operation. In TV Zero Zones (2002), he used the transmission pause of TV station to break the flow and conventionality of media images. While he declares the TV test image to be a logo for media stagnation, he also sees in it a free space for criticism. Using the blue box technique, he sneaks into the image and transforms it into a sort of real pictorial space. The form of an "electronic aquarium" (Bakowski) with its tiny fading figure of the artist as an encapsulated "swimmer", is reminiscent of the limits set to the individual 's freedom by media-produced desires and the satisfaction delivered along with them.
Bakowski acts in the zero zone of television within a display that, as a geometric color map or virtual abstract painting, appears like a palette for all TV images, whose artificial abstractness refers to the fact that all media images are genuinely artificial. Rather than setting his test image to entertaining background music, he uses a martial sine tone that aggressively drills its way into our consciousness.
TV Zero Zones sees the TV test image as a contrast to the sequence of programs, as one lacking action, and turns it into the actual program. This reanimation of program gaps proves the regular program to be the actual gap; one of its messages being that television is at its best when it does not take place at all and its misappropriation
shows how depressing it is when it does function normally. This concern about everyday television culture and the digressive use of the medium brings to mind Pierre Bourdieu's critique
"On television", a lecture held on television about television. Bourdieu confronted his listeners with the fact that he had negotiated exceptional terms for a TV
appearance, such as unlimited talk time,no censorship, and his own choice of subject and this is what he said: "A very unusual situation I command here, to put it in an old-fashioned way, a very
" unusual power over the means of production". In underscoring the reason why my conditions are so uncommon, I am also saying something aboutthe common conditions under witch one has to speak on television.....