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Exposure

James Byrne
1985, 5:55 min, color, sound

Description

Here Byrne reintroduces himself as performer to question the identity and position of the artist/individual in a media-saturated urban environment. With a boxing match as his central metaphor, Byrne suggests conflict, confinement, and internal/external struggle as he intercuts the boxer and himself with the often violent and emptied spectacles of broadcast television news and other found footage. Inserting his image within these appropriations of mediated information, Byrne identifies with the boxer. He choreographs himself in solitude, isolating and fragmenting his own figure in natural and urban landscapes, as a gesture of alienation from the media reality of contemporary culture.