May 26 through June 22, 2011
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 26, 6-9PM
Dark, beautiful, and melancholic, John Rabe’s photographs of discarded television sets are reminders of our own mortality. The hyper-saturated Polaroid-inspired images, taken with the Hipstamatic® iPhone app, lend a retro, dreamlike feeling to Rabe’s sophisticated compositions, which capture a mood that’s welled within him for over 40 years…his fondness for nostalgia, and – as far as television goes – admiration, disappointment, and pleasure.
The Vast Wasteland Project’s title is a nod to one of the most famous speeches of the 20th century. Newton Minow, the fresh new head of the FCC, passionately criticized television executives for their violent, intellectually insulting, and (worst of all) boring programming. Minow said if they actually watched their own station’s programming for a day, “what you will observe is a vast wasteland.”
Minow also lamented TV’s lost potential. “When television is good,” he said in the speech, “nothing – not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers – nothing is better.” The Vast Wasteland speech was delivered exactly fifty years ago this May, and the exhibit includes the audio of Minow’s speech emanating from a vintage Philco Predicta TV set. “What began as a metaphor for programming has become a physical reality in LA’s streets and alleys,” said Rabe.
Has TV made itself dispensable? Or is this occurrence merely symptomatic of mass consumerism? A thing that brought joy to millions of people has now literally – and figuratively – been kicked to the curb.
John Rabe is an award-winning radio host and producer who has lived in Los Angeles for the past eleven years. At age 12 he snapped a shot of the I-500 Snowmobile Race in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan that wound up on the front page of the Detroit News. He’s been photographing the world ever since.
The Vast Wasteland Project investigates our relationship with mass media and its status in the collective consciousness.
