The video piece “Desensitizer” is a collage of many thousands of stills from violent movies, every still depicting a scene of brutal killing. Together, frame after frame, they form the doubtlessly most violent piece of film ever. 24 murders per second. Individually indistinguishable for the conscious mind, but together a numbing, flickering odyssey through movie violence. A challenge for anybody who believes or does not believe in subliminal perception, and likewise to believers and non believers of the effects of video violence.
Excerpt from the text “Reach for the carrot, it is a weapon!”
Written by
Petja Grafenauer & Veljko Njegovan
for the catalogue From Above made in connection with the exhibition with the same name at Vzigalica Gallery, Ljubljana 2010.
Desensitizer places us in an uncomfortable, fear and anxiety generating dentist’s chair and makes us watch a ten minute video loop consisting of twenty-four images of murders (taken from movies) per second. As each image appears for merely a fraction of a second the images cannot be recognised, however they create a flow that at first silences us and then numbs us. This work poses questions to all believers as well as non-believers in sublime perception and the influence of television/film/video violence. Blom discusses the ways in which the contemporary society is interlaced with media as well as the effect information has upon the individual who sucks it all in. Media images are so incorporated into society that it is impossible for anybody living in the Western civilisation to escape their flow.
Desensitizer is a word game. It is a machine that robs us of our emotions. We are numbed by the repetition. From the initial disgust and shock that are a result of the moving pictures, we sink into a senseless state. The video and the dentist’s chair lose their effect; we become immune to the images and events that surround us. The experience is reminiscent to watching the daily bloody scenes on television.
It is possible that the total numbness is a result of the violence shown in the contemporary world. But why did Desensitizer choose film as a medium? Is violence most exposed in films?
We see loads of violent images in the daily news and reports. They are also shown with a special intention.
Maybe film was chosen because this project – similar to other works by Blom – also deals with the copyright issue. Once more he opted to use copyrighted material. However, agency shots shown in the news are also copyrighted. The decision to use film as the medium for the project is linked to the issue of pleasure, for people obviously enjoy viewing violent scenes on screen.
Mankind has watched executions since time eternal. In Rome the crowd would cheer as individuals were torn apart by lions. Today a similar opportunity for pleasure is offered by the media.
We do not enjoy the violence we watch on news, but when watching a film we derive a certain pleasure when good defeats the bad. The knowledge that we are watching a work of fiction combined with our morals allow us to experience this pleasure. In the film the show ends at some stage, it is not real and you can permit yourself to experience pleasure. In Blom’s work the story is taken away and only pure violence remains...
Another factor that numbs us so quickly is the quick succession of the violent scenes. We see twenty-four of them each second. As it is impossible to recognise the individual images the artist successfully avoids any copyright threats. On the other hand this is a project that offers two uncomfortable things – a dentist’s chair and violence, how is it possible for us to be numb?
If you see an image repeatedly it can either stimulate or numb you. When film was invented people ran away when they saw the image of a train appear on screen, for they failed to realise that this was merely an image. Through repetition we have learned that this is merely an image, and today nobody escapes from the cinema. On the other hand former Yugoslavia used a red star to remind us of our belonging. And because this image spoke about reality its repetition strengthened our awareness.
Due to the frequency of images in Blom’s video it takes roughly only 30 seconds for us to become numb. Desensitizer offers a condensed summary of the life of a contemporary individual. The condensed images are placed in front of us in the form of a pure fact. As if the artist wanted to say: ‘See, this is how you live and the effect that you feel is the same to the one you carry within yourselves every day.’
And what is our attitude towards the presentation of violence in media?
The two of us are numb.
We are familiar with violence from films, television, the Internet and other media. However, we have never seen such bloodshed in real life … But films also have violent scenes that are hard to swallow. One such scene is the long scene from the Occupation in 26 pictures (1978, directed by Lordan Zafranović) that shows partisans being killed on the bus. In this scene the violence does not mimic the classic film scenes, in which once a body is hit, colour trickles across it. In Desensitizer the scenes change extremely quickly – the only thing that links them and makes them recognisable is the red colour of blood.
The thought that we are sitting in a dentist’s chair and watching a video collage of the bloodiest scenes from the movie history no longer causes us discomfort. The chair is also merely an unavoidable fact that is offered to us by culture. We think about it. When we saw it for the first time we felt pressured and challenged. With its form it drew attention to the fact that something unpleasant will happen to us and then we saw a truly unpleasant thing and were under the impression that this is a collage of society. This is an appropriated image and portrait of our civilisation. We found it slightly reminiscent of dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y by Johan Grimonprez (1997), a one hour documentary, which is however much more romantic than Desensitizer. Violence in itself is not problematic, the way in which it is portrayed is.
Man is an aggressive animal. Without civilisation violence is a means of protection, obtaining food... only with the appearance of civilisation does it become a means of terror and pleasure that merely intensifies through history. In a slightly scary way the dentist’s chair attracts the visitor with its robustness and technological appearance. The work toys with the psyche of the visitor, but only in order to make him think. In this sense Desensitizer is a socially engaged project.