Sean Snyder: Index

Sean Snyder: Index

10 February, 2009
by: Tom Jeffreys

What to discuss about Sean Snyder's exhibition Index at the ICA? Of the work on show, what to select to write about here? And what to omit? This is difficult both because I have a word-limit and because, as we shall see, Snyder's work is concerned with precisely these issues.

The exhibition consists of three video installations and several series of photographs. In the Ground Floor Gallery is the first video – entitled appropriately enough Exhibition (2008). For this work, Snyder has re-edited an old piece of Soviet propaganda that depicts a small village museum putting on an exhibition of Mexican art. The original apparently praises their efforts, but Snyder's version questions the effectiveness of both the exercise and the ensuing attempt to spin it. None of those who attend the exhibition seem particularly enthralled; something that repeated assertions of the brilliance of the work cannot overcome.

Let's leave aside the photographs for the moment and head upstairs to the two video installations – Casio, Seiko, Sheraton, Toyota, Mars (2004-05) and Afghanistan circa 1985 (2008-09). The latter consists of footage shot during the Russian occupation of Afghanistan during the 1980s. There's a scene involving Russian troops and native Afghanis dancing together that is so obviously set-up that it's quite entertaining.

So far, if I'm honest, nothing particularly grabs me. But the third video Casio, Seiko... is quite brilliant. The work incorporates still images and moving footage from a variety of sources – governmental, journalistic and amateur video – to provide an exploration of the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is not so much the conflict that interests Snyder but its (re)presentation.


Sean Snyder 'Casio, Seiko, Sheraton, Toyota, Mars', video installation 2004-05

The work takes in images of explosions and plumes of smoke of course, but the true focus is divided between the materiality of war – consumer goods, economic exchange, the brands in the title – and the relationship between the 'reality' of war as an event, and its simultaneous documentation as spectacle. And this is not simply a dichotomous relationship.

It's all tied together by the monotone narrator, who presents images and informs us 'The caption reads...' or 'The headline reads...' What we witness here in the ICA is not war: it is imagery. But the two are blurred: whilst the film exposes the mechanisms of photojournalism through quotations from textbooks and instruction manuals, the fact that many soldiers strap cameras to their guns suggests an interrelationship between soldier and journalist, between deed and documentation. What now is real? To some extent this is not new. Jean Baudrillard's The Gulf War Did Not Take Place made many of these points back in 1991, but Snyder's images make it more immediate than Baudrillard's words ever could.

I think what really interests Snyder are all the bits and bobs – what he terms the 'largely unseen spectacle of incidental props' – out of which we attempt to fashion narratives. And this is what the photographs downstairs look at. In war particularly, there is a barrage of things, a torrent of information that must be sifted and selected, if sense is to emerge. To this end, there are CCTV images, muted cartoons, fragmented close-up patterns, pictures of labelled CDs, binders, notebooks, film reels...  These represent the fall-out from Snyder's research, and yet the presentation of these artefacts in a gallery requires just the kind of selection processes that Snyder observes (and criticises?) in the work of the mainstream media.

There is so much more I'd like to say, but we must end here. To borrow a phrase – from I forget where – Index is concerned with the documentation of process and the process of documentation. The selections and omissions so often concealed are here made engagingly evident.

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Tom Jeffreys