Video. 11' 27"

This is one of the first works in which Muntadas considers to analyze the language of the media, and warns of the need to read between the lines the information we receive from the media, in order to contrast the manipulation exerted by the lobbies that control the world of information, censorship imposed by the political classes and centers of power, and how content is prioritized in order to ensure that the population maintains the bases of the market economy.

About this work Muntadas write: "It's about fragmentation. How media — in this case, magazines ( People, Money, U.S. News & World Report ) and television — reduces information." Continuing his investigation into the process of reading/viewing information, he contrasts blurred television images with close-ups of printed words from magazine pages being turned. Reframed, the images demonstrate the media's ability to manipulate, limit and restrict information. The title contrasts the reception of a written text with that of a television text.

In this video in which the written word is transformed into an image and the image takes the body of an oral discourse, Muntadas invites us to reflect on the saturation of information devices that prevails in the today's world, on the homogenization of the speeches and on how the information, the publicity and the mechanisms of a capitalized world use the same gestures, supports and speeches to reach the public.

Watching the Press / Reading Television (1980-1981) is a kind of symbolic distillation of On Subjectivity and Between the Lines [both previous video works of Muntadas, on 1978 and 1979, around TV]. Under the ominous sound of the Marianne Faithfull’s "Broken English", we see various fragmentary images that refer to the experience of being a media consumer. We follow the camera as it moves slowly, in close -up, around the edges of the TV monitor, forcing our attention on the "frame" of the images that are transmitted. We see the covers of magazines like People, Money and U.S. News and World Report and close-ups of iconic advertising figures like the Marlboro Man. Looking over the shoulder of a reader who flips quickly through the pages of these magazines, we fleetingly glimpse familiar-seeming but not quite recognizable images and typography. From this rapid succession of individual pages and layouts, something like the generic graphic language of mass communication takes shape before our eyes.

Christopher Phillips

Architectures of Information: The Video Work of Muntadas (1996)