While you were at home passively watching TV

COURTESY of CHRISTOPH DRAEGER

Christoph Draeger’s “Black September” blurs fact and fiction to address media sensationalism.

By Kristen Peterson (contact)

Thursday, Sept. 10, 2009 | 2 a.m.

At the Fifth Street School auditorium, Swiss artist Christoph Draeger is delivering montages of titillating carnage, barbaric acts and natural disasters, merged with some of Hollywood’s best plane crashes and rampages.

The devastation, real and manufactured, is artfully merged to further blur the line between news and entertainment.

Draeger, cleverly, is showing us who we are as a society through the sport of news.

He surveys, rebuilds, re-creates and presents the spectacle disasters and how we interact with them in the media world.

The artist gives us something to ponder, a chance to step back and take a critical look at our love of spectacle, our demand for spectacle.

We tune in night after night. A car crash could keep anyone planted on the couch and satiated for a good 15 minutes or until some other tragedy comes along.

Television news, after all, is a business. There are ratings. Say what you want about the media, but ratings go up with disasters. The media are just giving the people what they want, and people want blood.

This is nothing new. Draeger reminds us that the appetite for disaster is deeply rooted in the human condition and points to the games at the Roman Coliseum as an example.

“We consume disasters,” he says. “We are waiting for them in the TV chair.”

That might explain the low turnout at Friday’s event.

There were only 20 people in the auditorium at the Fifth Street School. Sure, many of the people who normally would attend an event like this were at First Friday gallery openings.

But there are 2 million people living in the Las Vegas metropolitan area and that includes all those people who complain about the lack of intellectual stimulation and art.

Among the pieces Draeger brought to Las Vegas was “Black September,” a video re-creation of the deadly hostage situation at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, where media involvement had a direct effect on the result. Terrorists held captive Israeli athletes. The event was broadcast to the world. Terrorists watched the play-by-play coverage of an attempted rescue, giving them a chance to prepare.

His video “The Last News” is an over-the-top, in-your-face parody of 24-hour disaster news channel designed to feed our voracious appetites by giving play-by-plays of the decimation of cities around the globe.

“Big Ben has exploded!” the newscaster declares. “Wow! Would you look at that. Now again in slo-mo ... Empire State Building has been hit. It’s like a movie! America is under attack.”

Draeger includes scenes from 9/11 and movies such as “Independence Day,” “ConAir” and “Air Force One.”

The obnoxious newscaster’s presence goes from ridiculously annoying to heartbreaking as reception begins breaking down and the world has clearly ended.

It’s not subtle, but Draeger is, in fact, distilling this and other works from the millions of disaster images out there everyday.

Draeger is a respected artist whose work is in collections at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Kunstmuseum in Bern, Switzerland.

Draeger’s appearance was arranged by Alise Upitis and co-sponsored by the city of Las Vegas in partnership with the Contemporary Arts Center of Las Vegas and The Swiss Arts Council.

It was free and open to the public.

But it’s likely that a good chunk of Las Vegas was home on the couch, watching TV, mindlessly helping themselves to bad news, disaster and crime and numbing their brains with gratuitous violence with the push of a button.