University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

A selection of work

(USC Thesis Other)

A selection of work

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Content I
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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
A Selection of W ork
by Rita Reischke
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF FINE ART
i (Visual Arts)
!
August 1997
1997 Rita Reischke
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UMI Number: 1387827
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UNIVERSITY O F S O U T H E R N C A L IFO R N IA
TMC G R A O U A T C SCHOOL.
U N IV K R S m r HARK
LO S ANO K LK S. C A L IF O R N IA SO0O 7
This thesis, •written by
Rita Reischke
under the direction of kjsx. Thesis Committee,
and approved by all its members, has been pre
sented to and accepted by the Dean of The
Graduate School, in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
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A Selection of W ork
76 Tap*s 300 Narratives
Seventy-six audio cassette tapes used to record children’s accounts of the
1992 Los Angeles Riots, were made available to me by a Child Development
Research team. The tapes were made two days after the riots subsided. A published
article entitled: L.A. Stories: Aggression in Preschoolers’ Spontaneous Narratives
after the Riots of 92’ 1 defined the results of the research that the tapes represented,
statistically. Following my reading of the article, I began correspondence with the
research team, in hopes of accessing the taped narratives. During this
correspondence, I learned that in the interest of the participant’s (preschoolers’)
“confidentiality,’ ’ no individual narrative contained information that alluded or
pertained to the identities or whereabouts of those children interviewed. Although
j such information was not contained in the actual recordings, each tape had been
systematically erased, anyway.2 At my request, the research team offered these
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\ “blank” tapes (deemed useless to them) to me.
| 76 Tapes 300 Narratives was a site-specific work, situated in a vacant room
t
made available within the Special Collections Library, University of Southern
California, Los Angeles. The duration of the work, approximately one week, was
determined by one factor to allow each of the 76 salvaged tapes to play through an
installed sound and stereo system. Placed within existing glass-protected wall
cabinets, I organized the tapes according to the city name marked on individual labels
adhered to each cassette exterior.3 Usually, the cabinets within this particular private
1 Jo Ann Farver Child Development 1996, page 19-32
Society of Research in Child Development, Inc.
2 “We tape over them, or we run them through a cassette with record button on and
let them ‘record’ the air. But basically they are generally taped over or completely
destroyed, the tape itself is pulled out o f the plastic.” quote, Farver 1996
3 “Five other US Cities who had no direct exposure to the riots.” Cities included:
Los Angeles; New Jersey; S. E. Michigan; Calhoun City; Santa Clara and San Jose.
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room preserve, display and protect rare books and catalogues within the Special
Collection. Once presented within this specific site, a salient contradiction arises, fir
there really is nothing remaining on the tapes, which make preservation or care
necessary.
Certainly, a variety of institutions exist, such as a library house or archive, fix
the sole purpose of repairing and cataloguing damaged or aged material. There are
also, a number of organizations that compile data pertaining to objects and materials
that are lost, missing, destroyed or ruined.4 The National Archive in Washington, is
an example of one such institution, with the desire to organize and preserve, following
decades of the government’s neglect of its own materials. Visual documentation of
this neglect is available through a number of black and white photographs, all within
files at the Archive - the archival remains of what the present imagines itself to have
left behind. Before the construction of the National Archive in the I930’s, recovered
materials were located in attics, abandoned theaters, warehouses and the White
House garage, already damaged from fire, dirt or insects. The establishment of the
£
Archive is a reaction to a pattern of neglect and represents an attampt to replace that
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1 neglect with preservation. Many have (dramatically) asserted that information, in the
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| form of documents, data and Hies; are in dire need of preservation.
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Time and accident are committing daily havoc on the originals deported in our
public offices. The lost cannot be recovered; but let us save what remains...by
f such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of
I accident.
i
J -Jefferson.
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4 Examples include: City of Los Angeles, Document: Losses endured bv Store
Owners and Retailers in Los Angeles, due_to the L.A ..Riots.
Bureau of Tourism in Los Angeles, Document: Decline of Tourism in Los Angeles
following the L.A. Riots. An overview of Hotel Revenue Losses.
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Considering the issue of material and information preservation within
institutions, particularly within an academic environment, the Special Collections Site
proved a very appropriate location for the work to occur. In a sense, it was incisive for
the work to take place and remain situated within this “academic environment,”
(University and Library) yet removed from any direct affiliation with the Department
of Psychology or any similar designated departments or “establishments of
research.” As an example of specific information selection, the work questions the
factors determining what is consequential or insignificant and what portion of
information is to be conserved or destroyed. The work also questions the varying and
often contradictory cultural definitions of “private” and “public” that can determine
the form in which information will then be accessible.
The narratives were coded for length, complexity, overall thematic content,
characters in the stories, number of aggressive words and story outcome.5
. All audible information forfeited, each cassette tape, nonetheless, bore its
! original label, applied by the research team for identification purposes. As explained to
| me by the researchers, coded numbers signified the following: the individual child,
(name transcribed in code) the institution attended by the child, (example: daycare,
private or public school), location (city), sex and nationality. On any given 90 minute
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: cassette tape, there appeared to be an average of seven series of numbers
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I representing seven preschoolers. Not only does this code system meet the privacy
| and confidentiality requirements, enforced by The American Psychological
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■ Association; they also serve as abbreviations of the above mentioned information,
thus providing a system for the sequencing and exclusive identification of information
by those conducting the research. Throughout the article, this activity of transcribing
(spoken) information and data into codes is evident The numerous charts and graphs
illustrating the percentage of “aggressive words used,” are nonetheless unreadable,
s Introduction of article: L.A. Stories: Aggression in Preschoolers’ Spontaneous
N apalm s, after.the Riots of .92'
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due to the highly specialized mathematical system used to catalogue and dissect each
individual word within the narratives. Unfortunately, only four sentences from one
(unidentified) preschooler’s recorded account of the violence experienced during the
Los Angeles Riots, is reinscribed word for word within the article. How can there be
private things, let alone privacy to protect, in a situation in which almost everyth ing
around us is functionally inserted into larger institutional frameworks of all kinds,
which nonetheless, belong to somebody.
The article’s established intent, to analyse narratives for “aggressive”
language use, indicates one of the highly specific and selective rationales for research.
Specific, also, in its final deduction, the article concludes:
Children who had direct riot exposure had more aggressive thematic content and
negative outcomes in their narratives than did children who had no direct riot
exposure. There were no other statistically significant associations among the
variables.6
Examples of other types of “specialized” research as indicated by a document title,
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continue to make up the material for many of my additional works; The Ontario Birth
>
j Defect Atlas. Registry of Losses and Drowning rates for Alaska Natives and Non-
»
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j Natives bv gender 1988-92. to name a few. Taping the narratives of children in other
{
| regions within the United States, or seeking out only “aggressive” words, seem to
: indicate an outrageous arbitrary principle of selection. Yet it is precisely such an
| apparently logical disjunction that can point out the arbitrariness with which more
I
conventional formal or scientific organization precepts come to be regarded as rational,
and then natural.
6 Conclusion o f article: L.A. Stories: Aggression in Preschoolers’ Spontaneous
Narratives after the Riots of 92'
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censorship through silence
Findings of the study indicate that exposure to an isolated traumatic event and
acute urban violence influences' children's expression of aggression.7
I found myself recognizing the apparent absence and loss of personal
narrative, not only within the entire process of the research but more consequential,
within the erasing of the tapes. Furthermore, the irretrievable sense of loss was
evident through listening to silence as each tape played through stereo and sound
equipment throughout the duration of the work, (although at times, sounds and voices
were audible, yet almost completely incoherent). 76 Tapes 300 Narratives was a
display of material previous stored within an institution, serving as both a funerary
monument and an index of "official" secrecy, through erasure and power. In disclosing
the curious disregard findicated by the tapes’ erasure, in the hands of the research
team, the work begins to question formations of reality and validity. To an extreme,
; issues of instilled paranoia or notions of conspiracy arise, in that one may question the
$
nature of the inventory of information given, how much is objective classification
| verses subjective. Furthermore, to what extent are certain strategies more tied to the
j political objectives of psychology and research and than to a more general context cf
| an institution. As values and meanings are continually re-assessed, how do we
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| retrieve what is already lost? Does this gesture of retrieval and others like it, serve
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| to reproduce the structure that has for so long dominated Western Modem
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■ consciousness in which, trauma is manifested in loss, is addressed by the process of
j j concrete objectification - silence faced with narrativity, erasure with reinscription.
Concerned with presenting the unpresentable - that which is no longer
accessible, I coordinated efforts to play the tapes and have them be “heard.” The
tapes within the Exhibit together with the sound emitted from the speakers, cannot
7 L.A. Stories: Aggression in Preschoolers’ Spontaneous N arratives after the Riots
g j-9 2 .
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be viewed or listened to with complacency. A new trauma occurs in the suspension of
language and blocking of meaning through the voided tapes. There is trauma in the
very product, not only in the event itself, but a binding of trauma to representation.
The duration of the Exhibit, the one-time playing of the tapes, mimics the temporal
occurrence of the spoken word and immediate experience. That is to say, to redirect
attention back to the preschoolers’ and to each individual story or “narrative”
...already vanished.
disappearance
Since 76 Tapes 300 Narratives, material for my work has involved the
resonance of privation of information, at the hands of an institution, to one suggesting
actual human loss. The Anchorage Daily News. Alaska’s most read newspaper,
frequently reports on people who have disappeared. The sheer number of such
articles confirm that the harsh environment, weather and landscape, seems to result in
an abnormally high amount of "missing people.” For my work, the Anchorage Daily
News serves as an example of a highly public forum that creates a new form of loss
as it anticipates an audience - the reader and local citizen. The subjects of such
articles, including information regarding the “lost” person, (name, family life and
those who grieve) are supplied throughout designated spaces within the newspaper
itself. It is the event of being “missing” which has usually constituted the very first
mention of the person in question within the media.
Unique in its daily coverage, this visual and public information source creates
a system in which yet another type of disappearance occurs. In tracing the news
coverage of a “missing person” event, over time, it gradually reveals a slow
“disappearance” of any mention or information of that person. From front page to
page 2 to section C to page 22, inevitably, the story disappears from the newspaper
altogether. A created presence of loss occurs within the space of the daily newspaper.
It also serves a commemorative purpose, as the replacement of an absence with a
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presence. In this case, a temporary presence in the form of a printed notice. Public
monuments to victims of disaster have operated upon the belief that such a
replacement is indeed possible where the traumatic scene is ambiguous.
Registry of Losses
A collection of memory is limited by designated institutions and the criteria
they employ which privileges certain “angles” of memory, some elements to the
exclusion of others and so on. Thus memory becomes culturally organized in the
preferred likeness of those who posses the power to define the past. For the
individual, memory always involves a degree of intersection between the seemingly
irreducible immediacy of recollected experience and the tug of institutional sanctioned,
“official” memories.
The work Exposing Loss, included findings extracted directly from an
interactive list posted on the Internet entitled Registry of Losses. This registry was
| initiated by a group of health care and research members whose stated interests lie in
providing a forum for the public to contribute personal experience of a specific loss.
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| Anyone can submit their personal information regarding their loss. However, their
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\ information is subject to revision by the editors of the registry. This editing involves
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| determining a few select words and providing one individual line on the page, per
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; “loss.” The visual arrangement of the list - one line per personal experience - results
£ in numerous pages of information that appear repetitive and cognate. In order to
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- provide non-identity revealing data each line contains a selection of clinical or
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| scientific terms surrounded by the common word - loss. My work, Exposing Loss,
> augments the existing list, by altering the visual display of the information given, the
results being a lengthy video work documenting the activity of painting over all words
accept the words loss or losses. Over time, as incoming information is continually
added to the list, the activity of erasing and documenting, which constitutes the work,
continues.
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The computerized Registry of Losses puts a twist on our expectations. It
does not reveal the personally written memories of loss, which it had encouraged.
Rather than include the original language and forms of expression used, we witness a
series of words extracted from medical and scientific vocabulary, rendering the
information somewhat indecipherable. Here, one repeated word stands in for several
unique situations. Highly edited and transplanted, all specific references lost, the
viewer must supply their own interpretation. Exposing Loss provides another layer of
editing and in doing so, it accents the repetition of the words loss and losses. The
repetition of words, now removed from a variety of personal “stories” and experience,
probiematizes any process of remembrance over and above any attempt at recovery of
the faded and obscured lost words.
Through the fragmentation and shocks of modem life, the mechanical repetition
and haphazardly juxtaposed information and raw sensationalism of the mass media,
our immediate experience of things no longer forms a meaningful, coherent whole but
is rather a welter of fragmenting, unintegrated sensations • something simply lived
through rather than meaningfully experienced. As a document referring to personal
loss, individuals referred to within the Registry of Losses are provided with
summary features, no names given. The information appearing on the list, always
precise and obsessed with quantifiable detail, remains fragmentary and strangely
decentered. Instead, a sort of hypnotic mimetic identification is applied. This private-
to-public registry points to the manner in which the interpretation, representation or
reduplication of the event (real or posited) is inseparable from the idea of trauma. As
with the erased tapes, there is trauma in the suspension of language and in a blocking
of meaning. Furthermore, there is a yielding of identity to identification (of the loss)
achieved through the mechanisms of reduplication. The opening of a possibility cf
relations to others, also opens the possibility of disturbance in the mimetic
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identification at the expense of the subject and a violence in the name of a violated
self-difference.
Detect Maps
January 1997,1 began correspondence with the organization involved with providing
data for the Birth Defects Atlas of Ontario, all other Canadian organizations that could
potentially provide similar data; as well as every hospital throughout Ontario. All
current birth defect occurrences documented in Ontario, during the course o f this
exhibit, will be faxed here.
-Text included in Exhibit
The Governmental Organization, Health and Welfare Canada produced the
Ontario Birth Defect Atlas8, a document that features a series of twenty four
computer generated color maps9 of the province of Ontario. Twenty four birth defects
were selected for the study, those anomalies generally considered to have serious
health repercussions or cause serious disfigurement.10 The project represented the
first time in Canada (and possibly world wide) that an atlas had been produced to
examine birth defects in a systematic way at the county and municipal level for an
entire province. On the basis of an accompanying color chart (using culturally
instituted color symbology) all boundaries depicted on the maps are distinguished by
defined colors. Red and orange constitute “high risk” areas while cool colors such as
blue and purple, indicate “low” or “no risk” areas. The purposes of the maps were to
illustrate the spatial variation of birth defect rates in Ontario in order to facilitate the
detection of general patterns of birth defect distribution and statistically significant
risk ratios. No other visual or textual information, such as landmarks, city names or
street names, were included within the maps. They are devoid of detail.
I was interested in the Birth Defect Atlas in order to study the ways in which
maps preserve information; exploration of various aspects of cartography - maps as
forms of inquiry and discourse. Commonly, maps require distortion in order to achieve
8 Health and Welfare Canada
9 Atlas Graphic, Strategic Mapping, Inc.
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simplification. Dependent on the selective interpretation of information, there is an
inherent inaccuracy caused by the editing of a map. With the Birth Defect Atlas, there
appears to be no interest in including details such as street names, distinct regions,
land formation, etc. The goal is to contain the least possible information, arranged
unambiguously, permitting the reader to extract and generate an image. The
consequence of such simplification and distortion obliges one to recognize that an
interpretation must be made and understood as an integral part of the art cf
representing the “reality” we see around us. It becomes an experience of priority -
what should be included and what should be disregarded. The work’s meaning
incorporates the entire system that governs the dispensation and manipulation cf
mapping information.
Information concerning birth defect occurrences over an eleven year period has
been transformed into opaque labyrinths and vacant landscapes in which a surface cf
signs is entirely disassociated from its referents. There is something arresting, almost
| abnormal, in the severity of simplification of these maps. Read as an iconographic
I landscape of (absent) presences and missing bodies; the maps become a minor of
| material dispersed daily from locations across Ontario, received via fax machine.
| The installation, Defect M aps, consisted of a positioned fax machine and a
\ display of all maps appropriated fiom the Ontario Birth Defect Atlas. All maps,
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( L reproduced, framed and wall-mounted, corresponded with labels, acting as titles cf
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each birth defect. Only existing data comprised the work. I was not interested in
j !
altering any of the source material nor in disrupting the standard system in which
information is relayed.
A language of suspended delays, missed encounters, repetition, casualties,
resistance and reception is everywhere in this work. The fax machine emphasizes the
rise of an invisible network and material distribution. It constitutes a centrality cf
instantaneous textual information over the aesthetic (visual maps). The “normal”
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route of data, usually locked within the Hies and archives of the various (medical)
institutions, is re-directed into an entirely separate space: the art context space, as
well as a space that can be considered as geographically remote. The fact that the
information within the installation pertains to individuals outside the country
marginalizes the work internally and assigns it a semi-peripheral resonance.
Whereas the maps were created by permitting the disorder of past lived experience to
contribute to the project, the fax machine represents immediate, often up-to-the-
minute occurrences. Potentially, at any moment, an incoming fax may arrive. The fax
itself serves both as document as well as a trace. This one-on-one format of the fax
has decisive spatial consequence. Furthermore, it points to something real at the
other end.
"real time *
Promising immediacy and authenticity, the conscious choice made with D efect
Maps was to incorporate a process of documentation into the actual viewing space,
rather than removing the work from the spectator’s sense of “real-time.” 1 1 Since the
viewer’s space occurs in real-time, of which current events are a very real part, the
artwork becomes a means of extending human consciousness through documentation.
While the work sets up tensions between the spaces it addresses (Ontario,
Canada/Los Angeles, California or hospital/installation site), it also points to a
correspondence between them. The work transforms not only the material’s
appearance but its function from that of aesthetic to one of social context
Information arriving by fax reveals more about a certain lack or emptiness, in
its selection of included information, versus information purposefully withheld. The
“Real-time" as coined by artist Hans Haacke, exemplified in his work entitled
Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real Time Social System as o f
May 1971. Haacke’s fact-finding approach to an inquiry into the politically
charged relationship among individuals and geographic locations. The work
includes an exhaustive and systematically compiled survey o f one fam ily’s real-
estate holdings in lower-income neighborhoods in New York, an exploration of
dissembled images that reveals contradictions that exists within society.
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number and types of birth defect occurrences are documented, whereas information
such as dates, names, severity o f condition and at times even the name of birth defect
is avoided and substituted with an ICD - number code. All faxes omit any indication
of referring to an individual. The incoming flood of vague numbers and codes replacing
real bodies and real persons threaten to make both obsolete. As editors, those
sending the faxes exercise ideological control through the process of including and
excluding; in short, creating a predetermined meaning through the delivery of chosen
information. Within the maps, the occurrence of birth defect (which are normally
considered traumatic), are seized in a process of signification. Then precisely they
indicate - by way of code - which distances, sublimates and pacifies them.
ICD Codas
E Codas - Extamal Causas
Numbers that represent a code indicating a specific birth defect type appear on
several faxes Ih e coding of birth defects follows the Ninth Revision of the
International Classification of D iseases (ICD). The ICD is a system for the
classification of morbidity and mortality, based on the anatomical site affected,
modified periodically by expert groups meeting under the auspices of the World Health
Organization. Birth defects become a part of an ordered construct. The display within
Defect Maps adheres to the ordering of the maps (1 through 24), as presented in the
Ontario Birth Defects Atlas. Upon providing the maps, a space in which to be viewed
as a whole, a curious choreographing of defects, is perceptible. Maps 1 through 6 all
represent defects that appear on the top of the body - head, face and neck.
Methodically working down the body and limbs, the final map 24, represents the
defect occurrence that affect the feet: Club Foot. This priority and attention to
locations on the body suggest yet a different kind of mapping and ordering. In forensic
medicine, the body is considered as a kind of map, where the lines and scars are the
coordinates.
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The World Health Organization also supplies a second set of codes,
concerned with the body, this time the “external causes” effecting it. Defined by
Trauma Registry Coordinator, Martha Moore, the E-code system “describes the
mechanisms of an injury event.” 12 Unlike the serial numbers that are created for each
scientific birth defect name, the E-codes consolidate a basic selection of common
“mechanisms”, identified with non-descriptive and often foreshortened words.
Examples firm this extensive list include:
805.2 Rail, Pedestrian vs. Train
8053 Rail, Pedal Cyclist, Oth Noncollision
8103 Traffic, Animal Rider/Occ Vs. Train
840.7 Air, Power Craft, Parachutist, Take/Land
871.7 FB Left in Body During Removal of Catheter or Pack
884.1 Fall from Cliff
The words applied suggest a highly indefinite description of an injury event,
with much unaccounted for and left to the imagination. As merely registering the
efforts of a serializing epidemic, this list also suggests a loss of all sense of specificity
involving an actual individual and unique experience. Surely not all “mechanisms” are
I included. The curious inception of a system defining mechanisms directly causing
injury to an individual affirms the contingency that people and their experiences are
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j defined and conformed within representational processes, within networks cf
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• distribution within legislated spaces where the specifics of the event dissolves. The
entire description of possible E-codes is particularly interesting as material for work,
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I once again involving the appropriation of what is already “given” as pertinent
| information. The registry categorizes individual experience through systems that
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consist of indexing and retrieval of automated information. Designated subcategories
exist within the E-Codes such as:
Traffic, Nontraffic, Road, Water, Air, Place of Occupation, Poison, Acute, Sterile
Failure, Mechanical Failure, Misadventure in Patient, Fall, Weather, Accident
Drowning, Suicide, Assault and War.
11 W orld Health Organization
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This process of creating a limited set of categories seems to fit into the
epistemologicai desires and requirements of the public. Transcribing an event (injury,
traumatic or fatal event,) into a standard set of limited definitions, suggests a
narrowing and containing of personal experience. These codes are based on
exclusions and abstract divisions, difference pushed to indifference. Coded in a *most
abstract characteristic, the principle of selection that determines number and interval
is just as appropriately drawn from the realm of internal politics in that its material
exists in the desire of an imperious institution to exercise a global dominion of
scientific authoritative expertise.
blue ads
(work in progress)
The P fizer’ s AS&E 0450 Machine, advertised in American M edical Monthly floats
serenely in royal blue, neither hospital, patient room, nor radiologist lab, but rather
some abstract Space, the effect o f it own pure technical integrity.
The technologies of the late 20th century less and less resemble tools or
discreet objects considered separately from their surroundings and more and more
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| resemble systems intertwined with greater universal systems. In March 1997, I
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I began photo-documenting a numerous selection of advertisements appearing within
| medical journals housed within the extensive collection at Norris Medical Library, Los
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Angeles. I categorically sought out those advertisements that included a photo
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depiction (not illustration) of objects such as: medical tools, instruments and medical
\ equipment (machines and computers). Since medical journals generally cater to
| professional, medical practitioners (as consumers), an inexhaustible number of such
ads surfaced within each journal. Conspicuously, many of the advertisements
incorporate a strickingly similar and unique aesthetic sensibility. Consistently, the
object featured is illuminated or bathed in some shade of blue. Regularly applied
throughout the entire ad, this “unnatural” color choice saturates background spaces
or taints the environment in which the object exists.
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Perhaps this consistent use of color indicates an attempt to de-humanize the
situations depicted. The ads are generally emptied of specificity and of people.
Although the object is visible, its visibility is nonetheless limited. Again, such
consistent aesthetic choices discern an underlying desire to create some uniform and
“ideal” situation. Hundreds and thousands of these “blue” ads, suggest a subjective
control in the selection process, an accepted standard in how these types of objects
are displayed within the picture. Thus the photographs prove to be less the
description o f an object than the construction of an environment. Take color away from
reality and it all comes across as a documentation of the untrue.
One overriding factor in these depictions of medical equipment, is a
presentational technique of institutions through their medical tools. Simulation takes
precedent over the real thing. Within these ads lies an implied ideal realm cf
normative aesthetic quality, equipment and mechanics. The machines and tool
‘ advertised are directly linked to the body, are flawless, new and waiting, ready to go.
I
; They anticipate illness. These objects occupy a planar and frontal space, offering
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! themselves directly to the viewer. These medical products positioned in a somewhat
! ; faux landscape, which does not include a particular location or too distinctive a
| rendering o f place. Without a range of color, the portrayed locales, robbed of their most
| defining characteristics, become non-sites. The color and light obscures much more
!
| than it illuminates. If more were recognizable - if say, the spaces were granted their
I
natural color as light that permitted us effortless details - then these details would
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become backdrops for human activity. It is the space’s very non-specificity that gives
it its own “life.” The space is affirmed through its own negation.
This entire collection of documented ads has been forwarded to Jeffrey Roche
Advertising Agency, Canada. Equipped with computer and photo editing technology,
this advertising firm is presently working to remove the object from each photo
document. Appropriated and refashioned. Once extracted from all ads, (a graveyard cf
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objects) the surrounding color, design, detail, space and environment in which the
object was once situated, will remain. Because the ads offer more of a constructed
landscape and faux environments, created by superficial stage sets, than a view of the
equipment itself, these are not photographs of medical tools, but vacant images. The
process involves taking the theme of emptiness and absence and pushing it to an
extreme moment.
Finally, the objective of eliminating the commodity object yet retaining all
other visual information, is to reveal mechanisms of manipulation by isolating things
and accentuating their artificiality and arbitrariness in order to demonstrate that there
is no reality operating in these advertisements. Working with this material,
determined through the distortions imposed by the media representation or through
the act of representation itself, there is an interest in revealing not truths but untruths
or at least a greater awareness of the conditions o f representation.
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Bibliography
Farver, Jo Ann, Child Development, LA. Stories: Aggression in Preschoolers’
Spontaneous Narratives after the Riots o f 92’ The Society for Research in Child
Development, Inc. 1996.
Health and Welfare Canada , Birth Defects Atlas o f Ontario. 1992.
World Health Organization, Ninth Revision Conference, Manual o f the International
Statistical Classification o f Diseases, Injuries and Causes o f Death, Vol. 1. Geneva;
1977.
Sherman, GJ. The Canadian Congenital Anomalies Surveillance System: A B rief
description. Disease in Canada 1988.
Williams, Roseland, Notes on the Underground An Essay on Technology, Society and
the Imagination. Cambridge Mass. MIT Press.
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R ep ro d u ced with p erm issio n o f th e copyrigh t ow n er. Further reproduction prohibited w ithout p erm issio n .
A Selection of Work
by Rita Reischke
thesis advisors: Jud Fine
David Bunn & Margit Omar
This thesis paper accents several installation and site-specific art works
completed during the last year. It establishes my progression of aesthetic, artistic and
conceptual interests through detailed chronological descriptions of individual works. I
am working in artistic areas that include borrowing source material gathered from
medical statistics and codes, medical advertising and other forms of information
collection having to do with human misfortune. Furthermore, in presenting such
materials unaltered, (governmental document maps, “official” registry’s, audio
cassettes used for research purposes and disease and injury codes), I hope to reveal
that these materials all combine various conceptual dimensions in a manner that tends
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’ to obscure information.
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Asset Metadata

Creator Reischke, Rita Monic (author)

Core Title A selection of work

School Graduate School

Degree Master of Fine Arts

Degree Program Visual Arts

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag American studies,Fine Arts,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor Fine, Jud (committee chair), [illegible] (committee member), Bunn, David (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c16-16097

Unique identifier UC11342282

Identifier 1387827.pdf (filename),usctheses-c16-16097 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier 1387827.pdf

Dmrecord 16097

Document Type Thesis

Rights Reischke, Rita Monic

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA