Shock and Awe
2003
Video, 00:29:41.
Materials: 4/3, colour, sound
Collection: Courtesy of the Artist.
Gianni Motti’s video work Shock and Awe appropriates an accidental live broadcast when President George W. Bush was about to announce to the American nation the commencement of war in Iraq as part of the wider ‘War on Terror’. The broadcast news channel EuroNews mistakenly aired the minutes proceeding the announcement, in which Bush is preparing, having his hair combed, rehearsing various serious and solemn facial expressions, then grinning at the people off-camera. His jovial and nonchalant attitude sits in stark contrast to the gravity of his actions, including the tenuity of his connecting of Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime with the Taliban and Al-Qaida in Afghanistan, and the fact the war was undertaken under the false pretence of supposed weapons of mass destruction held by Iraq. In this broadcast, we witness inadvertently the media mask having slipped off the real face of George Bush.
