Richard Serra

The videos this week made by Richard Serra were, in my opionion, very different from one another. The first video I watched was Boomerang. At first the constant echoing was interesting and I could see where he was going with this video but it soon became very hard to watch and I almost wanted to turn it off. The constant echoing made it hard to understand the woman speaking and what she was really saying. Taking it word by word, I slowly began to understand what this piece was trying to convey. The woman was talking about the details of her voice being repeated and how it affected her brain and the space around her. To me it was almost like she was a human television sending out signals which were her words and having them be repeated outside of her body, much like a television station and television set would do. It was also interesting to see how the echo affected her thinking process and what it made herself think about as she sent her words out into the world.
The second video, Television Delivers People, was completely opposite from the first one. This video had a huge political message as phrases about how the media have such a large influence on us as a country. It was almost ironic in a sense to read how the media has such an influence on us and is this huge propaganda factor in our lives and at the same time be influenced by these words that Serra is telling us. I thought the music choice was also very interesting. Serra makes a comment about how huge companies owns the media and I thought that the background music was very fitting. It was a contrast between jazzy commericial music and jazzy music you would hear at a fancy coctail party held by the wealthy, something along the lines as drinking martinis while you know you have control over the mass society.