Richard Serra

Boomerang

Boomerang was a rather strange experiment. I was surprised the subject was so calm, I would have been very annoyed and frustrated after a minute or two. I could not understand what the echo was suppose to do at first, but then slowly I realized I hear the words differently, more individually than before. We tend to listen to sentence and look for a collective meaning. We rarely listen to a sentence word by word. However, in Boomerang the words were individualized and sometimes distorted especially the -ing and the longer words. As she said, this phenomenon draws our attention to the way we comprehend and apprehend words.

Television Delivers People

What struck me the most about this piece was the contrast between the harshness of the text and the jolly mood of Muzak. At first, I couldn't understand the choice of music, but then it occurred to me that perhaps Serra is trying to mock TV commercials that, as he argues, present their propaganda in form of entertainment. At one point, I caught myself tapping out the tune giddily even though I was simulatanously feeling some anger rise in me in response to the text.

I also noticed that midway through the video, Serra's criticism of the media expands to encompass the culture of capitalism as a whole. He accuses the shareholders of ignorance and the corporations of irresponsibility among other things. Above all, he sees the American people as products of this culture produced by corporations through TV.
I agree with Serra on most of his points where commercial TV (or advertising in general) is involved. I agree that TV has become a tool for manipulating the market. In a way, most of our needs are defined by the ads we see. So yes, I can see that Corporations are evil and we are their minions brainwashed by TV, but that does not make television inherently vile. I believe that television is a great medium controlled by some not-so-great people, a powerful tool that has fallen into wrong hands.

However, despite all that, I believe that there is such a thing as pure entertainment made available as a by-product of the dark and twisted profit pump that is commercial television. There are TV shows that are purely entertaining, some that are educational, and a few that are (god forbid!) artistic. In this way, TV shows are like any other type of performance art, except they are made available through selling ads not tickets. Moreover, I am of the mind that advertising is an artistic form of expression in and of itself, and perhaps I am biased in my view since I am persuing a career in that field, but I know this for sure, I am not the only one who considers Andy Warhol an artist.