Richard Serra

After viewing "Television Delivers People" I thought it was a pretty standard piece of anti-establisment rant. The attitude and perspective presented are pretty stereotypical of that time. Using some pretty strong rhetoric, Richard Serra was able to put in a slightly apocalyptic undertones behind the Muzak playing in the background. Actually my favorite part of the video was the music. I guess he was trying to express the placidity with which we accept the propaganda spewing from our TVs, but it was kinda heavy. The whole railing against materialism, the tenuous grasp of basic economics; all of it could have come out of the mouth of a Berkeley hobo. The whole thing reminded me of Orwell's "1984", with all his talk of the "NEW MEDIA STATE". But even so, Serra's basic point of us viewers being delivered as products for the advertisers makes sense to me, it's just not as big a deal as he makes it out to be.

In "Boomerang", Richard Serra puts the focus and control in the hands of the woman pictured. The visual aspect is very simple, and could have just been excluded and made for an en equally interesting experiment. The video is by nature introspective, as the woman is listening to her own voice echoing in her ears. She plays with the echoes, and there is a very robotic quality to it, which reminds me of Daft Punk for some reason. Probably because they ARE robots. The experience is very otherworldly, both for her and for us, and it must have been a pretty disorienting experience. But this type of experience has the potential to be very philosophical, it could be a reflection of Serra's desire to replicate the effects of mind-altering drugs. But she seems like she's having a lot of fun, especially with the word boomerang. But although the video is interesting for the first few minutes, I couldn't help but think that this setup is something we might find at a kid's museum like The Tech in San Jose.