Sean Snyder
Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, UK
The ICA’s substantial ground-floor gallery contains a small collection of pinned-up photographic print-outs - the sparsity of Sean Snyder’s exhibition, ‘Index’, is striking. Further investigation reveals a film behind a temporary partition at the end of the space, two more films in the upper galleries and a series of prints in the corridor. Yet the initial impression is worth noting, for it complements the subject of the photographs: physical data containers from Snyder’s personal archive (USB sticks, dossiers, CDs, tapes and so on) and various found images (that span subjects, geography and time). The latter had previously been stored on the former, but are now digitized, with the physical containers destroyed (though conversely photographed). Sparseness announces a concern that is now integral to Snyder’s work: the dematerialization of information following the advent of digitalization. While by no means attention-grabbing, there are some interesting ideas to be found at the artist’s first exhibition in a UK institution.
Snyder’s work has previously investigated the ideological use of imagery by the media, governments and individuals, concerns that are continued by the films shown at the ICA. Casio, Seiko, Sheraton, Toyota, Mars (2004–5) charts the part that brand names have played in the ongoing Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. While the idea of war as a branding exercise is diverting, there is little here that wasn’t already covered by Jean Baudrillard’s The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1995). Afghanistan circa 1985 (2008–9) is a very short looped film of found footage from a training video for Soviet and Afghani troops, however, other than positing a 1980s counterpoint to the current conflict shown in its partner film, it gives very little away.
Considered alongside the body of work shown downstairs, these films are clearly case-studies in Snyder’s ongoing consideration of taxonomies. Just as broadcasting companies edit war footage to tell a narrative, Snyder sources footage from news agencies and assembles it into a personal archive to tell his own tales. Unlike the journalist, however, Snyder does not only use secondary footage: he opens out his working methods by presenting his own archive for public consumption. In doing so the artist moves the viewer’s concern from the overtly political natures of the films to a consideration of how belief and knowledge are formed by the structuring of information.
In destroying the physical manifestations of his archive, Snyder asks whether the proliferation of digital documentation will hinder or help future attempts to order and categorize present events. Where historians have previously arranged a number of primary sources into a historical narrative, will the sheer amount of recorded material, held in infinite digital code, propose a problem? Or will the abstraction of information create a bigger problem? It is a dry subject, but one that is worthy of attention.
Oliver Basciano
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