DAVID JOHN ATTYAH

A BRIEF HISTORY OF OUTRAGE (2003) is an offset press, soft-cover book, documenting the first six years THINK AGAIN’s agitprop and public work. Upon its release, it was distributed by DAP.

The volume also contained additional, original conceptualist artwork - a series of photocollages culled from advertising images and documentary photographs. The Sample Series intends to provide the media context for many of the issues that THINK AGAIN’s work confronted. In the volume, each picture from The Sample Series appears opposite one of THINK AGAIN agitprop posters or public interventions.

Click here to see an archive of THINK AGAIN’s work.

Scroll below to see The Sample Series.

BOOK EXCERPT

A Brief History of Outrage includes artwork combining photography, design, digital imaging, drawing, and collage. Additionally, we provide photographic documentation of the work to illustrate how it appears in context. A Brief History of Outrage also includes a new series of collages, entitled Samples #1-11, which appear on pages opposite our work from the previous six years. Combining unaltered advertising images and documentary photographs, the collages mine the symbolic terrain of advertising and mass media and set these public languages against a radically different kind of imagery.

With the collages, we investigate how public images deploy explicit and implicit political content and structure the polity’s conception of civic life. Samples #1-11 also provide context to the topics that THINK AGAIN has considered; they draw from some of the most prominent images in our culture. For example, Target comments on gentrification, Altoids comments on hate crimes, and Fox TV comments on funding federal intelligence. Public images also capitalize on and manipulate private fantasies and fears, translating empire into lifestyle (Kenneth Cole), social work into bathroom tile (Ann Sacks), and conflict diamonds into intimacy (De Beers).

Of course, work that ignites a progressive political imagination must also contend with the opposing cultural institutions that try to encourage people to think and act conservatively, defend the status quo, and denigrate progressive politics. Samples #1- 11 expose how the mass media colludes in cultural backlash and how mediated images are enmeshed with the fabric of daily life. Finally, Samples #1-11 reflect an aspect of our larger critical project over the past six years: one that investigates correspon- dences between lived experience and represented reality, fact and fiction, and political process and mystification.

It is the nature of mediated culture to invert the scale of things, to make Calvin ads the size of skyscrapers and to insist that wars are necessary inconveniences. It is through creative acts that consumer culture translates everything into a commodity or market. And it is via acts of imagination that the political machine exploits fear in the service of empire. We are outraged at the super-The lights dim and the theater quiets as An Army of One screens before Eight Mile begins, Eminem appearing as himself.

THINK AGAIN dissents. A Brief History of Outrage attempts to restore things to size.