The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Zippadee-do-dah, Zippadee-ay

VIDEO · 2004 · WITH MIKE PARR

A collaborative exhibition with Mike Parr (Geczy/Parr) at the Art Gallery of NSW about the present state of neoconservatism and militarism. The title is an amalgam of the famous work by Wilhelm Reich and the famous ditty from the 1946 Disney film, Song of the South, with all its questionably racist overtones.

This installation in collaboration with Mike Parr consists of two films, a sound piece, and a sculpture made of newspapers. The latter was a kind of scaffolded pavillion, a parody of Minimalist purism, made entirely of bound newspapers, the left-overs of what is destined to be incinerated or recycled. This object was linked to the yellow press and the partisan media, their ideas consigned to a crude object with all the words now lost. The footage is taken from an earlier performance of Parr, Save the Concentrations Camps, where he sat alone, his face sewn up, before a wall of text. One observing him there I was struck by just how pathetic - in the true sense of the work of inciting pity - a spectacle it was. So why not defile the sentiment? Not offer sentimental succour but prod the idea with the same callousness as neoconservative politics. I dubbed over the videos myself singing the song of being carefree and happy from a now very questionable old film which, among other things, consists of the notorious sequence of the tar baby. The net effect was a disorienting spectacle of the ugliness of a compassionless world.