The Athens (GA) Institute of Contemporary Art is currently presenting the exhibition Free Press in Free Fall. Curated by Allie Goolrick, a graduate student in the University of Georgia’s Grady School of Journalism, the exhibition aims to address the current state of the media in the United States. It features a number of US-based artists including, Kathryn Refi, Wayne Bellamy, Gary Duehr, Melinda Eckley, John English, M. Ho, Franklynn Peterson, Marie Porterfield, Phil Ralston, Hannah Lamar Simmons, Ed Tant, Jordan Tate and Michael Thomas Vassallo. These artists have each been selected for their topical focus upon our country’s news media. These artists (whose work unfortunately cannot all be discussed) address timely issues such as the status of printed news in the digital age, the over abundance of information, and the reality of omissions and biases in the media. Rather than declaring ‘the fall of the free press’ – which would be a dubious claim – these artists seek to understand and critique news media today. In this way, the title of this exhibition would be better phrased with a question mark.

According to the online catalogue (by both Goolrick and Artistic Director Lizzie Zucker Saltz) this exhibition asks whether digital media threatens the very idea of the free press in today’s society. As new media is unavoidably brought by globalization, many understandably lament the current proliferation of layoffs and financial difficulties of many local newspapers. Hannah Lamar Simmons’ work Newspaper Blanket is a decidedly nostalgic visualization of the decline of the news press. It can be read as a consummate expression of the familiarity and tangibility of the newspaper – furthermore as a part of our cultural fabric and the tradition of story telling. The installation is conceived entirely of newspaper woven into a ball of newspaper yarn draped over a rocking chair, placed alongside knitting needles.

Exhibit curator, Allie Goolrick, in collaboration with photographer Wayne Bellamy, examines the decline of traditional news media at a local level in a similarly reverent fashion, through the depiction of loss. An Echoing Emptiness presents digital photographs illustrating physical evidence of job loss and financial struggle at the Athens Daily Herald. These photographic images are alternated by quotes from well-known historic figures on the merit and importance of journalism in society. The gallery visitor is not only shown ‘emptied offices’, but ‘disassembled darkrooms’ that nostalgically point to the move from film to digital photography.

Franklynn Peterson’s photojournalism work from the 1960s and 1970s illustrates the darkroom approach to photography and its utility in capturing important historical moments and social issues. Importantly, Peterson’s photographic portrait of Marshall McLuhan from 1974 is projected as a 35 mm slide. The inclusion of this portrait begs brief address of what some art historical scholars determine to be our post-medium condition. Should we pay any mind to Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase that ‘the medium is the message’? If we do, it is certain to reveal that the multiplicity of outlets in which we receive today’s news reflects the globalization of today’s world. Globalization is both the determining force for the movement away from print and the defining context of today’s news coverage.

Athens artist Kathryn Refi, who received her MFA from the University of Georgia, critiques news from a traditional source. In doing so, she contributes her own unique take on the prominent theme of mapping, which has gained ascendancy in our contemporary period. The artist examines news radio in efforts to map the geographic location of news coverage and illustrate its incomplete nature. Refi’s All Things Considered marks the geographic location of the news stories included on the revered NPR program to which the artist tuned in for one hour every day for the entirety of 2007. Dots were placed on blank white paper (underneath which the artist temporarily placed a map for guidance) to carefully record the areas from which news was reported. The blank paper, which excludes national boundaries and territories left vast blanks – pin pointing the relativity with which we view the world. The catalogue points out that Refi’s work ‘condenses’ a year of news into ‘visually digestible form, making it apparent how much is excluded’ – unwittingly or not. Regardless of efforts by NPR and other news sources, coverage seems to be unavoidably biased and incomplete.

Despite the pains of transition new media must be seen to have many advantages, which include an arguably lessened environmental impact. Furthermore, its ‘grassroots’ character allows greater access and a more global audience as internet access increases. Anyone can ‘participate’ by commenting on online news paper articles while also blogging and tweeting their opinion. New sources such as podcasts, iReports and news websites emerge online, serving to replace and supplement print, radio and television. The contemporary individual can usurp traditional impediments and become a visible journalistic force. The new grassroots possibility of the internet news medium came powerfully to the fore on the Huffington Post, for example, during coverage of Iran’s recent election uprising. As traditional media outlets were banned from the nation, Iranian citizens submitted their own accounts and videos of events taking place.

In the context of globalization, information travels faster than ever before through increasingly complex and virtually instantaneous networks. Therefore, it is now more important than ever to question the source and integrity of the news we consume. Internet opens each of us up to a global network of ideas and stories – thus to the possibility of increasing awareness. While the possibility of new media is truly global, it is important that we do not overlook the need for an intellectual filter in order to discern what is reliable from what is not. Artist Jon English’sClassic Babel, investigates the over-abundance of information in today’s world. English places speakers that play all of Athen’s local radio stations inside of a visually classical column. Through speakers on the column’s facade, an indecipherable cacophony of noise is emitted for the gallery visitor.

English and other artists featured in Free Press in Free Fall choose to create work that is stark white. As the catalogue points out, this artistic decision can be viewed as representing or reflecting the concept of white noise, which is defined as the ‘”heterogeneous mixture of sound waves extended over a wide frequency range”‘. The omnipresence and wealth of daily news can combine to become ‘background noise’ that is too overwhelming to process.

Free Press in Free Fall ultimately demands that the gallery visitor approach news media with a critical eye. It remains at the Athens Institute of Contemporary Art through 8 November 2009.

Josh Azzarella Untitled #27 (Unknown Rebel) (2006), Video

Mark Moore Gallery has been organizing its annual Ultrasonic exhibitions for four years now, featuring emerging artists from the U.S. and elsewhere. This year’s installment, Ultrasonic IV: Fresh Perspectives, more subdued than its high-strung title suggests, seems to confront the present through the lens of the past, rephrasing visual legacies in a way that suggests nostalgia can be prescient.

It’s a fascinating trend: in a time when technology allows the production of slick, seamless images, artists return to the antiquated media of the past.

Josh Azzarella Untitled #46 (The Awful Grace of God) (2007), Video

Josh Azzarella’s videos, collages of grainy found and reedited footage, turn profound political moments into silent lulls. In Untitled #46 (The Awful Grace of God), just over two minutes in length, Robert Kennedy stands before a crowd that appears loyal but listless. Kennedy doesn’t ever speak – or, at least, he doesn’t look like he does – and the soundless, blurred film makes a melancholic moment out of something that should have been empowering. Though of course, in retrospect, any footage of Bobbie Kennedy is melancholic.

Tim Barber’s cinematic photographs, with their the-world-is-bigger-than-you-are presentiment, evoke 1960s Cinema Verite – they approximate in-the-moment truth except, once framed, truth becomes another form of fantasy. Barber’s subjects don’t acknowledge the camera. For the most part, their faces are obscured, directed away or literally distorted by a flash of light or suspended foliage. But in one image, Untitled (wrapped in plastic), a woman’s perfectly legible, pristinely made-up profile rests inside a plastic bag. Exaggerated yellows make the image look like it’s been imported from a past decade and the plastic wrapping suggest an attempt to keep a dead face picturesque. Does this attempted preservation act as a protest against immediacy? Or is it simply an inability to let go?

Tim Barber Untitled (pillow) (2008) Digital c-print

While Ultrasonic IV certainly deals with nostalgia’s heaviness, it also offers plenty of levity. Walter Martin and Paloma Munoz re-imagine the snow globe, taking sentimental keepsakes and making them sinister. As objects, the globes are kitschy as the real things; as narratives, they’re absurd and callous. Had the Coen brothers depicted Narnia, the result might have been similar: miniature figures climb through stony ruins, find themselves chained together in the midst of forests, nearly fall from cliffs, and use boulders to stomp one another into the snow. It’s winter wonderland gone terribly wrong.

Looking back, remixing and sampling are things art, like music, has gotten good at, and they’re things Ultrasonic IV does well. The urge to revisit what already exists makes sense; the world has so much information in it already (and so much misunderstood, overlooked information) that taking the remix approach seems economical.

Walter Martin & Paloma Munoz Traveler CCLVII (2009)

At the end of her novella The Dog of the Marriage, Amy Hempel wrote, “I see the viewfinder swing wide across the lawn, one of those panning shots you always find in movies, where the idea is to get everybody in the audience ready for what will presently be revealed” – Except that Hempel’s characters never really get past the panning shot, and neither does contemporary art. The lingering question seems to be whether we should keep anticipating the reveal, or accept that rear-views are the closest we can get to looking forward.