War (What Is It Good For?)
The selection of pieces for each show is forgivably arbitrary: it’s easy to imagine moving them around. Chris Burden’s massive The Other Vietnam Memorial (1991), which bears three million invented Vietnamese names etched in a dozen huge copper tablets hung from a freestanding Rolodex-like structure, belongs in “War (What Is It Good For?)” but is found in the more spacious territory allotted to “Life Death Love Hate Pleasure Pain.” You can imagine swapping the war exhibit’s eight affectless “Aestheticized Disaster” pencil drawings, which Jim Shaw copied from television screens and news photos, with Dennis Adams’s Patty Hearst: A Thru Z (1979/90), a Warhol-like appropriation of 26 news shots of the former Symbionese Liberation Army foot soldier, now in “Categorically Speaking.”
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Border works as a montage but is more rewarding as a narrative–the reflexive diary of an artist traversing a frightful landscape. And viewers who merely sample the video may well miss a title that occurs just once: “This is not a true story,” Rovner says near the beginning. That title is followed by another, “Israel-Lebanon border.” In an earlier version, a longer title stood in for the “true story” one: “The story, all names, characters and incidents portrayed in this film are fictitious.” But toward the end of Border there’s an extremely chaotic shot, lasting mere seconds, that captures an explosion, a burst of flame, screams, and soldiers’ bodies on the road. If Rovner’s title is taken at face value, it’s a scene that’s expertly faked.
