Rod Dickinson and Tom McCarthy: Greenwich Degree Zero

At the Western Front until January 14, 2006

2On February 15, 1894, the Royal Observatory in London's Greenwich Park, the point of origin for global longitude and Greenwich mean time, was blown up by a French anarchist named Martial Bourdin. His act of terrorism spawned public outrage and intense fear about the presence of foreign anarchists in London. Bourdin's attack succeeded symbolically in "blowing up time" as the British Empire knew it, and had profound reverberations in security measures and policies of the era.

Or that's how it might have ended up. In reality, the outcome of the plan was radically different: Martial Bourdin succeeded only in unceremoniously blowing himself up, leaving the landmark building fully intact. Despite inspiring a flurry of articles and news stories, his failed act remains a historical footnote, an anticlimactic blip.

Greenwich Degree Zero, the studiously revisionist exhibition currently showing at the Western Front, considers the former scenario. Produced by U.K.-based artist Rod Dickinson in collaboration with novelist Tom McCarthy, the work presents "documentary" film footage and revised historical papers that imagine the effects of Bourdin's assault had it actually succeeded. The exhibition is the last in a multivenue series organized by local curators Lorna Brown and Jonathan Middleton called, simply, Set. In the context of the curatorial mandate-to "explore concepts of rehearsal and re-enactment and how they relate to social institutions"-Dickinson and McCarthy's reinterpretation of historical fact bears some uncanny similarities to our post-9/11 era.

The exhibition is introduced by a film work that "documents" the burning observatory building in the moments following Bourdin's bombing. The artists manipulate footage to present a plausible visual record. Using period costumes and a hand-cranked Victorian motion-picture camera, Dickinson and McCarthy appeal to a contemporary viewer's desire to see clearly the "ground zero" of the terrorist attack.

An archive of altered newspaper articles, journals, and images bolsters the film. The newspapers and anarchist journals of the time have been seamlessly manipulated to depict both an underground resistance movement and a society increasingly anxious about the terrorist networks in their midst. The narrative speaks to contemporary experiences of the dubiously supported "war on terror".

Dickinson and McCarthy straddle a line somewhere between truth and concoction, between history and the present day. The viewer enters a contested space-one where facts are obscured by the manipulation of media, and where a historical nonevent becomes a reflection of our own tumultuous times. The past, or the manipulation of it, is prologue.

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