Josh Azzarella is an American video artist portraying his own country's historical documentation such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the initial bombing of Baghdad, and the 9-11 Terrorist strikes montaged as vignettes. This well known film footage is digitized to video and digital manipulation occurs making the images unrecognizable in relation to their original content schemes. Every single frame in the resulting video has been reworked by the artist to become an abstracted form in both visualisation and content display.

Clement Greenberg 1 claimed that "abstraction" elevated paintings to the highest point. If Greenburg could witness Azzarella's video abstraction, there would be no doubt the critic would even support this technological based practice. Azzarella's work reclaims the film into a digital paradigm, offering the viewer a new branded experience of pixels and color, thereby eliminating emotional predispositions and changing the "individual memory" into "abstraction". As Jean Baudrillard 2 suggests in his essay, "Precession of the Simulacrum", the semiotic failure of links between the image and what has been pictured offers the viewer four possibilities:

The image can be the reflection of a basic reality;
The image may mask and pervert a reality;
It may mask the absence of a reality;
Or it may bear no relation to any reality3

By Azzarella's reclaiming archival footage and historical memory the artist builds on all four possibilities proposed as by Baudrillard are achieved.

In discussing Azzarella's work, I will focus on the single video channel work "Untitled #4". The artist's process includes selecting historical event footage recognizable to the collective memory. Untitled #4 uses footage from the famous Abraham Zapruder film which depicts the assassination of President John. F. Kennedy. The Zapruder film footage has been reproduced many times given its subject matter in newspapers, books, the internet and film. Given its wide distribution, the film has become part of the American cultural fabric and collective memory. The source footage as Azzarella states "beckons the viewer to have an instantaneous gut reaction of empathy and grief." For this reason, this footage proves a solid choice to reflect on the constructs of a base reality.

As Baudrillard proposes, the next step is to mask and pervert this reality into a new subject. Azzarella's digital processing, manipulates layers of images, recursive frames to create a distorted time-based response from the original film.

Footnotes:
1 Greenberg was an active art critic who praised Abstract Expressionist paintings
2 Jean Baudrillard is a French social theorist influenced by Karl Marx and is famous for his investigation into hyperreality
3 Azzarella