The Whitechapel presents a new exhibition of Swiss artist, musician, video-maker and graphic designer Daniel Pflumm, including the world premiere of new work, London, 2008.
Daniel Pflumm has been playing with advertising and corporate branding in his films for over 15 years. He takes images promoting airlines, fashion houses, banks and utility companies and edits them into a hypnotic repetitive stream, set to pulsing techno rhythms. Taking clips he creates montages that satirise expensive commercials and contain elements of both glamour and superficiality, while reflecting on the impact of the mass media on people’s lives.
The exhibitions will be on view through 9 May.
The Whitechapel showcases Pflumm’s new film London, 2008, alongside three other films, Questions and Answers CNN, 1997, Europaischer Hof, 2002 and Paris, 2004.
Currently under development, the new video, London, 2008, will mix footage from the G8 summit with car traffic, crowds of pedestrians and heavy storms accompanied by a new soundtrack, also devised by the artist.
Questions and Answers CNN, 1997, shows a series of loops with TV anchormen sitting in silence, captured between the frenetic exchanges of highly charged interrogations, accompanied by subtle electronic music.
Europaischer Hof, 2002, alternates images of colourful, runny liquids with those of circling toothbrushes massaging false gums and teeth, and clips of advertisements from around the world. Mixing indulgent sensuality with clinical austerity, the montage takes on an unnerving child-like quality.
Paris, 2004, shows a multitude of flickering logos alongside film clips of controlled explosions, cars on fire, commuters in Paris, shots of nature, which all ends with the camera man being arrested at the airport,
Pflumm corrupts Pop art’s celebratory aesthetic of mass consumption by deconstructing logos with computer-generated graphics, and removing typography to leave blank empty shapes. He operates somewhere between computer hacking and official computer programming, to manipulate existing codes churned out by the advertising industry to create his rhythmic sequences of images that become spellbinding abstractions. -- www.whitechapel.org
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