Charles Burson: America Dystopia America

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Charles Burson

Image: Charles Burson. America Dystopia America (still), 2022. Color, sound, one-channel; 12 minutes

Bruno David is pleased to present "America Dystopia America", a video work by Colorado-based artist Charles Burson. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

Using appropriated contemporary images, (from newspapers, television, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and other online sources) tumbled, fragmentized, and granulated, Charles Burson seeks to evoke the threat of America becoming that fictionalized society portrayed in grand dystopian films and novels. Burson says “The foundation for such societies is dysfunctional government, teeming, violent and desperately poor masses and an overclass of wealthy, privileged, uncaring overlords. The events, divisions, and societal conditions of America’s Trump era, Covid, and until now, the Biden era, evoke the conditions of such a dystopian society. At the core of this is a collapsing national consensus in and of America, the disappearance of which promotes conflict, stagnation, deep cultural divisions, and a chasm of wealth and inequality.”

Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and cable are reshaping us and our world into one in which there are multiple truths and alternative realities. They are fostered and reinforced by the personal information silos into which we are herded and shaped by our media platforms and their algorithms. The screens into which we obsessively view are depersonalizing our interactions and corrupting our capacity to empathize. They are destroying our ability to hold and share a national consensus on what America is and should be. Opinion writer Ezra Klein articulates this phenomenon, in his recent New York Times interview with the author, Richard Powers.

The noisy grainy, distorted, and accelerated timeline is meant to disorient and create an emotional and disturbed response from the viewer. The intermittent ads are inserted for humor and to mimic the disruption and manipulation with which we are confronted every day. The soundtrack, a minor key arrangement of our national anthem by Robert Aslin, sets an ominous tone as it evokes the sad state of our nation and unites the fragmented visual images.

Charles Burson, born in Memphis, TN., received a Bachelor of Arts in political science from the University of Michigan, a Master of Arts from the University of Cambridge, and his J.D. from Harvard Law School. He was the legal counsel (1997) and Chief of Staff (1999) to the Vice President of the United States under Al Gore.