Matt Keegan | 1996

Matt Keegan

1996

New York City, USA: Inventory Press, 2020

248 pp., 8 x 10.5", softcover

Edition size unknown

Published in November of last year, this Artist Book is a compendium of essays, interviews, photographs, magazine covers and other ephemera, all concerned with the year 1996. The interviews and commissioned writings attempt to reassess the 1990s, and the titular year in particular, which Keegan views as a pivotal moment in American politics. In addition to being the birth year of Generation Z, the year marks a key moment when the Democrat Party made an ideological shift to the right. 

Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, to devastating consequences. The 1996 Immigration Act laid the groundwork for the mass deportations that we see today. The 1996 Telecommunications Act "failed to serve the public and did not deliver on its promise of more competition, more diversity, lower prices, more jobs and a booming economy,” a 2005 Common Cause report concluded. “Instead, the public got more media concentration, less diversity, and higher prices.”

The public also got Fox News, which launched on October 7th, 1996. The station that hasn't merely shifted the dialogue, it's altered the language. "Fox has two pronouns, you and they, and one tone: indignation," wrote Megan Garber in The Atlantic last fall. "Its grammar is grievance. Its effect is totalizing." Last week the network announced its prime time hour will further minimize 'hard news' and increase the opinion 'journalists' that are the station's bread and butter. 

The cultural and political impact of the top-rated news network couldn't have been more clear than the last four years.“People think [Trump] is calling up Fox & Friends and telling us what to say,” a former producer on the show recounted, “Hell no. It’s the opposite. We tell him what to say.”

"Did you see George W. Bush’s quote about the coup attempt on January 6? “The violent assault on the Capitol . . . was undertaken by people whose passions have been inflamed by falsehoods and false hopes.” And I thought, “Are we supposed to read this quote and not recall that this person started a war, that is still ongoing seventeen years later, by lying to the American public?”"

[...]

"In 2016, I made a video called Generation that features my parents, siblings, nieces, and nephew all providing their definitions to a set of nineteen words, one of which is “American.” My father’s associations were “bullying, exaggeration, made up, there’s so many things all built up in a PR concoction.” I agree with him, especially in the wake of the white supremacist-led violence and theater of January 6.

At the same time, as an artist and educator, I have optimism about the collective work we have to do in opposition to the delusions of the right. It will take time to counter the damage of Trump’s presidency and the speed of online misinformation. This year feels like a breaking point, and there are a growing number of progressive and diverse voices entering public office and gaining traction in national debates on things like healthcare and a living wage. But in order to truly repair what’s been broken, the Democrats need to break with received wisdom of the last twenty-five years. Joe Biden has control of both the House and Senate, so let’s see what he and his party do with it."

- Matt Keegan, to Artforum, January 20, 2021