21c anxiety in the works of David Rosetzky
David Rosetzky creates photo-based, video and sculptural installations that deal with issues of identity and subjectivity in a global capitalist culture in which identity is commodified through media imagery, fashion and advertising. Rosetzky’s subjects often seem to be imprisoned by their own anxieties as they grapple with the futility of their own agency. As well as dealing with self-identity, the artist also focuses on interpersonal relationships and the problems that people have in accepting intimacy. His works probe the existential anxiety that haunts the postmodern subject in a world where globalisation promotes hegemony in a bid to erase difference.
Rosetzky looks closely at documentary, reality TV, fashion and advertising to analyse how these media construct images of self and other. The talking head of realist confessional TV recurs, as subjects face the viewer to tell intimate stories about their own lives and experiences. The viewer finds him or herself in the position of voyeur looking into the world of another’s anxiety. Rosetzky’s work acts as a kind of psychological probe that utilises the languages of popular and commercial culture. The aesthetic he favours is mostly flat but highly charged in terms of colour and there is often an ambient sound track that acts much like the white noise of advertising, prompting the viewer in unconscious ways.
Critics have often used the term existential as a way of describing some of these video portraits, however, the term is mostly used as an adjective. There is certainly a sense of existential anxiety as Rosetzky’s subjects meditate on their own failures to truly connect with others, but it is the ontology of existentialism that punctuates the work and makes it more complex and... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline