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‘There is a curious affiliation between writers and artists’, remarks a voice in the video Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y by Johan Grimonprez, 1997. ‘In the West we become famous icons while our books lose the capacity to transform and influence. Years ago, I was still convinced that a novelist was able to change a culture’s inner life. Now that territory has been claimed by bomb makers and armed men. They pressurize human consciousness. Like writers did before we became completely assimilated.’ 1. I don’t know if the artist ever had as much influence as the writer speaking in this quote from Don DeLillo; but the ambition was there. The twentieth-century avant-garde was especially eager to exert influence on a world scale. The revolution it desired had to be all-encompassing and in order to achieve it, human consciousness needed to be violently attacked. History’s hard-line lesson, however, was that the revolution was limited to the sphere of art where attacks are symbolic. At the close of the nineteen-seventies, some artists construed this to mean that art had to be traded, in a radical fashion, for concrete action against the establishment. Because in those same years, fledgling urban guerrillas like the Red Army Faction also sometimes dubbed their actions art, there briefly seemed to be a parallel in goals and methods.2
Although these paths have diverged since, and art is back on familiar ground, the avant-garde dream of influence and omnipotence has never entirely disappeared. With a degree of envy, artists have seen how, via the media, terrorists have succeeded in assailing human consciousness. This resounds in the response of German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen to the attacks of 11 September. He referred to the incident as ‘the greatest work of art in the entire cosmos’. Admiringly, he said of the terrorists: ‘Those are people who are so focused on one act, five thousand people are corralled towards resurrection in a single moment […] something we composers cannot match. Many artists also attempt to exceed the boundaries of the conceivable to rouse us and open up another world for us’.3 Stockhausen was compelled to swallow his words with ferocious alacrity. But one year after the attacks, his words were echoed by Damien Hirst, albeit less dramatically. He felt that the incident could be seen as ‘kind of like an artwork in it's own right’ and that, on one level, it was worth congratulating. But he, too, swiftly had to eat his words. 4. But his response is understandable: the images of the burning Twin Towers are etched into our memory in a way seldom, if ever, achieved by works of art.

    Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y is devoid of envy. With an interweaving of images from the media, home videos, propaganda and advertising, Grimonprez’ film is an inimitable narrative of the relationship between terrorism, political systems, consumption and the omnipotence of the media. The hi-jacking that is initially an amateurish and somewhat laughable enterprise becomes magnified and more maniacal as media attention increases, as if the sheer amount of images begs a higher bid. Ultimately, in Grimonprez’ vision, the image is victor: the testimony of two dazed tourists who accidentally capture the plummeting of a hi-jacked plane carries more weight for TV than the hi-jackers' motives.

The film not only makes the influence of the media on our consciousness visible: their implacable force, which hijacks us more far resolutely than any terrorist, is also palpable in the work. The gruesome images, historical fragments, obscure commentaries, commercials and bland cheery jingles keep you transfixed to the screen as proof of the medium’s puissance. With this piece, Grimonprez doubly tackled the impregnable bulwark of TV: he exposes its working and simultaneously succeeds in turning the medium to his own hand. In the end, his video was sold to TV channels world wide.