Is it War or Is it Memorex?

[San Francisco]: Arch D. Bunker, [1991]. 11 x 17 in. Offset.

Including a comic strip drawn by Tom Tomorrow, this poster draws attention to the ways in which media reports may misrepresent reality - through underreporting of anti-war protests for example, or through their usage of the tightly controlled Pentagon-released footage of the conflict.

“War means that a huge part of our lives has just gone ballistic, out of control. Like the economy, it is a chaotic mess. The adroit Pentagon/CNN video barrage encourages us to consider this an inevitable, remote, and unstoppable condition. Which it is, as long as we remain glued to the tube.”

Arch D. Bunker was an anonymous artists collective that mobilized in the early 1990s in response to the First Gulf War. The short-lived group detourned and criticized the distant and calculating language of military officials, arms dealers, politicians, and corporate media pundits. Produced in the first decade of cable news and the 24-hour news cycle, these prints also brought attention to the distorted ways in which most Americans were being shown the conflict, on television - the spectacle of war.

Though there is little recorded information about the group itself or the artists behind the initiative, we do know that Arch D. Bunker grew out of Processed World, the anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist magazine directed at office workers, produced in San Francisco in the 1980s and ‘90s. Their pointed criticism of the mainstream media’s complicity in the everyday spectacle of modern war is prescient in the age of media overdrive, riot porn, and social media.