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2003; the world watches as the space shuttle Columbia disintegrates over Texas; as Iraq is invaded for the second time; as the deadly SARS virus broke out and that kiss between Madonna and Britney. That was the year that was. Some of the most shocking front pages of the 21st Century and yet the thing about news and especially the newspaper that tells it, is that it’s so very quickly not new anymore. In One Year of the News, a piece first exhibited in 2004, Angus Fairhurst made use of six different newspapers from 2003 collected over the course of 52 weeks. The front pages of the newspapers during the course of one week were photocopied on top of each other to form 312 panels. The six newspapers weren’t mixed up, the stories weren’t discernible. Miria Swain: Obviously you couldn’t have possibly known what the news of 2003 would be, but when you first started collecting the newspapers at the beginning of the year did you know what form the work would eventually take? Angus Fairhurst: I had done some pieces before that were just a week or just a month of the news, so it was then a logical step to do a whole year. In making the piece, I was less concerned with the content of the newspapers, than I was with the idea that what would normally be revealed by the news, would instead be hidden by the process of printing the newspapers on top of each other. The piece was never going to be about specific events, it was more about the sense of how specific events are communicated, but also gradually covered up by the sludge of time. I suppose the piece deals with the transient nature of newspapers… the sense of things being forgotten. It’s kind of a memorial to forgetting as much as it is about the homogenisation of information. MS: I guess the process of archiving that material over the course of a year must have been quite an arduous task. Did you start off by designing a system, or did you make the work as you went along? AF: I was definitely interested in the idea of archiving ephemeral information that other people have thrown away, so the organising principle came as I was doing it. I wasn’t clear about the piece until I started to collect the newspapers, I was actually a little unsure about the idea, or a little bit lazy about it to start with, so I ended up scrabbling around later in the year for the few days that I had missed at the beginning… it’s difficult to find old newspapers once they have gone. One Year of the News, 1st January-31st December 2003, (detail)
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