apexart
held an open call, requesting submissions of a 30-second TV commercial
about us from individuals and collaborative groups. The commercials
are available for viewing on a public-access site, where viewers
were encouraged to visit and cast votes for their favorite. In
addition, all commercials were be on view as part of an innovative
living-room-style installation at apexart from January 9 to February
16, 2008. The winning entry will have their commercial aired on
network TV.
The exhibition was conceived to examine
creative practices in contemporary culture and to reconsider the
current promotional model of the art world.
Ad-Vice
Some many years ago as a young man visiting England
to meet the man who would in time become my father-in-law, asked
to properly explain myself… Well, it’s easy really,
nothing quite so shameful as, say, being an artist. Maybe even
more of a sham, but even out of the mouth of a spotty twenty-nothing,
there must be some authority and impress to proclamations of being
a well-published art critic and journalist. Speaking as we were
to an old British Adman, the response was casual enough to cut
me to the quick: “Oh, you mean the stuff they print on the
back of ads.” So long ago now it would seem odd to remember
this one rather polite and proper rebuff in a lifetime of humiliations
so clearly, save a recent reminder. In the fall of 2001, the economy
following the will of the people into utter panic, most of the
publications I write for (art magazines included) were fortunate
if they could count one third of their usual advertising pages.
With editorial space in commensurate constriction, already commissioned
work was reduced to little more than glorified blurbs and -- to
my surprise at least -- no one seemed to miss the great discourse
of ideas in the least. No, they missed the ads.
In time such hard lessons inform the pragmatism
that turns us into our enemies of course, but so too must we admit
that the view of fine art and advertising as oppositional forces
is perhaps a bit too easy. Now beholden to this realization that
most any address of popular culture is no more than reverse-side
ad copy, we too can accept the fact that the machinations of marketing
are as much a force of commission and consumption as any endowment-
equally pernicious and benevolent to all manner of artistic support,
institutional, private or otherwise. More than any other cultural
practice, it turns out, the avant-garde has never had a more attentive
audience than advertising executives. If ever artists come to
those grim thoughts of who cares about their efforts and why,
shouldn’t there be some small solace in knowing that the
emergent industry of post-war advertising has liberally and consistently
studied the visual and narrative strategies of the creative cognoscenti
for myriad tropes that have in many ways fundamentally changed
the way people see the world? Arguably, a number of tendencies
that first manifested themselves in the art world -- including
most notably Surrealism and experimental film -- have only gained
cultural import as their gestures have been coined into the broader
currency of pop culture ad spiels. And certainly as the oeuvre
of many of the top contemporary artists would indicate, for better
and worse this conversation has hardly been one-way.
Perhaps what those of who play in the minor leagues
of big time culture fail most to recognize is the actual role
of advertising. You see, we tend to think that they are all out
there to sell us something when in truth they are not in the least.
Unlike gallerists, ad people are not shopkeepers. They have nothing
to sell. Walking through a gallery district, or worse yet an art
fair, one cannot help but be struck by how close to shoe salesmen
most art dealers really are. Those who entertain and annoy us
daily with their pitches, however, are not actually asking us
for patronage -- they are rather our patrons. Imagine for an instant
the kind of reception you would get if you walked into the corporate
headquarters of say an Ogilvy & Mather, Saatchi, or Wieden+Kennedy
to try to buy something, be it sneakers, a bar of soap, or a new
car. Suffice it to say they have no desire to deal in goods. Thanks
to gift shops and cafes, museums today in fact offer a lot more
for us to buy than ad firms, which it seems are much happier buying
stuff. Even in sold-out shows or the studio of the hottest artists
there is usually something there for sale if you just have to
have something, so it’s a little bit disingenuous for us
to pretend some hierarchical authority over those more commercial
forms of enterprise.
If advertising is not there to sell us stuff, you
have to wonder what it is they actually do. Well, this lack of
understanding between the purveyor and audience is just one of
many irksome details that advertising and the arts have in common.
We each specialize in a service that is neither called for nor
particularly appreciated. Both visual artists and ad men offer
a product that is intangibly more than anything material, and
together they are in equal pursuit of sensations, emotions and
aesthetics that lie at some interstice where the object finds
its appreciation. For all we may strive to mine the profound,
ultimately our task is not so dissimilar to theirsimparting meaning
onto the meaninglessness of things. Let us honestly ask ourselves,
why do we hate them so? Perhaps it is because, albeit in ways
that might debase content rather than elevate it, we not only
do the same things, but also in measure of effect they are probably
better at it. What this ‘it’ is can migrate with the
necessities of market, culture, season or era, but in advertising
we must understand that the product is incidental to its position
in our imagination. Just like us, they are primarily concerned
with the subtleties and incidentals of perception. We similarly
hold the notion of objective truth to a scrutiny of ruthless subjectivities,
and I imagine this practice is what makes us such inveterate liars
all.
When advertising is good, as it can be, and works
well, as it often does, it doesn’t necessarily make us run
out and buy the product in question. Simply, it imparts desire
through the simulation of meaning. Artists today may be enjoying
a far more diverse palette of intentions than the ad topography
of need, greed and wanting, but I’d guess in terms of the
psychological spectrum, advertising hits more sites in the collective
psyche than we could possibly innumerate. Thanks especially to
politics; advertising is able now to really sink its teeth into
less product- friendly domains of hatred, fear and distrust. Much
like art as well, advertising is a mimetic tool that both locates
memory and manifests it. We all want to be remembered, this is
inherent to creativity, but more than that we need to remember
as our identity is purely a construct of our memories. For this,
for the jingle that runs unchecked in your head, that logo that
pokes your retina, and that slogan that sticks in your craw, thanks
indeed for the memories.
Carlo McCormick ©2008
This exhibition has been made possible,
in part, by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council with the generous
support of The September 11th Fund. |