It's a Mad, Ad World...

Today the opposite of tomato is 'Lost in Translation'


graphite/30x20cm
original source: ‘The Times’ 10/03/08

The appeal of this source photographic image, culled from a newspaper advertisement for men’s shaving foam, resided initially & most obviously in its incorporation of the old faithful modernist grid into its composition (see a selection of recent previous entries & drawings): in this instance the checkered background recalling something like Carl Andre’s floor piece ‘Steel-Magnesium Plain’ (once immersed in visual art, it’s impossible not to see it everywhere & thus be able to refer to it, to be living ‘the life aesthetic’).


Carl Andre ‘Steel-Magnesium Plain’

However, another pleasurable aspect presents itself: that of being able to appropriate into an art context an image from the world of advertising & commerce, & thus reverse the more familiar flow of traffic of this relationship. In such an instance, one might refer to the work of Richard Prince, who visually sampled newspaper advertisements as an act of ‘appropriation art’ & went on to rephotograph other particularly American consumer icons such as the Marlboro man , thus giving to them an ambiguous depth & unsettling, thought-provoking quality previously lacking.


Richard Prince ‘Cowboy’

Despite the acts of desecration advertising habitually, ritually visits upon images & ideas culled from art, I can’t help sometimes loving the dumbness & cheesiness of advertising images, the utter fatuous crassness of so much visual advertising, the fakery of the ideal world-to-be-aspired-to it strives, so hard in such a facile manner, to create, & this image provides a fine instance of such, not least in the sense of smug self-regard of the figure admiring his handiwork in the alluded-to mirror, etc. In the transcribed drawing, removed from the context of the product it is promoting & the lifestyle claims of the accompanying text, it seems even more absurd: this might be an aspect to be pursued…

All this seems to tie in nicely with the current TV broadcasting on BBC4 of the ‘Mad Men’ series, a thus-far (2 episodes in) interesting dramatic recreation of & peek into the murky depths (or perhaps ‘shallows’ is more appropriate in such a context) of the world of the 1960s Madison Avenue world of advertising, adding another note of topicality to this particular drawing.

And yes, I am aware of the irony of the ‘appeal’ (undeniable, sometimes) of images taken from advertising, given an innately critical attitude to the world of…
On a related matter, there’s an interesting article on the work of Richard Prince, particularly the comment upon how, acquired & displayed by wealthy collectors, thus commodified itself, such work becomes an advertisement for the brand-name of the artist himself.

Soundtrack:

Lambchop ‘Aw, C’mon’, ‘No, You C’mon’, ‘Damaged’
Belle & Sebastian ‘The Life Pursuit’
Sigur Ros ‘Takk’
‘Test Match Special’