advertising is dead.

May 16, 2010 by me | 1 comment

http://www.blogto.com/arts/2010/05/what_happens_when_a_streetcar_becomes_an_art_gallery/

derek flack put together a fine recap of the conversation he and i had while riding the streetcar last thursday.  he explores one of the key observations about the installation: no one is looking.  he muses that

Somehow I doubt that this is merely the result of apathy. On the contrary, I’d speculate that this refusal is demonstrative of a disillusionment with the standard fare of images and ads, a prevailing disinterest in the predictable corporate offerings.

many of us are fluent in deconstructing how advertising defines our cultural myths.  sometimes, advertising does it for us: the introduction of heavy handed irony into marketing has allowed us to create the idea of “the system”, an implicitly threatening yet nebulous entity that is eminently powerful but impossible to confront.  the corresponding search for cultural authenticity (i.e. the hipster movement) has stemmed out of the way that we’ve accepted this nihilistic irony.   but having changed the topic with an ironic shrug for so long, corporations no longer have the credibility to say anything to us honestly.  “open happiness”, “joy it forward”, “love what you do”, “i’m lovin’ it”: these ideas can’t fit with how we have come to see big business and how we’ve been taught to view advertising.  we’re left confused, and maybe even a bit hurt by the way we see ourselves reflected through corporate eyes; it is only natural that we turn away.

the key outcome of the 2008 financial crisis and the failure of the copenhagen meetings has been the first genuine exploration of whether a society can be driven by the profit motive alone.  big business, which has spent so much time and money mining the collective unconscious to discover “consumer trends”, can’t find a way to engage itself in the conversation without an existential questioning of its own purposes.   its voice is stuck in a quickly receding past: with nowhere to develop, it is dead, left behind, collectively useless.  a new message must rush into that vacuum that more accurately reflects who we are now.

if we are to discuss the true questions of our culture -  how can we react to our changing influence on the world?  have our choices brought about a better world?  how do we orient ourselves towards one another, especially as viewed through technology?  how do we prepare ourselves for a future of exponential resource degradation? – we must develop a language predicated on principles of sharing, truth, justice, and love.  i don’t know if my installation is the masterpiece of this new message, but i do believe it is a harbinger of changing times.  i think that’s something worth thinking about when riding the streetcar.

  1. carey’s avatar

    carey on August 20, 2010 at 6:06 pm

    Hola Jordan,

    I want to write and congratulate you on your funding, and wish you the best of luck striking out on your journey. Your project sounds really rad. I mostly just caught wind of it, and I was struck but how under-used KS is by or about Mexican things-people. Which is mostly another story, but I will bring it back around in a minute …

    What I liked about your streetcar work was the idea of giving a less media saturated view of India’s people to Canada’s people. While no lense and no photographer is unbiased, your work separates much of the politics from the situation, gives a new POV to Toron…ites?, and allows folks to view something artistic for a second, not is supposed to be newsworthy. Me late – a way of saying in Spanish I like, but literally means it makes me heart beat – all of this.

    I’m an American living in Mexico City at present. I would like to invite you here. I believe you’ve got your plans made already, but if you would like to walk down, it’s only around 1800 miles more, give or take. As you know, it’s a very politically charged act to walk across the Mexico-US border. As you travel south, I imagine that you will feel the influence of migration, immigration and Mexico more and more. I have not been to either place, but I picture LA and Tijuana as distinct places, but each as fused as the other, to the point that TJ feels as US* as LA feels Mexican.

    As a Canadian, you have the advantage of not being a US person* in seeing and presenting this. The same advantage can aid you in simply presenting my country photographically with little more distance.

    If you decide to come, I can arrange for you shows in art galleries, events where you can present and talk about your work, and workshops that you can teach. Work relative to US-Mexican personal relations would be interesting to folks here. Of course, work about the pueblo estadounidense (the everyday US people), would also be of interest to folks here, for many of the same reasons it would be interesting to folks in India.

    Anecdotally, I also wanted to add that there are many metro stations here which have galleries throughout their hallways. Photos are periodically shown, and often scenes of regular people, rural Mexicans as urban Chinese. Can’t promise anything like that but it doesn’t seem very unlikely either. I also thought you’d like to know that, although of course presenting art in a must-see advertising public space is very different than presenting images in a gallery, even if the gallery space is in a public space

    *In English we are lacking adjectives to describe things and people from the US. As the word American refers to all of the Americas, I decided to improvise.

    Best of luck and buena onda.
    Love, Carey

    PS My people are on the east coast, or I would offer you space. I highly recommend couchsurfing.org.

    PPS Maybe you would tell me to do it myself. That would be okay too!