The Image-Go-Round

unpublished panel presention for The Media-Go-Round, Artists' Week, Adelaide Arts Festival, Adelaide, 1984
Times Sqaure (1980)

“Have artists being divested of the position as dominant image-makers in society?”

Do I detect a note of alarm in the gasping of this question? If the alarm is present as I suspect, then I can only reply with astonishment. I have never regarded an artist as having such a privileged position in society, and upon encountering this notion in this way, I am once again confronted with the bloated discourse of art history that informs our day to day perceptions of art.

Before we can even attempt to consider a dialogue between art and advertising, I think you should understand my conflict with the slanted subject of this forum. Artists Week in Adelaide will give a very different intonation to our discussion here from some conference in an advertising agency’s board room. Here today there feels as though there is an a priori context into which we are supposedly comfortably slotted. It is a context that combines beliefs that (i): an artist of today can be a dominant image-maker, and (ii) an artist of today should be a dominant image-maker. This is a context that would, I believe, be somewhat different in the advertising agency’s boardroom. Living in the murky shadows of monolithic art histories, the going assumption or violent belief is that there were times when the artist in society was a powerful force. But history is probably 99% mythological and 1% historical, and its application is often more ritual and critical. As we continually construct the past, present and future into a hierarchy of cultural levels (placing society here, galleries there, politics here, television there) even the most conservative of historical discourses in art would have to acknowledge the perversity of today’s venture in relating art and advertising this way. The two paths appear to have momentarily crossed, but their intersection—as eventful as it may seem—does not sufficiently highlight the differing journeys that led to this intersection.

Let’s take one step at a time, because not only do I strongly argue that the artist of today is pathetically ostracised from the integral flows of society, but also that the marvellous field of advertising is running hard to keep up with the proliferation of images that daily inform and reform the meanings and effects of visual communication.

The application of art history has a lexicon for the categorical structure of art mostly serves the survival of the artist. In all its liberal leanings the title ‘Artists’ week’ is truly symptomatic of such a critical neurosis. Presumably, we give a space and a place for the voice of the artist, historically muffled and strangled by his or her ideological context. Well, I don’t regard myself as an artist and have personally never believed myself to be one, so discourses about history or artistic creativity in this light have never felt particularly relevant to me. I have always found a good ad on TV to be more interesting and enjoyable than a lot of contemporary art I have encountered. As a result, my location is fixed in a place other than that of the self-professed artist. For sure I have my own problems—but they sure aren’t artistic ones.

The concept of a ‘Media-Go-Round’ nevertheless relates to a fairly prevalent interpretation of cultural activities spinning around in circles, locked into reconfiguration forces unseen, historically repeating themselves and effectively eradicating the specificity of differences that they hold within themselves. But I’m sure that as we might smirk here today at such directionless pursuits, I can hear them in the advertising boardroom being quite bemused by a similar state in contemporary art. The point to be made is that circular movement is too precise and structured a metaphor for what is a much more elusive sense of movement in everyday cultural exchanges. Nothing ever repeats itself in culture: it is only the mechanics of our vision that constitutes things in such a way. The uniqueness of the event of every cultural product (their manufacturer and placements) acknowledges the endless state of the Present so that our only recourse to articulating them is through endless speech. Be it the expressive painter or the pressured copywriter, both contribute to a flow of society and culture that can only be described as arbitrary. And while we argue over whether any exampled work by either is or isn’t so, the work itself has already been consumed by the mythologization of everyday life.

Enough philosophy for now, as we cut to this dialogue between art and advertising. Hopefully I won’t get caught in the crossfire of art condemning advertising as a bastardised craft paying lip service to consumer-oriented and market-dictated trends, abusing visual communication in order to seduce and manipulate. And let’s not forget the ricochets of advertising valiantly defending itself with the archaic metaphor of the creative process in brainstorming, copywriting and production, and of how advertising is a socially valid art form not recognised as such due to the realistic everyday pressures put upon it to succeed. Both arguments are prompted by hysterical reaction, and in their fury they miss the most important issues at stake. There is one basic issue that constitutes a major thread winding its way through many art forms, causing splits that result in hierarchical cultural layerings. If it can be summed up at all, it would between an art that seduces or manipulates, and an art that essentially communicates. There is the work that touches us and the work that bludgeons us; the work that moves us and the work that bulldozes us. But these views are only comparative, as any interaction between subject and object is an event mediated by mutual consumption and manipulation. For art to declare advertising as ‘poor’ art is as dumb as advertising bothering to ‘elevate’ itself to the (supposedly ‘other’) level of art.

It is however smart for art to recognise its own reflection in advertising. As time goes by, the communicative effects and the ideological structuring of art and advertising become more and more blurred as we—as subjects of culture—become more and more culturally saturated. As our societal discourses become increasingly self-conscious, our artwork more theatrical, and our mundane existence more artistic, the realms of Art and Not-Art are cross-fertilising, oblivious to our perception (all lack of perception) of the whole affair. In a sink-or-swim dilemma, we have to throw overboard our existing criteria for evaluating the arts, as paintings look like a record covers; jingles sound like records; films look like rock clips; and rock clips look like ads. And of course each and every iconographic element, stylistic gesture, historical quote and representational meaning is totally interchangeable. The articulation of difference has shifted onto another plane, echoing the type of shift that originally generated the sexual revolution through sexual confusion (“Is it a boy or girl?”), but which is now typified by cultural confusion (“When is that object not that object?”). These days, creativity is cheap and simple: from strains of contemporary arts that prompt us to get again cry “That’s not art!” to the replacement of barbers with hairstylists, to the TV series credit that says “Created by Aaron Spelling”. Children today been told that even when they brush their teeth are being creative. For sure, there is bound to be an incredible reaction in the future against this glut of creativity that relieve a lot of people out in the cold.

But this whole situation really is a false alarm, because as we panic over the lack of difference between art that uses media imagery and advertising that uses artistic modes and devices, both retain their uniqueness of contextual form no matter how much they assimilate one another’s surfaces. If ever there was a truer vision of total chaos, it would have to be a world devoid of Difference where everything was the same. But of course everything is different—even the exact replica or duplicate of the original is precisely that and not the original. The surfaces of cultural products may be fluid and interchangeable, but their context is viscous and not as easily transformed. For contexts to shift it takes more than simple arty gestures. That community mural is still art, and that incredibly artistic magazine cover is still advertising. Even though to some degree ‘context is in the eye of the beholder’, future art histories will most likely be telling us otherwise. The problem is that as confusing as all this cross-over work might be, it still doesn’t confound enough. Trapped in a mirror maze and continually fooled by our reflection, when our hand touches the glass we know precisely where we are.

If there is a question here relevant to current social states, it should be: have advertising people been divested of their position as dominant image-makers in society? Surely the most pervasive image-makers today work within the Pop music Industry. With the growth and development of rock/video/film clips over the past 6 to 7 years, there has been a notable transformation in the face of society. So much so that if you’re intrigued by the novelty of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”, then you’ve missed the boat, because the “Thriller “clip in all its grandiose pretentions of breaking new ground in visual entertainment in fact heralds a backward direction in film clips by attempting to ‘be’ a film rather than the appropriation of one. If the “Thriller “clip does occupy a position, though, it would have to be as an example of the most convoluted conglomeration of musical, visual and cinematic codes ever assembled into the one object: George Romero meets Bob Fosse meets funk music meets EC comics meets racial-image-integration meets The Blob meets MTV. And the guys a Jehovah’s Witness to boot.

In a period where Pop music is currently divesting itself of all its own subcultural icons, the advertising and film industries are picking them up like second-hand clothes, having New Wave-looking groups sell everything from milk to jeans to breakfast cereals. Whereas advertising used to be more obsessed with the history of the arts—churning out denim-clad Mona Lisas; depicting Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe as a barbecue; putting Romeo and Juliet in the supermarket and Mozart in the toilets—it appears to have been for the past two years more concerned with New Wave culture (which, incidentally, culturally pronounced itself dead sometime in 1979). But lets not forget, too, the endless pastiches in many a TV ad that hang their punchlines on the history of the cinema—from Dziga Vertov to Busby Berkeley to Chariots of Fire. Whereas the quotes from art history are more obvious, cinematic quotes work in more of a silent homage, usually creating a level external to the basic narrative of the ad that the film buff will catch on the fly. And whereas the advertising industry is economically and logistically locked in with the film and television industry, making every film director a potential ad maker (and vice versa) there is no plane of relativity between the advertising industry and New Wave culture—other than the former’s commoditization of the latter. Everyone thinks they know how to ‘represent’ a punk on television—but the punks are rolling on the ground with laughter at those very representations.

However, historical discourses can only ever deal with representations as artefacts, according their status as objects above and beyond the problematic and lost domain of their contextual environment. The youth of yesterday look plausible enough in the portrayals by Richard Attenborough in Brighton Rock, Vic Morrow in The Blackboard Jungle, and Steve McQueen in The Blob, to name a few. But I’m sure they were as embarrassing to youths then as films like Time Square and Starstruck are to me now. One of the most prolific get neglected workings in society is the transmutation of subcultures into mainstream culture, where the immediacy of meanings becomes fictionalised into fairy tales of visual communication. The desire here is not that subcultures retain their ‘original’ status, but that the cultural activities involved in this cross-fertilisation acknowledge the process of decay, mutation and rejuvenation involved here.

Advertising is a blind art—never knowing what’s coming around the corner, contrary to the notion of its awesome power. But art itself is blind anyway. Artists—from the sphere of what we traditionally and conservatively recognise as being Art with a capital A—too often sees things in terms of power and control, shifting their own delusions of artistic control and creative power onto the field of advertising. In fact, neither has such mythical abilities due to the broader cultural context of which they are both a part. Success of an ad—economically determined so—is just as much touch-and-go as the success of an artwork—historically measured as such. The advertising executive feverishly researches the effect of the ad, while the artist hangs out for public reaction via gallery exposure and critical coverage. Both attempt to organise the forum of their work as best to their advantage as possible, but clutching a rabbit’s foot could probably do just as much good. Image-makers are made by society itself, and society only consists of images made by the image-makers themselves. That is the centre of the ‘Image-Go-Round’.


Text © Philip Brophy. Images © Times Square.