Critical Practice - Trimester 2
The challenge of other possibilities
The danger of being satisfied with working within the comforts of the familiar; therein lies mediocrity.
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The urban image of advertising, presented here in the style of billboard panels. The blurred and grainy effect reminiscent of Daido Moriyama’s ‘Farewell to Photography’ photographs
Moriyama, a photographer of the urban landscape, focussing on the authentic. His criticism of an ever consumerist driven post-war Japan, was that photographs in papers and magazines were not accurate representations of reality. His photographs were often blurry, grainy and out of focus.
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The empty or abandoned billboard undermines the function of the billboard which is to promote a culture of consumerism and sustain commodity fetishism. As such an empty billboard is a revolutionary statement simply by the fact of being empty.
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Photopolymer etch of billboard with advertisement removed. Disrupting the narrative of the billboard.
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A first use of the Off-set litho printer. What is interesting here is the ability to build up an image with many painterly layers.
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Both artists part of the noveau réalisme using décollage as a way of revealing the layers of imagery in advertising as a metaphor for the layers in society.
Mark Bradford manages to incorporate direct political messages into his work. The significance of his work is not ambiguous or open to much interpretation/variations in meaning.
Barbara Kruger disrupts advertising by using text and imagery used in an advertising format to subvert established norms. Use of text in this way is effective and has mileage.
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Removing the advertisement releases the billboard from its original purposes of stimulating commodity fetishism. But is art in its place simply a different type of commodity? In a Capitalist society everything is for sale and everything has a price.
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Replacing the advertisement with text which disrupts the advertising narrative is altogether more powerful and creates a dialogue between consumption and debt. A Capitalist society relies on the latter to sustain the former.
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By 1970, the boom of post-war development, housing and population growth had slowed. Ruscha’s title enthusiastically and ironically announces financial opportunities in a book full of desolate, ugly and remote patches of dirt and chain-link fencing.
The title of the work and of each image are deliberately factual. The titles describe precisely what the viewer sees. The use of a type-writer style font was chosen to mirror Ruscha’s style.
A half-tone image printed on acetate to produce a photo-lithography plate.
A half-tone image printed on acetate to produce a photo-lithography plate.
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Ruscha used photo-lithography for the production of his books. I therefore decided to do the same. Here, a photo-litho plate prepped for printing.
The acetates were too dark leading to underexposure and loss of detail. Too much ink also led to bleeding of the text.
Plate not dried thoroughly after wiping. Some water left on the plate resulting in poor ink adhesion on the paper.
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The four mono-prints each undermine commodity fetishism in some way. The irony of exhibiting these in the shopping centre is intentional!
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This didn’t scan well. I suspect the light blue didn’t provide a sufficient contrast with the white background.
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Printing the QR codes onto coloured Perspex and presented in a wooden stand. What is produced looks more like an art commodity. The anti-commodity only revealed on scanning.
Displaying them in a frame achieves the same end.
Displaying them in a frame achieves the same end.
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Brandalism website @ www.brandalism.ch
Stickers produced with the QR code and image. The intention is to stick these around the shopping centre, thereby taking the anti-commodity message out of the gallery space and into the shopping space itself.
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