AFTER THIS UNCOMMERCIAL BREAK

At 4000 AD/ When science and art are entirely/Melted together to something new/When the people will have lost their remembrance/and thus will have no past, only future/…Then they will live in a world of only/Color, light, space, time,sounds and movement/Then color, light, space time/Sounds and movement will be free/No Music/No Theater/No Art/No/There will be sound, color, light, space, time, movement ( Stanley Brouwn  )

Nicolas Schoffer, lumino-dynamic constructions

And now a message from our sponsors.Call it feeding your head. Altering the message flow to the brain through infiltrating and subverting convention of the well-worn, market tested realm of commercial media. Call it alternative expressions of the relationships between time and space, or metaphors on vision. These subvert traditional linear assumptions on camera frame movement and its spatial relationships.”Normality is, more or less, a well-managed form of what is usually regarded as its opposite. Thus, sanity as a  kind of gentrified madness; madness not simply being an accidental derangement of reason but an essential, original possibility of human existence never fully overcome”. (Aaaron Shuster, Frieze Magazine )

Allan Kaprow (center, with beard) and participants in his “Yard” (1967), at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York.

Called advertising ”interventions” or ”interruptions”, they often depict, reflect and express the existential violence of the urban landscape in all its absurdity.Certainly, its a grenade toss, a metaphorical improvised explosive device at the reactionary cult-of-the-precious-object-in-the-gilt-frame mentality, which is the principal foundation of the traditional art game and its legions of museum wallahs, art-gossip mongers, forgers, fakers, phony art teachers, crooked dealers, greedy investors, culture hawkers, and innumerable other art et ceteras.

Takis, magnetically controlled

Its about questioning the notion of the accepted state of ”purchasing” the public sphere. That public space is a commodity to be bought and sold as a commodity and not integral to personal rights and freedoms. Public space viewed like airwaves or print media; to be cut, pasted and sold as rate per unit of measure. This invasion is violent. Advertising acts as a filter and channel between desires – those of the buyer and those of the seller – meeting in public space. The discombulation is sometimes termed fauxvertising, and is a semiotic attack on consensual reality. Regarding these interventions into the sensory auto-pilot, you appreciate  how blunted by convention and habit these encounters can be.

Jeff Koons, Michael jackson & Bubbles, 1988

” We Interrupt This Program”  exhibition brings us artists who have tinkered with that, ingeniously mimicking advertising to subversive ends, or creating interventions into the media flow that comment on or resist its compelling capacity for diversion, affirmation and seduction.This often done with comic effect, by breaking the flow. Conceptual representations that are or formed the base of television viewing before the medium became flattened and expanded. Other artists, like Los Angeles’s Chris Burden, copy the look of TV to subvert its authority, as he did in Chris Burden Promo (1976), broadcast intermittently in L.A. and New York. Here, he simply presented the names of famous artists in succession (Vincent van Gogh, Rembrandt, Michelangelo etc.) along with his own name, using a colourful balloon typeface suggestive of discount advertising. Placing himself among the greats, he razzes consumer culpability.

Alexander Calder, Moving Sculptures

That story is one of ambivalent conflict, summing up many of the problems and triumphs of the avant-garde: how it depends on and conflates promotion and meta-promotion, branding and meta-branding, not quite wanting to explode the systems onto which it ties deconstructionist bows. Yet, it still runs counter to the art gamesman’s dream of educating the masses to appreciate the precious object sort of art .There is nothing new in this. The Dadaists said the same thing almost 90 years ago; and the Neo-Dadaists, New Realists, Pop artists and so on ,  in spite of their protests to the contrary, have in effect simply carried on where the old brigade left off.

Benglis’s image does not document a performance so much as it enacts one, a performance of pornography that doubles as a brazen commentary on the marketing of contemporary art and the public exposure of the artist.The instrument in question was a large, cast-latex double-headed dildo that Ms. Benglis held defiantly between her thighs in a now infamous color photograph.The image was a self-portrait for which the artist posed nude wielding the prosthetic phallus, which became a form of feminist fetish object as art,and  sporting the obligatory sunglasses to cap the look. It was the historic , polarizing dust-up that ensued when this photograph appeared, in 1974, in Artforum, a leading modern art magazine of the time that is even more legendary. Ms. Benglis called the image a “centerfold” and considered it a work of art; others called it an advertisement. Others categorized it as pornography and unsuitable for an art magazine.Five of ArtForum’s art critics, two of which were women,  wrote an outraged letter to the magazine denouncing the ‘ad’ as an “object of extreme vulgarity” that “brutalized” both themselves and their readers.The Benglis ArtForum work confronted art world machismo, as well as feminist prohibitions against the sexual representation and commodification of the female body. It critiqued the contemporary art market and the public exposure of the artist.

Another example is Martha Rosler demonstrating the function of a juicer as if she were wringing someone’s neck:Rosler’s slashing gesture as she forms the letters of the alphabet in the air with a knife and fork, is a rebel gesture, punching through the “system of harnessed subjectivity” from the inside out.”I was concerned with something like the notion of Ôlanguage speaking the subject,’ and with the transformation of the woman herself into a sign in a system of signs that represent a system of food production, a system of harnessed subjectivity.”( Martha Rosler )

Semiotics of the Kitchen,

”As hard as I tried to avoid thinking of the art as evidence, however, there was no way to tune out the background audio from Martha Rosler’s performance video, Semiotics of the Kitchen, in which she displays and identifies various mundane kitchen utensils while speaking in a desultory monotone. The effect is that of being followed around by the voice of a sedated Martha Stewart intoning an inventory of functional domestic trivia, including a hamburger press, ice pick, and juicer. If you happen to be a postmodern househusband, you may think “been there, done that” until you glance at the video, notice the date (1975), and observe that Rosler’s way of demonstrating the function of the ice-pick is to make a weapon of it, stabbing the cutting board as if it were intimately connected to whoever confined her to this culinary prison.”

United Art Contractors

A stand out, though, is the series of ads by the man/woman collective United Art Contractors (Terri Helene Keyser and David Stanley Shire). Self described as ”minor conceptual artists” they humorously tackled careerism and corruption in the art world. This involved ruses such as ads in the back of Artforum magazine offering to pay for reviews, ”Rave review by well-known art critic $150,…bad review by well known art critic, $50…”. During the eighties, this pair of geeks of the bad-hair-and-glasses variety used commercial ad space to pull a variety of stunts. In Please Tell Us How Pretty We Look (Artforum, 1985), they offered to pay $9.99 an hour for friendship, explaining: “Our lives are filled with emptiness and desperate misery and we want friends. Its not that we don’t have enough friends. We don’t have any. Are you pretty, witty or wise?” they query. “Can you cook? We don’t want to be friends with just anybody.”Whipsawing between self aggrandizement and pathetic neediness, they mimic the language of the personals, and the curious windows onto human posturing and self doubt that they afford. ( Sarah Milroy, Globe and Mail ) No discussion on intervention and rupture of media flow can be complete, without a plug for the San Francisco based Billboard Liberation Front which is a group of culture jammers devoted to improving billboards by changing key words to radically alter the meaning:

Billboard Liberation Front

”Rather than debate the hydra-headed polemic on which forms of rhetoric and persuasion are protected, let’s just say that our minds and attention-span are a resource that will be colonized and exploited, unless we work to conserve them–and this is never easy. … Two that I favor I call fauxvertising and FSU-ism. In fauxvertising, an existing message is creatively falsified to reach a higher truth or deeper meaning. It takes an unacceptable sales pitch and turns it into a provocative statement. Instead of harnessing human desire to sell something one may or may not need, the idea is to identify what is really at stake, subvert the ad and jumpstart discussion about issues that concern all of us. Which is the last thing advertisers want us to do, have a debate or foster discussion.”…That means taking an active role in shaping the world in which we live. Socialization is supposed to round off the roughest of edges, or we would not be able to get along with each other. Public space should include areas in which the public can truly express itself, rather than just running around the hamster wheel of commerce at the mall.( D.S. Black, Billboard Liberation Front )

Ultimately, the genuine artist does not strive to be original, he or she is original involuntarily. Unfortunately, most people are inclined today to regard the artists use of unconventional materials, or tactics, as a gimmick. But the ”We Interrupt This Program” exhibit only undelines the fundamental way in which art of the future will differ from that of the present. Technology, new media, and what will come threafter, will be the art of an advanced technological age. The desire for motion in art goes much deeper than that of a few avant-gardists looking for a new toy to bring them publicity. Its the passion for motion that will probably prevail.

To those who believe that art is a substitue for something lacking in life, a religion, a sublimation of a desire that is not directly satisfied, it seems logical to suppose that  in an ideal world, art will wither away. That great pioneer of abstract art,and utopian ideologist, Piet Mondrian, expressed this when he said, ” Art will disappear as life gains more equilibrium”. However, if an artist can only experience something which his time and social condition has to offer, then tomorrow’s art will be vastly different from anything we know today.Obviously, the precious-object-in-a-gilded-frame concept of art will long ago have died and been forgotten.

That there are probably more easel pictures being painted today than ever before does not alter the fact that this form of art has been dying for 90 years. Perhaps the present vast quantity being vomited and belched forth is the mark of a death throe. Ninety nine.nine.nine. nine.nine. percent will be valueless in 100 years. The brush and paint tradition will have been played out and so will have the pop arts, and Pollocks, and Tinguely’s, Rauschenberg’s  et al. which will collect dust in galleries for eggheads, the equivalent of which would be today’s museums of paleontology or ethnology.