art and ads and (possible) visual sampling
The composition above and left is Julie Mehretu’s Stadia I (2004) and the ad at left is for Absolut Vodka titled “Absolut Machines” (2008, Agency: TBA\MAP, Sebastien Vacherot art director and Laurent Seroussi photographer).
I happened to be flipping through Luerzer’s Archive online for the print ads of the week when i found this one for Absolut. I was struck immediately by the likeness it shared with Julie Mehretu’s work, which I had first encountered in Detroit Institute of Arts in a special exhibition in February 2008. Her series of Stadia images incorporate these kinds of freefloating geometries of color and ink and above palimpsestic traces of building schematics and floor plans and architectural renderings. Stadia I posesses a depth that the digital image above does not really represent, and the complexity of the forms beneath what seems like a glossy plastic coating is very important to the overall impact of the piece in the gallery. Mehretu’s representation of mass culture by constituting the cathedrals of sport into these deceptively forshortened compositions interrogates how we dedicate and consecrate and perform ourselves in our spaces.
With this work, Mehretu presents a very architectural piece with the drafting lines and the title Stadia I. The structure of place is drawn in overlapping diagrams and schematics though the overall solidity of the structure is more allusive than concrete. It is as though the artist applied a cubist approach to the definition of place shown here, and has captured an event’s motion as a temporal foundation of the stadium itself. The layering of the piece’s formal elements, too, summons memories of motion like the kinetic performance of Pollock. In that kind of work, the paint is more of a tracing of a performance rather than a static capture much like what we see here.
There are more suggestions of a fundamental temporality in play with this piece. The lines and blocks of color are reminiscent of sheet music, of the static representation of an essentially time-driven art form. The overall design, too, reminds me of a video instillation by Russel Hulsey titled Conducting Silence (2002) in which a conductor’s movements are slowed down allowing the audience to encounter the act of music direction as a kind of balance exercise or tai chi. In Stadia I the very structure seems to move and race and pulse, leaving contrails and tracers of color and line. Indeed, this composition seems to capture a performance through aggregate tracings analogous to the writing of music notation. The viewer encounters a visual language for movement and--perhaps surprisingly--can read it.
The composition of the Absolut ad seems to echo the formal skeleton of Stadia. There is a central pivot around which the riblike forms ladder into space and the machinery at lower right extends. The central figure is not a focus of the image, though, but a starting point. The visual intrigue of the piece rests in the repetition of forms into sinistral and dextral curves of repeated inanimate and mechanical forms, all of which lead the eye in a parade around the center in an effort to see what’s going on here.
What’s going on here? The copy of the ad reads “In an Absoulut world machines amplify your creativity” indicating that something creative is going on. At first, we can go along with this because so many of the forms swirling in the ad are inscrutable and the set design indicates a performance piece or a performance instillation in a museum. But on closer examination we see recognizable forms: glasses floating in the air, machines that look like paint-can mixers, one of the black dots being dropped olive-like into what looks like a cocktail shaker. As these images start making sense, we get an overriding impression of watching a bartender at work, moving swiftly through the performance of prepping a cocktail.
So the ad merges mixology with art and creates in the process the strobelike tracings of an act caught in motion, frame by frame in multiple exposure. A very clever piece of work. But this also seems oddly similar to the Mehretu piece. In reading the pieces, the similarities are quickly evident in the ways the respective compositions work as functions of performance measured out in time. Even looking at the pieces quadrant by quadrant, there are forms that echo too closely to feel accidental. I don’t mean to suggest that the designers of the ad used Mehretu’s work as a foundation, but perhaps some familiarity with her work influenced the willingness to experiment with extending performance in time using static visual media. In any case, the comparisons are instructive in reading both side by side.
i suppose I could also point up the similarities between these and Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-23), but lets leave this alone for now.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
