Media Intervention
Content
The basic elements of the series Advertisement are scepticism about the value systems in the various fields of work and the inquiry about the ways of reception of visual and textual information, which legitimise and promote those systems. The essential doubt derives from the artist's reflection on her own work, i.e. from a value system determining the position of her activity in the society. If politics presents power and manual work is comparably powerless, then an economic field that surpasses the basic existential needs, like health care, nutrition and social security, represents an added value. Therefore sports (including automobilism) and fine arts can be interpreted as essentially equivalent fields. With both fields we are encountering a"beautiful« object that becomes an object of desire, whose market value is not set by material but, rather, aesthetic values. Despite this, cultural workers have a tendency to consider their own work as being outside the economic currents, as an exclusively symbolic activity. Due to many examples of such attitude, various fields of work are separated by strict social, educational and conceptual differences. One of the rare social locations where all of these fields meet is the mass-media. Consequently, the Added Value piece wishes to dislocate itself from the fine arts context and intervene into the mass-media, to relativize the divides between different fields of work and to treat automobilism and art on equal terms.
Realisation
Three media interventions in Novi list Daily (Rijeka) will occupy one third of the newspaper's page (260x380 mm). The intervention in a format of 260x125 millimeters will contain a textual and a pictorial part. The photographs will show close-ups and details of prestigious automobile brands. The text will be a mimicry of art historian topics with the use of automobile marketing terminology. The work will be published on the pages of three different editorial boards, which are not connected to culture or automobilism, i.e. the pages covering domestic and international politics and similar.
Technical description
Novi list, 3 editions, 260x125 mm (3 photographs and text: 200 words)
Collaborators:
- Photography: Jasenko Rasol
- Text: Ida Hiršenfelder