This has been transcribed from an photograph of the original - where the text could not be read - ?? have been inserted.
What follows is a description of some of the concerns that arise out of this project for billboards. (1)
Whatever means the Museum may use to establish their "value" these images on billboards remains a terrain between: in a misalliance which places them between the Museum and Advertising, both of which are channels for the distribution of commodities.
These artists were commissioned on the basis that their work has attempted to breach the tyrannical divide of popular culture versus the institutions of art. Yet the Museum's ability to keep the production of meaning under surveillance compromises these tactics by the very process of attributing Value.
The point of difference here is that these artists not only confront the Museum's Value but also advertising attribution of values. Advertising thinks it is the dream instrument for controlling and regulating the money system, yet here it is revealed as tremulous. These works are Janus-faced: one face challenging the art magazine, the other advertising.
It is this position that gives rise to a new terrain for a production or images
To occupy this terrain profitably (sic) the images must be aberrant in relation to both advertising and the Museum - to give value to the undervalued. Artists using the space of billboards in other contexts have addressed this undervaluation by attempting to produce a more adequate image of the real.
There are two problems with this kind of realism. Firstly that these conventions are just as easily absorbed by advertising as by the Museum and secondly its ethnocentric nature which always asserts the domination of the West.
It is a critique of the second of these which has informed an exhibition held in Paris during 1989, Magiciens de la Terre. (2)
Rather than focussing on the real it has addressed the spiritual and universal dimensions of a variety of cultures. It has resulted in compromised aims because these dimensions become universalised within the operations of the Museum. The problem is that magic and the spiritual become equated across cultures such that those which had a territorial basis have been collapsed into those that don't.
The magic and the spiritual in the West have long lost any such territorial significance, have de-territorialised and can only surface or exist in the undervalued, in a fetishised form, e.g. the occult.
Religion/theology (as opposed to religious mysticism) is an exception here and is the only recognised form of dealing with magic and the spiritual, for it re-territorialises some aspects of them — the containment that this effects explains the new-found popularity of religion.
In effect what it does is, make the spiritual and magic belong to "another word", e.g. the replacing of magic with the "miracle" exemplifies it.
The aberrant images by the artists in this billboard event bring the spiritual and magic back to this world (re-named of course).
Like the voodoo object they carry all of the marks of their culture without any traces of transcendence
It is because the elements in these images have been extracted from "other territories" such as tho??? photography, graffiti ... and are moved into the de-territorialised zone of urban space/the everything that they can be magical.
Submitted to the photographic techniques of mass production, cut adrift from any attribution of authorship and the impossibility of a unified subjectivity that this implies, they become a magic which we could re-name "Urban Voodoo". (3)
It is not magic-as-idealism which re?? advertising and the Museum are compelled to repeat, but a magic that suspends these reflected i??? in a de-territorialised zone.
That this work embraces such elements is not an idealised gesture of disembodiment from territory is a "fact" of living in Western consumer cultures.
Denise Robinson, February 1990.
Footnotes:
(1) This is a sa summary of a longer essay to be published in the catalogie for ADD MAGIC A Billboard Project
(2) Exhibition held at Centre Georges Pomdidou, curator Jean Hubert Martin.
(3) I owe this term and some of its implications for this text to Allen S. Weiss in his article, "Outside In, Some New Improved Anxieties of Influence, Art & Text, No 35