New Carriage

Dear Art-maker –

I was thinking about some of the problems you outlined in your  manifesto — “Nobody listens to me”; “I’ve lost the power to grip the minds and hearts of the public,” etc. — and they are bummers. I am being as honest as I can when I say that I feel your pain.

But maybe your poem, novel or surrealist dream-theater belongs outside of the gallery. What I’m saying is that maybe there’s room for a genuine art experience — a spark ignited in the mind of a single viewer — that occurs in the world of commercial circulars and coupons.

I am enclosing an excerpt from September’s “Angie’s Mailbag,” from the consumer-reviews aggregator Angie’s List. “Susan T.” writes:

The type of artwork mentioned above looks like this:

I am going to put on hold the fact that I think this might represent a real artistic triumph — the working artist, through the medium of a consumer publication devoted to reviewing house-painters and plumbers, unwittingly sends a message to a woman in Texas, and that message explodes in her brain like a nightmare — and am instead going to take this time to reflect a little about distortion.

If you are Susan T., you want to hire a plumber who looks like an adult human plumber. He should not “look like a fetus” or have “boneless rope-arms.” But I keep coming back to an axiom, probably flawed, that the more a work of art expresses its uniqueness, the more it will seem broken, wrong or distorted.

Furthermore: this is a good thing.

(As an aside, doesn’t the Angie’s List plumber seem like — that famous distortion — a Giacometti shadow?)

Notable Unique Artists hired to perform commercial work are often hired expressly for this skill — the ability to see wrongly — and I’m reminded of the Errol Morris commercials where a man’s head is framed out in favor of his blue-collar gut, or where the “natural subjects” of a rooftop party — attractive young people drinking alcohol — are instead seen in fragments or partially obscured by a chunk of steel.

I worked on a website once where a client balked at using generic photographs (ubiquitous) of well-dressed business people. The smiles and sartorial sharpness and non-insanity of the people, she said, was itself disturbing and unreal.

In any case we should be thanking Susan T. of Dallas. I can’t share her view, but who’s to say she didn’t have her fill that day of signal-disruption and expressionistic interrogation. Sometimes we want to know the world.

Which brings me to these last items of internet curiosity: Iconoclastic Artists Making Commercials. (David Lynch and the Coen brothers.) Which is wholly different from artists appearing in commercials. (Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol.)

All best,
M.