Laurie Hogin, I Can't Believe it's Not Butter!, 2006.
From the series: Allegory of Psychodemographics: Twenty-Four Brands
My Family Uses in a Typical Summer Day
Courtesy of Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art.

Branded and On Display

By Scott Andrews

Galleries 3 and 4, SMoCA
Through September 21, 2008

Branding: logos, slogans, trademark colors and patterns, and all the happy little ditties used in advertising, clamor for our attention but exist only to be remembered. In the grand worldview of marketing, the familiar is the real. Even when claiming otherwise by shouting “new,” “unique,” “original,” these happy little product road signs are posted like friendly guides throughout the global information flow. The rest of media is just “content.” The stuff we call art is made of the same materials, and sometimes by the same technicians, but has a different cover story.

Since at least the beginnings of Pop Art forty and fifty years ago, when artists like Andy Warhol made sculpture out of Brillo Soap boxes and Campbell’s Soup cans, Jasper Johns offered replicas of the American flag as paintings and Roy Lichtenstein painted blow-ups of cartoon imagery replete with Benday Dots (the pixel-like particles of color that are used in newspaper printing to create images), contemporary art has been expected to speak with a critical voice that questions instead of reinforces our assumptions about the world, pointing out—often with irony—our habits of thought to save us from a lemming-like plunge into the sea of consumerism and blind belief.

The irony of ironic art is that it uses the same tricks as marketing. Put another way, art—ironic or not—depends on the same devices as imagery used in marketing for recognition. By calling our attention to itself with the jarring mismatch or scandalous image, we, the viewers, remember the artwork, and if all goes to plan, the name of the artist, too, and count ourselves the lucky insiders in the know. When this happens, the result is blue chip, branded art that thrives in the auction houses and is safer than the no longer almighty dollar or hapless real estate as capitol investment. More often than not, the project fails. When the artwork’s message shouts like a public safety announcement, we get turned off until we find another art voice that lampoons the looser.

Organized by the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Branded and On Display was curated by Judith Hoos Fox and Ginger Gregg Duggan. Working as the team curatorsquared, with the nifty logo C², Fox and Duggan have had a successful run with this show, which has traveled from its home base in Illinois to Boston, Wichita, Austin, and Scottsdale. Like gross sales of soda pop or running shoes, such a tour proves success, rendering any comment moot. But why does this show work?

Like a good fashion show (both curators, not surprisingly, have covered the fashion world), there are ups and downs in the exhibit, winners and also-rans.

The Coca-Cola brand is featured twice.
Once, by Chinese superstar Ai Weiwei, whose Neolithic Culture Pot with Coca-Cola Logo presents an ostensibly ancient artifact seemingly vandalized by the familiar red logo, and again by Siebren Versteeg, whose Dynamic Ribbon Device shows a news feed from the Associated Press displayed white in the distinctive cursive script on patented Coca Cola red. Attached by the internet to the Associated Press RSS feed, it’s always up to date, making the pairing of the two artists something old and something new.

Laurie Hogin’s series of monkey paintings Allegory of Psychodemographics: Twenty-Four Brands My Family Uses in a Typical Summer Day would bore us to tears if we read the work only as a reduction of her family to clueless consumers, but is saved by the painting itself, which is simply fun to look at.

Hank Willis Thomas’s Branded Head, with a Nike logo Photoshopped onto a face-less shaved head, may align sports branding with slavery, but it succeeds because it is good graphics.

The inclusion of one of Haim Steinbach’s trademark shelf sculptures, One minute managers VI-1, in the show gives us a rumor of the inside track in the exhibit. Steinbach has been producing his always-the-same triangular shaped shelves out of plywood, (or rather, having them fabricated) for several decades. Topped, in this case, with medicine balls and stockpots, his work plays on the concept of the ready-made by keeping the artist’s hands carefully away from the making of the artwork. The laminated shelf is the brand, and like the seasonal offerings of a great couture house, always in fashion, even when temporarily eclipsed in the media by the efforts of younger talent.

Artists in "Branded and On Display" include Ai Weiwei, Conrad Bakker, Amy Barkow, Ashley Bickerton, Michael Blum, Louis Cameron, Diller + Scofidio, Terence Gower, Laurie Hogin, Pierre Huyghe, Clay Ketter, Ryan McGinness, Amelia Moore, Donna Nield, Haim Steinbach, Tempi & Wolf, Yuken Teruya, Hank Willis Thomas, Brian Ulrich, Siebren Versteeg, and Zhao Bandi.

Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (SMoCA)
7374 East Second Street
Scottsdale , AZ 85251
Tel.: (480) 994-ARTS
Web: www.smoca.org