CIRCA Art Magazine - Summer 2002 - Are You Someone? Artists and the Art of Branding

After Warhol, Hughes argued, "nothing would be left in the sphere of art except its use as a container for celebrity" and as a result "the idea of the avant garde was consigned to social parody, the world of fashion, promotion and commercial manipulation." However bleak this vision of the Warhol legacy may be, the one-time advertising man's transformation into what Hughes termed "pure product" was (of course) part of the plan: "I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood," Warhol once said in one of his many endorsements of the US obsession with celebrity, "Everybody's plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic."

Such a stress on artificiality and on 'the discourse of promotion' has come to have special relevance to contemporary art, Warhol's understanding and manipulation of his own 'human brand image' having ultimately been at least as influential as his parodic treatments of mass-market imagery. Fredric Jameson has spoken of a "contrived depthlessness" in relation to postmodern architecture and this term, in the wake of Warhol, has tremendous relevance to current art practice, both in relation to the means by which artists respond to the exigencies of the mass-market and to the way in which artists have sought to exploit or even undermine their own potential as 'human brand images'.

The latter tendency has been identifiable in the work of the young British artist Gavin Turk since the earliest stages of his career. Turk's now infamous Royal College of Art degree show in 1991 featured an empty studio with a ceramic plaque on the wall stating "Borough of Kensington/Gavin Turk Sculptor/Worked here 1989-1991" - a direct attempt to construct a reputation despite the absence of any actual 'work'. This was beyond even the conceptual-art imperative of eradicating the 'object' in that this empty space alone was not being constructed as conceptually 'meaningful'; rather, the plaque functioned as a form of logo, the name 'Gavin Turk' becoming connected (before its time) to an iconography of artist myth-making and the marketing of heritage. In later works, Turk has sought to further this interest in playing with his own potential as a form of human brand by creating life-size waxwork self-portraits of himself in a number of familiarly iconic guises, ranging from Sid Vicious to Che Guevara. As Louise Buck notes, these works (which reference the pose of Warhol's Elvis Presley portraits) "play with and parody the way in which reputation is gained and status conferred, as well as our desire for artists to be heroes."

Sam Taylor-Wood; XV Seconds, 2000, installation for the facade of Selfridges, London; photo Stephen White; courtesy Jay Jopling/White Cube

Of course, some of the questions raised by Turk are not new - Buck even refers to his endless "representational recycling" and his "cover versions" of other artworks. Since Piero Manzoni sought to market cans of his own ordure, an idea such as 'authentic expression' (which is made problematic in Turk's practice) has, at the very least, been placed within inverted commas. Manzoni consistently challenged established understandings of authorship, mockingly 'producing' artworks through such radical acts as signing the body of a female life model (a 'work' given a feminist update by the Irish performance artist Amanda Coogan at IMMA's recent Marking the Territory event), but perhaps it is important to note how this interrogation of the viability of expression should be located within the context of art-world commercialism. Manzoni's work in this sense offered a premonitory glimpse of how at the end of the twentieth century artists would become "locked into a market structure that resembles and parodies that of the multi-national corporation," as Hughes has forcefully argued. What perhaps could not have been anticipated was the way in which the branding policies of multinational corporations can often be seen to resemble and perhaps even mimic the strategies of conceptually oriented art.

In No Logo, Naomi Klein's trenchant dissection of late-capitalist branding philosophies and the set-text for those wishing to be schooled in the thinking behind anti-globalisation movements, a convincing case is made for the emergence of a new attitude to marketing among multinational companies during the 1980s and '90s. At the heart of the paradigm shift documented by Klein is a move from products to brands, a move away from manufacturing towards the shaping of companies into what Klein terms, in a remarkable phrase, "meaning brokers." Behind this new approach lie any number of immediate economic incentives (including the 'downsizing' of a company's core business as production is farmed out, often to third-world subsidiaries) but perhaps more strikingly Klein argues that the added emphasis on branding offers potentially greater rewards, including the 'corporate transcendance' of a complete integration of branding philosophy into cultural and social space. In recent years, Klein comments, "a select group of companies has been attempting to free itself from the corporeal world of commodities, manufacturing and products to exist on another plane" - an extraordinary concept in the context of a discussion of contemporary art, given the extent to which the made object was removed as the centrepiece of art practice during the twentieth century. Substitute the word 'artists' for 'companies' in Klein's statement and we virtually have a definition of conceptual art.


Isabel Nolan; from Sloganeering, 2002, video stills; courtesy the artist

While there is a potential danger in overstating these strategic similarities, there can be no doubt that corporate thinking and contemporary art practice frequently become interwoven, with varying consequences. The YBA phenomenon, energised as it was by the Saatchi empire, is a case in point, with Damien Hirst in particular often being singled out for specific attention . One of Hirst's most high-profile applications of his own 'brand potential' was his partnership with the chef Marco Pierre White in the Soho restaurant Quo Vadis, a venture which was ultimately doomed when diners were found to lose their appetite when seated near Hirst's vitrines of dead animals. Eventually, the artworks were removed with Marco-Pierre White replacing the Hirst works with his own creations: "sub-Hirst decorations that avoid[ed] menacing or troubling the diner," as the Guardian's Jonathan Jones commented at the height of the furore. White's 'exhibition', Jones added, attempted "to keep the cachet of an artist...while getting rid of the nasty edge."

Perhaps it is to Hirst's credit that the physical presence of his works had an effect beyond 'the discourse of promotion', doing more than acting as a 'container for celebrity', even if all that was inadvertently achieved was the creation a mild disturbance among some affluent Soho diners. Much less, arguably, could be said of Sam Taylor-Wood's XV Seconds, her high-profile collaboration with Selfridges which involved the creation of 'the world's largest photograph'. In this 900-foot photographic frieze, which wrapped Cristo-like around the façade of the Oxford Street Selfridges store, Taylor-Wood updated the scenes from the Elgin Marbles, replacing the Greek Gods with a series of celebrity actors, models and musicians. This portrait of what Taylor-Wood termed "modern-day gods" (including Elton John, and actor Ray Winstone) was , according to Selfridges head of marketing Nick Cross, commissioned in order to "bring to the twenty million customers who visit Selfridges each year the excitement of public art on a grand scale," the work representing "the bravura and imagination of today's British artists." The logic of this statement seems akin to that of 'co-branding', a corporate principle identified by Klein as involving "a fluid partnership between celebrity people and celebrity brands." This concept perhaps identifies the ultimate interweaving of the corporate and the creative, a point at which we might believe, as Naomi Klein has suggested, "the lines between corporate sponsors and sponsored culture have entirely disappeared."

Yet possibilities for the establishment of dissident positions in relation to the hegemony of branding and the 'spectacle-commodity economy' (to borrow an old catchphrase of the Situationist Internationale) are consistently being sought. Examining the cultural and ideological mechanics by which the meanings of artworks are manufactured is an essential part of this project. Indeed, such alertness to the complexity of contemporary art's networks of production and reception characterises recent work such as Gerard Byrne's Why it's time for Imperial again, a multi-layered, deconstructive piece of film-making shown recently as part of the IMMA group exhibition How things turn out.¹ This work is, in fact, largely about brand identities, taking as its starting point a 1980s advertisement in National Geographic magazine for the Chrysler Imperial motor car. The ad's content, a staged or even wholly fictional conversation between Frank Sinatra and Chrysler Chairman Lee Iacocca - manifestly a 'partnership between celebrity people and celebrity brands' - is reimagined by Byrne as a discussion between two men walking through a run-down urban location, the original text's 'discourse of promotion' gathering accretions of darker socio-political significance in this new context. Maeve Connolly, writing in CIRCA, has referred to the way in which "conventions of display" become a subject of scrutiny in this work but she also identifies a No Logo-like subtext concerning "the displacement of manufacturing by the information economy."

Amanda Coogan; Madonna, 2001, from Marking the Territory: A Performance Event at IMMA, curated by Marina Abravamovic; courtesy Irish Museum of Modern Art

How things turn out brought together a number of artists who seem sensitive to the various ideological and institutional frameworks within which contemporary practice is located. For curator Annie Fletcher "the question of who does the interpreting and the representing is always to the fore," and among her selections were artists such as Eoghan McTigue and Isabel Nolan who have on occasion linked questions such as this to the various processes of the 'information economy'. McTigue's Something forever, for instance, shown at Belfast's Golden Thread Gallery in 2000, is a large-scale photograph of the electronic advertising screen which was once located at Shaftesbury Square in Belfast and is now installed at Windsor Park football ground. This empty sign, as Aaron Kelly has observed, "bespeaks something of the commodification of visual art, the subsuming of its artistic autonomy and integrity within an image-ridden and aestheticized postmodern culture." In viewing the image of the blank screen, Kelly argues, we almost expect images of commodities to suddenly appear, overwriting "artistic usage with economic function." Isabel Nolan's Sloganeering, a video work included in Perspective 2001 at the Ormeau Baths Gallery, begins with another blank space in which we are well used to seeing commodity images: the front of a t-shirt. Wearing a number of plain white t-shirts at once, the artist repeatedly scrawls across her chest defiant, sarcastic and often self-consciously contradictory messages. As the video plays at a comically speeded-up pace, we see Nolan write such statements as "I refuse to communicate," "I'm sick of perky slogans" and even "I fuck rich capitalists," her slogans becoming personalised versions of the logos, images and brand (or band) identities that regularly appear on t-shirts. The relentless production of attitude and opinion here is perhaps a mocking version of the way in which t-shirt slogans appear as expressions of individual identity while simultaneously implying subjugation to the forces of the market. As one scribbled message claims that she "will not make any more art about art," we can be sure that the concerns about identity and expression raised in work such as this have an 'art about art' relevance which encourages scrutiny of the role and persona of the artist in what Naomi Klein has termed our "new branded world.

Declan Long is a writer and Education Manager at Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, Dublin.

¹See review of Gerard Byrne's show at the Limerick City Gallery of Art in this issue, pp. 79-81 - Ed.