VISUAL NOISE

The world around us is crowded with visual signals: signposts, traffic signs, billboards, neon advertisements, logos, street furniture. We ‘understand’ them because we know the street code, or we think we understand them because advertising’s frame of reference is our day-by-day acquaintance with its fleeting fashions. Actually, billboards and neon ads have nothing to tell us except that we should buy something – not really a foreground issue. Unlike public art, advertising does not rely on the viewer’s special attention; it is strident and pushy, allowing no opportunity for critical distance. To an ever-increasing extent its ubiquitous presence is defining our perception habits and thereby people’s expectations of a work of art in a public space they use every day. Notably, American artists have taken this phenomenon into account. The first to do so were pop artists like Claes Oldenburg, while in the eighties such artists as Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger deliberately resorted to advertising strategies in order to target a wide public. Interviewed about the apparent contextual independence of her work – from gallery and museum to billboards, stickers, picture postcards and suchlike and back again, Barbara Kruger answered: ‘Well, I don’t see them as separate spaces’, and asked if she thought they were indistinguishable, she replied: ‘No, no, I think that they’re different…’. However, in the same interview she explained: ‘But I think that there are those of us who don’t see themselves as guardians of culture. We hope for a place which allows for differences and tolerances. What we are doing is trying to construct another kind of spectator who has not yet been seen or heard.’ If two different spaces were not separate, it would probably be hard to differentiate them – and the spaces we are concerned with here certainly can be differentiated. An essential difference between public space and an art gallery is that the latter sells billboards at high prices because they are traded there as objects of culture. The hypocrisy of this argument is only too obvious: on the one hand Kruger regards culture as elitist and obsolete and expresses her criticism by leaving the cultural institutions and entering public space; on the other hand the cultural institution is accepted and its value-enhancing potential exploited for financial gain by the sale of billboards as objects of culture for high prices to an elite public. And it is in any case doubtful whether a few billboards can construct another kind of spectator in the thick of all that deafening visual noise.