Rick Poynor
Liberating the Billboard?
We are so accustomed to seeing billboards in the street that they are now taken for granted as an inevitable feature of everyday life. “No city street would be complete without them,” claims British advertising man John Hegarty of the agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty. According to this view, advertising is central to the purpose and meaning of a city street. If there were empty spaces where the billboards usually go, a street would in some crucial sense not be a proper street at all. Hegarty assumes that our intention in travelling along a street is not merely to get somewhere, but to expose ourselves to a continuous display of messages encouraging us to buy things. Our time, then, as users of this street, is not fully our own. At least some of this time is owed, in the form of our attention, to those who wish to use these billboards to persuade us.
In societies that pride themselves on their freedom, this is a remarkable state of affairs. If we push aside the dubious notion that billboards are as natural to a street as trees are to a forest, then some obvious questions occur. What gives advertisers the right to impose themselves on us like this as we move around in public? If we are free, then what became of our right not to be treated as a target audience day in day out everywhere we go? It is not even necessary to challenge the idea of advertising itself to ask these questions. Other forms of advertising, at least as it has been practised in the past, are much less intrusive, operating in areas over which the individual can exert a measure of control. You can choose not to buy a magazine full of glossy ads. No one is obliged to watch television and you can always zap between channels. But the billboard presumes to monopolise large areas of shared public space, cluttering the streetscape and blotting the landscape outside towns with its unavoidable appeals.
David Ogilvy, founder of the Ogilvy & Mather advertising agency, openly acknowledged that billboards were indefensible. “As a private person,” he writes in Confessions of an Advertising Man (1963), “I have a passion for landscape, and I have never seen one improved by a billboard. Where every prospect pleases, man is at his vilest when he erects a billboard. When I retire from Madison Avenue, I am going to start a secret society of masked vigilantes who will travel around the world on silent motor bikes, chopping down posters at the dark of the moon. How many juries will convict us when we are caught in these acts of beneficent citizenship?”
The billboard’s immense power to reach the public has inevitably made it a site of struggle. From the 1970s, beneficent citizens who resented the way in which a few outdoor advertising corporations were allowed to control public spaces began to answer back. They didn’t chop the billboards down, but they added messages of their own and changed the ads’ meanings, often using nothing more elaborate than a spray can. Later, these Situationist-like acts of détournement became more technically, conceptually and graphically sophisticated. The Billboard Liberation Front, formed in San Francisco in the late 1970s, created seamless modifications to roadside billboards using computer-aided design, Photoshop and laser-cut vinyl elements that were pasted into position on the ad. In 1998, the anonymous group of culture jammers targeted Apple computers’ “Think different” advertising campaign, which made use of famous figures. After a simple alteration, the Dalai Lama now advised spectators to “Think disillusioned”, while TV mogul Ted Turner proclaimed “Think dividends”.
These were acts of semiotic sabotage carried out in secrecy against the wishes of the advertiser and they survived only as long as the site owner allowed them to remain. But what if it were possible to rent the advertising space and create longer-lasting alternative messages for this most public of platforms? The work of Barbara Kruger is still one of the most striking attempts by an artist to use billboards in this way. In the 1980s and 1990s, with funding from art museums and foundations, Kruger applied a graphic format based on black and white photos and a consistent use of the Futura typeface to a series of outdoor projects aimed at car drivers, pedestrians and public transport users in locations such as New York, Minneapolis, London, Melbourne and Strasbourg. Kruger’s slogans had the simplicity, directness and impact of regular advertising copylines, but their messages were ambiguous and unsettling: “Surveillance is your busywork”, “We don’t need another hero”, “L’empathie peut changer le monde” (Empathy can change the world). Showing a perfect understanding of the medium, her work mimics and twists graphic conventions to produce images that are sufficiently “professional” in appearance to compete on equal terms with conventional advertising and even to overpower it when the two are seen side by side.
There are, however, some problems with this convergence of art and advertising. If artists can become more advertiser-like in their methods, then advertisers, seeking new ways to connect with a jaded public, can become more artistic. In the 1990s, Benetton’s controversial campaign, led by creative director and photographer Oliviero Toscani, offered probably the most extreme example to date of the blurring of categories that can occur when a corporation attempts to turn “artist”. Toscani liked to claim that there was no fundamental difference between what he was doing, showing photographs of a mucus-covered newborn baby or a dying AIDS sufferer next to a Benetton logo on a public billboard, and the commercial underpinnings of publishing and the contemporary art scene.
It was certainly the case that some fine artists were thinking more and more like advertising people. Would-be iconoclasts such as Damien Hirst made no secret of being excited by advertising’s social impact and its power to hold the attention of a broad audience, and they readily embraced the consumerist values it embodied and the mechanisms of promotion it employed. Hirst, too, took part in a billboard art project. His patron, Charles Saatchi, Britain’s most powerful art collector, is an adman and Saatchi’s tastes can hardly have failed to influence the artists who depended on his support. For publishing projects, Hirst chose as his design collaborator Jonathan Barnbrook, who worked on advertising campaigns in his early career with television commercials director Tony Kaye, another exponent of the idea that advertisements should be taken seriously as art and exhibited in museums. In 1999, in collaboration with Adbusters, Barnbrook created a Kruger-esque billboard in Las Vegas that carried the slogan by Tibor Kalman: “Designers . . . stay away from corporations that want you to lie for them.”
These interconnections are perhaps sufficient to give a sense of how confused this territory threatens to become. New York graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister’s billboards for Art Grandeur Nature 2004 in the Parc de la Courneuve, Seine-Saint-Denis, France (until 17 October) encapsulate this dilemma brilliantly. Where Barnbrook’s contributions to the outdoor project incline towards an unambiguous statement of his political position – “Autrefois on marquait les esclaves. Maintenant on est esclaves des marques” (In the past we branded slaves. Now we are slaves to brands) – Sagmeister presents images that leave viewers with a degree of freedom to provide their own interpretations. Where Kruger makes art that dresses in the clothing of design, Sagmeister produces design that wears the clothing of art.
At first sight his five interlinked billboards, showing a series of outdoor scenes, exude a sense of relaxation and contentment. They are fairly straightforward in conceptual content – the words combine to form the sentence “Trying to look good limits my life” – but they are realised so beautifully that they become compelling. The aim is clearly to encourage us to reconsider our consumerist preoccupation with appearances, but there is nothing confrontational or hard to assimilate about the imagery itself. It is all too easy to visualise similarly enigmatic images being used as intriguingly oblique advertisements for an insurance company, an environmentally-aware cosmetics retailer, a cell phone network. Almost anyone could identify with the words “my life” formed from cactus-like elements stretched on a wire frame in front of an empty football pitch. All the ad would need is a logo in the corner.
The growing art-consciousness of advertising means that any attempt to use the billboard as a medium for serious art simply plays into the ad industry’s hands. The more original and effective an idea is as communication, the more likely it is to be appropriated. In the process, distinctions between art and the hard sell become increasingly muddled. For anyone who believes that advertising is the art form of our age, or who thinks that there is no vital difference between the two, this will not cause concern. Everyone should be troubled, though, by the omnipresent advertising billboard, especially since the successful precedent that it sets is already sanctioning other even more intrusive forms of advertising. The Spielberg film Minority Report offered a vision of street advertising that used retinal scanning to produce customised messages for passing consumers.
While it is tempting to make use of the billboard as a public delivery system for art projects, and there have been some impressive examples, we know by now that these incursions are unlikely to change anything and it may be that all they accomplish is to endorse the legitimacy of the medium. The most radical course of action would be to follow adman David Ogilvy’s advice, take up arms against the billboard and lobby for their removal from our streets.
[This essay was written for the Art Grandeur Nature 2004 website and catalogue, where it will be published in French. Thanks to Morten Salling, curator, for allowing its use here.]
Jump to Most Recent Comment
Kruger makes ADVERTISING THAT DRESSES AS art that dresses in the clothing of design.
I was walking in the East End one day, and spotted Boxfresh's we are you campaign. My blood began to boil seeing the EZLN words twisted to sell trendy clothes. A step further and I was confronted by a Krugeresque poster wheatpasted on the wall, "We are slaves of the objects around us". The rendering was less sophisticated than what I knew of her work, so I was a little surprised, trying to figure out whether it was an art school project or not. Another step and another poster in an identical style "Selfridges Sale Up To 80% off!". I was stunned. I couldn't believe that a department store would stoop so low as to rip off one of the most well known graphic artists of our time. I couldn't believe the naivety of their ploy and was a little confused as to their marketing agenda. It infuriated me, and I ranted to my friends about corporations stealing our language and how we need to fight back and how I was going to write an essay about it and how I was going to deface all their ads and how Kruger should sue them....
And then I found out she actually did them. so what's left?
Any history of the billboard in America would reveal an unlikely opponent: Lady Bird Johnson.
The Interstate Highway System was built in the 1950s during the Eisenhower presidency. President Johnson and Lady Bird used to drive from Texas to Washington D.C., and the First Lady was distressed by the billboards and junkyards lining America's brand new highways. In 1965, her influence on this issue became clear: in the State of the Union address, Johnson stated, "a new and substantial effort must be made to landscape highways to provide places of relaxation and recreation wherever our roads run." Lady Bird was obsessed with this issue, believing that "a cleaner, more beautiful country could calm people and bring them together."
What is interesting is that billboards, just when post-war commercialism was reaching new heights, were not embraced like other forms of advertising. In fact, Lady Bird thought billboards were just another form of "pollution" — something the government should clean up and regulate. "Public feeling is going to bring about regulation," she told reporters, "so you don't have a solid diet of billboards on all the roads."
Over time, this concept led Johnson to add the Highway Beautification Act to his Great Society Program. As finally passed, however, the legislation was watered down by lobbying by the Outdoor Advertising Association of America.
That the Great Society agenda envisioned a nation free of billboards suggests the degree to which they really are a form of pollution — something to be eradicated.
While billboards were not eliminated near areas for "commercial uses," there are huge patches of open space in the American west where you can drive for hours without seeing an advertisement. Thank god.
Thank you for bringing this topic up. Since participating in a billboard project myself, I have been questioning role in which this operates in. As you point out it blurs the lines of designer/artist/advertiser to no end. But I am a little taken aback by the statement " we know by now that these incursions are unlikely to change anything and it may be that all they accomplish is to endorse the legitimacy of the medium".
Is it so wrong to legitimate the medium? Why not celebrate the medium as yet another place to insert one's voice. It functions the same as the poster on the telephone booth, street pole, busstop, construction site, etc. It's message must be quick and too the point, you can't write a book there. It's surface available to both the good, non-profit organizations with a cause, artists with a message for the good of mankind to the bad, those that they are voicing against. And once we recognize this, as those successful artists/designers in the past have, why not celebrate this. I say the more the better, even if the lines blur beyond recognition.
I have mixed feelings about the eradication of the billboard—at least in an urban environment. In reading this I tried to imagine a (North American) city/town without billboard advertising. In any old photograph I can think of there are still "billboard advertisements" in the form of painting on the side of buildings (and how wonderful it seems when a building is torn down to reveal the old advertisement for some long-gone product or store on the wall of its neighbour). Signage, mega-signage and advertisement are part of the urban environment, and have been for longer than most of us have been alive.
In fact, visual clutter acts as a clue to how close you are to "the action" of a city. The Ginza in Tokyo, Times Square, Il centro di Milano—in all I have seen some of the biggest, most obtrusive and fascinating advertising, and those places wouldn't be what they are without it.
Outside the city (and often as not, within it) the billboard is an abomination, but that's an issue of place and content, not medium.
Having said all that, I do wish that there were programs in place to give a certain percentage of space to artists. Renting billboards is insanely expensive, but if it were supported by the city I do think it's an excellent venue for public art. If everything you see on a billboard is not necessarily advertisement, then every billboard is open to question: What is it? What does it mean? And that could only be a good thing.
The Art & Subversion of Ron English
Marian's distinction between urban spaces and rural environements is certainly a fair distinction in this discussion.
When I wrote of Lady Bird Johnson and the history of highway beautification in America, the primary issue was protecting the wide-open natural environment from another form of pollution -- in this case, the visual pollution of billboards and junkyards.
In urban spaces, though, hasn't "visual clutter" become romanticized? I love Times Square as much as the next person, but isn't there a difference between the lights and action at the "crossroads of the world" and the gross commerialization of this urban energy? What happens when this vitality is totally the result of maximizing advertising impact?
When Times Square was being "redeveloped," Tibor Kalman was a great champion of keeping the visual chaos of signage, lights, advertisements, and billboards. What he feared most was that Times Square would turn into another Disneyland, with everything so controlled that Times Square would lose its rawness and chaotic urban quality.
A decade later, after mandating that every building and business had to keep the exterior lights and signage and billboards, isn't it still a little closer to Disneyland than anyone wants to admit? Isn't Times Square's zoning-regulated chaos a little like a planned community? Isn't it a designer's version of chaos?
I believe rawness is raw. I'll go so far as to call it authentic. There is nothing raw or authentic about Times Square any longer. It's an advertiser's dream: captive audiences captivated by the very energy of commercialism.
Very good essay, and very good comments. I just wanted to pass this link along. It's a 1960 Harper's essay that was reprinted in the great zine Stay Free.
http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/admap/howardgossage.html
"An advertising medium [is one] that incidentally carries advertising but whose primary function is to provide something else: entertainment, news, matches, telephone listings, anything. I’m afraid the poor old billboard doesn’t qualify as a medium at all; its medium, if any, is the scenery around it and that is not its to give away. Nor is a walk down the street brought to you through the courtesy of outdoor advertising."
I think it's an interesting essay/post and dead-smart comments, but as a guy who's bought billboards for myself and then also for my clients, I'm here to (respectfully) disagree. Simply, I wonder if it's not reductive to place "landscape" as some ur-condition which billboards disrupt... e.g., Rick Poyner's note that "they really are a form of pollution — something to be eradicated." Pollution? Of what?
Billboards are on the side of highways, for example. To portray billboards as a disruptive element in nature is to normalize the highway, power lines, and cars that support them (a kind of homeopathy described by Barthes in "Operation Margarine"). And ultimately, it's the loose volts and carbon monoxide that have far more pervasive and enduring effects on the environment. That's what pollution looks like, to me. The billboards are just at the end of a long chain of polymers.
What we're talking about here are systems. Billboards are the effect of capital and the production of value, just as highways (to get us to the landscape) are the effect of a complicated system of oil consumption and suburbanization. Why would you stop at removing the billboards, exactly? Is it treating the disease, or the symptom?
And if they're not on highways, they're in cities. To Rick Poyner's original point, that billboards corrupt an otherwise contemplative experience ("our time, then, as users of this street, is not fully our own") I would say that I live in New York City, man, my time on the street was never my own. There's architecture here and there, and architecture has something to say, and then there's all these other people, and then there's everything else that provides me with reasons to stay in the city.
"What gives advertisers the right to impose themselves on us like this as we move around in public" is whatever it is that gives architects that same privilege, or monument-builders. Or crowds. Protestors, even, and thank god for that. It's the street... it belongs to everyone. Including the advertisers. Including the artists.
My time on the street was never fully my own, and that's fine with me. I choose to live in a city, and the clutter is the benefit, not the cost. Walter Benjamin's romance of the flaneur is based on the pleasure of a kind of an exchange between the observer and what he called the "plethora of unassailable stimuli." He wrote: "for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite." I believe in that more than I believe in a journey from a to b carrying only my own ego.
You take all those billboards away, you limit also the essential opportunities for a kind of poetry, all I'm saying. I recall a three-story board for Modo on Bowery -- it stayed up for a year after Modo went bankrupt, and after the tech bubble burst. I think it was Weiden; it showed a bunch of beautiful people having a beautiful time. The headline read something like "Hunger for life is a lot like hunger for cheese fries." When it first went up, it made so much sense, somehow. But then post-boom, it telegraphed the hollow aspirations and satisfactions of the late 90s, like litmus paper cut into broadsheets.
I passed that abandoned billboard for years and understood it to be a Monument to the Bubble, and I was sorry to see it go. Poetry, is all I'm saying, I would have paid to keep it there forever, a false promise for a non-existent product. It beats naming an airport after Ronald Reagan.
--
Neither here nor there, I would also introduce Robyn Collier's work into the discussion. I'm not sure if it supports my points or negates them, and that's probably a sign that it's pretty good work. One of the artists who understands that erasing from the world is a valuable form of making a mark, he's eliminated insignia and "corporate media messages," like a David Ogilvy with Photoshop. Take a look, the page is sponsored by Anderson Consulting.
Apropos, I also just came across a photo essay on spacing.ca -- the intro, by Dylan Reid, (no permalink) reads:
photo essay
The Importance of the Poster
by Dylan Reid
Posters are an essential part of Toronto's urban landscape. A by-law that would greatly restrict postering was proposed to Toronto City Council in 2002, but it sparked widespread opposition and has been temporarily shelved. This photo essay is an attempt to explore the nature of postering in Toronto.
Yes, that urban rawness you're talking about is authentic. It's layered, grafitti'd, gritty goodness is 100% real. Las Vegas, Disneyland and Seybold can keep that Hollywood veneer.
____
Is it still true that Hawaii bans all outdoor advertising? Even soda vending machines are solid blue for Pepsi or solid red for Coke (no pictures or logos). But, I can't imagine San Francisco without outdoor advertising. In some ways it keeps the landscape fresh. But then again, I'm a fan of (some types of) grafitti.
billboards are no different than any other form of advertisement except that it is large scale and easily readable by a large centrally located audience. as with all advertising it is up to the individual person to decide whether an advertisement has and effect on them. it is our personal freedom that dictates what is influential and what is garbage, and this view varies with every individual. and for those who find the billboard's message too large, too overwhelming, and too inexcapable, then my suggestion to you is to not look up.
