Abstract
This chapter turns to curatorial initiatives to bring art into mediated advertising spaces. A historical narrative of interventions in New York’s Times Square from the 1980s to the present considers how and if art can produce meaningful moments of encounter within an overwhelmingly commercial space. Beginning with Messages to the Public in the 1980s and concluding with Midnight Moment in the 2010s, I argue that these initiatives develop a kind of intra-spectacular practice that works within the shifting commercial screen landscape to productively point to its edges. Artists explored include Jenny Holzer, Pipilotti Rist, Jeremy Blake, and others.
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Notes
- 1.
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994).
- 2.
Specifically, “spectaculars” are defined as “large and elaborate, non-standard structures custom-designed to gain maximum attention through such eye-catching special effects” located in high-visibility areas. “Outdoor Advertising Association of America, Inc. > About OOH > OOH Basics > OOH Media Formats > Spectaculars,” accessed August 21, 2018, https://oaaa.org/AboutOOH/OOHBasics/OOHMediaFormats/Spectaculars.aspx.
- 3.
Siegfried Kracauer and Thomas Y. Levin, “Cult of Distraction: On Berlin’s Picture Palaces,” New German Critique, no. 40 (1987): 94.
- 4.
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, first Schocken paperback edition (New York: Schocken, 1969), 239.
- 5.
For a nuanced reading of Benjamin’s reading of the counterpoints of contemplation and distraction, and the role of attention in disrupting their related states, see Carolin Duttlinger, “Between Contemplation and Distraction: Configurations of Attention in Walter Benjamin,” German Studies Review 30, no. 1 (2007): 33–54.
- 6.
William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Henry Holt, 1890), 402.
- 7.
Thomas H. Davenport and John C. Beck, The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business, Revised edition (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2002).
- 8.
Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form, 3rd edition (New York: Routledge, 2003), 94–95.
- 9.
The definitions provided by the Outdoor Advertising Association of America are as follows (sampled): “awareness: the recalled recognition of an OOH [out of home] advertising message by an individual or audience”; “impressions: the total number of times people are likely to notice an ad on an OOH display” (these are divided into gross and in-market); “dwell time: the interval of time when a consumer is in close proximity to an OOH ad”; “message duration: the interval of time when a digital OOH advertising message is viewed”; “likelihood to see: the portion of the OTS (opportunity to see) audience who are likely to see an ad…can also be referred to as commercial audiences.” “OOH Glossary of Terms,” Out of Home Advertising Association of America (OAAA), accessed August 11, 2020, https://oaaa.org/AboutOOH/OOHBasics/OOHGlossaryofTerms.aspx.
- 10.
The OAAA responded to industry worries over increased zoning and regulatory restrictions by anti-billboard activists by establishing a self-regulatory body, similar to the development of the Production Code in the film industry decades later. For a full history of the controversies and battles over outdoor advertising and its relationship to the arts, with a particular eye to the context of New York City, see Michele Helene Bogart, Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 79–124.
- 11.
Billboards have been the site of significant critical public art, as illustrated in MassMoCA’s 1999 exhibition “Billboard: Art on the Road” and the billboard wing of the For Freedoms initiative organized by Hank Willis Thomas and Eric Gottesman to increase civic participation through public art. They have also been a site of collaboration between major museums and outdoor advertising groups, as in “Art Everywhere,” which ran in the UK in 2013 and 2014 and in the United States in 2014.
- 12.
Catrien Schreuder, Pixels and Places: Video Art in Public Space (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2010), 9.
- 13.
Dave Colangelo, The Building as Screen: A History, Theory, and Practice of Massive Media, MediaMatters (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020), 168.
- 14.
Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 115.
- 15.
Bennett, 127.
- 16.
These stipulations, including the minimum luminance requirements, required square footage of illuminated signage per linear foot of street frontage, and other details were first put into the zoning code in 1982. This code has since seen many amendments and revisions. City of New York Zoning Resolution, Article VIII: Special Purpose Districts, Chapter 1: Special Midtown District, amended June 28, 2018.
- 17.
Zach Melzer, “Screen Clusters: Urban Renewal, Architectural Preservation, and the Infrastructures of Urban Media” (Ph.D. in Film & Moving Image Studies, Montréal, Québec, Canada, Concordia University, 2019), 65.
- 18.
Philip H. Dougherty, “Advertising; An Addition to Times Square,” The New York Times, October 11, 1976. The “zipper” is a news ticker that was installed in 1928 and originally programmed using light bulbs and a conveyor belt.
- 19.
Fred C. Shapiro, “Talk of the Town: Spectacolor,” The New Yorker, February 14, 1977, 27.
- 20.
Williams, Television, 92.
- 21.
“Talk of the Town: Rauschenberg,” The New Yorker, May 23, 1977, 31.
- 22.
Colab was a New York artist collective interested in social activism that included Dickson, John Ahearn, Jenny Holzer, Kiki Smith, and other artists, many of whom later had pieces in Message to the Public.
- 23.
“Design Limitations for the Spectacolor Sign,” 1989, Series V, Subseries B, Box 32, Folder 9, Public Art Fund Archive, Fales Collection, New York University Libraries, New York, NY.
- 24.
Jenny Holzer, “Wordsmith: An Interview with Jenny Holzer by Bruce Ferguson,” in Jenny Holzer: Signs, ed. Joan Simon (Des Moines: Des Moines Art Center, 1986), 67.
- 25.
Holzer in Nicholas Zurbrugg, Art, Performance, Media: 31 Interviews, First edition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 218.
- 26.
Of course, in their initial appearance as posters, the Truisms were static, just as they were in many other iterations, including on theater marquees as part of Creative Time’s 42nd Street Art Project in 1993.
- 27.
Many of these approaches to her work are summarized in Gordon Hughes, “Power’s Script: Or, Jenny Holzer’s Art after ‘Art after Philosophy,’” Oxford Art Journal 29, no. 3 (October 1, 2006): 419–40.
- 28.
Joan Simon, “After/Words,” in Jenny Holzer: Signs, ed. Joan Simon (Des Moines: Des Moines Art Center, 1986), 81. Emphasis added.
- 29.
It turned out his threat was a bluff and he never had any explosives.
- 30.
Patricia C. Phillips, “Temporality and Public Art,” Art Journal 48, no. 4 (1989): 334.
- 31.
Based on an unpublished survey by Jerri Allyn and videotaped street interviews by Les Levine summarized in Anna Novakov, “The Artist as Social Commentator: A Critical Study of the Spectacolor Lightboard Series Messages to the Public” (Ph.D., New York, New York University, 1992), 74–75.
- 32.
David Wojnarowicz, Alfredo Jaar, Adrian Piper, Vito Acconci, Guerrilla Girls, Edgar Heap of Birds, Anne Bray, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and a host of other major players were part of the eight-year run.
- 33.
The content in question was also the title of the two artworks: This Womb Does Not Belong to Doctors, Legislators, Judges, Priests, the State and Certainly Childbirth Is Our Mortality, We Who Are Women, works quoting Spero’s earlier text and image work drawing from her own writing and the Aztec Sahagun, respectively. Carol Jacobsen, “Redefining Censorship: A Feminist View,” Art Journal 50, no. 4 (1991): 52.
- 34.
“Artist’s Antiwar Message Censored,” Art in America, January 1984, 176.
- 35.
Ellen Lubell, “Spectacolor Short Circuits,” The Village Voice, February 10, 1987, 81.
- 36.
Melzer, “Screen Clusters: Urban Renewal, Architectural Preservation, and the Infrastructures of Urban Media.”
- 37.
Stuart Elliott, “THE MEDIA BUSINESS: ADVERTISING; Sony’s Times Square Jumbotron Has Begun to Attract Advertisers,” The New York Times, August 31, 1993, sec. Business.
- 38.
Bill Carter, “Part ABC Studio, Part Disney Billboard,” The New York Times, September 18, 1999, sec. Business Day, https://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/18/business/part-abc-studio-part-disney-billboard.html.
- 39.
Nearly two decades later this connection between massive screen space and small screen products had not changed. During a visit to Times Square in 2018, I noticed a significant amount of screen time on spectaculars promoting Netflix programs and mobile media devices and services.
- 40.
Daniel Makagon, Where the Ball Drops: Days and Nights in Times Square (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 147.
- 41.
“Email Correspondence between Terry Shorrock and Pipilotti Rist,” December 6, 1999, Series VI, Subseries A, Box 49, Folder 12, Public Art Fund Archive, Fales Collection, New York University Libraries, New York, NY.
- 42.
Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, “Duchess of Nothing: Video Space and the ‘Woman Artist,’” in Women Artists at the Millennium, eds. Carol Armstrong and Catherine de Zegher, October Books (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006), 153.
- 43.
Due to design limitations stemming from a partnership with Max Racks, a company that makes postcards available for free at bars and restaurants, this design was not used in favor of a more generic image with a description of the project on the back.
- 44.
Pipilotti Rist, “Draft Invitation Card,” n.d., Series VI, Subseries A, Box 49, Folder 12, Public Art Fund Archive, Fales Collection, New York University Libraries, New York, NY.
- 45.
The impetus for the project came from the posthumously produced series of “unadvertising” campaign messages by designer Tibor Kalman that Creative Time showed on the Astrovision screen in March of 2000, just prior to Rist’s work.
- 46.
“The 59th Minute,” accessed February 13, 2013, http://www.creativetime.org/programs/archive/59/artist_retrospective.html.
- 47.
Fischli made this comment on the occasion of the re-presentation of this work as a multiscreen intervention as part of Midnight Moments . “Times Square Arts: Büsi (Kitty) February 1, 2016–February 29, 2016,” accessed September 17, 2018, http://arts.timessquarenyc.org/times-square-arts/projects/midnight-moment/bsi-kitty/index.aspx.
- 48.
Anne Pasternak, “Talking with Creative Time’s Directors: An Interview in Three Parts by Michael Brenson,” in Creative Time: The Book, ed. Anne Pasternak, Michael Brenson, and Ruth A. Peltason (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 2007), 256.
- 49.
Michael Kimmelman, “ART REVIEW; A Seasonal Migration of Cultural Scope,” The New York Times, August 8, 2003, sec. Arts, https://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/08/arts/art-review-a-seasonal-migration-of-cultural-scope.html.
- 50.
Chris Chang, “Jeremy Blake,” Film Comment 39, no. 6 (December 11, 2003): 17.
- 51.
Margot Bouman, “The Temporality of the Public Sphere: Orpheus Descending’s Loop between Art and Culture,” InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture, no. 4 (2002), https://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/the-temporality-of-the-public-sphere-orpheus-descendings-loop-between-art-and-culture/.
- 52.
William Neuman, “Closing on Broadway: Two Traffic Lanes,” The New York Times, July 11, 2008, sec. New York, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/11/nyregion/11broadway.html.
- 53.
“Times Square Transformation,” Times Square Alliance, March 21, 2017, https://www.timessquarenyc.org/times-square-transformation; “Times Square,” Snøhetta, accessed September 18, 2018, https://snohetta.com/projects/327-times-square.
- 54.
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 92.
- 55.
The earlier initiatives discussed in this section also had title cards and credits, but the anticipation generated by the countdown is distinct.
- 56.
Giuliana Bruno, Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 47.
- 57.
“Times Square Alliance : Midnight Moment: A Digital Gallery,” accessed February 13, 2013, http://www.timessquarenyc.org/times-square-arts/moment/index.aspx.
- 58.
“Chris Doyle – Bright Canyon,” accessed September 19, 2018, http://chrisdoylestudio.com/bright-canyon/.
- 59.
Zlatan Krajina, “Domesticating the Screen-Scenography: Situational Uses of Screen Images and Technologies in the London Underground,” in Public Space, Media Space, ed. Chris Berry, Janet Harbord, and Rachel O. Moore (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
- 60.
Anne Ring Petersen, “Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger at Times Square,” in The Urban Lifeworld: Formation Perception Representation, ed. Peter Madsen and Richard Plunz (New York: Routledge, 2005), 368.
- 61.
Fred Evans, Public Art and the Fragility of Democracy: An Essay in Political Aesthetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018); Cher Krause Knight, Public Art: Theory, Practice and Populism, 1st ed. (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008).
- 62.
The durations and frequency varied from site to site. For example, 15-second videos appeared every 5 to 7 minutes on a billboard in Times Square, 30-second videos appeared every half hour on the curved screen at the Barclay’s Center in Brooklyn, 10-second videos appeared every 100 seconds on Westfield’s network of 19 synchronized screens, and still and animated works appeared more randomly on LinkNYC kiosks. “Commercial Break – Public Art Fund,” accessed August 13, 2020, https://www.publicartfund.org/exhibitions/view/commercial-break/.
- 63.
Anne Bray, “The Community Is Watching, and Replying: Art in Public Places and Spaces,” Leonardo 35, no. 1 (2002): 15–21. Her billboard interventions have inserted provocative statements into advertising landscapes or even washed over them, as in White Out (1985) in Los Angeles.
- 64.
Though this is usually spelled “live mic,” this spelling comes from photographs of the screen in situ with the words “LIVE MIKE” above a cartoon of a rear-facing Statue of Liberty holding up a microphone instead of a torch.
- 65.
Jenny Holzer, “General Project Description,” 1984, Series VI, Subseries A, Box 39, Folder 27, Public Art Fund Archive, Fales Collection, New York University Libraries, New York, NY.
- 66.
Holzer.
- 67.
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “From Gadget Video to Agit Video: Some Notes on Four Recent Video Works,” Art Journal 45, no. 3 (September 1, 1985): 223.
- 68.
Buchloh, 224.
- 69.
Two works created around the 2016 presidential election were Hank Willis Thomas’s Truth Booth (2016-on-going) and LaBeouf, Rönkkö, and Turner’s HEWILLNOTDIVIDE.US (2017). Unlike Sign on a Truck , these projects did not use live images on a large screen but rather produced spaces for participants to speak and interact with a camera. Truth Booth recorded brief monologues in a traveling inflatable speech bubble that asked people to complete the phrase “the truth is…” HEWILLNOTDIVIDE.US featured a stationary microphone and web camera outside of the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, New York, that streamed live to the titular website. The project began on the inauguration of Donald J. Trump and was meant to be a participatory space where people would demonstrate a lack of division. The work’s intersecting vectors of celebrity, surveillance, and fringe Internet communities, however, cut the project short after “alt-right” instigators and white supremacists repeatedly showed up on site. I explore this further in Annie Dell’Aria, “From Rallying Cry to Dysfunctional Site: Surveying Participation in HEWILLNOTDIVIDE.US,” International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media 15, no. 1 (2019): 84–103.
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Dell’Aria, A. (2021). Commercial Breaks: Intra-spectacular Public Art. In: The Moving Image as Public Art. Experimental Film and Artists’ Moving Image. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65904-2_3
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