Summary
The posters are more a matter of using aesthetics in the service of demagoguery: produced by students (and academic staff) who had occupied the École des Beaux Arts, they deployed an iconography as immutable and preordained as any politico's boilerplate speech-making: the clenched fist, the crab, the assassin in black hat, the worker in beret and overalls, barbed wire, the black and white men held apart by the politico -industrial fascist bourgeoisie (fat man in a trilby), rats, sheep, the soldier's webbing holster. Even better, his co-curator Jeff Boardman is creative director of a "youth marketing" company called Freewheelin', which appeared on the BBC's Money Programme to market Diesel jeans by "setting up a pirate radio station and running an illegal sticker campaign; trying to make sure that 55DSL is worn by the trendiest people in the UK - musicians, skateboarders and breakdancers; organising the hippest launch party for Europe's first 55DSL store at the very latest club", and which now (even better) is advising French Connection.
See the full content of this document
Extract
Signs of the Times
Interesting that the Hayward Gallery should celebrate its 40th anniversary with an exhibition of street posters from the Paris rebellion of May 1968. Presumably we're expected to see some sort of political or aesthetic or spiritual link between the Hayward and the Paris students and workers. Tricky. As tricky as the invariable all...
See the full content of this document
Sponsored links
