M is for M

Icons are pictures as transportation. Historically they transported prayers to the attention of their respective saints and more recently users to their respective computer applications. So that it’s more proper to ask not an icon of what but to where. This transportation is not primarily through passive reception but through an act of projection. The icon doesn’t demand prayers to be directed towards it for if it did it would be an idol, rather the icon only awaits prayers. Occasionally however this transportation is involuntary and unwanted. I teach introductory oil painting classes to high school students. One of my students in the course of making an abstract painting inadvertently drew a curvy yellow shape resembling the letter “M”. Upon inspection the painting was immediately engulfed by the strength of the McDonald’s Corporation’s hold on yellow objects resembling, “M’s”.

Typical of advertising as it is, the experience was disconcerting for its leap over more understandable interruptions such as the actual letter “M”. What had occurred was not the recognition of an “M” followed by McDonald’s, but the transportation directly to the brand identity of McDonald’s. Further examples of McDonald’s advertising suggest that this result was intentional. Outside of a subway station near my commute was a billboard that read “sto ach gru bling?” What’s missing from the sentence and presumably from your stomach is McDonald’s. Aside from the bravado of branding 1/26th of the alphabet is the further goal of branding the shape and color of the letter independent of it’s linguistic content. In another advertising campaign in Denmark yellow items such as pliers or the undercarriage of a wheelbarrow were used to create the visual effect of the logo without using any linguistic reference. In these ads it is as if the “M” from the McDonald’s brand mysteriously appears in nature, like a spontaneous apparition of Mary.

What was so disconcerting about the experience in the classroom with the student was that I had not been presented with advertising at all, but rather the student’s painting had elicited the McDonald’s brand that evidently hibernates inside of me. Theorist W.J.T. Mitchell in his book “What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images” formulates images as living entities (occasionally even as parasites) existing in the ecosystems of human societies. This view requires the active psychological entanglement of the viewer with the image. He writes,

“We are stuck with our magical, pre-modern attitudes toward objects, especially pictures, and our task is not to overcome these attitudes but to understand them, to work through their symptomatology.[1]”

These “brand-images”, as they are referred to in advertising literature survive in our consciousness and breed to spawn parodies or homage. What Mitchell concludes in part is that “What pictures want is to be asked what they want.” In so doing we hopefully learn not only about the structure of images but also our own psyche. So what does the McDonald’s billboard image want? It wants for mental participation to fill in its’ lack, as if it were a riddle or puzzle. By presenting an incomplete textual address the compulsion to fill it in reinforces the McDonald’s ‘M’ as the thing that fills the lack and the answer to the grumbling stomach. After all the address was phrased as a question, (is your) “stomach grumbling?”. The task of any new icon to the extent that it can exist must be to acknowledge the inevitability of this psychological exchange and answer it with an informed response.

[1]W. J. T. Mitchell, What do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 2005.

"I have come home and I'm looking through the window. Outside it's snowing, no waves at all. The beach is white, the fence posts are gray. I'm looking back at a world now gone forever. Thinking of a time that will never return. A book of photographs is looking at me. Twenty-five years of looking for the right road. Postcards from everywhere. If there are any answers I have lost them." Robert Frank

Twenty-five years ago, in 1984, Lynne Warren and Mary Jane Jacobs chronicled the previous decade’s monumental alternative spaces in Alternative Spaces in Chicago, an exhibition and catalog for the Museum of Contemporary Art. Many spaces have come and gone since then and, with a few exceptions, the names of those places live on only in the CVs of artists who exhibited in them. Like ghosts they travel through the subconscious professionalism of so many prospective careers. There is a touch of sadness in people’s voices when they talk about the life and death of these spaces. An emotional toll is exacted when a space ceases to exist because the artist-gallery relationship is never completely devoid of feeling. But the lack of an adequate record of these temporary exhibition spaces obscures the dynamic and forceful activities performed in them and in the future because of them. They were and are the result of a specific cultural, political, and economic climate that informs the present condition of artist-run spaces and determines their lifespan and collective reception.

Generally, artists would rather make art than assume the administrative duties of operating a gallery. When compelled by external factors to do so, artists fill in the gaps between social groups, commercial galleries, and cultural institutions. Therefore the work of an artist-run space is related to the perceived possibility inherent in those artists’ communities. As diverse in motive as in form, artist-run spaces link up with larger civic artistic communities and/or the international art market; celebrate particular genres, mediums or generations; challenge the accepted frame of exhibition practice; create new forms of artistic/ curatorial hybrids; and form the physical site of community activism and cultural change.

The alternative spaces and collectives of the 1970s grew out of a desire to show anti-commercial, ephemeral, or Feminist work. Those spaces rose to institutional status and hosted what were in essence mini-museum shows throughout the 1980s. Yet they struggled to re-invent themselves to survive the funding crises of the 1990s. A lack of relevance to the new generation, by both the commercial galleries in Chicago and the now established “alternative spaces,” formed the basis for a new set of exhibition venues, dubbed the “Uncomfortable Spaces.” Unburdened with the former goal of opposing commercialism and wary of the restrictions imposed by government funding, the “Uncomfortables” adopted “alternative” programming but merged it with commercial gallery structure. Subsequent generations of apartment and artist-run spaces in Chicago have reused this model with different variations in an effort to be financially sustainable. (cont.)

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