Watch the Gap: The Shock of Application and Wolves in Sheep's Clothing Main Menu

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What if the gap is derailed? Or better yet co-opted. Hijacked! Within the context of art, we might consider this a gap of potential. We could call it a détournement in the sense of the Situationist International (SI), whose critical activities countered what theorist Guy Debord called the “Society of the Spectacle.” The SI deployed counter-strategies pitted against the dominant culture of the day: redirecting the intentions of consumer culture toward a different ends: not the realization of the spectacle but a “demonstrative breaking” (Drifting) through which “the way the spectacular …[is] exposed … through the creation of non-spectacular ruptures…‘situations,’” (Drifting). Situations, for the SI were actively created and not passively consumed. On the one hand, this “failure” to subscribe to the aesthetics—indeed the proliferation of “representations”—of dominant culture vis-à-vis this society of spectacle succeeded in its subordination of the status quo. Or did it? Subversion is also co-opt-able. And failure might be considered the new success.
 
 
In Sign Wars: the Cluttered Landscape of Advertising, Goldman and Papson explore what it means when détournement itself gets derailed.  In this mise-en-abyme layering, where subversion is used subversively as another form of recuperation that masks the ends of advertising by making fun of advertising tactics, it is not easy to decode the messages without falling into the trap. Parody, a beloved technique of the SI, when “well executed produces a catapult effect by taking advantage of the advertising expenditures of another advertiser.” (36) But this meta-capitalistic maneuver is not the main reason for the tactic. They illustrate this with an example of a Snapple ad that rips of a GAP clothing ad, snidely making fun of the pretentiousness of the original ad. But when one company is selling an entirely different product—drinks verses clothes, in this instance—we have to wonder what this tactic is actually selling. Goldman and Papson explain, “[B]y targeting viewers who think of themselves as highly media literate, Snapple aims to develop their sign value as irreverent media-literate observers…that sees [themselves] as outside the accepted signs—as savvy enough to recognize the bullshit of other people’s signs.” (36) Indeed, “this kind of sardonic media-literate debunking is less an exercise in subverting the dominant ideology than another method of hailing.” (36) Snapple makes you think like an artist.


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  1. Bernays Sauce Emelie Chhangur Consumption is the product of another kind of gap. A gap in between theory and practice, in particular Freud's theories and the practice of public relations as conceptualized by his nephew Edward Bernays. Freud’s theories of the unconscious were consciously applied to what Bernays called the “engineering of consent” (Happiness Machines, see 00:028:00) that would change the course of history: everything from American mass culture, to neo-liberal concepts of democracy, to curating can be traced back to Bernays and his application of psychological theory to the “establishment,” be that in politics, big business or in the culture industry. Bernays’ techniques of mass persuasion are still as pervasive today as they were in the 1920s, if not even more sinister in the ways in which these techniques have not only engineered consent but orchestrated the conditions of control—techniques further coopted by politicians, the CIA, and public relations firms. The drive to consume and commodify everything from products to images to lifestyles is a strategy of desire (Engineering of Consent, see 00:24:53) that has its roots in the gap between intention and realization.

    On a side note, Curationsism, a term coined Toronto writer and art critic David Balzer, is “the acceleration of the curatorial impulse to become a dominant way of thinking and being.” (Balzer 8) In his book by the same name, he explores “curation’s close alliance with capitalism and its cultures.” (9) He asks in the book, “[H]ow much curatorial work did you do today? (116) acknowledging the implications of the century of the self as we transition into the century of the selfie. Indeed, we have become the “arbiters of our own taste” (Eight People Sipping Wine in Kettering, see 00:00:22) but never as a condition of freedom, but as a recuperation: now the commodity of our own cognition.

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