Billboard:
Art on the Road: a Retrospective Exhibition of Artists’ Billboards of the Last 30 Yearsby Laura Stewart Heon, Joseph Thompson, and Peggy Diggs
MIT Press, $20 paper
André Breton said that the primary surrealist act is to fire a gun into a crowded street. An equivalent to this armed vision of the return of the repressed is billboard art. This book, which is meant to accompany an exhibition of billboard artists in North Adams, Mass., unfortunately neglects that anonymous graffiti-ist who, sometimes beautifully, subverts both the flow of advertising rigmarole and its consequent set of images, that dream with price tags. Instead, the curators have gathered together Guerrilla Girl provocations, the inevitable Barbara Kruger, and other worthy souls, including Joseph Kossuth, perhaps the first artist to ponder the medium. The three essayists here see billboard art as a purely didactic endeavor that gives a clear and simple progressive message. This is a bit misleading. At one point, Harriet Senie, in her history of billboard artists, worries that “if the image is not familiar, the meaning may be misread, or not register with the audience at all.” Isn’t this the point? When the advertiser’s exploitation of the libido dumbs it down to a series of brand identifications, the artist has to go back to Breton’s suggestion: a dirty war on the level of juxtaposition.
This article appears in October 22 • 1999.