Comments on: I Wanna Be Like …

By: nick

nick — Thu, 10 May 2007 11:29:57 +0000

Ralph, just wait to you get your blog. I’ll fudge your pimp until he’s working working for me.

By: RLewis

RLewis — Wed, 09 May 2007 15:18:40 +0000

Sometimes you fudge the Pimp. And sometimes the Pimp fudges you. Watch out! -R

By: Simon

Simon — Mon, 07 May 2007 19:24:11 +0000

Re: Image of Hilton, the guerilla ad:

See “Ironia: Medieval and Renaissance ideas of Irony” by Dilwyn Knox at University College London (pub. Brill). Practically no new concepts of irony operate in culture but some of the older ones can provide means to rethink new ways to design it. This book is largely bibliographic references as well – years of looking through the Vatican library to examine sources of writing on irony – also look at Samuel Beckett’s notes on Teofilo Folengo – the Renaissance writer who wrote in Latin but with an Italian grammar – hence the language appears stream-of-consciousness as well as being somewhat Rabelaisian… Irony comes from certain incurable features of language rather than a desire to be sarcastic … and on …

By: Simon

Simon — Mon, 07 May 2007 17:46:35 +0000

Thanks for that. This is great I actually saw the Mike Daisey video and his website through links here. What a vain goof! I was lucky in that my sound system wasn’t working as he was giving his performance and the image of people pouring water over his work reminded me of some fluxus performance – Yoko Ono with scizors or Gustav Metzger blowtorching things in London in the 1960’s (If anyone sees this little man today at openings in Hoxton or at the Tate spouting off some rubbish, please remember he was a survivor of Auschwitz – as were a few fluxus performers.) Joseph Beuys once amplified his objections to a German gallery that used his childhood bathtub to store beer during an opening. This conceit of reaction can carry the work further – I wonder how Mike Daisey could be surprising or unpredictable in harnessing the indignance of his reaction into means to carry the work to a higher level of art, or to sharpen the aesthetic acuity of the conceit, instead of just appearing like a vain moron.

By: nick

nick — Mon, 07 May 2007 00:50:27 +0000

The artist on why he did it:

“The Hilton Hotel presents itself as a paragon of excellence and class. The brand’s image badly needed updating.”

So you’re right, it probably shouldn’t be considered a fake ad. I fixed that for you.

By: Simon

Simon — Sun, 06 May 2007 18:32:09 +0000

Its weird you put this in a public space but the incidents you refer to are entirely internal to your world. Cool, what does Richard Foreman think of things like that? That article on Foreman is sort of the best thing on this blog as far as just one tiny little winkle of implication about how blogging acts as a foil for pre-meditated dramatic dialogue. Incidently there’s no such thing as a ‘Fake Ad’ only a guerilla one – and those are more epistemologically orthodox than commercial ones because they use a familiar visual language to confound the ‘construction’ of an expected commercial message. They assume therefore that commercial ads actually do convey commercial, inducing messages that are possible to undo and re-direct. As we all know of course advertising doesn’t actually do that, it acts as an after image reconfirming our choice to buy into or not. Sort of like re-visiting foreman after the world of blogs…