Buy Mark's Art or the Terrorists Win

"Tasteless" may be how David Bonetti from the St. Louis Post Dispatch described this exhibition, or at least the title of the exhibition (which also appears in much of the work), but I rather enjoyed Buy Mark's Art or the Terrorists Win at PHD Gallery. I personally thought that the fusion of World War II pin ups, the potential campaign for the war on terror and the ephemeral nature of architectural advertising was intriguing.

Admittedly, the reappropriation of the pin-up girl imagery could be seen as overdone, but the iconic aspect of said imagery lends believability to the scenes conveyed by connecting the imagined modern propaganda campaign to the disintegrating architectural advertisements of yesteryear. The blurring between what is real versus what is imagined, what is current versus what has passed and the interstices between these states is of particular interest to me.

All of these works were more than willing to satirize the culture in which we live and the messages which we have received. I especially liked "Cloning - Made in the USA" in which a model is juxtaposed several times into the same photograph as a means of both toying with the viewer and further exploring the ideas conveyed in the imagined propaganda on the building that she is seen beside.

I do not claim to have any sense of taste at all in my judgments concerning what is and isn't appropriate, so perhaps the title was in poor taste, but I thought that it complemented the exhibition well. I feel that it can be good to challenge convention and to laugh at ourselves sometimes, no matter how crude. Humor can be a wonderful healing mechanism and allow us the opportunity to see things anew.