Fabula: Consumer Media and Contemporary Art

Irene Hoffman, Curator of Exhibitions

Fabula represents a collaboration between Cranbrook Art Museum and the Cranbrook Academy of Art PrintMedia department’s interest in engaging sources from contemporary culture, media, technology and communication systems, Fabula explores the colliding fields of  art, fashion, advertising and design. 

….labels like Prada and Gucci run ads for their new ready-to-wear lines in art journals, the co- mingling of art, commerce and fashion is a timely subject, and one that has engaged a number of contemporary artists. Fabula brings together six national and international who address the symbiotic and at times contentious, relationship between these spheres.  From Sylvie Fleury’s fetishized chrome bronze car engines and designer shoes to Art Club 2000’s photographic spoofs on advertising campaigns of The Gap clothing stores, the works in Fabula  engage and at times critique the advertisements, logos, product designs and packaging so skillfully created and employed by fashion and retail industries.

As a means of further exploring the communicative power of consumer media and providing a context for the artists in Fabula, this exhibition also features installations of  four retailers, specially invited to participate because of their highly successful logos, brand identification  or TV and print advertising campaigns. Each of the invited retailers - DaimlerChrysler, Neiman Marcus, Target, and Tiffany - designed their own installations for Fabula.

From a signature Tiffany window built into the museum’s wall to a video montage of Target’s latest catchy ads, these installations are presented alongside the artists work setting up a dialogue between consumer media and contemporary art.

Betwixt

Steve Murakishi

Fabula is actually a word located somewhere between fable and fabulous...I interpret Fabula to mean  an extraordinary story.  Fabulation is the act of inventing or retailing fantastic tales or unrestrained otherworldly visions.  A fabulist is a provocateur.

It’s not all shopping..

To me  this exhibition is more about cultural expression, media and language than a critique on consumption. Creativity is alive and well in the agency of retail and communication. This exhibition is a way to investigate PrintMedia’s practice, program and creative production - through mediating sources from culture, media’ technology and communication systems.  

Like prêt-à-porter ready to wear, Fabula locates the merging currents of art, fashion and design.

Fabula Artists

Art Club 2000

Looking specifically at corporate marketing strategies of retailers and aimed at Generation X collaborative groups known as Art Club 2000. These seven member Cooper Union Art School graduates, became notorious for their satirical photographs and actions focused on The Gap clothing stores. Slogans, like “Fall into the Gap” and “For every generation, the Gap” sought to make the Gap symbol  for inexpensive well made casual clothes. Exploring the power of such advertising and marketing campaigns,  Art Club 2000 shot a series of group photographs of members wearing matching Gap outfits. Shot in ultra hip New York  locations like Times Square and Soho. The group shots closely mimic the slick look of Gap prints ads and such become parodies of these campaigns mocking the uniformity of the fashion marketed to the youth culture by the retail giant. 

Vanessa Beecroft

Italian born artist Vanessa Beecroft’s work comments on the imagery of fashion and advertising in a broader sense with works that challenge the images of women portrayed in high fashion magazines, film and television.

Beecroft staged live performances that could be described as a collision of art, fashion, sculpture and theater. Her performances involve seemingly homogeneous female models in militaristic formation staring vacantly at an audience for several uninterrupted  hours. In a performance at the Guggenheim Museum of Art in New York City, Beecroft outfitted 15 of her 20, lady models in Gucci logo rhinestone bikinis and 4” spiked heels. The remaining five were dressed only in heels. Beecroft directed her models to not make eye contact with the audience for two and a half hours.  

The homogeneity of Beecroft’s models and their traits of glamour and beauty they share serve to underscore the idealized images of women perpetuated by fashion and film. 

Sylvie Fleury

Swiss artist Sylvie Fleury creates work that celebrates the world of beauty and luxury and cliched commodities of male and female desire.  Her installations, sculptures and videos explore the seductive power of acquiring material  possessions and the allure of the products and brand names marketed to men and women. 

In the world of glamour, designer fashion and shopping are the subject of many of Fleury’s works in which the pleasures of acquiring and owning designer possessions are articulated with an unapologetic enthusiasm .

center of is Sylvie Fleury’s of beauty and luxury through the consumerism of designer labels and iconic logos.  happily implicating herself in the pleasures seduction of consumerism

New York artist, Tom Sachs takes a more stance towards the market with works  that challenge the iconography of status, style and wealth. Banal objects that Sachs calls “Cultural Prosthetics” are branded and glamourize with an upscale designer label in  “Tiffany Revolver” and “Channel Rat”. In another work titled ”Hermés Value Meal”, Sachs applies his exclusive Italian designer’s logos to cardboard containers in a fabricated MacDonald’s Big Mac Value Meal. 

Sachs challenges our often irrational desires and highlights the fetish power of these logos. Sachs’ biting and ironic objects remind us of the manipulative power of marketing and incredible allure of the designer label.

H.N. Semjon

Berlin based artist, H.N. Semjon shares a strong  lineage of Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenberg’s use of everyday objects;  like cleaning products, food packaging and household supplies.  Semjon selects original products and applies a painterly coat of semi-transparent bleached beeswax.  The wax diffusion of these powerful logos seems to break loose and create new mosaic  identities.  The objects are  shown singularly or in product groups giving them a sense of suspension, while trying to “rename” their new identities.

Masato Nakamura

Tokyo based artist Masato Nakamura’s illuminated works reference the association of America’s corporate logos. Working with convenience stores and fast food chains; Nakamura’s works underscore the visual and associative impact of corporate icons while commenting on the cultural infiltration of American commerce that is affecting the urban landscape of Asia.

Nakamura’s installation of MacDonald’s golden arches points us to questions of homogeneity, chapel-like religiosity and the polarities of hunger and obesity. Perhaps Nakamura’s greatest challenge was the negotiation with the corporate McDonalds to use the global icon of the golden arches.

Retail Exhibitors Daimler Chrysler, Tiffany’s,  Neiman Marcus, Target