MUNTADAS VERA LIST CENTER NY

Political Advertisement 1952–2012: 
Antoni Muntadas and Marshall Reese

Film Screening & Discussion

Thursday, November 1, 2012, 6:30–8:30pm

The New School, Theresa Lang Community and Student Center

55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor

New York City

20 Years VLC => Free Admission

www.veralistcenter.org

"Sometime in the early 1950s Madison Avenue's hucksters realized that they could sell political candidates like any other product, a throat lozenge or facial tissue."

–Steve Seid, Fifty Years of Campaign Spots (Berkeley: Pacific Film Archive, 2000)

Five days before the 2012 U.S. presidential election, artists Antoni Muntadas and Marshall Reese present a new installment of their twenty-eight-year project Political Advertisement. Launched in 1984—and in each edition updated with new campaign advertisements—the project helps determine whether things have actually changed since the early '50s when "guided by the cooing come-ons of the thirty-second TV spot, campaigns were soon reduced to photo ops, televised debates, and sound bites. Out was the whistle-stop tour and the scrappy convention, in was the instant poll and the attack ad." (Steve Seid)

Starting with Eisenhower vs. Stevenson in 1952 and extending to Obama vs. McCain in 2008 and now Obama vs. Romney, taken together, the ads depict how the image of American presidential candidates has evolved over thirteen elections, and how advertising tactics such as negative ads, soft-sell techniques and emotionalism fundamentally changed the country's electoral process. Political Advertisement includes rare—some never before seen—footage from the artists' own archives, updated during every election since 1984. Compiled and edited by Muntadas and Reese, the stream of thirty-second TV spots runs without commentary for an hour. In the discussion that follows, the artists and Professor of Media Studies Carol Wilder will discuss how the development of televised media and electoral politics have become increasingly inseparable.

Participants

Antoni Muntadas, artist and Professor of the Practice, ACT/Department of Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Marshall Reese, artist

Carol Wilder, Professor of Media Studies and Film, The New School for Public Engagement

Organized by Vera List Center for Art and Politics.

VLC = 20 Years. Join us for a 20th-anniversary year with free admission to all VLC events. Stay tuned for more information.

MUNTADAS Entre/Between

Muntadas, "This Is Not an Advertisement," Times Square, New York, 1985.
Photo: Pamela Duffy. © Muntadas / ADAGP, Paris, 2012.

Muntadas

Entre / Between

Until 20 January 2013

Jeu de Paume

1, Place de la Concorde

75008 Paris

www.jeudepaume.org

lemagazine.jeudepaume.org

The Jeu de Paume presents a major exhibition by internationally recognized artist 

Antoni Muntadas, one of the early practitioners of conceptual and media art.

The show will survey Muntadas' prolific career, from the seventies to present days. His art practice spans four decades, in which he has utilized actions, video, photography, multi-media installations, publications, public art, the internet, radio and other media to address key political and social issues of our time. Incorporating in-depth research and astute readings of cultural situations, his incisive works have addressed ideas such as the relationship between public and private, the flows of information along the media landscape, and the inherent power of architecture and other social frameworks.

The show Entre / Between is comprised of 9 thematic constellations: Field of Translation, Places of Spectacle, Microspaces, Communal Spaces, Domain of Fear, Spheres of Power, The Archive, Systems of Art, Media and Landscape.

Muntadas (Barcelona, 1942) studied industrial engineering in Barcelona and came to art through painting. In the early seventies he became interested in multimedia art and moved to New York, where he currently lives and works. He maintains an intense teaching activity and his work is present in some of the most important collections in the world: the Museum of Modern Art – MoMA (New York); the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid), Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona – MACBA (Barcelona) or Museo de Arte Contemporânea (São Paulo). He has appeared in some of the most prominent international art festivals: documenta VI (1977) and X (1997), the Venice Biennale (1976 and 2005) or the São Paulo Biennale (1981), amongst others. In 2009 he was granted the Velázquez Prize for Visual Arts.

Curator: Daina Augaitis

Exhibition organized by Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, in collaboration with the Jeu de Paume, Paris.

With the help of the Acción Cultural Española (AC/E) and of the Institut Ramon Llull.