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Tonight Laura and I are going to head over to Quimby's to see Ben Marcus, author of The Age of Wire and String and the new Notable American Women, which I plan on purchasing tonight.
Ben Marcus' website (thanks Geegaw) is set up like the website of a fictional corporation, Marcus Systems Enterprises, with fits in with what I was saying about "intimate bureaucracies" some time ago.
Like Marcus' other work, the website recycles cultural forms and idioms to portray a world which is new, yet somehow oddly familiar. I'm a big fan of Marcus' project, and I find the website entertaining (dig these crazy tests).
But the model of the corporation that Marcus is scavenging from is slightly out-of-date: all stylized silhouettes, space-age geometric forms, and bureaucratic jargon. Not to say that this isn't all well and good. Marcus frequently appropriates forms which have a vaguely archaic feel to them, and this is a part of what gives his work its strange power. But I'd like to see someone (besides Adbusters and ®TMark) appropriate the forms of the contemporary corporation, the corporation newly focused on friendliness and hipness.
Think phone-company imagery. A contemporary corporation no longer represents itself as an anonymous, stylized body. It represents itself as a young Asian girl, a female boxer, four Caucasian friends having fun on the town, and an old black man hugging his granddaughter. Always putting forth the message "we are you, whoever you are." Labels: art, capitalism
Thursday, April 11, 2002
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