i saw this tiger woods commercial the other day and it made me think about action painting and the nature of the artist’s mark. Evidence of the hand of the artist is something that has become less desirable in the contemporary art market. the notion of design has swept through every facet of modern life. As wal mart and target strive towards bringing good design to the masses a certain taste for slickness and presentation permeates the art world. two poles have begun to emerge, on one end are artists who produce well manicured, well designed, well composed and slickly executed works, and on the other pole has been this emergence of the faux naive or handmade work. The irony is that both of these methods are as insincere and rooted in marketing as the other. as i watched the 30 second tiger woods spot i couldn’t help but think that the author of the commercial was a half assed student in school. she or he probably took some art history survey classes, and whether they realized it or not absorbed this classic hans namuth film of jackson pollack painting on top of the camera.
It made me think about how there is a contemporary art history lesson embedded in the tiger woods commercial. while jackson pollack was still truly trying to express what a modernist angst ridden shamanistic artist living on the fringes of society and at that time the art world felt, tiger is just flaunting his huge cultural capital. But there is a distinct difference in the way tiger paints his painting. tiger’s “art” is the result of pure action and no innate expressive emotion. his painting is the evidence of an action, in this case hitting paint filled golf balls similar to performance, process, and action artists of the sixties(although to his credit i cannot immediately think of any artist making art with golf swings at that time). In the sixties the contemporary art world in america was small and exclusive, no one cared, there wasn’t a need to have a perfect artist statement and expansive resume, these artists were primarily making work for themselves and their friends(the audience was an added bonus, they flocked to the spectacle later to see people shoot themselves and camp out in the gallery). One of the methods employed by these artists was to follow a series of actions(see richard serra’s verb list for the epitomy of this) and then the resulting “evidence” comprised the work. As a self described student of the sixties, it’s art, it’s culture, and to a lesser extent it’s music, i try and imagine myself somewhere in between the purely expressive art and purely process/action art of this era. It is funny how a 30 second commercial for a product i will never covet, endorsed by a celebrity i care nothing about, can hit upon so many of my interests. as if this rabbit hole of thinking weren’t enough to make me really want to go back to school and write a book, i took the thought process even further. i started thinking about other incidences of car commercials riffing on artworks and i remembered a few years back when the honda company ripped off/paid homage to fischli and weiss’s der lauf der dinge.
here is the honda commercial.
after re-watching i also noticed a subtle tribute to other artists work including calder mobiles and such, and some of chris burdens kinetic pieces.
now compare to the fischli and weiss