For a few years in the early 1960s I enjoyed successful career in advertising, saving money for my long-planned breakaway into the dissolute life of an unemployed artist. I didn't realize then that I was an early postmodern artist. The ads I created for hardware and power tools were immersed in very subtle affirmations and creation of middle-class suburban life. The "aesthetic" of my ads was to aim the products to the new imaginary, booming white-collar consumer class male: the fellow who had completed college, usually majoring in economics, had married a pretty girl, bought a suburban ranch in the boonies, drove a family sedan or station wagon, had a few beautiful kids, and was eager to prove himself as a new "do-it-yourself" pioneer by finishing the basement, adding a sunroom or building a fence to safeguard the family puppy. The ads not only served that consumer but more important, created him (definitely a him).
Here was theory adding aesthetic value -- an imagined, improved, better -- morally better -- selfness to be experienced when using an electric drill, or doing the jobs that handy blue-collar guys used to do. This view, the aggrandizing of mundane skills as idealized symbols of the all-American "can-do" male, was central to the postwar mythologizing of middle-class values. I didn't create ads for the simple tasks that saw blades and electric drills could do but what they made of their users. If a good suit, a new car, an office job, a pretty wife, crispy smart kids, and a white clapboard house made the man, the drill or saw in his hand made him a real man, an up-to-date Abraham Lincoln log-splitter. (Don't just show the tool but show the man at home in his sporty weekend clothes using the tool amidst his admiring family). Having saved my money, I gave up my postmodern life to create unfashionable, overworked and troubled modernist art works. But It took ten years and plenty of inflation for me to earn as much as an artist as I did as a fantasy-creating ad man. Now, fifty years later, the art world has long since discovered the power of mid-century consumer advertising. Many of today's artists are ad-people. They take something very ordinary and present it as the affirmation and realization of materialist dreams, a way of life, the road to happiness, the promise that anyone can be not only well-off but better, morally and culturally better. Today's white cube museum is only yesterday's empty concrete basement awaiting the man with the right tools, a place of awe and ambitious fantasy of a perfect future. wc
