168 | 2024

WENDY VOGEL

Fantasy Fakes

Let’s begin with an Internet detour.—Brainstorming for a title about Laura Schawelka’s work, I found a short opinion piece by a creative director praising a Coca-Cola advertising campaign from the late 1960s.¹ The writer compared it to two related slogans, which I corroborated on Coke’s official website.² Stacked together, isolated from dozens of mottoes the beverage brand has used throughout its history, the lines give the impression of found poetry.

“It’s the Real Thing” (1969)
“Can’t Beat the Real Thing” (1990)
“Make it Real” (2005)

Reading them together, I was struck by the way they moved toward doubting reality, rather than confirming it. If the 1969 slogan insists bluntly on Coke’s authenticity, the 1990 version boasts the drink’s genuine superiority among competitors in the soft drink market. The 2005 tagline, however, does something much stranger. Here, the messaging makes a direct, even neurotic plea to consumers. “Make it real”—but what is “it”? The choice of a beverage? Or the illusion packaged in Coca-Cola’s advertising campaigns? In the world of advertising, which calls for constant reinvention, Coke’s message of “realness” seems to undo itself. Rather than presenting their product as genuine, Coke turns the measure of reality over to the consumer. The slogan uses the imperative verb: (You) make it real. The brand demands that the consumer confirms its reality. The advertiser asks the consumer to invest in the fantasy it has created.

1 D’Arcy/McCann Erickson, “13: Coca-Cola (1940s) – It’s the Real Thing,” Creative Review, https://www.creativereview.co.uk/its-the-real-thing-coca-cola. Also see “History of Coca-Cola Advertising Slogans,” The Coca-Cola Company, https://www.coca-colacompany.com/about-us/history/history-of-coca-cola-advertising-slogans.
2 “History of Coca-Cola Advertising Slogans” (see note 1).

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 168/2024, pp. 9–20.

FIONA VILMER

Ambient Images

In his essay “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (1984), Fredric Jameson describes his hallucinatory experience while wandering through the Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles,¹ designed by the architect and real-estate developer John C. Portman and opened in 1976. In this mazy tour of space, close to a postmodern sublime,² Jameson positions himself as a disoriented subject. The narrative stroll is “reified,” encapsulated by the mechanisms of the glass escalators and elevators—visible from both the inside and outside—and marks a disruption in the movements of a body now detached, alienated and fragmented. In this enclosed space, the floors unfold a mise en abyme of the suffocating city, a miniaturized and concrete substitute of late capitalist society. From inside, the continuous rotation of the bar on the top floor invites the viewer to contemplate the city, eliminating depth by producing images of the city itself. From the outside, the glass facade covering the four cylindrical towers conceals the hotel, its shimmering surfaces reflecting images of the city of “Los Angeles itself, spread out breathtakingly and even alarmingly before us.”³ Signifying the collective consciousness, the image of Los Angeles—its fragmentation and its vastness—the Bonaventure Hotel is a generic picture of both the city and of late capitalism, an “ambient image.”

1 Originally, the text was published in 1984 as: Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 1, no. 146 (July–August 1984), pp. 53–92. Later, it was published as: Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 80–85.
2 On this notion, see Claire Geddes Bailey, “The Postmodern Sublime: Fredric
Jameson’s Bonaventure Hotel,” The Garden Statuary, November 29, 2018, https://thegardenstatuary.com/archives/2856.
3 Jameson, “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” p. 83.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 168/2024, pp. 21–32.

MARK PRINCE

No ideas but in things: the art/writing of Pati Hill

Like Diane Arbus, whom she knew, Pati Hill had a career in fashion before the other career—or careers—for which she is better known. Hill was a model, Arbus a commercial photographer, part of a husband-wife team specializing in shoots for glossy periodicals of the 1950s for which Hill modeled. Arbus photographed Hill at some point. They were almost the same age. Both abandoned their first professional identities: Arbus for a solo career as an art photographer, Hill to write novels and short fiction, and later to make art and artists’ books with images produced on a photocopier. It may be an indication of the limited control a female artist in the mid-twentieth century could exercise over her life—and, by extension, over her art—that, unlike most of their lauded male contemporaries, both Arbus and Hill had to transition through the intermediate step of a more practical occupation, and ones that, perhaps not coincidentally, involved the production of images of women for mass consumption. Arbus subsequently claimed to have “hated the fashion world.” Characteristically converting passivity to circumstance into a positive, Hill wrote that “many copier artists are women, and copy themselves exclusively. I don’t copy myself but I modeled myself for years on account of the peculiar feeling of ‘reality’ it gave me. The reality of an object, maybe.”¹ In an ironic symmetry, she would go from being objectified in the form of images to making images of objects, which became the basis of her practice in the 1970s. […]
That ten-year gap between periods of exclusively writing and copying/writing reflects how partially her application to visual and literary art is approached by cultures shaped by a pressure to specialize. The attention her writing-qua-writing has received—for instance, the series of contributions she made to The Paris Review magazine in the 1950s, under the editorial hand of George Plimpton—tends to be collateral, conditional upon a recent wave of art-world interest in the photocopies she published and exhibited in the 1970s. The partiality overlooks how central to her project the relation between the media was.

1 Pati Hill, Letters to Jill: A Catalogue and Some Notes on Copying (New York: Kornblee Gallery, 1979), p. 100.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 168/2024, pp. 33–44.

JON DAVIES

The Scene of the Crime

“Many artists are continually exploring different ways of working through whatever they consider unresolved—whether formally or conceptually; this can take the form of a repetition of themes or a revisiting of artworks they’ve produced previously—a return to ‘the scene of the crime,’ if you will.” —Lyle Ashton Harris¹

American artist Lyle Ashton Harris (b. 1965) was recently celebrated with a major survey exhibition co-organized by the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University and the Queens Museum. Jointly curated by Lauren Haynes and Caitlin Julia Rubin, Our first and last love included work spanning his nearly forty-year career, structured via a striking series titled Shadow Works, which Harris created between 2017 and 2020. Each unique assemblage is a retrospective in miniature, with dye-sublimation prints capturing montages of his own photographs, found images, and textual fragments tinted by brightly colored gels and joined by ephemera (such as locks of the artist’s hair), all framed by patterned Ghanaian textiles. The works exquisitely trace the inseparability of the artist’s life from his work, and the continuity between what lies in the frame and what lies outside, turning backward to past artworks and to key reference images, news clippings, and notes to conjure new meanings for today.

1 Lyle Ashton Harris, Lauren Haynes, and Caitlin Julia Rubin, “Conversation,” in Lyle Ashton Harris: Our first and last love, ed. Lauren Haynes and Caitlin Julia Rubin, exh. cat. Queens Museum and Rose Art Museum (New York: Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2024), p. 12.

Text contribution in Camera Austria International 168/2024, pp. 45–56.