Food for Thought

Combining text and image has always been a welcomed challenge for me. This formula came to me in a half-asleep revelation after witnessing youth culture in a pure form. "Kids these days." We must be frank with them, they're tired of old sarcasm. Though they do not like to be indoctrinated, my message is urgent. The planet hasn't time for another generation of Western egocentricism.




Short phrases provide meaning on the surface, the inset images juxtaposed with one another, as well as with the words they apply to, help further the meaning and add a little ambiguity.

The photos are originals, from Flickr Creative Commons, Wikipedia public domain & freedigitalphotos.net. I liked the humanity of the selection on Creative Commons.


The photo credits are a copyright compliance and a reference the post-structuralist art-making conventions that have been gaining speed in music (in the form of sample-based hip-hop & electronica) and visual art (in the form of collage and montage) since the late 20th century. The room for originality nowadays is more in the basic concept and less in the representational style.



Is it significant that I build these just as I would ads for the newspaper? What do you think?

William Blake, Mark Titchner, Stefan Bruggemann

Text & Image Artists

William Blake was a Romantic G:


http://www.dailyartfixx.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/blake_william_nebuchadnezzar.jpg


http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/romanticism/images/WilliamBlake-Jerusalem-Plate-33-1820.jpg


http://nickbaines.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/jerusalem-william-blake.jpg

Mark Tichner is a Photoshop G:






Most of his work features these short motivational speeches, with a very angular, blocky type. What's interesting is the way he photoshops the images past the point of absurdity. The average viewer, who is accustomed to varying amounts of photoshoppy effects applied to nearly everything in our visual culture, is overwhelmed with the plethora of intersecting and disappearing lines and colors but is obligated to look at the same time. The exact sort of sublimity and energy that advertisers hope to achieve with photoshop is what Titchner harnesses to send progressive and semi-critical messages. This puts him in the same general movement of Banksy and Shepard Fairey; that is, the artists devoted towards the battle against the massive media takeover of American culture and proliferation of advertising therein.

Stefan Bruggemann is the Gangsta of satire:



I interpret this second example to be poking fun at the simple aesthetics of the conceptualism in the 60's. But 50 years later, we're still just as lost as a young Donald Judd in the matrix of post-modernism.


Neon is a popular way to make text and specific letterforms look way cool.