March 7 to April 12, 2009 / Galerie Clages, Cologne
Installation REVUES, 2009. Video projection of 10 still images and black satin waterfall curtain.
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We live in fantasy worlds. Brought to us by advertising on TV or in magazines, on bill boards and in the internet. This is nothing new. Advertising has been creating ideal worlds, images and fantasies for longer than we think and remember. It has built up its very own vocabulary – as well as its own image language. Even if advertisement campaigns today are meant more then ever to catch up with real life and try to talk authenticity – the authentic people in the ads and commercials still look amazingly attractive in their ‘real’ made-up world.
Longing for the things that we don’t have yet has become a huge part of our daily obsessions. We want to drive the amazing new car from the TV commercial, we want to dress like the girl in the photo internet blog or to have a hair cut like this famous actress. It doesn’t mean we always get what we are longing for, but for this little moment of imagination and dreaming we see ourselves living in another world, identifying with another live – a fantasy place where we are just a happier version of our self. For doing so people reflect their own image – do I look attractive? How successful am I doing in my job? We picture a more successful career and a more perfect relationship as well as a flawlessly attractive body in our fantasy.
Lifestyle magazines always did deliver the ideas and images for our longing to live a more fabulous life. Next to the products in ads they communicate a whole universe of lifestyle fantasies and illustrate them with articles and images. They show us how it could be. The most powerful images can be found on the cover of a magazine. Women’s faces, portrait pictures, promising and seductive. There is no way around them. No magazine can sell without because we understand what their promise is – the world of entertainment, pop and glamour that lets us forget and takes us out of our daily worries. The individual portrait behind those cover faces is missing – each portrait shows another/same facade again and each new issue marks another month or week with a new face – the face from before is already history.
And here again we are happy to open another magazine and in the very moment doing so we already have forgotten the beautifully shining face of the cover girl looking at us and right away we indulge the world that we have become to love and long for. It is seducing us on purpose, working the clichés, taking us in – we all know, but we don’t care.
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