Conversation, Screening

Sometime in the early 1950s Madison Avenue’s hucksters realized that they could sell political candidates like any other product, a throat lozenge or facial tissue.
—Steve Seid,Fifty Years of Campaign Spots
(Berkeley: Pacific Film Archive, 2000)

In the afterglow of President Obama’s Second Inauguration following the most expensive political campaign in history—a record $2 billion spent in the presidential campaign alone—artists Antoni Muntadas and Marshall Reese present a new installment of their twenty-eight-year project Political Advertisement. Launched in 1984—and in each edition updated with new campaign advertisements—the project confirms that little has changed since the early 1950s when “guided by the cooing come-ons of the thirty-second TV spot, campaigns were soon reduced to photo ops, televised debates, and sound bites. Out was the whistle-stop tour and the scrappy convention, in was the instant poll and the attack ad.” (Steve Seid)

Starting with Eisenhower vs. Stevenson 1952 and extending to Obama vs. McCain in 2008 and then Obama vs. Romney, taken together, the ads depict how the image of American presidential candidates has evolved over thirteen elections, and how advertising tactics such as negative ads, soft-sell techniques and emotionalism fundamentally changed the country’s electoral process. Political Advertisementincludes rare—some never before seen—footage from the artists’ own archives, updated during every election since 1984. Compiled and edited by Muntadas and Reese, the stream of thirty-second TV spots runs without commentary for an hour. In the discussion that follows, the artists and Professor of Media Studies Carol Wilder discuss how the development of televised media and electoral politics have become increasingly inseparable.

Participants
Antoni Muntadas, artist and Professor of the Practice, ACT/Department of Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Marshall Reese, media artist and member of Ligorano/Reese
Carol Wilder, Professor of Media Studies and Film, The New School for Public Engagement

Organized by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.

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