In late August the Estonian national newspaper, Ekspress, published an interview with me about advertising and public space. Merit Karise, the interviewer, has supplied an English version below.
As a result of this interview Merit was invited to give a “presentation about alcohol advertising and youth at a roundtable that took place in our Parliament on Oct 9th, and where MPs, the representative of our President and rep. of Chancellor of Justice took part.” Since then there has been talk about bringing her to the Economic Affairs Committee of Parliament where legal changes in alcohol advertising regulation can be made.
By the way, the article references my personal work outside the Anti-Advertising Agency, viewable on visitsteve.com, and an interview I did with Rob Walker for Murketing’s Q&A section.
Interview for Estonian Ekspress, August 30, 2007 (Merit Karise, teacher of advertising and advertising critique at Tartu Art School)
You don’t paint on canvas and you don’t show two flickering TV screens facing each other in an empty gallery. Your gallery is the public space of cities and often you don’t give any sign to your viewer that it is art that she/he is seeing. Why is that?
I think there’s 2 reasons for that.
One, is that the white cube and “modern art” don’t come naturally to me. I grew up in my parents furniture shop and worked in garages though my teens and twenties. When I started art school, I had never been to a contemporary art museum. My creative background was punk rock, film and radio. When I made art, I wanted the people I knew to understand it – the people who worked with me in the motorcycle shop, or the friends and family I had. These were working class people more than “cultural class” people. I realize now that I walk in both worlds, but at the time I got started I was very much in the former. When I finally started going to museums, a lot of the work I just didn’t understand and it didn’t speak to me. Read More
Shop-Dropping in Ma’ariv
On New Year’s Day I received a call from a journalist at Israel’s Ma’ariv Magazine. The interview was folded into a feature on shopdropping. The piece discusses the Anti-Advertising Agency‘s shopdropping workshops from early 2007 and the People Products 123 project with Amanda Eicher. if you can read hebrew, check out the 2 page spread.