They’ve got game

The posters for the 2012 London Olympics have just been released. Organisers had spread the load and got 12 artists to do posters around the theme of the Games (what a pack of wimps, we would have commissioned Dick Frizzell to do the lot). Anyway, things have sure changed in the London Olympic Poster game as you can see.

And, along with his poster, there'll be a huge bonus on the first day of the Games when Martin Creed's work no. 1197 will be performed: bells all around the UK will be rung as quickly and as loudly as possible for three minutes.

Images: Top left and right London Olympic posters 1908 and 1948. Middle 2012 posters by Rachel Whiteread and Tracy Emin, bottom 2012 posters by Martin Creed and Howard Hodgkin.

All rights over the Olympic Games and associated Olympic Properties are held by IOC. Olympic Properties includes the Olympic Symbol, Flag, Motto, Emblem, Flame, Torch etc. as per the Olympic Charter. This blog is not associated with the IOC or any of the organizers in any manner. The information provided here is merely for educating people and spreading awareness.

Cover girl

“I want to train models to walk a different way.”

Marina Abramovic talking to the Financial Times.

Images: Hot off her MoMA performances, Marina Abramovic poses for the January 2011 issue of the Serbian edition of Elle magazine and the Fall edition of V.

Blackie’s hoofed it

Where do you go to read about animals, art, art theft and Billy Apple? Here on OTN. In this tale the perfect OTN storm takes place at the Kingsland end of New North Road where Horseland’s Chevalier store has been for around 30 years. The reason you knew Chevalier was in the horse business (apart from the name) was the presence of a horse standing on the top of the store's canopy three meters above the footpath. Not a real horse though, one of those fiberglass ones, a horse sculpture. 

These days finding Chevalier is not so easy as the horse - all 75 kg of it - has been nicked. The story has played out in the Auckland City Harbour News (front page six column header, full colur photo, above the fold etc) which tells us that the horse (painted black in 2001 and sensibly named Blackie) has not turned up. 

The Billy Apple angle? Blackie’s representative, store manager Mark Corner, was, “Flabbergasted… Mr Apple used the horse as inspiration when designing the company’s logo several years ago. It’s one of the icons of Kingsland. It’s sad to lose it.” 

Crimestoppers hotline: 0800-555-111

Image: The ghost of Blackie lives on in Billy Apple’s logo for Chevalier.

Like, likes?

Cloud nine

In the latest round of National Bank ads, Cody the black stallion takes a back seat to art. We’re not talking generic art lookalikes out of a design shop here, but commissioned work by John Reynolds, an artist who has work in every major art museum in the country and who represented New Zealand at the 2006 Biennale of Sydney. The paintings are in Reynolds’ signature style with small canvases, some piled on top of one another. ‘Smaller repayments’ one of them tempts. “Fix for how long?” another slyly questions. Also part of the team is Hawke’s Bay artist Martin Poppelwell. In the ad a young couple unwrap the works from their protective bubble wrap and Academy-hang them on their living room wall before stepping back to gaze lovingly at this strange poem to banking. Recessions are for babies.

Thanks for the heads up W

Artists in Ad land: Vintage holiday edition

Artists in Ad land: Ralph Hotere

In 1996 the Bank of New South Wales merged with Trustbank to create New Zealand’s largest bank Westpac. Change your name and you got to change your stationery. To give the new bank some cultural clout, the design shop that landed the rebranding commissioned Ralph Hotere to create a work that incorporated 'Westpac red' to serve as the basis for the visual identity for the new brand. Hotere painted RED X2 and details from it were used to brand, via colour and texture, Westpac's branches, ATMs, credit cards and adverts.

The Hotere look lasted for around four or five years and was then phased out. Through the commissioning process the painting belonged to the bank and was lent for a time to Wellington airport where it hung above the escalators to the departures level. Since April 2003 it has been on loan to the Auckland Art Gallery.
Image: Details of Ralph Hotere’s RED X 2 in use on a Westpac ATM

Artists in Ad Land: Joseph Beuys

A couple of linden trees from Joseph Beuys’s famous Documenta work 7,000 Eichen—Stadtverwaldung statt Stadtverwaltung (7000 Oaks—City Forestation Instead of City Administration) were chopped down the other day, as Artforum relates. In this event lies a strange link to Ad Land. To pull together funds for this hugely expensive project (404 million DM in 1982) Beuys embraced the celebrity cash cow making-an-ad-in-Japan.

Ham Solo

The BNZ is the latest to reach for the art cliché presenting its admittedly cute pig as an artist. It’s all trotters, palette, beret and brush along with the resulting “cubist” (read modern art, even if Cubism was a pre-World War I phenomenon) self-portrait. Why the pig is painting en plein air is anybody’s guess but it looks as if he’s set his easel up on the banks of the Avon River in Christchurch. Good to see a South Island artist getting some recognition.

You gotta know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em

In a recent episode of the hit TV series Mad Men art made a surprise cameo appearance. The ad world and the art world are often connected as we have shown in previous posts. In this episode of Mad Men it was the ad-boss-purchase connection. The artwork was a Rothko purchased by agency boss Bert Cooper. In the scene we learn that Cooper paid $10,000 for it which, for the time, (Mad Men is set in 1962) synchs with David Rockefeller’s purchase of Rothko’s White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose) for $8,500.00 two years before in 1960. Later in the show Cooper lets on that he only purchased the work to make money. “Between you and me, that thing should double in value by Christmas.” He would have been better to hold. Rockefeller sold his Rothko in 2007 for $72.8 million.
Image: Stirling & Cooper staff Jane, Ken, Harry and Sal sneak into Bert Cooper’s office to look at the ‘Rothko’ in episode seven of the second series of Mad Men.

Puppy love

Durex meets Jeff Koon’s Made in Heaven, balloon dog style.

Theme park

In the 1970s – before post-modernism made theme shows a no-go zone – there was a letter to artists that used to go something like this. “Dear Rick, Next month we are mounting an exhibition called Puppy Love, which will examine the role of the dog in art. We would like to borrow your work Seven dogs. If this work is not available perhaps you could suggest another of your works that features dog or you might even consider making a special dog work for the show.”

We were reminded of this when we saw an ad for Kinder Seeks Art in the most recent Art Forum. You can go to the web page here and read…

“Kinder has initiated an international search to find and record works of art (drawing, painting, sculpture, street art, photography, installations, video etc. etc.) inspired by the form of the Kinder egg or its surprise-toys.”

… or, maybe you would like to make a work of art that features the Kinder egg and send it to us.

PS

A less successful art cover for Esquire under George Lois's art direction. (see previous post)

Art in ad land

The cover of Esquire featuring Muhammad Ali as St. Sebastian was created 40 years ago by legendary American ad guy George Lois. At the time Ali was waiting for his appeal to be heard by the Supreme Court having refused military service in Vietnam as a conscientious objector. (He was sentenced to five years of jail for draft evasion).

Lois had been roped in to create covers to raise the readership of the magazine which had flagged since a flying start during the great depression as a classic raunchy man’s mag. Lois was also responsible for other great Esquire art covers including one for an article on the death of the avant-garde in 1969. Warhol and the soup can were shot separately and merged in what we would now call a Photoshop situation. Lois’s covers helped raise Esquire’s circulation from half a million to ten million over ten years. He was with Esquire from 1962 to 1972.

Images: Left illustration for the cover story The Passion of Muhammad Ali. Left top, Andy Warhol features on the May 1960 cover story The final decline and total collapse of the American avant-garde, bottom right, August 1963 Lois cover featuring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor’s romance on the set of Cleopatra.

Artists in Ad Land: Billy Apple

Along with his contemporary Andy Warhol, Billy Apple managed to have a close association with advertising and still be seen as a credible practising artist. Unlike Warhol, Apple did it from the inside. Somehow, as he says in the terrific documentary Being Billy Apple, he was able to “drift in and make a lot of money, and drift out.”

Probably his best known campaign was for Tareyton, the cigarette company. James Jordan of BBDO came up with one of the most famous US ad lines of all times, “I’d rather fight than change”. The gag was completed by models with a bruised eye painted in make-up. When Tareyton brought out its new ‘light’ brand in the late seventies, it was Apple who came up with the “rather light than fight” line, switching the black bruise with a white patch.

In Being Billy Apple, Apple talks about other brands he worked on including a British tea print campaign, an early example of using packaging art to promote Breeze detergent and Warner ("why have half a TV when you can have a Warner TV"). One of our readers has suggested that it was also Apple, as Barry Bates, who drew up one of the first versions of the Farmers logo.

As you will know from past posts Apple is still juggling art and ads. His recent campaign for Marcus Lush has hit New Plymouth.

Image: Tareyton print advert based on Apple’s concept