ESSAY: Levi's New Ad Campaign

Screen shot from Levi's ad, "Go Forth", featuring Walt Whitman in scratchy authentic sounding old 78 vinyl voiceover - unbelievable, really. It's meant to be powerful, poetic, a ode to the endurance and dignity of mankind. Fireworks go off, sounding like gunshots. It's a gritty place of trial and try-again, this America. Then, the ad slaps a close-up of the little red Levi's tab onto the last frame. Is that a subtle butt shot? Well, that's where that little tab is, n'est-ce-pas?

When I found out it was shot mostly in Louisiana, I thought of Robert J. Flaherty (Nanook of the North) - didn't they make you see that in film class - whose last documentary was a commission from Standard Oil (1948), called Louisiana Story. It's the story of the construction of an oil rig amidst a pristine wetlands, and how well it all turned out. It did, didn't it? Didn't it?

"The genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges, or churches, or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors, but always most in the common people."

Walt Whitman

I want to praise activists through the years.

I praise those of the past as well, to have them honored.
Studs Terkel, author of Working

Studs, are you turning over in your grave yet? Just keep reading.

Next Ad "We are all workers":

[wind blows soft and sad as soft slow-spoken African-American young girl reads her school essay in voiceover]

"We were taught how the pioneers went into the West.

They...made up what things could be...

People got sad and left.

Maybe the world breaks on purpose...so we can have work to do.

...people can't see...how frontiers are all around us." [ glorious orchestral music up]

from To Work, directed by John Hillcoat, shot in

Braddock, PA

Screen shot from We Are All Workers, directed by

Aaron Rose, a five-minute mini-documentary about the attempt

of Braddock PA, a decaying milltown, to rebuild as a commercial center

and artists' community. It's a story of urban reclamation, going green,

and Levi's Jeans. Weiden & Kennedy, a Portland ad agency (Nike, Old Spice,

Target, Converse) did these incredibly artsy beautiful ads.

Well, you've got to have something to wear while you're saving the earth. Gosh, it's nice to hear someone talkin' credit about what we're tryin' to do. Maybe it's not so bad to have to work hard.

It still takes bodysweatmuscle work, work with your hands and back, to keep things clean, to get fixin' up done, doesn't it. Kinda makes you think how you oughta help out, join in. They were like that in the '60's. They had new explanations, new motions and notions. You see them around today, in post offices, Apple stores, with their backpacks, faded blue denim workshirts,

hiking boots, folk dance skirts swirling. Back East, lots of them, still. I think they got them in

Idaho and Oklahoma, too. Don't they?

What they've got is people who wear jeans but really don't want to be had. Do you really think that rugged individualists are going to buy jeans because a corporation has branded itself as socially responsibile? Has endowed itself with certain American rights? Where are these jeans made, anyway? Did Levi's open a factory in Braddock?

I was going to get a plane and go wash birds in Louisiana. Then my biologist brother told me that it's really hard on them to be washed with detergent and most of them die, unable to function in the new locations they are released to.

So I just cleaned the garage instead. I hired two Levi-clad day laborers from the city's hiring site who worked very hard in 95 degree temperatures for $12 a hour, a burrito lunch, and all the water they could drink. See, I got the idea, right? Then I had a garage sale and people paid me to carry away my junk.

I think I'll just let everyone else reclaim, resist, and buy the jeans instead and hang out looking retro-cool.

If hard work were really a virtue, then mules would be saints.

James Dee Richardson

Maybe they really are, and we just don't know it.

Seriously, the commercials are exquisite in tone, frame by frame marvels of polished balance, and have a most lyric and elegiac mood, deeply cinematic. I love the color, the scratchy chalky typeface, the music. Reverentially, I return to Walker Evans, the WPA murals, Dorothea Lange, Bernd and Hilla Becher, The Grapes of Wrath...You just want them to go on and on...video photo essays of deep and satisfying summation.

Are these ads going to sell jeans? I do want to see the nursing home of the baby boomers in a few years, check out what they're wearing while they listen to the Stones. Hope they can still hear them.

LAST AD: Verizon

An unshaven, balding young man turns his chiseled profile to the heavens. His head is circled by halos, blue, undulating to reddish near his shirt. His shirt and tie are open, his chest is swelled with grace. He is trusting, open; a seeker who has listened and looked for answers, and is being filled with them as we gaze.

Yes, the heavens are filled with messages these days, just like they've always been. There's scholarly agreement about just what St. Teresa found out in her moments of rapture. I wonder about our St. John of the Electronic Desert, though. What twittering shades have informed his vision?

Signal is strength - just what does that mean? Is that like the medium is the message? That means that content is irrelevant, doesn't it? Or maybe, it's like E.M. Forster, "only connect". That will be enough to keep the airwaves open.

The ad is proto/neo-Shepard Fairey, of recent Obama-vision notoriety. What makes me connect the two advertisements? There's a kind of fascist agit-prop message underlying this style, and also in the Levi's ads, I think. It serves as a kind of advertiser's warning and confession: Don't be fooled; this really is an ad after all, and I really am trying to sell you something. They just do it so very very well.

ART REVIEW & ESSAY: Textiles: The Value of the Decorative Essay&Photos

author photo

Textiles have a powerful continuing fascination for me - as an object class, they serve the most daily, intimate, bodily and domestic needs, but cultures almost immediately begin to embellish them with images that retain undeniable authenticity. It's impossible to escape communicating status, aesthetic values, and personal identity when donning a garment of any kind. They function as brand, prison, transparency, and mirror. To wrap the body is the first, continuing, and last act of human life, the most poignant care the family and society performs for each other.

Since textiles are impossible to redact, their power has relegated them to a separate class of art object - domesticana - as the Chicano art movement terms art products made by women with traditional female-gendered material and messages.

Dean MacCannell in The Tourist, describes tourism as a compensatory perceptual stance and relational form, an attempt at "moral involvement" (p. 40) because "everyday people...[are]...condemned to look elsewhere, everywhere, for...authenticity, to catch...a...glimpse of it reflected in the simplicity, poverty, chastity, or purity of others' "[cultures] (p.41). Global capitalism and materialism has destroyed human unity with the natural world and only simulated realities are available.

 "I hate traveling and explorers". Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, quoted in Artforum, April, 2010, p. 174

I would go further, suggest that the collector/aesthetician-stance may serve a similar purpose. MacCannell, whose critique, chilling and undeniable as it is, seems to me to leave us in an all too familiar unidimensional wasteland. Might as well become a freegan. Then I look at Claude Levi-Strauss describing a transformational energy in culture that reverses negative meanings, rendering them positive. An example is cannibalism. Christianity has created a symbolic sacrament of the body and blood that functions to incorporate power from the god, as cannibals believed they could when they consumed their enemies. (Thomas Crow, Artforum, April, 2010, p. 171).

Psychologists like Erick Erickson also describe behaviors that while neurotic in some, may be mature ego function in others. (Childhood and Society). Always, dependent upon the context. So, I aim for a post-modern informed, contextual integration. It is the task of individual to create a purposeful stance, which though subjective, will be convincing.

I realize that I want an aesthetic that is both journey to enjoyment and transcendence. It must not deny irrationality, hypocrisy, and grief. No scolding or preaching either. Don't bleach me dry traveling to distant conceptual plateaus. Tricky navigation is challenging and welcome. Oh, and please, an occasional humorous side trip. The experience of life on this wasted industrial plain still is our life to live. Reductionism is a reverse disposal of perspective, cramping open-ended possibility and creative action.

Then, to return to my interest in textiles and tourism. These are my mother's old handkerchiefs. Born in 1910, surely she used them for decades until kleenex convenience replaced them. I found them in an unironed, but clean, wadded-up ball when I went through her possessions. I kept them for a long time, until, unable to bear it no longer, one summer day with little to do I carefully ironed and folded them all, and put them away in a special box. At least I still had room for them.Then I saw photos of Rachel Whiteread's studio, a few objects on display. How wondrous strange - that this minimalist sculptor of newly-filled volumes that moved me to mourn and face death would display objects, no matter their formal properties.

author photo  

Barbara Kruger

Martha Stewart's Living Magazine articles on collectible textiles (June, July 2010) showed me I could display the handkerchiefs, but it wasn't until writing this today that I find this choice purposeful, battling myself as I do over sentimentality and kitsch. I do not claim art status for them, but to use them to trace the domesticana chain from function to craft to modern textile/fiber art.

 Barbara Kruger - all small photo /text images

Orly Cogan, textile images

Searching for My Prince

OBIT: My Aunt Ro's Life Celebration

On my recent trip to Iowa, I called my cousin Debbie, my Aunt Rosalie's daughter, and Betty and Elmer Stearns, the sister and brother-in-law of Leo Lindberg, my mother's second husband. Although I didn't go to see them, and it's been a long time since we spoke, they greeted me so warmly and fondly, as if we'd chatted every day for years. Those family ties I held so loose and slack now seem mixed skeins of relation that hold me closely wrapped - I am grateful to find them in place after all, one of later life's small gifts of recompense for past sins of omission.

Deb told me that Aunt Ro had been placed in hospice, and I do know what that means, but I was still taken aback when she called a few days after I had gotten home to tell me that my dear, funny aunt had passed at 98. She was the artistic one. Uncle Roger, too. I saw their paintings as a child when I went to their homes, one of my clearest bell-tone memories. Though I felt very alone as I defined myself as artist and art teacher, I think Ro and Roger were there, offering me that path when my mother, bless her soul, wished for me a secure and functional life of homemaking, teaching, maybe nursing. (A vocational test I took in high school suggested I might be a drill-press operator.)

That day on the phone I asked Deb to tell Aunt Ro how much I felt her spirit in my life, and how glad I was that I had and have this work. She told me later that she had told Ro this, and I was comforted to know that one small last connection had been given to me.

I also remember when my Aunt Bruna renounced me for a teen-age incident. I had "shot my mouth off" over her endless grieving, not realizing how troubled a person she really was.

Even 35 years later, Bruna would never speak to me or see me, and before she died, I wrote her a letter telling her that I was sorry and asked her to speak to me once again. She refused. But Aunt Ro had read the letter (shared with her by my mother) and she told me that it was a good letter and I felt her tough brand of regard directed to me for what this had cost me.

I knew in some way, I'd made it right anyway.

Now, my parents are gone, my beloved uncles are gone, and all my dear aunts but one, my Uncle Roger's wife, Berniece, who lives in Cedar Rapids, alone, doing very well, living a quiet, blessed, and kindly life. I don't think about it so much, that the generations have switched places and I'm now the one moving close to the horizon's end. The perspective shifts; acceptance and a sense of privilege grows. My own children and grandchildren fill my heart and days with immediate joy and rejoicing gratitude. That's me, in full being, so fully part of life's ongoing stream.

Aunt Rosalie was frequently published in the local papers.