Translated by Denise Pierrotti

Talking about the contemporary body is talking about an organism or an information system. A net of negotiations that are virtually traced in our daily life. The bodies quickly connect and disconnect with the territories. By means of new technologies – like cell phone cameras, GPS systems and i-pods – we interact with the environment compounding it with the ideal techno scenario.

We build this kind of city, with its specific technologies where advertisements take shape and float over our heads; that is when they don’t slip inside our own bodies. They challenge us the whole time. Adverts are more and more seductive, creative, and convincing… And, why not artistic?

What we really notice is that art and advertising manage to unite and create fantastic advertising campaigns in which the product image and its course through the market are worth more than the product itself. However, what becomes “fantastic”, in the literary sense of the word, is the fact that many of these strategies are well-known, and call themselves, in the advertising world, “guerrilla marketing”.

Guerrilla. n. A band of armed volunteers, who fight the enemy out of the field or in ambushes; undisciplined troops; gang of thieves; a political faction that does not constitute a disciplined party.

Dicionário Brasileiro Globo, Francisco Fernandes, Celso Pedro Luft e F. Marques Guimarães

This kind of marketing strategy, which is developing more and more in our techno-scientific society, puts great value on “interactivity” and hyper-real aesthetics, forming a bridge between the enchanted world of advertising and our grey and banal daily life.      Still, most of the time, these activities are carried out in the public spaces of the streets, in the shape of urban intervention.

One of the most well-known “guerrilla” campaigns is the one that convokes a group of people and hires them, in the name of a company, to tattoo their bodies with the symbols of a commercial trademark. In a funny way, or by pure coincidence, or who knows as an answer to this kind of advertising activity, an artist from Rio de Janeiro, called Ducha, created a piece of work in 2002 called Tattoo on a poorly paid man. The work was made possible due to an Itaú Cultural edict: the artist hired a man to tattoo the Itaú logo on his head, taking this action to the bank´s private art gallery, portrayed on the body of the man as his work of art.

Nowadays, there are several advertising agencies dedicated exclusively to this sector of advertising and that are set apart from the others by their flamboyant media presence.   They organize marketing campaigns with parades, free product samples and an abundance of “interactivity”. In these cases it is hard to identify what is entertainment and what is advertising, and, in this “genial” mixture, the product itself becomes a mere end. But this end seems no more interesting in our society than “I always want more”. Desire nowadays is aimed at the intervals of what is new, it reaches into the future into a constant age of more desire, in a coil of pleasure, which prevents this from being reached, it doesn’t seem to have boundaries.

Putting aside the possible socio-behavioral analyses of the individuals involved in this kind of activity, we are interested in discussing the relationship between art, advertising and the body: art in the scope of its most critical expressions or that has the vitality of denial; active advertising in contemporary bodies and people’s daily lives in the shape of entertainment.

It is interesting to note how art, which often tries to mock our mediocre lifestyle, acts in conjunction with advertising here, often failing to escape from the traps of this junction.   Obviously, if we think that the same activity has a completely different meaning depending on the spaces in which it is carried out, in galleries or on the streets, and inside a shared system of different signs, we can see the difference between art and advertising, as well as the media effects that each one will cause.

However, the question here is the following: does art, in the face of new advertising strategies, bring critical action or a simple aesthetic portrait of this reality and, thus becomes an advertisement of itself?

Advertising. n. Quality of what is public; vulgarization; divulgation; publicity by advertisements, posters; appeal.

Dicionário Brasileiro Globo, Francisco Fernandes, Celso Pedro Luft e F. Marques Guimarães

It would be a waste of time discussing if artists are interested in advertising their own work or not. Because they are public individuals, they are already inserted into the media system in our society, and need it to articulate what they do in markets or on artistic circuits. The discussion must concentrate on another plan: on the type of work and systems of art in which artists express themselves and circulate.

This debate also applies to advertising and it is an ethic, not moral, discussion about art and its social applications. If art were a mere subjective expression, with no status or value, such a profitable and investment-friendly market would not have been built around it.

This discussion becomes ethical, as it invades the public space of the city, tattooing its fabrics, compressing individuals´ bodies and hardly allowing them to breathe. And finally, what includes this question in an ethical-type debate is the fact that advertising not only restrains, imposes and obliges, but is often enjoyable and extremely well-accepted by the public in terms of mobilizing desires and moralities.

[The other day, I was walking down Rua Visconde de Pirajá, in Ipanema, and in the middle of several workers who were giving me leaflets saying “I buy gold” and “Earn easy money”, I saw another one carrying a tray with little plastic cups on it. They looked tasty and steam was coming out of them. I got closer and asked if it was for free, he gave me one of those little plastic cups and said that it was iced coffee. At that moment I thanked the marketing campaign. Of course! It was just advertising for an internet café that had just opened at the mall down the road. The idea was an open-air drink and a flyer together with the “souvenir” that was worth 10% off any product in the store.]

The reply of art comes in shape of performances in public spaces, events, public art, interventions and urban interferences. Most of the time they are relational aesthetics answers, which invite and appeal to the multiple sensorialities of passers-by. Several works of art use this public place in order to propitiate a larger circulation of art and to build it really public, in the sense of art as a cultural product available for anyone.

It is hard to escape from the tricks of the market [is it possible?], especially now that creativity is around us, in the shape of some art-product available to everyone, maybe performing a role that public art wanted to consummate, reaching more and more people and in a more effective way. However, the big question would be the following:

Art intended not only to reach these people, but to make them think and to feel in the body what they are exposed to every day. To criticize, not only to communicate in the middle of so much communication. To remove senses from places saturated with senses, to relax, to chill out, and fascinate without profitable ends.

[Product for sale! Art for sale! En-joy it! Try it! Don’t pay anything and don’t take it home!]