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OF PRACTICE

My interest in the systems of mass media, advertising and culture from the 1950’s onwards has led to my current themes that tease and probe the surface of media representations. Recreating and mutating them to emphasise their underlying meaning. Representations that we have come to take for granted. The portrayal of men and women in advertising/ media. How sex and pornography is used by those industries.

How sex and pornography is linked with and sustains patriarchy and the social system of male supremacy.

How society perpetuates a system of male supremacy and how media are used to condition us from childhood onwards.

In my work I explore this conditioning in sex and violence in patriarchy.

Media are used to define socially appropriate behaviour and responses and permit unchecked homophobia from childhood onwards as part of the system of conditioning which discourages men from viewing and treating each other as they treat women.

Consumerism and advertising condition us into our place in society. We learn to fear disapproval and remain within rigid behavioural constraints.

Our emotions are confined, suppressed and channelled into envy, greed, competitiveness, personal consumption and concern over our appearances to distract us from the real issues of the world.

Our subconscious desires are exploited in consumer culture and advertising.

Glamour and personal social envy - our sense of powerlessness combined with envy leads to the fantasy dreams of consumerism.

Our own little worlds of illusion and fantasy, gossip and scandal, eyeing each other constantly, have become our reality, the biggest soap opera now is our own life. We model ourselves on the fiction on screen, wish to become like those we see there, and live as they do in the clean happy world of the adverts.

Marshall McLuhan defined the media of print and photography as hot, Television, drawings and cartoons as cold. I enjoy exploring the effects of transforming hot media into cold that, as McLuhan recognised, require a greater audience involvement and make a greater impact.

Media fiction influences our reality.

Addiction, satisfaction – you can buy pleasure/ satisfaction/ control/ domination/ peace/ sexuality.

The press / media dramatise and personalise the news. After years of conditioning us to an emotive point of view, a dispassionate view is hard to achieve. Them and us – take your sides – get divided – be independent – be controllable.

We are conditioned, regimented mechanised and now seek our inner selves, our natural selves. Advertising/ products/ media appeal to this search for the inner self with their implied promise of fulfilment and enhancement.

Mass media and advertising expose us to ever-higher levels of sexual and violent imagery and ideas. The aftermath of events is disregarded in favour of the next stimulating event. Craving ever more stimulation from entertainment how far will consumers be allowed to indulge their psychopathologies in role-playing and virtual reality games of the future. Will these games, and marketed mood altering drugs, be seen as useful social control in the future?

Advertising / media persuade the consumer to consider themselves superior through joining the elite band who use a product.

Consumerism as a new religion

Capitalism and pornography. Selling the dream of owning and controlling another body as if owning a car. Both are sold on their desirability, looks and promise to perform well.

Advertising and pornography – both systems of social differentiation, class structure, patriarchy - promise feelings of pleasure achievable through purchasing.

Pornography and advertising – systems of symbols, poses and gestures.

Branded products offer a class or position that can be bought into. Brands as indicators of class/ gender/ status/ sexuality.

Sex for the consumer generation – packaged and branded.

Pornography and products appeal to our self-image and are used to create it and maintain it. We buy pornography/ products and join the club, confirming or enhancing our image/ status.

Sex has become a system of ‘cooked’ language, gestures, hints and euphemisms. The cooked – Innuendo, euphemism. The raw – graphic images of sexual activity.
‘Play mummies and daddies’ juxtaposes the raw and the cooked in the printed media through which many of us were conditioned as children. We have grown used to ‘cooked’ sex through our culture and media. We have our own mental pictures for the euphemisms. The brutal explicitness of graphic images undermines our mental images. Hot ideas in a cold medium.

Pornography and consumer values – in both we pick up, use/ abuse then discard.

Pornography as technology – creates demand, conditions the mind informs our attitudes, conditions our sexual behaviour and expectations.

The dehumanising effects of pornography and violence. ‘Having an accident’ concentrates on the dehumanised voyeurism inherent in us all in the wake of an accident. It turns the mirror on the voyeur.

Sex – Technology – Death, a modern triptych.

The metaphysical hunger that draws people to view the carnage of accidents. The morbid urge to gaze, to ogle, to confirm.

Voyeurism in technology, sex and of death.
Sex – the sexual act, the body forbidden, hidden, taboo,
Death – the destruction of body forbidden, hidden, taboo.

David Evans

18 May 1998

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