LA GALERIE 13 JEANNETTE MARIANI presents Anne Brunet & Guillaume Josué: Tout Doit Disparaître.
Anne Brunet & Guillaume Josué
La conso(u)mmation des signes.
“Revolution is wherever an exchange is established that breaks the finality of models, the mediation of code and the consecutive cycle of value. For the secret of a social word, of a revolution, is this rigorous volatilization of any transcendent social instance (…) Revolution is symbolic or it is not.”
Jean Baudrillard
At a time when the death knell is sounding for our societies devoted to mass production and consumption (and when ecological threats are forcing us to scale back our dreams of abundance), it’s no longer only necessary to change our consumption habits, it’s also become vital to overturn the system of symbols that supports this economy. While it’s easy to see that material waste is accumulating exponentially all over the planet, it’s just as important to understand that the world of advertising signs that surrounds us, and which daily shower us with their slogans, is also producing ever-greater quantities of symbolic waste. Advertising is the discharge of signs, the gradual sedimentation of their meaning: the placing under guardianship of their value.
Faced with the rising tide of propaganda (and the paralysis of floating signifiers), Anne Brunet & Guillaume Josué are like guerillas. Deconstructing with a sense of humor not devoid of poetry the mechanisms on which advertising marketing usually relies (over-coding an image with a slogan, a symbol with a commercial purpose), they give their viewers back the possibility of freely associating an image with a text, a symbol with its meaning and, perhaps most profoundly, a signified (a concept) with a signifier (a form). But rather than simply describing in abstract terms the mechanics behind their work, let’s take one at random, and see how it works.
What exactly is going on in a work like “Make the sky the most beautiful place on earth”? To find out, we must first note that this title is none other than the slogan of an Air France advertisement. In other words, before being a somewhat poetic phrase (reminiscent of the description of paradise for Christians), the average viewer can’t help but have in mind that someone is trying to sell them something. Then, looking up at the image itself, he or she may smile to see, instead of the luxurious airplane he or she expected to see, the image of Astro (the little robot), carrying on his shoulders Kiki (the friend of the little ones) and Patrick (the gentle starfish, friend of SpongeBob SquarePants) flying in the company of a winged dragon (symbol of Asia – Astro’s homeland).
In other words, Anne Brunet and Guillaume Josué didn’t just have fun reworking a slogan to give it a “quirky” illustration, but — bringing together several semiotic codes in a single imaginary space, they were able to turn the superheroes of their childhood into the figures of a new mythology whose ambition (and critical scope) is none other than to be able to give new meaning to what, until now, has only been the property of an airline or a manga production company.
Cette publication est également disponible en : Français (French)
