Art & Advertising
In a world saturated with images, which are to be considered art and which not art? Is the question even relevant anymore? Advertising icons have been subverted by Pop artists and attained high art status. Meanwhile, with the democratization of photographic techniques (Polaroid, digital camera, etc.), combined with a populist belief that everybody can become an artist, any image-producer may lay claim to creativity. That would be forgetting talent. Swiss-born photographer Hans Gissinger has certainly not been oblivious of this particular ingredient that makes his images blatantly idiosyncratic. However, the photographer by plainly naming his book Between Art and Advertising. Work from 2004 and 2006 shows not only modesty but an attitude spanning a career: he rates advertising not so low and art not so high. This does not mean that he does not consider photography, or his photography, as artwork. But for him, what counts is the making?the process as well as the production, whatever its original intention: advertising for a product or photographing a still life. It takes a little courage and a great deal of honesty to mix both kinds of work. Many, whilst benefiting from the market economy, still pretend to create, free from its contamination, as though living in a fantasy world of pure aesthetics, Hans Gissinger does quite the reverse?he fully acknowledges the photos he took for Cartier or Ebel watches, incorporating them into this photographic corpus, which he describes as ?my history, a story between Art and Advertising.’ Better, by juxtaposing advertising pictures with other images (from his travels in Mongolia or personal projects like Water Recipes with Catalan chef Ferran Adria), he proves that there is a kinship in the quality of his work, be it artistic or commercial; he re-creates a context where transit is possible. Thus one passes from the limpid brilliance of a gem to the transparency of water, but it is not mere taste for parallels that brings these pictures together. Gissinger loves to play on the deceptive principle. With him, you never know where you are, you question your senses and are drawn into self-doubt: is it snow or is it egg white? Blood or strawberry jam? Can this be the nape of a skinhead or is it freshly shaven pigskin? He toys with scales: micro/macro, and opposites: life/death. The homely detail neighbours cosmic immensity, pregnant bellies are never far from visions of decay. Gissinger loves these diptychs which, at first, seem incongruous and question logic, only to reveal paradoxically that the meaning is in the absurdity of being here rather than there. Here you have a pair of feet firmly set on the planks of a wooden floor, next you have a motorway running towards some unknown destination. In Between Art and Advertisement you also encounter single images in the form of still lifes: lone banana skin with palm trees in the background or a dead sheep’s head (the organic, live or dead, is ubiquitous throughout the book).
In Hans Gissinger’s work, you may lose all sense of gravity, but not your sense of humour. He likes to destabilize cum grano salis. Geniality is part of his character?a most welcome trait in the oft-too-serious world of advertising and art photography. The self-portrait with his tongue sticking out is illustrative of the man’s capacity to defuse the artist’s heroic self-representation; the tongue is a fake one, or rather a very long red pepper, that makes him look like a lustful Tex Avery wolf.
Appetite ? desire from the stomach ? is a key theme in Gissinger’s imagery. ?I think with my belly’, he insists, ?Food is the first and last thing in your life, from the breast to the ?Henkersmahlzeit?, the meal of the condemned, it’s very intimate.’ The autodidact is driven by instinct and has proved it by his choice of subjects, many of which are related to food and cooking. One recalls a magisterial black and white book with French chef Meneau, La Conversation, and most recently, Tartas, a video piece in collaboration with Spanish pâtissier Christian Escriba (cream tarts exploding in the guests’face); selected stills are presented in Between Art and Advertising. Food is something physical, it is concrete matter, texture to be worked on by the photographer. Nothing metaphysical, here, with self-professed atheist Gissinger: beneath the skin (you may lift it as you wish, as demonstrated by the series on plastic surgery) there is no truth other than that of the flesh, palpitating with desire.
Between Art and Advertising may sound a very blunt title for a book so rich with images. In fact Hans Gissinger could just have named it Between, for what is at play here is for ever in flux, between solid and liquid, life and death, it is the organic ebb and flow?a celebration of absolute transience.
Sean James Rose