Saws and Bears or Dystopic, futureworld, blackleather, zipper, zombie, virus, retribution

 
Following up on a topic mentioned recently, and a piggyback to boot, I thought… Isn’t it an interesting situation when clients ask you not to repeat cliché warhorse/chestnut approaches to visual problem solving? The current bizarro-war/econo-politic is really straining the limits on this, isn’t it? It’s quite a dilemma. On the one hand, one can easily understand it but on the other, even though there’s considerable pressure to invent new ways of saying the same old thing, have the average editor’s or reader’s minds really expanded as far as ours are expected to in the few hours we have to problem solve and sketch?  I doubt it, but I could be all wrong. Eliminating certain popular or cultural icons prima facie might imply that not even knowing them in the first place might have currency and that’s exactly where I was when I started [prior to “getting” an education] and apparently where we are now!  Everything-but-the-kitchen-sink minds demanding outside-of-the-box solutions designed for quick-read audiences. Think outside of the box only so long as everybody understands which box. Most likely it’s the television [like pornography, I quit television when I reached adulthood]!
Thinking outside the box, which once conjured images of Francesco Goya or William Blake, has come to mean different but quick reading. Does this address some manner of newly evolved visual intelligence [attributed to the hyper-visual digital world] OR could this be yet another example of that anti-expertise, non-hierarchical, anti-elite, and "democratic" aesthetic that’s going around [Illustration 2.0]? Or is it both?  After all, “getting it” quickly and thinking might not be divergent paths but I do think that icons like shorthand imply a kind of quickness. Homer Simpson or Sophocles, which is in the box?
Perhaps Poetry Slams and Karaoke were the first hints, art-like events that common folks could understand like boxing matches or baseball games replete with scores like a fucking beauty pageant for Chrissakes! Iron Chef is more SNL than any Reality. Even Colonel Tom Parker wouldn’t have thought that up! Trying to come to terms with the multiplex convergences that constitute the current climate makes reading Derrida, Foucault et al seem like bedtime stories for children. I suppose that today more people expect, understand and even DEMAND OUTside over INside?  With the comic book the dominant narrative mode today you’d think that at least there would be a greater appreciation, dare I say veneration, of the pictorial image, even if content is as thin as newsprint and has never been MORE cliché? Never the less, I see clichés nearly every time I look at major media from magazines to feature films. WTF?  Has the outside become the inside?  Yes, but what kind of image is it? The outside-of-the-box kind! It’s all commodity art after all, isn’t it?
Anyway, here are two examples from my recent work.  The first is from Plansponsor Magazine and is about GM cutbacks: AD Soojin Buzelli.  The second is from Canadian Business Magazine: AD Tim Davin.  Both QP’s and in both cases, even though I had virtually impenetrable manuscripts [they might as well have been written by Derrida], the perceptive AD’s immediately tossed out simple, synoptic phrases like “cutting something” or “ bear on a globe” which helped cut to the chase immensely. Otherwise, I’d have literally spent hours trying to re-invent the wheel or whatever. No doubt without success. Twitter: Thnk U!