This
November a crime will take place at MACBA, Barcelona’s museum of
contemporary art: six artworks by American artist Peter Halley will be
stolen. With the help of 80 civilians from 17 countries, undercover
investigator Sam Cooper will catch the thief. It’s not a film plot, but it
could be. (Think: Thomas Crown Affair meets Cluedo.) Rather, this intricate
caper, based on an unfinished novel by award-winning Scottish writer Val
McDermid, is an elaborate brand-marketing stunt by Mini, the British
manufacturer of the small, high-performance autos that inspired Mary Quant’s
eponymous skirt and upstaged Michael Caine in The Italian Job. Known as
MISSION MINI, the project collapses the division between fiction and
reality, enabling anyone with a driver’s licence to participate in two
irresistibly seductive tropes: art theft and the great European adventure
mystery. The moonlighting sleuths will scour the streets of the Catalan
capital in – you guessed it – Minis. But the question remains: why would
Peter Halley make art to be stolen? Indeed, why would a respected American
artist and academic become involved in an overtly commercial campaign for a
British car?
Known since the early eighties as a member of the East Village Neo-Geo scene
as well as co-founder and publisher of index – an interview-based pan-arts
magazine featuring images by artist-photographers such as Ryan McGinley and
Wolfgang Tillmans – Halley took on the project because ‘this kind of
approach in brand communication was completely new to me. MISSION MINI is a
link between my work as an artist and a publisher.’ Clearly, in a culture in
which companies make fortunes by creating ‘brand identities’ – and BMW (who
recently acquired Mini) commissions famous directors such as Guy Ritchie and
Ang Lee to make short films – marketing strategists aim to appeal to
consumers’ intellects as well as their wallets. Ever since Andy Warhol
popped up on the scene, the boundaries between consumer-driven design and
‘high art’ have become increasingly blurred, raising questions about the
role of the artist and the status of art in contemporary Western culture.
While British artists such as Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin have recently
critiqued the market’s blatant appropriation of art, there is, at the same
time, something libratory and historically continuous about the notion of
art as mass communication.
Citing Warhol’s statement that ‘artists used to have it better’ in the old days, Halley comments, ‘they were told what to paint! This kind of art, working on a definite assignment dates back a long time and has a great tradition: just consider the day and age of Renaissance and Baroque art, when artists were requested to design costumes for court festivals.’ Halley continues the Old Master tradition in his bottega approach to art-making as well. Assistants apply up to 50 layers of paint to canvases based on his drawings. However, he insists on adding the final coat of Roll-a-Tex himself. It is precisely this coat that gives his abstract geometric work a depth and texture, and indeed Halley adamantly maintains that his Day-Glo canvases do not continue, but critique, the cool, transcendental investigations of first generation minimalist and abstract artists. In a 1983 statement, he writes: ‘I have tried to employ the codes of Minimalism, Color Field painting, and Constructivism to reveal the sociological basis of their origins. Informed by Foucault, I see in the square a prison; behind the mythologies of contemporary society, a veiled network of cells and conduits.’
The notion of ‘cells’ is central to Halley’s work and theory in that it calls upon our experience in post-industrialist Western society. From the Internet to the interstate, we are increasingly living in ‘cells’ connected by ‘conduits’ that replace direct human contact by simultaneously linking us more quickly and at greater distances. As an artist, critic and publisher Halley insists, however, that art stands at the interstices of social and individual experience. His six collages – his first foray into this medium – for MISSION MINI extend this philosophy, as he juxtaposes photographs of street pavement and fishnet stockings with lines and bright squares: again, conduits and cells.
The car is, of course, another ‘cell’. In his essay ‘On Line’, Halley writes: ‘The mechanism of the cell and conduit, while universal, is hidden. The automobile travels from destination to destination along various routes of circulation, but only when it stops at a gas station does it plug in. Filling up, that minor task, is actually the essential part of the system.’ Thus, this moment of connection is what makes for the possibility of social interdependence, rather than cut-off alienation. And in the same way, Halley has situated art squarely in the public world of experience rather than the white cube. Perhaps this is what MISSION MINI is all about: it allows an artist to utilise one of the most pervasive conduits, marketing, to reach us cell dwellers. Whether we fill up is up to us.
Melinda Rose Silva is a freelance writer and photographer based in London