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Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Visual Art What Makes A Great Stranger Cover, Or the Power of Context

Posted by Jen Graves on Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 10:12 AM

I'd argue that this week's cover of the Stranger is pretty great. It's bright and summery, and it happens to hit right as the sun comes out in full force. It's a package of Otter Pops, for chrissakes, and it's throbbingly beautiful. How can you do better for a July cover? This cover, in fact, is the exact, exuberant opposite—even formally speaking, this present vertical stripe to that past horizontal stripe—of another classic Stranger cover: the Blue House cover, which we printed the week after the murders at the Blue House. The cover space is its own context. It builds up its own internal history in addition to its external connections both intended and happenstance (the murders, the perfect summer weather after an unbelievable stretch of July grey). I love this cover; it's pretty close to perfect.

The image is by Isaac Layman. In real life it is 6 by 4 1/2 feet and stands in a white-cube gallery at Lawrimore Project along with several other images the same size and the same subject (though the colors of the Otter Pops vary).

In that configuration, I was considerably less impressed. And the image's success as a Stranger cover does nothing to persuade me that the image in the gallery is any better than I thought when I wrote this in my review of the show:

Layman is clever, and this has its short sides, namely, self-satisfaction and artiness. A few of his works fold too neatly into the pages of art history: A roomful of giant photographs of packets of Otter Pops is, well, too pop. They're perfectly enjoyable as a right-in-your-freezer subversion of a color-field painting chapel by Rothko, and they're ingeniously installed, ringing the gallery's white cube room beneath a rectangular fluorescent light amid track spotlights—the flat coloring of the fluorescent, oddly, making the room feel skylit. But this neat operation is not the full extent of what Layman can do.

It's not that the Otter Pops are an utter failure in the gallery—and plenty of people have disagreed with my assessment and bought them in that larger-than-life form (I wouldn't be surprised if you see one or two of those giant Otter Pop images on the walls of your local museum someday soon, nestled perfectly into the art historical canon narrative).

It's just that the image is better as a Stranger cover—an unexpected, glowing newsstand gem that flashes and streaks at the right moment and then disappears. Every image cannot be separated from its use. Never underestimate the power of context.

Comments (5) RSS

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Otter Pops are a success because they remind people who took Chem or Biochem of Western Blots.

Thus giving them both art cred, non-elite cred, and geek cred.

Posted by Will in Seattle

on July 27, 2010 at 10:45 AM

I'd only seen this coverage from a distance and didn't even realize that they were otter pops. Fantastic!

Posted by Josh Bis

on July 27, 2010 at 11:21 AM

how on earth do otterpops remind you of western blots? please show your math. also, "people who took Chem" would have no idea what a western blot is. i suspect you don't, either.

Posted by blip on July 27, 2010 at 12:11 PM

@3, Will is full of shit. You have to understand this. His sole goal in posting ANYTHING is to attempt to fool naive people into believing that he is cool, savvy, with-it, technical, knowledgeable -- when he is the exact opposite of all of those things. He's not trying to add to the conversation; he's trying to make himself look good.

Because he is so spectacularly short-sighted, it never occurs to him that some people here might actually know something about one of the subjects he's blithering about, thus rendering his project impossible. This, despite the fact that it happens ON EVERY SINGLE POST.

The way this backfires, every single time, is the special glory of a Will in Seattle post. What never occurs to him is that claiming special knowledge, but demonstrating that he has no idea how that special knowledge works, just serves to make him look even more pathetic. For instance, here, where he appears to not know the difference between chemistry and biochemistry, which would be perfectly forgivable in a civilian but embarrassing as hell in someone who WORKS IN THE FIELD.

Likewise, it's not unusual for an American to not know anything about New Zealand, but when Will goes on at length about his trip there, and STILL gets nearly every single thing wrong about the place, including the difference between Wellington and Auckland, that's inexcusable. He brags about his military service, but understands less about military operations than people who didn't. He has lived in Canada and Texas, among other places, but knows less about those places than four-year-olds in Iowa. He poses as an expert on publishing and bookselling, yet when pressed he cannot identify the bookstore just two blocks from his house nor successfully identify the (imaginary) book he claims to base his idiot urban theories upon.

So, yeah. Will's mention of western blots has absolutely nothing to do with the subjects of this article (art or otter pops) and everything to do with his desire to convince you that he's a biochem expert. He convinces us all instead that he's a complete and utter boob.

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