the gluestick legacy

magazines are for cutting to pieces. i have a blue folder and it is full of magazine clippings. interesting words and phrases. patterns and backgrounds that look cool. anything that strikes me when i've got my scissors in hand. on saturday i pulled out this blue folder and spread its contents all over the floor, carefully, and i got out my gluestick and paints.

i sift through a paper stew of other people's words and i do things like this with whichever random bits jump out onto the edge between poetry and meaning: i take no note of where they came from. save a few of the more common or more striking advertisements (there's no such thing as a chicken knife) i don't remember where they lived before they came to my blue folder. some of the clips in there are relatives. "after decades of being ruled" above is the sister of a "terrorists are beheading people" which i still haven't used. "chicken knife" still lives in the blue folder, but i glued down its cousin--"french kiss," from the same ad campaign--ages ago.

only recently have i begun thinking seriously about these clippings as the product of some graphic artist or ad designer somewhere. so many clever string of words grabbed my attention, but i never transfered that attention to the diligent copywriter who probably broke her brain trying to come up with them for me and the rest of my demographic.

perhaps this parallels the emergence in my mind of advertising as art. i can probably blame that on all my rhetoric classes in college. if rhetoric is an art, then persuasion is an art, then advertising isn't the evil nuisance i'd always thought it was... maybe. in any case it provides me with all these lovely magazine clippings.

magazines are an intriguing medium. the word has its roots in storage, particularly military. my blue folder, a magazine of magazine clippings, one might call it, is pretty silly i suppose. all these words on paper, cut out of one context to be pasted into another. "after decades of being ruled/save yourself/no such thing as perfect" hardly makes sense anyway, not even to me. what's the point?

well, words are always coming from somewhere, going somewhere else. why should one diligent copywriter break her brain coming up with the words for one advertisement, only to let them sit around inside a feeble perfect-bound cover until the issue gets tossed away?

but they aren't just words. our diligent copywriter isn't the only one in the game. some designer chose a font, colors, spacing. some creative ad director had her say on the alignment, placing, background. if rhetoric is an art, advertisement is an art. a flimsy, fleeting sort of mercenary art, but still art. luckily, it is the kind of art no one minds if you tear apart, cut up, and reglue.
maybe my little ambiguous postcard art is flimsy and fleeting too. if so, that's only fitting, i guess. this might be my strange way of pretending to fill the shoes of that creative professional whose job i would love to have. with these clips i get to be the diligent copywriter, choosing my words and the graphic artist trimming them and arranging them however i like, and along with that i don't have any creative director over my head telling me what to do, nor any demographic out there to persuade. this is me, playing grown up.

or maybe it's just me, playing.