Experimental Jetset, 2007.

"One part sentimentality, one part irony, one part detachment" is a quote from Susan Sontag, taken from her introductory essay to 'The Art of Revolution', Dugald Stermer's collection of 96 Cuban posters. In our installation, we set this quote in letters taken from these 96 posters. Details of posters, blown up to the size of posters again, in an attempt to unite two contradictory forces: Sontag's criticism, and the aesthetic power of the original posters. An abridged, short-circuited version of 'The Art of Revolution'.

Sontag's quote is typical for a majority of critics: those who believe that political or subversive aesthetics are tolerated within popular culture only in its most neutralized form. Or in other words, those who believe that recontextualization is automatically a cynical, postmodern construction.

Which is an opinion we don't agree with at all: in our naivety (perhaps), we do believe that aesthetic material can have a subversive potential, even when completely encapsulated in commodity culture. After all, it is through pop culture, and more specifically through rock music, that we became interested in movements such as Futurism and Dada; movements that truly changed our way of thinking. So on a most personal level, we do believe in the subversive potential of mass culture and pop culture. We are convinced of the transformative power of aesthetics, even when these aesthetics are presented in a completely corrupt context.

Which is why, in this particular installation, we try to find this 'subversive potential' exactly in the aesthetic material itself: the 'inner-cells' of the original posters, the purely formal details, the DNA of the printed matter.

Then why, one may ask, use a quote that says the exact opposite of what we mean? For this, we want to refer to Walter Benjamin's work on flaneurism. This may seem like a stretch, but it is not: in fact, in the light of the title of this exhibition ('Beauty is in the Street'), Benjamin's concept of the flaneur makes perfects sense. (After all, it is Benjamin who, in 'The Arcades Project', quotes Diderot: "How beautiful is the street!"). In 'The Arcades Project', Benjamin describes a world in which "everything is face. Each thing has the degree of bodily presence. Under these conditions even a sentence (to say nothing of the single word) puts on a face, and this face resembles that of the sentence standing next to it. In this way, every truth points manifestly to its opposite. Truth becomes something living; it lives solely in the rhythm by which statement and counter-statement displace each other in order to think each other".

This is a quote that really speaks to us, not in the least because, as graphic designers, it is our daily job to give sentences and words "a face" (taken in the most literal way: a typeface). And so, to follow Benjamin's logic, we used Sontag's quote to manifestly point to an opposite truth, namely our own opinion.