POWER LUNCH
2022 | Spring Break Art Fair | New York, NY
Curated by Kat Ryals and Cara Marsh Sheffler
Here, high above Madison Avenue, we revisit the corner office of the ad men who told us what we needed and why. We fix ourselves a highball and tuck into a four-hour power lunch in the boardroom where dreams are bought and sold and packaged to you, the American consumer…
Power Lunch takes you on a slick, Op-Art, psy-ops romp through the back rooms where the edens and social revolutions of the 1960s were sold out and sold back to America for profit. Utilizing the aesthetics of the corporate boardroom, the three-martini lunch, and the kind of propaganda that won advertising industry awards, the exhibition creates a research-based, immersive space that provides a vision of the future that was antithetical to utopia from its very conception. The show features subversive embossed wallpaper, collages, photography and ¡AGITPOP! PRESS books, all within a backdrop of a sexy Space Age ad firm.
We invite you to join us in the conference room. Relax and let the girls take care of you as you peruse our latest campaigns—Monsanto, NASA, United Fruit, and Dow! Stay awhile, and behold photographs of the pavilions for a reimagined World’s Fair, our crown jewel campaign. The Fair sold the notion that Cold War Capitalism was the True Democracy—and that the rest of the world merely exists as a consumer experience for the taking. Welcome to Madison Avenue, where the best idea is the bottom line!
CORPORATE COLLUSION CAMPAIGNS
Within this immersive exhibition-cum-advertising-firm-boardroom, a series of collages adorn the walls—reimagining moments of historical corporate / military collusion as if they were advertising campaigns. Each collage features appropriated imagery that expands upon various histories explored in the ¡AGITPOP! PRESS World’s Fair Guide. Collages are accompanied by the follow wall text by Cara Marsh Sheffler:
As the great general Sun Tzu teaches us, the art of war is mastered by he who subdues the enemy without a fight. What is advertising but the art of persuasion? Indeed, why else call it a campaign? The meaning of a campaign is tripartite, a matter of politics, military tactics, and sales hard and soft. Our firm’s greatest achievements may be glimpsed upon this wall, campaigns that brought these arts together deftly in a single stroke. Here we celebrate legerdemain so light the wallet will simply lifts itself out of the pocket. We celebrate an economy of ideas so gorgeously collusive that the collage itself is co-opted into the shining link between capitalism and the consumer the world over! Businessmen are but warriors in columns of chariot dust, who quaff a cold martini. We present to you Napalm, bananas, saran wrap, and even Mickey Mouse! As you survey this wall of the work we do, think fondly of that ancient general, of Dow, of Monsanto, of The Art Of War—and the art of misusing Eastern thought to obliterate Eastern culture.
Corporate Collusion Collage I (Nasa)
22” x 30” archival pigment print with cut vinyl and nylon flocking
We promised you Mickey Mouse and, by gosh, here he is! See our favorite cartoon fellow gazing at the stars with NASA Nazi rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, who was snatched up by Uncle Sam even before those Nuremberg prosecutors had a chance! The crown prince of Operation Paperclip partnered with Walt Disney to give the American public the moon and so much more! As though powered by Saturn V rocket boosters (also invented by a Nuremberg alum), the US is at the forefront of selling science to a public ready to blast right into the Nuclear Age and into the nebula mushroom cloud of the New Frontier.
Corporate Collusion Collage II (Monsanto)
22” x 30” archival pigment print with cut vinyl and nylon flocking
Like a tiger in the mountain jungles of Vietnam, Agent Orange pounces, streaking across the sky and into the Communist lair. Thanks to Monsanto, Operation Ranch Hand sprayed 19 million gallons of herbicide across Southeast Asia in the name of capitalism. From the Miracles of Molecules in the Home that graced Tomorrowland and the Monsanto House that caused a sensation at the World’s Fair, Monsanto has a suite of products that take you from the cradle to the grave. Monsanto is at the heart of textile chemistry, woven into your life—like Agent Orange itself—for decades and even generations to come!
Corporate Collusion Collage III (Dow)
22” x 30” archival pigment print with cut vinyl and nylon flocking
Dow is a brand that sticks with you. Founded in 1897, Dow forever changed the American kitchen in 1933 with saran wrap, and ever since has excelled at all manner of second skins. With products handy in any kind of kitchen debate, when diplomacy fails, Dow adheres to the American cause, stripping the forest so Uncle Sam can see the trees. Dow will stop at nothing to attract top-tier talent, as we see Sarin gas inventor and Napalm evangelist Otto Ambros beaming among his peers near the witness stand in Nuremberg, calm and confident his talents would be needed across the globe whether in steaming Southeast Asian jungles or in refrigerated supermarket aisles across the Fruited Plain.
Corporate Collusion Collage IV (United Fruit)
22” x 30” archival pigment print with cut vinyl and nylon flocking
We’re simply bananas for Chiquita! What’s more miraculous than a banana that simply arrives from Ecuador or Guatemala—countries separated by over 2,100 miles—and is always exactly the same and obscenely inexpensive? Cheap and uniform nutrition! Will wonders never cease? A single banana can provide up to 15% of your recommended potassium intake, but it can also provide cover for copious regime change, an impetus to build US-backed infrastructure for an entire hemisphere, and the energy you need to fight Communism within the vast purview of the Monroe Doctrine! From the Dulles Brothers and Tricky Dick to the High Priest of Madison Avenue himself, Edward Bernays, the banana braintrust is truly a smorgasbord that helped define the American Century.
Exclusive Wallpaper (Stuytown)
Open edition, digitally printed vinyl wallpaper with clear embossed text
As a backdrop for the imagined ad exec’s desk is a wall clad with a mod, brightly patterned "Exclusive Wallpaper"—part of a series of subversive wallpapers that explore the history of segregation US housing development. They each combine mid-century inspired patterning with overlaid clear embossed text from legal documents pertaining to inequality in housing. For POWER LUNCH the embossed text is sourced from the defense in the landmark 1949 court case Dorsey vs Stuyvesant Town Corp that desegregated New York City’s Stuytown housing complex. In defense of their segregationist policies, housing developer Metlife argued that–regardless of the fact they received public money to complete the housing project–because they are a private company, the 14th Amendment did not apply to them.
Text reads:
Stuyvesant, the capital owning and managing its housing project, has the power by its private action to fix its own policies with respect to selection of its tenants without any overnmental act, consent or approval. Under the cases the Fourteenth Amendment of the Federal Constitution article I of the State Constitution article I are not applicable to such private actions.
Exclusive Wallpaper (Levittown)
2022, 24in x 64in, embossed / digitally printed wallpaper
Overlaid text sourced from racially restrictive covenant found on deeds in Long Island’s Levittown development. Text reads:
The tenant agrees not to permit the premises to be used or occupied by any other persons than members of the Caucasian race…
World’s Fair Pavilions
11in x 20in each, archival pigment prints
On top of the Exclusive Wallpaper (Stuytown) hang 6 archival pigment prints of architectural models—imagined showpiece projects from the firm’s top corporate clients for the 1964 World’s Fair. Each model reimagines a pavilion from the Fair but with the hindsight of the state-sanctioned violence that the American Century was predicated upon. For more information on the content of each individual model pictured, see here from the initial exhibition at Field Projects.
