19 October 2007 6 Comments

From the Miami Herald Oct 11

BY JAWEED KALEEM

Early this summer, artist Bert Rodriguez found himself with a problem: He was scheduled for an October art gallery show, yet was too broke, too uninspired and too frustrated to produce any work. His solution?

Sell some ads. And in the process, plaster the Fredric Snitzer Gallery with them to produce an installation in which he presents them as his art.

Advertising Works! – about 35 ads, some as big as 15-by-35 feet, pitching everything from food and wine to art galleries and artists themselves — opens Saturday night during the Wynwood Art District gallery walk.

For a man whose résumé includes a performance in which he sat in a chair in the back of a pickup truck as he read children’s bedtime stories, passing off large ads for design house Marimekko or Bustelo coffee as gallery art — and getting paid for putting them on white walls — might not seem that extraordinary, but it’s a direction that Rodriguez, 32, hasn’t gone before.

”I’m making an art experience through the most seemingly unartistic means. I’m doing all this stupid stuff artists don’t usually think of: marketing the space, selling portions of walls, talking to advertisers about my target audience. That doesn’t usually result in something I can debate art-wise,” he says.

Rodriguez e-mailed everybody he knew: contacts at Soffer Adkins (the Fort Lauderdale advertising firm at which he once did graphic design; they bought a medium-sized ad and put his face on it); art galleries (the Dorsch Gallery designed a 4-by-10 foot map directing visitors down the street); hotels (The Standard paid $7,500 for the most expensive ad); nonprofits (Arts for Learning paid a few hundred dollars); and museums (The Wolfsonian paid $1,750 for a 7 ½-by-7 ½ foot piece).

”Surprisingly, I didn’t get any real estate at all, which I thought was brilliant, because everywhere you go in town you see signs in your face about it,” Rodriguez says.

While billboards, television commercials and radio spots are unavoidable for many people, Rodriguez says his exhibit won’t be the “same stuff you see on the street.”

”Outside, ads are not an eyesore for me and I don’t think they’re necessarily evil. But there is a certain kind of aggression attached to advertising that I don’t appreciate. It’ll be different here,” he says. “This is going to be like Disney World — there will be eye candy everywhere, wall to wall, top to bottom.”

He’ll sign all ads, which will be for sale like any other gallery art. In the past, Rodriguez’s art has gone for as much as $10,000 for complicated electronic pieces and as little as $500 for a drawing.

But the question remains: What place does advertising have in the gallery world?

Perhaps the question can be answered by a 2002 piece Rodriguez sold at a charity auction, a 12-by-15 inch, wooden-framed needlepoint canvas. The lettering: “It’s clever, but is it art?”