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Critique of Pure Image - Between Fake and Quotation
that’s revolution – ads & revolt
Specific thematic selection by the author of 30 digital prints of ads from 1967-today.
Rudi Maier, born 1965, lives and works in Ludwigsburg, Germany. He is a media theorist and activist and an anthropologist. After working as a registered nurse, he took up anthropology studies at the University in Tübingen, from where he graduated in 2004 with a work on the use Karl Marx in commercial advertising from 1967 to 2003. He has since kept a focus on issues of the appropriation of revolutionary imagery and icons by commercial advertising.
Today’s neoliberally organized societies are full with advertising. One is faced with a daily load of up to 5000 commercial contacts. But advertisings are also always an expression of the conditions within the society, or better: There is no ideology without signs. The use of a special category of signs, those of anti-capitalist protest movements, the icons of left and alternative protests like Che Guevara, Karl Marx, Ulrike Meinhof, etc., for commercial purposes is the topic of the German anthropologist Rudi Maier’s project “that’s revolution – ads & revolt.” Maier has collected more than 1500 commercial ads from 1967 to present. Here he presents a selection of thirty ads from his collection – a powerful glimpse on the struggle around the meaning and appropriation of signs.