California Dreaming: I Like Blight
by Rebecca Schoenkopf
L.A. citizens really don’t like the billboard glut.
Anne Bray is a lovely woman, tall and blonde and well-put-together. She is an artist, often focusing on feminist issues and remaking the urban landscape. The landscape she wants is pristine: one of her projects comprised a whiteout of all signage on six blocks of Lincoln Boulevard in Santa Monica. It took six weeks, she said, of going each day and joking and joshing around with each shop owner on the stretch to get them to agree to have their signage covered in white paper for a Sunday. Anne Bray has persistence in spades.
Farmlab is a marvelous concrete bunker, along the L.A. River and under a bridge at the outskirts of Chinatown. With funding from the Annenberg Foundation, it’s a hub for urban art projects and hosts a weekly Friday salon (with free lunch!). Last week’s salon featured a packed house of at least a hundred to hear Bray speak about billboard blight. People in L.A. hate their billboards so much.
Bray is, she said, chuckling, an “abolitionist” regarding the visual blight of billboards, and almost all the audience seemed to agree. Even if billboard companies promoted 99 percent art and one percent commerce, she would still put the kibosh on them if she could. She said she is told to just ignore the onslaught, but that with the “5,000 ads” we see each day, they go “straight to the sub.” She showed video of Sao Paolo, which has outlawed all outdoor advertising. Its empty billboards are now ghostly and gray. Meanwhile, just a few days later, outraged vigilantes began slapping cease-and-desists on illegal advertisements around town. Who cares? THEY CARE! And man, I don’t get it.
illustration by Paul Takizawa
From the audience, I raised my hand. To me, billboards aren’t blight, and I feel perfectly capable of tuning them out. I rarely read their messages; instead, I see them as pure sensation: pure saturated color and light breaking up the monotony of our beige-on-mocha buildings. If I were hiking in Topanga and found one at a trailhead, I would be furious, but as part of the urban landscape, they create color and desire. Think of Tokyo, or Las Vegas. Some see all that furious neon as bombardment. I see it as stimulation. It makes the cityscape dynamic. It makes me feel young, and alive.
I’m not a particularly consumerist person. The only advertisement I’ve seen lately that has me actually wanting to try the product is the ad for Domino’s; I’m a sucker for self-flagellating hyper-honesty, and curious just how much less like cardboard their new pizza tastes. I am not looking for ads to tell me what to buy. Instead, I judge them aesthetically; most I point at and laugh. Very few meet my aesthetic criteria, and then I get to point out what they’re lacking in composition or catchy tagline. (I really love to judge.) Some are art in their own rights, beautifully composed. I am not offended that people are trying to sell me something; usually, I just wish they’d try harder.
After the question and answer session ended, a bearded man with an accent came up. “Would you put a Budweiser ad in your living room?” he asked in a rather hostile manner, seemingly offended that I wasn’t offended. “No, I wouldn’t,” I answered, before remembering that I have an old framed cigarette ad hanging above my couch. “Would you hang a Campbell’s Soup can?” my boyfriend cut in. The man argued and argued, really upset, and we left soon after. For all the actual pollution in L.A., where breathing the air is equivalent to smoking a pack a day, is visual pollution really their Alamo? What they choose to stand and fight? I just truly don’t understand the passion. Take on shit that’s actually adversely impacting life in L.A.! Take on the school district! Take on assholes who don’t pull to the middle of the intersection when waiting to turn left! If it were a pristine cove, or a beautiful ridgeline they were fighting to keep commerce-free? Of course! And in their first order of business, they can take down the Hollywood sign.
In Prague once, 15 years ago, I saw a reclining 20-foot man with a woman looming over him. Where his penis would be was a humongous bottle of beer, jutting up toward the heavens. It was hilarious: advertising in its infancy for a country just learning capitalism. In a capitalist country, unless we work as a nurse or a teacher, all of our jobs are dependent on advertising, and it’s naïve not to accept that. (By ramping up its advertising during the Great Depression, Kellogg’s became the dominant breakfast cereal company in the United States.) Rather than calling for abolition, teach kids to be critical of its promises instead. Beer will not make your penis gigantic, but maybe Domino’s pizza does taste better than it did. Thanks, advertising, for letting me know!
Comments
100% true true true. Billboards—especially in the downtown sectors—add color, form and character to the urban physiology. Taking them away would be like chainsawing the jacarandas that line my residential street. These people need to confront the real sources of urban blight: ugly wood power poles planted down practically every LA street and ugly mini malls with their hideous mishmash of signage fonts and colors. Just think how lovely this city would be without those kinds of eyesores.
2010-02-06 by miracle mile maniacInteresting idea. Maybe we should set up Urban Reserve Lines and allow billboards inside them, but not out. I.e. keep rural & non-urban highway’s billboard-free that way you could enjoy “nature” without signage and have the visual stimulation in the urban areas where they add more color to the visual “noise” already present.
2010-02-08 by Ann Calhoun
i agree. and how cool is your boyfriend, anyway?
2010-02-06 by florence