In the last hundred years perhaps, one
of the most revered and celebrated forms of home and personal décor has been
that of repurposed print literature and media, of all and any sorts. Ecumenical,
literary, news……….and let’s not forget advertisements..!
Much as Columbus will forever be
known to history-lesson pupils as the founder of America, the late, great
artist Andy Warhol will be immortal as the creature who discovered art in the
design of the Campbell’s Soup label. Conclusively, the folks at Campbell’s who
first designed that very label were evidently just a bunch of soup makers with clearly
little or no innate sense of artisanship.
Apparently, it took a mod, irreverent creator decades later to
bring its aesthetic force to fruition.
After that, the latter 20th
century U.S. population caught on madly.
In the late 1970s, as a child of eleven visiting my first Wendy’s
franchise eatery, I was captivated by the interior’s theme, tabletops laminated
with the images of nineteenth century newspaper household product ad pages,
wallpaper of the very same. I was
fascinated. It was my first genuine encounter
with the tidal wave of “pop art”. The
movement as such in the interiors of Wendy’s didn’t even last that long. But on the nouveau design front, the
trend had arrived.
It wasn’t just for Soho galleries
and Village sophisticates anymore. Over time, sophistication could be
recognized on contact in anyone donned in a black T-shirt proudly displaying a
front reproduction of a headline page of the Daily Mail, or a significant cover
of a LIFE magazine. To simply carve out a page or two of a 1920s edition of
Variety or some entertainment trade rag, as my mom or my aunt did at one time,
framed and hung in the living room or kitchen with great care, brought instant
elite to one’s otherwise common quarters.
I wonder what people did back in the 1920s for that sort of effect when
those pages were nothing but trashable newsstand fodder.
What was dismissable in one era
would become reverential in the next.
Much in the way an ancient artifact is honored among a culture that
truthfully cares little about the item’s genuine origin or its founding purpose,
the subject matter or continuity within the text of those 1890s Times pages handsomely
framed in the foyer is absolutely foreign to the young homeowners who mounted
them. It simply enhances the era of the
actual hallway’s vintage.
In other words, employing the
concept put forth quite incomprehensively to a mass culture in the 1960s by the
erudite Marshall McLuhan, the medium is quite effectively the message. In this latter-day case, the product of the medium
in question now serves a secondary purpose.
A 1977 episode of All In The Family tossed its critical grenade at the
pretentious garbage-as-art Soho gallerists, when Archie’s beloved old living
room chair was inadvertently adopted and “re-created” as an art statement in a
downtown exhibition. But despite the
reflexive live-and-let-live laugh, it was only the late acknowledgement of a tidal
wave after the storm.
The most advanced evidence of the storm
back then came in those displays one might have seen downtown, window displays with old,
refurbished portable television sets piled up together, flickering familiar snow,
in some statement representative of our postvideomanic culture. To be anthropologically certain, that would
cite the generation best known as “X”.
We were the “TV Generation”. For the
most part now, there is none anymore. It’s
a world of download and devices, devoid of any sense of collective viewer
unity. I don’t know anyone currently who
each watched the same prime-time comedy in their home on a TV set at 8:30 last
night. If they did, they were calling
each other on rotary phones.
In my formidable kittenhood, my immediate
elders were not young. They were the mature
end of the Depression-Era generation, some pre-Roosevelt. The popular culture they related to best went
out when running boards on automobiles did.
Their most content solace came with recollections of an era brought to life
only when a Paul Muni crime drama fired up on Channel 5 on a Sunday afternoon. My quiet grandmother was known to pop to life
when Greta Garbo stepped out suddenly on The Late Show after midnight. These moments were the anti-inflammatory
remedies these people relied upon to restore their inner dopamine in an
alienating biosphere of oxidative stress.
They couldn’t do it with music or outfits. They didn’t spend their time buried in the
periodicals of their youth, even if an old, cherished mag or box of photos
remained buried on some closet shelf. But
that which was made readily available to them went a long way.
The X Generation has at long last,
in the real time of its own inevitable alienation, found its cherished remedy. The benevolence of some committed video
archivists and uploaders out there have devoted their efforts to restoring the
structures of our nation’s televisual past.
On YouTube, you are likely to find more and more long-form offerings of recordings
noted “Complete”, which indeed are broadcast “airchecks” of television network
or local presentation of decades past, uninterrupted, commercials, continuity
and all. It’s a futuristic art form that
to this day still remains fairly ahead of its time. A good many might swing past it, perplexed by
why anyone would care to deal with a broadcast full of what disruptively annoyed
them break-wise twenty years ago.
But how about forty years ago..?
I had plenty of TV in my life as wallpaper
as a child, but I’ve never really followed sports. It’s what’s made me the nerd that I am. But there was sure some TV sports in my
wallpapered life back then. My disinterested uncle would have ABCs day-long Wide
World of Sports serenading the living room on Saturdays. Visits to the cousins on Sunday afternoons
meant the sounds and images of CBS NFL Sunday before the dinner with an aroma
that had our tummies growling.
All I have to do now at 3PM on a
quiet afternoon is fire up an exquisitely reconstructed three -hour serving of
a CBS 1978 Cowboys-Steelers game, commercials, 60 Minutes and All In The Family
promos, AC Delco, Radio Shack ads and all, and my pre-teen stomach and I are primed
for my wife’s precious homemade vegetable soup just like a Sunday in the Disco
Era. I’m at some inexplicable peace in a
prior, innocent, inculpable time, when things had some greater identifiable shape. Even if books remain on shelves, keys still
remain in pockets and water runs from faucets, there’s plenty now that doesn’t
exist as it once did. Such a cultural
placeholder can sometimes return a comforting equilibrium to one’s immediate
existence.
While a restored NFL broadcast as
such probably holds even greater value for the NFL enthusiast, in the venue of “repurposing”,
the value is just a great or maybe even greater for the adjacent appreciator,
one who absorbs the element for restorative effect. It’s no different than the result upon those ailed
elderly who, in an experiment long ago, broke their dementia suddenly when
introduced to a re-created surrounding of their childhood past, a mock soundstage-like
construction of a vintage 1930s candy shop and corner, newsstand and all. Their healthy and long-depressed senses,
ignited by precious nostalgia, sparked immediately to life. We can’t all bear the personal funds needed
for a month-long retreat at some luxury ranch for such. But with some internet, maybe some wi-fi,
access to YouTube, maybe an effective vintage reproduction-style speaker
recalling the bass-heavy sound barkers of your uncle’s old ’65 monochrome
Zenith, some regular self-restoration in this high-functioning, battle-scarred
world can at once be ours.
The repurposing of video past is
thus in fact not re-purposing at all. In
fact, it’s a restoration of its purpose genuine. The same experience was driven
home to me preciously as I strolled past the park a few days ago, as two senior
fellows sat with each other, one’s smart phone proudly blaring the 1967 hit “Soul
Man” by Sam & Dave, in the quiet afternoon. What I experienced was the sound of a
transistor radio chiming the sounds of its indigenous era. Amidst my badly pre-occupied
mind, now transcended to a prior time, I made eye contact with those fellows
from afar and gave them the thumbs-up to their selection. They knowingly smiled.
Ultimately, it’s all art for art’s sake. To any soul, there is no greater purpose.
-Noah F.
