Operation Z4: Staring at the whore-like visage of ‘creatives’

“…the signs and signals, the symbols, gestures and messages through which western society sustains, sells, identifies and yet obscures itself by painting or powdering over its raddled, whore-like visage…” Dennis Potter, The Times

We should not confound the BMW Z4 with the advertisement which attempts to sell it. The Z4 is, like all other cars, a dream, a symbol and a piece of rust in the making.

The advertisement on the other hand is the weaver of the dream, the maker of the symbol. The dream has been made for us by ad agency ‘creatives’, God help us all.

And the dream is this: someone is painting. I think he’s a famous artist. But he isn’t painting like any ordinary painter, standing up straight and respectable next to a canvas, carefully recording. No, he’s dripping and splashing the paint on. He’s slipping and sliding in it. He’s free, he’s wild, he’s orgasmic. The painting is him.

Then he’s a car, somehow. It’s this slow transformation across 60 or so years of painter into car that is mysterious, but this is all a dream, and things in dreams are inexplicable. And the transformation is as immediate as it is slow.

Does everyone understand this dream, does everyone live it? Or are dreams categorised into socio-economic groups? Do I need an art history degree to buy a Z4?

The alchemy that has taken place is not just present in our culture, it is our culture. It is the recycling and transformation of the profound into the shallow, the ineffable into the unspeakable, the sublime into the smug. But it’s ok, generally we barely notice this happening, and we care even less.

The action painter reveals himself directly. He does not need to think, he does not need to theorise or hold himself back. He expresses himself.

The Z4 expresses itself, turning this way and that, painting as it goes, wild, free and orgasmic. The colours are primary, bright and gaudy. There’s a radical spatter of red on the Z4’s haunches. There’s an economic crisis on: this is no time to paint with shit browns and puke greens and finally unrelieved blacks, no time to drink yourself to death, take a mistress, drive drunk and die in a car crash.