Yeah, this is signage directing you to a youtube trailer for a Calvin Klein ad campaign called Provocations.  Looks like a fireball in a kind of Farnsworthy house and it’s probably not a stretch to say that it’s meant to look like art.  Another raid?

More worries about high water.  The house’s real close to the Fox River.

This film — maybe the whole package — is by some guy called  Fabien Baron and you can see a photo of him and what he and his agency are up to at the agency’s site.   Scary shit.  Music by this Icelandic guy called Olafur Arnalds.  Cats and kitties from there all doing sounds of the earth?  Right.  Ain’t singin for Pepsi, ain’t singin for Coke?

Got to give credit.

Neil Young gone from the band when Buffalo Springfield went at Monterey Pop in 1967.  Back to the idea of boundary or back to the idea of place, site?  You can read that Douglas Gordon wanted to do something with a piano in a landscape of some significance.  He did do something in a real landscape of some historical significance and the instrument is not without it, whether it stands in for high culture — civilization — or — and it could just as well —  for just late romanticism, wellspring for all those singer / songwriters hanging around the ’67 border. The thing with the Calvin Klein ad and the house — Farnsworth House — is that you sense that there was never any need on the part of the authors of the thing — cgi a solution to practical fireball problems — to think about using the real house — they want a nowhere — the fucks.

Potty mouth.  Hiding behind internet anonymity.

Chevaliers in the army of global capital — the real house putting at risk  their owning — the real thing mitigating against the phantasm — the spectacular — a never ending — they really want to take you out of time — present.  

Stay historical it is.  There’s a Brad Pitt commercial for a Japanese jeans company shot at Farnsworth and a music video from 2007 with Kenny Chesney singing his heart out by the banks of the Fox.

So if the Douglas Gordon work is perhaps a raid on the 60’s and 70’s watch over the decay of modernism, the Calvin Klein ad is a tardy and perverse try at repurposing it for really dreary ends.

Thank God for art.

Well Douglas Gordon is pushing Pringle of Scotland.  Into sweaters, jumpers.  Get it at Gagosian along with Keith Haring totes, Damien Hearst Keyrings and a Cindy Sherman tea service. 

Rockin’ in the Free World.