"Hardly Used Asparagus Pan Viewed In The Light Of A Body Sunlamp"
Since we have know that needs are not simply there, but have to be produced, an army of copy-writers photographers and managers have tried to stylise transferred goods of desire. Be they underwear, motor oil or a bank account, everything has its sex-appeal. Also product design also does its thing to awaken sale appeal. There has already been a great deal pf philosophising about the feminine form of the cola bottle and the success of the VW Beatle is certainly more to do with its tactile appearance and not due to its comfort.
So, drawing the erotic from a product is naturally not the only means to express it to a man or a woman. The more old fashion method stemming from a kind of mountebank type serves us with a different promise of prosperity; to eliminate life’s conflicts (Widernisse) playfully.
Products become problem-solvers which can do anything, and with this they exploit the myth of the industrial revolution: the machine liberates humanity from the drudgery of manual labour. All those practical pieces of equipment have not only bestowed us with comfort but also freedom. If it weren’t for the dish-washer women would not be emancipated, and without the televison there wouldn’t be any equality and fraternity. Consumerism and product fetishism ousted other world religions long ago; they don’t promise paradise after death, but already on the next shopping trip.
Indeed, the consumer good maintains its transcendental, seductive shine only as long as it is not consumed. The fitted-kitchen, which has already been cooked in, the slept-in double bed and the driven car are like fallen angels who have plummeted from the glowing consumer heaven into the dull depths of profane existence and have lost all their shine. Along with their virginity they have also lost their divinity. Now they equal their owners; they are common, defective and have all kinds of blemishes and marks. Sometimes there are some bad feelings towards them, as they have not fulfilled their overblown promises of joy and freedom. Their failure also makes them human, however, and through this a little bit likeable. Their trails of use and their fashion-oriented design demonstrate that they have something resembling life behind them, time is sitting on their shoulder and they are just as far away from eternal youth as their once hopeful owners. Admittedly they scarcely have anything to tell us in comparison to the competitive, unused goods which cry out for attention in daily advertising. Expiry dates are becoming consistently shorter as a consequence of the logic of over-production and surplus goods. Thus, the only remaining thing for the consumed consumer goods is a depreciation in value, their greatest deficiency to be played as a final trump: namely, to be cheap. And that is the most important argument for the second-hand shop.
The second-hand shop is to the official market what amateur theatre is to the professional actor. The stage in the pub swings between clumsy imitation of traditional acting and the charm of the "natural". (naturwuechsig) Similarly, there is often a movingly funny ungainliness with a so-called "private sale", which is also naively serious, which imitates the advertising language and images of the professionals; and imperfect advertising (Anpreisung) reconciles itself seamlessly with imperfect non-advertising.
The artist, Mady Braun, has chosen a special niche in the market of consumer goods for her work; the small-ads. As cheap and modest as the things they are advertising, they come exclusively from private sellers. Their lack of perfection gives rise to a lack of rational order; next to a coffee table we find the advert for a sausage cutting machine, next to a flower pot, some massaging equipment. This combination leads to the practical and the sensual achieving a touch of surreal poetry, comparable to LautrÈamont’s proverbial encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table. Absurd logic makes a bizarre contrast with bourgeois seriousness with which those advertisers compose the wording for their adverts. Compared to the companies selling brand new goods, the private seller, who hides behind a telephone number, remains anonymous and informs us just as meagrely about the goods themselves: "Grey leather sofa", "new table-tennis table" "camping toilet - unused" - not much more than is revealed. There is no sign of a hundred features or a thousand extras. And, whereas there is always a large-scale advertising photo in professional adverts to propel the product into the right light, like cracking it out of an egg, the small adverts remain imageless.
This is where Mady Brown comes in. To begin with she paints the text from diverse small adverts, which she finds in gratuitous German and Austrian newspapers, at the bottom edge of a middle-sized canvass, using the same print type but enlarging it considerably. Then she imagines what the advertised objects may look like. In keeping with the hand-knitted methods of advertising, Braun's painted illustrations of the found texts are not culinary exposed photographs or perfectly styled computer graphics but hand-painted acrylic paintings in a careful, yet seemingly awkward style, which strengthens the naivety of that text.
This is the painting technique of children, who have been "stream-lined" by their teacher to paint in a "right" and, above all, "clean" way. The foundation colour is monochrome and full, similar to that used in the adverts we know from Grandmother's time. The objects are set freely on this foundation, which, on the one hand, within the focus of the abstract colour space, should confer their own idealization and yet, on the other hand, should also make their distorted perspective even more precarious. The tragicomic failure of the goods’ promise of prosperity is set through these simple means so strikingly in the picture, that you can almost feel sympathy towards the poignant tools and devices. Braun finds metaphorical equivalents for the touched upon attributes of the "nice", the "practical" and the "domestic". She develops her own pictorial rhetoric for the language of petit-bourgeois adverts, which, in place of the superlative exultant banalities of the advertising professionals, is limited to facts and pragmatics and, due to reasons of thrift, often operates using absurd, incomprehensible or ambiguous abbreviation.
Braun's pictorial language is just as meagre. For example from "Dble bed w. 2 E- Mattresses"* she creates a sun bed divided into two, with an electric cable which shoots out of the spartan bed frame like a snake. Just now and again the artist allows herself a few smaller ingredients in which, however, a whole feeling of life shimmers. Like the little crocheted tablecloth, which is draped over the "Shoe Cupboard with two Wing Doors, Oak, for appr.20 Pairs of Shoes", kept in the realistic style of the Fifties. Just how many unpleasant feelings of being stifled and righteous and yet also how many idolised childhood memories can this accessory placed on such a piece of furniture conjure up?
Art historically viewed, Mady Braun's "adverts" belong to the still life genre. As the most bourgeois of all art genres, the trifling objects of daily life are drawn into the light of a higher art and equipped with dignity and symbolic significance. On the one hand Braun's "Adverts" parody the still life of objects as sheer goods and flea-market existence, hold a strong "low" and "U" under the nose of the highly artistic strategy of idolisation (still favoured in many citizens’ circles). We could talk about assort of self-made Pop Art where perfection and surface shine of pop has gone astray. Yet Braun's pictures do not exhaust themselves in elucidatory gests of de-mystification. Through the demonstrative apparently unwanted show of their failure, the cheap pieces of furniture and equipment offered for sale retain a sort of personality, in spite of their preserved anonymity and exchangeability. For it is difficult not to love the "Hardly Used Asparagus Pan" which suns itself under a "Philips Body Sunlamp", and whose glasses are suspiciously eyed.
But it is for other reasons than those planned by the sellers of prosperity from the corners of design and advertising.
Anselm Wagner
Translation Note
* "Doppelbett m. 2 E. Matratzen" - in German means "double bed with 2 Single mattresses" however, "E" is also the abbreviation for "Electrical" hence the use of the cable and the divided bed.

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