Lyndal Walker, They're
in Advertising: He Wears
Coke, type C photograph,
154 cm x 120 cm, 1997.

JUST BUY IT

The idea of reviving past styles is nothing new in Western culture. The revival of Classical styles, for example, is a consistent and predictable repetition in European art history. These revivals speak not only of a perceived (or invented) historical connection but also about the ideals of the contemporary. A revived style speaks little of the historical context from which it came, but instead serves as a point around which to rearrange or reread history through the ideals of the contemporary. In short, it is a means of structuring the present. In the accelerated revivals of 1980's and 90's fashion, pop music, advertising and even contemporary art, what are glossed over in the rush of styles are the mechanisms controlling and manipulating taste.

In her early work on punk revival and grunge fashion, Walker explored how subcultural or 'street' styles are appropriated and transformed by the mass media. In her photographs No Future (1994) and Punk: Paris London Rome (1994), the worlds of punk subculture, high fashion and commodity advertising meet. These are advertising-style photographs of shiny safety pins presented alluringly on satin backgrounds with the texts "No Future" and "Punk: Paris London Rome" composed of letters cut from newspapers, ransom-note style. In Walker's ultra-slick photos, punk, the anti-style of the seventies, is stripped of its anti-social, anarchist attitude and made seductive, cool and desirable. Similarly, the phrase "No Future", made famous by the Sex Pistols, is transformed from a nihilistic challenge to polite middle class society into a fashionable advertising slogan.

Cleaned up and paraded on the catwalks of the fashion capitals of the West ­ Paris, London, Rome ­ punk was the latest in a line of recycled styles to hit the consumer market in the early 1990s. Like any commodity, objects of high fashion must be wiped clean of their means of production and the context in which they are produced, and repackaged as an image. Walker looks at punk not as it was in the 1970s but as it is transformed into a 1990s spectacle, safely consumed from a distance on catwalks or movie screens (the glamorous nihilism of Sid and Nancy for example). Walker's punk works are more than photographs, they are 'advertisements' about the appropriation of subcultures by the world of high fashion.

Following punk, Walker turned her attention to fashion's appropriation of grunge, Seattle's contribution to Western fashion and music. In a similar movement, the latest anti-style was quickly transformed by advertising, fashion and rock videos into a series of commodities from clothing to music to movies. Walker's work of 1993-4 featured 'grunge beanies': Woolen hats with holes in them and trails of thread coming loose, presented as high fashion objects against a satin background. Grunge, like punk, was founded on a DIY aesthetic. Grunge was about creating music in garages and loungerooms, about fashion thrown together with clothes from op-shops. Rather than adopting the aesthetic (in the manner of the so-called 'Avant-Grunge' artists of the early 90s, such as Adam Cullen, Hany Armanious and Mikala Dwyer), Walker presents grunge's shift into the world of high fashion, advertising and mass media. This shift is all important, as once something like grunge becomes a mass consumer style, any notion of actually doing anything yourself is redundant ­ you can now buy it.

Both Walker's punk series and grunge series examine the appropriation and marketing of street styles as high fashion; the safety pin made safe again, the tattered beanie transformed into an object of desire, the transformation of subculture into spectacle. Walker uses the language of luxury advertising against itself, exaggerating the seductive strategies of fashion marketing. Her early works are a humorous presentation of how money and marketing make the banal look desirable. After the laughter, however, making poverty appear glamorous not only involves a ridiculous marketing strategy but a mechanism whereby dissent can be quickly neutralised and co-opted into the service of consumerism.

Walker consciously focuses on styles that date rapidly in fashion's continual push for novelty. Speed is a critical feature of the fashion and advertising industries. In the mass media the constant change of styles remains unquestioned, consumers are forced to 'keep up with the latest'. Walker's work freezes this motion and looks at the details of the fashion marketing mechanism, providing a site to begin questioning an industry that profits on the insecurity it generates. Unlike the obsolescence of advertising imagery, Walker's documentary project presents a parallel fashion history, an alternative history of contemporary taste.

They're IN ADVERTISING

Portraiture in 17th century Europe was founded on the principle of verisimilitude, that is, the painter's aim was to create the closest possible likeness to the sitter in an attempt to express the sitter's 'true essence'. Rather than archetypal religious or classical subjects from Greek and Roman mythology, portraits began to focus on the psychology of contemporary individuals. This 'new realism' in European portraiture set about freezing the immediate, concrete and sensuous aspects of everyday reality and subjecting them to ever-smaller analyses and categorisations. The portraitist's aim was to construct a 'realistic space' or spatial-psychological field within which the audience could interact with the personality of the sitter. With their emphasis on the psychic world, 17th century portraitists included costumes and props that indicated something about the personality of the sitter. Portraitists sought to expose the individual sitter's soul, rather than just their personality.

As contemporary portraits, Walker's photo series They're in Advertising (1997) reveals little of the psychic depth or the 'individual soul' of its subjects. Her works Maria Wears Winfield, Dean Wears Konica and Chris Wears Patra (all 1997) feature portraits of friends wearing op-shop clothes and accessories emblazoned with company logos and slogans. The snapshots have a generic feel that suggest manufactured identities, contrived personas, artificial surfaces appropriated from lifestyle magazine culture or trendy low-budget movies. They retain no nostalgia for any original individual but revel in an identity appropriated from advertising.

While she portrays archetypal characters, they aren't depersonalised but real-life people, her friends and peers. Walker shifts from the private sphere into the public gaze, focusing on the details of their clothing, revealing how these individuals define their 'individuality' via the public sphere of advertising and brand names. Walker presents a series of 'performance personas' rather than 'individuals' at a time when everyday reality has become a series of performances. In this performative world, the mass public sphere and private worlds dissolve as the individual is lost. The only hope of unification is through identification with commodities.

Beyond portraiture, They're in Advertising continues Walker's interest in the appropriation of fashion, this time, retro. Like the punk and grunge photos, Walker presents retro fashion in all its banality. Another 'street style' quickly seized upon by the advertising and fashion industries, retro has become the latest homogenised 'cool'. The scene is inner-city Melbourne, 1997, but it could just as well be inner-city New York or London. Maria, Chris and Dean are familiar self-consciously retro characters from almost any city in the Western world.

Walker's 'advertisements' are decidedly unglamorous. Instead of identifying a brand name with a celebrity, the audience is presented with unknown people identifying with a brand name. These people mean nothing to us, they're not celebrities who we are all supposed to desire. While appearing similar to the documentary art of American artists such as Nan Goldin and Larry Clark, unlike them, Walker offers the audience little emotional appeal in her snapshots. Indeed her relationship with them is more of a reflection on how the documentary style of such artists has been appropriated by the fashion/advertising industry. The most recent example is the new Calvin Klein ad campaign where unknown people talk about their private lives, transforming personal documentary into corporate identity.

CHOOSE LIFE

In the late 1990s, 'lifestyle' has become the latest commodity. No longer can we buy simply a shirt, a pair of underpants or a sofa, but these elements are now essential in constructing a lifestyle. At the up-market department store Georges in Melbourne, the people who provide customer service are no longer called 'sales assistants' but 'lifestyle consultants'. Lifestyle includes not only what you wear, but how and where you live as well as which music you listen to, which movies you see, where you spend your leisure time, and most importantly, where you spend your money. In areas such as fashion, music, film, design and advertising, subcultural lifestyles become quickly codified and transformed into disposable commodities for a homogenised mass market.

With works like They're in Advertising, Walker creates a space for lifestyle that blurs fantasy and the real. Behind her generic identities are real people (rather than rock stars or supermodels), engaged in constructing their own lifestyles, perhaps conscious of their own artificiality. Their performative aspect reveals these stylised characters in all their pathetic normality, exposing their fantasies of an alternative lifestyle, which is just as fashionable and homogenised as any other. In the 90s, fashion, advertising and superstardom are constantly drifting into everyday life and back out again to shape the homogenized 'cool'. In They're in Advertising, Walker identifies the point where the fashion and advertising industries take on the documentary strategies of conceptual art to sell pre-packaged 'lifestyles', 'identities' and 'characters'.

In her recent Share House series, Walker delved into the lived environment of several share households in inner-city Melbourne. Here her photographs focused on a concrete manifestation of a particular lifestyle derived from grunge and retro. Top of the Stairs, Kerr St., Fitzroy July 1997, Photo Wall, Gore St., Fitzroy , May 1977 and Sideboard, Gore St., Fitzroy May 1997, are photographs from the series, depict a haphazard collection of furniture and junk gleaned from op-shops and garage sales, a wealth of ephemeral detail. This is an environment of op-shop culture, the discards of fashion's forward motion, the excesses of fifties, sixties, seventies design patched together in a low budget interior design process shown in all its banality.

Walker's Share House series included a complete reconstruction of a share house loungeroom (1st Floor, September 1996). Here, Walker presented a lived environment as museum installation (complete with ropes to hold back the public), the contemporary frozen as historical spectacle. Her Share-Household Living Room brought into question how our lifestyles are mediated by the mass media spectacle. Again, instead of the glamourisation and sanitisation of such a lifestyle by fashion industry, advertising or Hollywood (films such as Reality Bites), Walker presents the grunge living room in all its banality.

From her early work that mimes the alluring surfaces of advertising and fashion magazines, to the latest Share House series, Walker reminds us that lifestyles are already art. Her 'advertisements' and environments are not separate from the real world but part of the real lifestyles we live; artificial and constructed, lifestyles already mediated by the mass media. Walker's documentary project stretches beyond the boundaries of the art world to bring questions about fashion, advertising and identity in mass culture into the contemporary art world. Walker's is an art of affects, an art that simulates the effects of a mass media culture, reminding us how passively we accept the real and our desperate need for the unity of the spectacle.

Danny Huppatz
1998

© The artist and
Courtesy of the artist.

Lyndal Walker, Punk
Paris London Rome,
type C photograph,
60 cm x 40 cm, 1994.

Lyndal Walker, They're
in Advertising: She
Wears Valvoline, type C
photograph on vinyl,
154 cm x 120 cm, 1997.

Lyndal Walker, 1990s
Share-Household Living
Room, mixed media, various
dimensions, 1996.

Lyndal Walker, They're
in Advertising: Chris
Wears Patra, type C
photograph on vinyl,
120 cm x 154 cm, 1997.

Lyndal Walker, Entrance,
Gore St. Fitzroy, type C
photograph, 40 cm x 60 cm,
May 1997.