John Miller + Takuji Kogo
Takuji KOGO (Japan, 1965), John Miller (1954, USA)

A CANDY FACTORY PROJECT
"Life sucks..." (2003 / 2006)

Some of the advertisements that we can usually find in the personal contact sections of newspaper classifieds (and nowadays, especially on the websites dedicated to finding partners and friends) are extracted in these works from their original reading contexts and subjected to aesthetised re-presentation. With this subtle process, they are given a dimension (and even a voice) and time that, as mere advertisements, they had never had before. However, what is most intensified here is the paradoxical nature of their condition. In other words, the conflictive meeting in these advertisements of the public and the private, the result of the fact that the intimate need for affection has looked for a solution precisely through a system that, like the commercial system, may only be characterised by its intense depersonalisation (not to mention its inevitable anti-romanticism). And in this appropriation and new scenography, the effort  of concretion to introduce themselves and offer themselves to which the advertisers are obliged due to the inevitable brevity of a classified advertisement, involuntarily becomes for them (and is thus perversely compared to) the efforts of poetic synthesis that an author would apply when composing the lyrics for a song ( the conversion of these advertisements into strange choruses of a song is the basis of  “Swedish gentleman” and time also orders and imprints a quasi musical rhythm to the appearance of these words in  “Life sucks...”). An extremely subtle reflection, in short, on the transposition of commercial logics to personal relations, to the forms of confluence of the same orders of language and desire both in the fields of economics and business and in the affective and aesthetic spheres, and around the possible implicit presence of the same social and power hierarchies in the groups (even in many of the forms of recognition of personal frustration and loneliness and in the attempts to mitigate these).