Antoni Muntadas uses video and means of communication as a landscape in which spectators must look for all of the hidden and invisible elements, all kinds of cultural and acultural signs. With Slogans, he continues his critical work into the processes of information and enunciation, producing a number of shifts, interferences and absurdities through bits of phrases taken from television advertisements that belong to the image culture we all share.
This video exists in English, French and Spanish (Antoni Muntadas targets all that is transnational, fluid and mobile) and presents a comparative dictionary of the most frequent terms used in the language of advertising. The phrases intervene in the middle of the field of view, partitioning it. The words are isolated and expand to the point of becoming a kind of mosaic – all of which is accompanied by a gentle easy-listening music by Ray Connifs. This pixelisation effect makes the coded language of advertising shift towards total abstraction. Behind the original message – ordering attitudes and acts among spectators in relation to the images they perceive – appears the body and matter of the word, then its disappearance into the test pattern.

Stéphanie Moisdon
Translated by Anna Knight