The Art Of Parties
The Upstart collective’s radical ad campaign is putting the art back into the party manifesto.
Valerie Flynn, 16 Feb 2011
With banks, bondholders and bailouts monopolising media attention, it’s easy to forget about non-economic election issues. That’s why a new campaign group wants to put the arts back on the agenda.
There are 1,000 fly-posters on the streets of Dublin at the moment, which cast a cold eye on the typical politician’s election mugshot.
“Politicians spend €100,000 on a poster campaign that is bland and crude and regarded by most people as litter,” says Aaron Copeland of the Upstart artists’ collective (no relation to the famed 20th century composer we assume!). “We aim to put creativity and the arts at the centre of any election debate and highlight the important role of the arts in society.”
When the dissolution of the 30th Dáil was announced, Upstart commissioned and duplicated the 500 artworks now adorning lamppost-space which would otherwise be given over to Eamon Gilmore, Micheal Martin and the rest.
Some of the results aren’t clever. The poster with the slogan “Homeless, Jobless and Speechless” is a particularly unfortunate case. But a lot more of them are brilliant. One Soviet propaganda-style poster, all jerky angles and grim socialist-realist greys and browns, shows a tiger being stabbed with the pointy end of a tricolour-flying flagpole. Under the mock-Cyrillic slogan, ‘BACK’, a man – standing on the poor Celtic Tiger – points in the wrong direction. The tiger looks like he’s in a lot of pain.
Another shows Brian Cowen giving Bob The Builder a piggyback, as himself and the Monopoly man stroll around an Escher-type cube with no beginning and no end. (No idea what it means, but it looks cool.)
Musicians have come on board too, with Nina Hynes, Hoarsebox and More Tiny Giants among the artists who are rumoured to feature in the web campaign, due to go live in a week’s time.
Copeland, an English teacher and the publisher of a poetry and graphic design magazine, accepts that Upstart’s message is a hard sell, at a time when many people are living in real fear of poverty.
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