How do you sell the presidency to voters? New York–based artists Antoni Muntadas and Marshall Reese have posed this question for decades, compiling footage from more than 70 years of American political ads to create Political Advertisement X: 1952–2024. Updated every four years since 1984, the film presents black and white clips beginning with the conformist Eisenhower era through Lyndon Johnson’s apocalyptic ’60s (Mad Ave’s “Daisy Girl” plucking petals off a flower in a countdown to nuclear Armageddon), then into the made-for-TV Reagan years (the Gipper’s feel-good “Morning in America” campaign) and the Twitter-amplified fake news that tainted 2020’s presidential election (Trump’s fearmongering “Stop Joe Biden and His Rioters” commercial), right up to our current fact-free and wildly uncertain 2024.
Muntadas and Reese’s electoral videos are queued in chronological order, with no explanatory voiceover — the better to activate viewers’ tangled noodles, too many of which remain, astoundingly, at loose ends. The film’s results are by turns maudlin, maddening, mendacious, absurd, alarming, and downright frightening, as consecutive ads play with greater and greater brazenness on the nation’s fears and prejudices, like an old school air raid siren. For more than 90 minutes, the artists let the commercials’ own words and images expose the sloshing toxic miasma between America’s growing electoral falsehoods and shrinking truths, specifically those surrounding U.S. presidential candidates past and present — while painting an unsettling portrait of the hyper-surreality that increasingly characterizes modern-day politics.
On Tuesday, October 22, 2024, Muntadas and Reese will premiere the 11th version of their four-decade collaboration. The venue: Cooper Union’s Great Hall, to be followed by a conversation with Brooke Gladstone, host of WNYC’s Peabody Award–winning podcast On the Media. The film, set to screen nationally, was due to play at the USF Contemporary Art Museum, in Tampa, Florida (which I happen to helm curatorially), until hurricanes Helene and Milton devastated the area. Spuriously, Governor Ron DeSantis continues to deny that these disasters are linked to climate change — in case you need reminding of the stakes. ❖
Christian Viveros-Fauné has covered art and its intersections with politics for the Village Voice and other publications for more than 25 years.
Political Advertisement X: 1952–2024
Screening and panel, Tuesday, October 22, 6:30-8:30 p.m.
The Cooper Union, The Great Hall (Foundation Building)
7 East 7th Street (between Third and Fourth avenues)
