Description
Read My Lips: Political Advertisement 1952–2024, by Muntadas & Reese
POLITICAL ADVERTISEMENT is a 40-year-long video project by Antoni Muntadas and Marshall Reese. Every four years, coinciding with the U.S. presidential elections since 1984, Muntadas and Reese compile and update their anthology, tracing the history of political advertising from its origins in 1952 to the present.
The campaign spots are shown without commentary. The latest version debuts one week before election day. In 2020, during the pandemic, the artists streamed their 10th version on the East and West coasts in conversation with curators and political scientists over Zoom.
The phrase “Read My Lips,” the title of this collection, is taken from George H. W. Bush’s acceptance speech at the 1988 Republican Convention, which Bill Clinton’s campaign appropriated in a campaign ad in 1992. Read My Lips is edited from talks* with Bill Horrigan, Chief Curator, The Wexner Center, Rick Prelinger, filmmaker and founder of The Prelinger Archives, and Tanya Zimbardo, Assistant Curator of Media Art, SFMOMA.
Jim Fleming –
“In the presidential campaigns of 2024, more than $12 billion has been spent on these kinds of political ads. This is 30% more than 2020 and three times more than was spent in 2016. Linear TV remains the cornerstone of advertising strategy for both Trump (who was created by reality TV) and Harris, mostly because the sources and effects of TV ads are still much easier to track (even after Citizens United in 2010) than those on social media or streaming. Medium and message merge in linear TV.
The compilations by Muntadas & Reese are greater than the sum of their parts because of the combinatory aesthetic logic of collage. Over time, Political Advertisement has become a kind of continuous nerve movie of the American political unconscious and an iconic record of the corporate-electoral imagination.” — David Levi Strauss, author of Co-illusion: Dispatches from the End of Communication (MIT Press) and co-editor of The Critique of the Image Is the Defense of the Imagination (Autonomedia).
Jim Fleming –
“As most of us are often suspended in our own indecisive state of mind, all advertising campaigns on TV and endless social media fronts are designed through the repetition of slogans or images to exploit our fear, anxiety, and stress.
This selected archive of political advertisements, brilliantly compiled by Muntadas & Reese, has exposed the sociological and anthropical groundworks that loom large below the threshold of our consumption.” — Phong H. Bui, Publisher/Artistic Director of The Brooklyn Rail, The River Rail, Rail Editions, and Rail Curatorial Projects
Jim Fleming –
“Read My Lips is a collection of conversations and essays providing illuminating insights, little-known facts, and provocative analysis on one of the ‘classics’ of contemporary art: Antoni Muntadas and Marshall Reese’s Political Advertisement.
Revised and revitalized with the US presidential electoral cycle every four years since 1984 and offering a revelatory lens on media, politics, power, persuasion, the ‘American’ public, consumer capitalism, and the presidency, Political Advertisement is a compelling compilation of what has become essential in attaining the pinnacle of political power: presidential advertising.
What were initially informational ads viewed privately on home TVs via a few channels, presidential advertising is now in the business of provoking strong feelings and creating big personalities, and has proliferated to screens transmitting exponential media options that are seemingly everywhere from domestic settings to public spaces to the phones that we hold relentlessly in the palms of our hands, making Political Advertisement ever more timely and important, and Read My Lips requisite reading.” — Mary Ann Staniszewski, author of Believing Is Seeing: Creating the Culture of Art (Penguin USA), The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art (MIT Press), and executive editor of Signs of Change: Social Movement Cultures, 1960–Now (Exit Art and AK Press).