I-610 North

This silkscreen depicts a billboard advertisement for Air Jamaica overlooking a busy interstate with the Houston skyline on the horizon. Created in 1980 by Tom Blackwell, this photorealistic silkscreen suggests the omnipotence of the male viewer. The location of this image – I-610 North – is a Texan interstate that loops around the city of Houston. Despite using a title that focuses on the facts of its location, what is most dominant in this scene is the image of a tanned, reclining model on an enormous billboard looming above the passing traffic.

Tom Blackwell, born in Chicago in 1938, began his career as an abstract painter. Finding abstraction limiting, he shifted towards a pop-influenced style and then, finally, to a photorealist approach. [1] With work in well- known collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Museum, he is best known for his depictions of motorcycles and storefronts. [2] Along with more prominent photorealists such as Richard Estes and Ralph Goings, Blackwell’s works often use reflective surfaces to highlight the uncertain borders between image and reality.

By presenting the viewer with a printed billboard within his own print, Blackwell achieves another kind of visual ambiguity. Air Jamaica was founded in 1963 and had 16 destinations by 1980, one of which was Houston, Texas. [3] Close inspection reveals that this specific advertisement depicts a woman lying on a beach with the tagline “Our vacation packages will win you over.” The billboard, steeped in gender stereotypes, uses the sexualized woman in the advertisement to “win you over.” Its image literally hovers over the drivers on the interstate, repeatedly impressing the objectification of its subject on to the stream of passing consumers.

Blackwell’s photorealistic images of urban life have often included depictions of the female form. In his print 451, also in the University Art Gallery collection, he explores the relationship between real women and the idealized female mannequin. [4] This work uses re ective surfaces to play with the uncertain reality of represented bodies, whether shop mannequins or reflected pedestrians. [5] In I-610 North, Blackwell again lays bare the surreal properties of a large floating woman over the interstate. The water in which she is relaxing almost seems as if it is an extension of the Houston clear blue sky, like a landscape within a landscape. The billboard uses a bikini-clad woman relaxing on a beach to advertise the Caribbean holiday destination, rather than the flight itself, and serves as an example of how women’s bodies are presented as objects for consumption.

Historically, advertisements have been understood to “portray an ideal conception of the two sexes and their structural relationship to each other,” showing men and women adhering to the gender norms of their time. [6] When feminist theorist Laura Mulvey explains that the function of the male gaze is to “project its phantasy onto the female figure which is styled accordingly,” her framework helps interpret the imagery of I-610 North. [7] For example, the woman in the billboard is shown in a subordinate position, lying passively on the beach, her face turned away from the viewer. She is being presented as an object specifically meant for the viewing pleasure of the male viewer. Like so many other advertisements of its time, this print also follows the pattern of the female nudes throughout art history depicted as an object for the male gaze.

In response to the gendered images that Blackwell further helped disseminate, feminist artists of the 1980s used the billboard form to critique the very ideas that advertising enforced. Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger, for instance, employed bold slogans to replace the powerless bodies seen in advertising. To similar ends, the Guerilla Girls used the billboard to confront inequality in the art world. [8] Their most well-known message, “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?,” is accompanied by an image of a nude reclining woman, not dissimilar from the model in I-610 North. Both draw upon the tradition of the female nude throughout art history, gesturing to such canonical artworks as Titian’s Venus of Urbino and Manet’s Olympia. Where feminist artists critique the sexism of art and advertising alike, Blackwell’s seemingly uncritical reproduction of the billboard repeats such stereotypes.

[1] Tom Blackwell and Linda Chase, Tom Blackwell: Artist-in-Residence Selected Works 1970–1980, Hanover: Hopkins Center, Dartmouth College, 1980.
[2] Louis K. Meisel and Helene Zucker Seeman, eds. Photo-Realism, New York: Abradale Press, 1989, p.83.
[3] Björn Larsson and David Zekria, “Air Jamaica 1980 Timetable,” Airline Timetable Images. http://www.timetableimages.com/ ttimages/jm.htm. Accessed April 10, 2018.
[4] Meisel and Zucker, Photo-Realism, p.85
[5] Linda Chase, Tom Blackwell: The Complete Paintings, 1970–2014, New York: The Artist Book Foundation, 2016, p.23
[6] Erving Goffman, Gender Advertisements, New York: Harper & Row, 1979, p.84.
[7] Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Visual and Other Pleasures, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 1989, pp.14–26.
[8] Laura Steward Heon, Peggy Diggs, Joseph Thomas, eds., Billboard Art on the Road: A Retrospective Exhibition of Artists’ Billboards of the Last 30 Years, North Adams, Mass.: Cambridge, Mass: Mass MoCA Publications and the MIT Press, 1999.

Author: Annie Abernathy - Spring 2018