WASTED

The power of advertising lies not in the individuality of each material, but in their common abundance. All urban spaces (and not only those) are accompanied by billboards, apartment blocks are covered with mesh, shops with thousands of packaging and commercial messages, and these aspects were not ignored by artists, but they actually represent their subject of research. Most people ignore commercial images, others feel their effects, or look at them critically. It is certain that they exist, in a certain form, in our consciousness.
Collective consciousness, according to Kay Mathiesen, refers to the existence of common ideas among several individuals which lead to the formation of a common topic which is familiar to all of them, and advertising is such a common topic for us. This is, in fact, the theme of the exhibition of the artist Andrei Gavrilița, and the objects represented in his works are the product catalogs of the Romanian hypermarket chains.

In the multimedia installation Wasted, Andrei Gavrilița explored how his artistic interpretation brings new meanings to advertising materials. His works are critical comments on the consumer society, the compulsive behavior of individuals, the harmful interventions to the environment, artistically expressed from the perspective of the objective observer. Thus, the format which the artist proposes through different specific techniques and through the digital processing of commercial materials, by filming the performative gesture of destroying them and by inviting the public to repeat the same gesture, forms a new discourse which questions waste.

The artist chose a company's marketing magazines for three reasons – an aesthetic one, a conceptual one and an environmental one. The aesthetic motivation is based on the varied colour palette of the catalog pages and the organic visual structures of the pages viewed perpendicularly, whereas the conceptual one – on the poor quality of the magazine as an object (the poor quality of the paper). The ecological implication is valid for all store chains, but one of them presents the greatest impact in this context. The brochures that can be found in Andrei Gavrilița's works are printed, according to BRAT (The Romanian Transmedia Audit Bureau), with a monthly circulation of approximately five million magazines (the average monthly gross circulation of 5,192,377 copies). The catalogs are distributed in mailboxes in Romania without any subscription. This aggressive marketing practice represents in the artist's view an enormous waste of paper, fuel and labor in an era where there are far more effective ways of advertising and where resources should be used rationally. As a result, most magazines are folded, ignored and thrown away – wasted. The exhibition proposed by Andrei Gavrilița encourages a critical spirit in the behavior of the marketing consumer, questions the ephemerality of advertising materials and the implications of decisions regarding choices in the marketing strategies of large companies. At the same time, it brings into discussion what stays and what is wasted in this whole system.