Artist “Swimming Horse” Tackles What’s Really Going On

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- "Swimming Horse," the nom de subversion of the founder and leader of the art group Hocus-Focus, has had his hoofs in a lot of different projects, but they all have a few things in common.

One, in keeping with Michel Foucault's directive, "Disturb the Spectacle," is "image disobedience." The other is "cultural interrogation," an insistent examination of what's really going on, or more pointedly, what's really going on that we don't want to know.

Swimming Horse will present a lecture-performance on his work and that of Hocus Focus at 10 a.m. Sept. 23 in the Screening Room in the Center for the Arts on the University at Buffalo North (Amherst) Campus. This event is associated with the "Persuasions" exhibition, which will open Sept. 17 in the UB Art Gallery. It is free of charge and open to the public.

Another aspect of the exhibition will take place at 3 p.m. Sept. 24 when Hocus Focus will launch "The Rafts of the Archetypes" onto Lake LaSalle on the UB North Campus. The event is one more step in the group's energetic and creative public battle against Apple computers' "think different" ad campaign.

Over the past several years, Apple purchased commercial rights to the images of a number of major cultural figures, among them Picasso, Einstein, Mohammed Ali, John Lennon, Jackie Robinson, the Dalai Lama, Samuel Beckett, Amelia Earhardt, Maria Callas, Martha Graham and Mahatma Gandhi.

The company then launched an advertising campaign that, in the words of Swimming Horse, "uses these figures -- transcendent individuals who represent significant values embedded in our culture and in our unconscious minds -- as pitchmen for Apple computers."

In protest, Hocus Focus has added famously its own commentary to Apple's massive billboards in Los Angeles, the Silicon Valley, San Francisco, New York and other sites. The Dalai Lama's "adjusted" billboard, for instance, reads "Marketing is Censorship." A billboard featuring Miles Davis points out that "No machine is a moody genius." Samuel Beckett, whose stern visage looks up under the slogan, "think different," is now "Waiting for different.

The group also has hung 10 giant "altered" ads from the roof of the corporate headquarters of TBWA Chiat/Day, Apple's advertising agency, and others from the roof of a Wall Street bank, where they hung for three days before corporate executives ordered them removed. In fact, Swimming Horse uses a pseudonym in part to avoid being sued by Viacom, which owns most of the billboards in the United States, including those he has altered.

Swimming Horse and his comrades Climber and Hawkeye, are dead serious about their mission. Swimming Horse defines it as "an attempt to focus public attention on the corporate subversion of the gift exchange, which is what these archetypal figures were engaged in before Apple bought up their faces.

"These individuals made a gift of their inspiration and creativity, both of which have value in the range of deep prosperity," he says. "Deep prosperity isn't a prosperity marked by income, real estate, new appliances and more computer equipment.

"It is an aspect of our lives defined by shared values; ideas and actions that promote growth, spiritual energy, deep human intimacy. They are human values like loving and giving, mystery, hope, the embodiments of dreams. They represent a rich treasure of beliefs and sensibilities that we carry in common."

Swimming Horse insists that Apple's campaign represents an attempt to assimilate these values as a their product's 'brand," and could not have been accomplished until we already had accepted the idea, promoted by corporations, that anything is a commodity.

"It took greed, trust lawyers, estate representatives, branding agents, you name it, to sell off pieces of Albert Einstein and Bob Dylan. Some of them have even sold themselves. These people represent some of the best in all of us," he continues. "Once they were set apart from the quotidian, but today who and what they were and are is now 'exchanged' at a level that is not transcendent at all."

To produce "The Rafts of the Archetypes," Swimming Horse and his crew first removed Apple ads featuring three famous figures from magazines. They removed the Apple logo from the prints and enlarged them onto 10-foot, arch-shaped lengths of 60 percent wind-bearing mesh. These will be mounted as sails on each raft.

"The launching represents in, metaphorical terms, the return of these iconic figures to their rightful place in our collective mind and in our unconscious," says Swimming Horse.

Melding with water, air and natural surroundings, they are liminal figures once more -- beyond the pale, beyond our grasp. Sailing the border regions, they represent their own creativity without reference to corporate logos and commercial slogans.