In amongst all the sexual and intoxicating shenanigans that typify the fictional advertising agency, Stirling, Price & Cooper in the long running TV series, Mad Men, the gnomic utterances of the valetudinarian Bert Cooper stand out.
With his neat goatee, ever-burgeoning art collection, and insistence that colleagues and clients alike be unshod before entering his sanctum, Cooper is a sort of Daoist of late capitalism - he might well endorse Ambrose Bierce’s definition of commerce as, ‘A kind of transaction in which A plunders from B the goods of C, and for compensation B picks the pocket of D of money belonging to E’, but he wouldn’t necessarily perceive this as a negative. Rather, Cooper is a man who knows that late capitalism is a river that you can never step into twice, so evanescent are its ebbs of deficit and profit flows.
This perception is one shared by the ideologues of capitalism and its revolutionary nemesis alike; in my experience - which is full and rich as Nescafe - the most sophisticated advertising creatives bear an uncanny resemblance to high-order Marxist theoreticians: both groups see through the veil of commoditisation to the world of pure forms beyond; the only real distinction is that ad men tend to regard those forms as descriptive of human avarice, and Marxists as the beautiful involutions of the loving human heart.
At any rate, this is why a casual reader/viewer who stumbled upon these garish spreads, super-saturated with cynicism, might be forgiven for imagining she was witnessing an exercise in detournement - the bowdlerisation of media slogans and advertising imagery developed by the French Situationists, a Marxist groupuscule which played a key role in the quasi-revolution of 1968.
For myself, I delight in the tightrope - smeared with superglue and dusted with glassy fragments - that the Mother creatives have walked; to one side lies the abyss of fervid faith in The Product, to the other mere callow sophistication, but what the Mother folk understand is that the very essence of their metier is to suspend disbelief for only so long as it takes to get to the other side; the true ad man is a transient being, incarnated first in one brief, then reincarnated in the next - no mere earthly reward, whether financial or status, can ever truly recompense them, for what they seek is a form of enlightenment that transcends all reification.
I understand all this, I think, because I come from something of an advertising dynasty myself: my uncle, Robert Ross, was Creative Director at Leo Burnett in New York in the 1960s (so one of the original mad men), and originated the Pilsbury Dough Boy among many other celebrated campaigns; my brother, at one time ran one of the most successful below-the-line agencies in London.
I well remember his offices, which, in the mid-1980s were located hard by the Old Street roundabout in a cavernous former-warehouse. Their roughly-adzed, varnished wooden floor and exposed utility ducts were, I now realise, the shapelessness of things to come.
When I came to write my own story, Prometheus, about an ad man who always wins the pitch - but at the cost of having his liver eaten daily by a Griffon vulture - I based the agency, Titan, in part on what friends in the industry had told me about Mother.
So now I’m in the enviable position of being able to repay the satirical compliment: by depicting their advertising as wasteful, cynical, bogus and fuelled by narcissism and narcotics, the Motherlings are doing something far more insidious than truth telling;
in common with some of the most nefarious evil-doers of our era - political, heirs-presumptive - they are hiding in plain view.
It was said of the writer Henri de Maupassant that he ate his dinner every evening in the restaurant atop the Eiffel Tower; when asked why he did so he replied: ‘Because it’s the only place in Paris where you can’t see the Eiffel Tower.’
Mother’s soothsaying is of this order - a shtick only possible for those on the inside looking out. And although it would require a Mobius strip to be torn in the very fabric of reality, I still like to picture the Motherlings, De Maupassant and Bert Cooper all chowing down together as the Belle Époque and our own tawdry one giddily revolves around their wise and wizened heads.
WWS, Mobile, Alabama, 2014
Read the intro to Mother's shots 151 Takeover, released next week, here.
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