70
Art and Advertising
14. Haim Steinbach, supremely black (1985). Courtesy: Haim Steinbach/ Sonnabend Gallery, New York.
there is a strong sense of fetishisation and an opportunity to take pleasure in ‘objects that are easily accessible and interchangeable’, while also ‘being complicit with the production of desire’.48 Pleasure, desire and fetishism also underpin the work of Fleury, although her works are often more specifically grounded in the sensual or sexualised side of consumerism, as in Bedroom Ensemble (1997), for example, where the erotic associations of the bedroom are heightened by the use of fake fur to cover hard furnishings and the dominance of reds and pinks. Approaches such as these may be said to comply with Richter and his contemporaries’ inquiry into the consumer values of Capitalist Realism. They also, however, fit with Schudson’s understanding of Capitalist Realism as a representational strategy in advertising. Although some are more functional and downmarket than others, the objects that are selected are familiar products that make up the theatre or spectacle of a wide spectrum of contemporary middle-class consumerism. Moreover, in the case of Koons and Steinbach at least, they are presented in a way that calls attention to their typicality, repeated in a regularised format that is resonant of their origins in mass production. In this respect, they become what the modernist architect, painter and designer Le Corbusier identified as objects-types, standardised objects that are also ideal in their flawless replication.49 This brings the discussion into Neoplatonic territory or the world of ideal forms, ground which, I would argue, is also shared by the typifying and idealising impulses that underpin Capitalist Realist advertising.50 The actors, products and scenarios created