Labour of Mourning_Palmers
It was all just a dream / Tout etáit un rêve / Alles war nur ein Traum
3 scissors-cut Palmers lingery advertising posters on graph paper
Each 143 x 220cm, 2020
Photos: Stefan Lux
It was all just a dream, scissors-cut Palmers
lingery advertising posters
on graph paper
143 x 220cm, 2020
Tout etáit un rêve, scissors-cut Palmers
lingery advertising posters
on graph paper
143 x 220cm, 2020
Alles war nur ein Traum, scissors-cut Palmers
lingery advertising posters
on graph paper
143 x 220cm, 2020
The posters show advertisements for the Austrian lingerie company Palmers,
which have been edited and collaged using the silhouette technique.
Since the 1970s, the Austrian lingerie brand Palmers has used erotic imagery
in a way that was unusual for the time. The posters in public spaces showed
young, mostly very slim women in highly sexualised poses. They provoked
feminist resistance but also had a large fan base and became collector's items.
The text 'Es war alles nur ein Traum' ('It was all just a dream') in German,
English and French was first cut out of the original posters and then collaged
onto graph paper. The font was modelled on the typography of 1970s hippie culture.
The cut-out effect makes both the text and the image more difficult to read.
The text and image create an ambivalent 'wobble picture'; depending on what you
focus on, you either see the image or read the message. Similarly to the image,
the message also becomes a 'wobbly picture': whose dreams have been stifled?
Those of the men looking at the advertising posters or the women dreaming of
equality and liberation from the male gaze?