Joanne Tod's Directional Carpet

Media has always been present in our lives and most milenials have grown up with their parents teaching them not to always believe in what they see in an advertisement. Advances in technology in the 80s created a huge impact on this and the TV industry as a whole. With cable TV beginning to contribute to the internalization of media and advertisements, this allowed cable networks with direct access to people in their homes creating whole new form of culture in the way we live. Because of this, consumerism became a significant part of our culture, a culture we’re too familiar with today. Directional Carpet, a piece by Joanne Tod created in 18__ expresses the changes that were occurring during this period with its relation to advertising, the

It was a period where everything began to revolve for the purposed of creating profit. Through this and the increase of advertising that came along with this fabricated a significant social and cultural change. People desires for commodities increased causing their goals and aspirations to be subjected to the cycle of working to attain these commodities. This consumer capitalism shapes and produces its subjects, controlling their whole psychological life. This becomes the main definer of our cultural habits and basis to our social order and happiness. Among people and many artist during this time came a new way of thinking about the world and with this was the birth of representation art. Moving from a period where realism was a popular form of expression, representational and abstracted art was highly criticized. It was a method of creating a copy of reality in a imaginastic and abstracted way. By deconstructing what it real this new form of art posed a a new and contemporary way of thinking about the world. In Directional Carpet, Tod does exactly this Through questioning the direction the culture was moving towards, she focuses on the representation by the observations of the paternalistic consumer ideologies and routines of their everyday hustle of the ‘work hard, play hard’

Art is culture-bound and is often determined though its period and its current beliefs, theories and interests. For example, through our current age of ‘less is more’, minimalism has become popular in all forms of design and art from open concept spaces, to simple design in fashion, graphics and product. During the period of when Joanne created Directional Carpet, the exploration and movement from realism and conceptualism was a response to the political, economic and societal circumstances that were occurring during this time. Abstraction became a popular way of expressing this during this decade by modifying and culling existing situations, advertisements, pieces of art and media. Tod was aware of this method and its rhetheoical power and impact it made. By representing images in a virtuoso style using high illusionism and brilliant hues, Tod incorporated strategic texts filled with clue above a subject matter to remind her viewers of the artifice of the image. This was extremely innovating during the period as it was very different from the more trendier and ascetic qualities of realism from its period