“A car in every driveway and a turkey in every pot” was the promise made by a presidential candidate in the post WWII era. It was a way to promise the “American Dream” to everyone. While automobile prices were tumbling, housing developments were creating affordable homes and the post war economy was booming; this was an easy promise to make.
Over fifty years later, through a hand full of wars and conflicts and a dozen presidents, the idea of the “American Dream” remains constant. The dream of: two cars, a house in the suburbs, the perfect lawn, and 2.5 children. This is still the carrot dangled in front of the American work force.
Television, movies, and magazines have taken the “American Dream” and use it to tantalize us and encourage our desire for the next-newer-bigger-better thing. Movies, television and magazines like “Home Alone”, “Everybody Lovers Raymond” and “Martha Stewart Living” are all constant sources of images and visions of the “American Dream” that are as realistic as Barbie.
How the media affects us, and our vision of the “American Dream” and the level to which we succeed in achieving this goal is what interests me. Media has taken this idea and used it to define commerce, and to create and define status. It is no longer just a car, but the latest bigger, sportier, better handling SUV with 16 cup holders. It is no longer the suburban ranch home, but a two-story mansion with a four-car garage, central air, the Viking stove and the SubZero refrigerator. It is not just 2.5 children, but the excellent student, three sport playing, music studying, uber child.
My work uses many of the media tricks while simultaneously allowing the viewer to step back and see the whole larger and largely false image. Scale simplifies this revelation and satirizes these otherwise banal scenes of daily life. Even when we try to express ourselves individually, media manipulates us. On vacation at the Grand Canyon we take snapshots that fall on a prescribed backdrop used by millions of visitors before. The only variances in all the Grand Canyon photographs are the interchangeable people in the scene.
As American individuals, do we respect the Viking stove because of its superior qualities, or do we desire the Viking stove for the image obtained by owning it? The media provides easy access to almost limitless information, and distorts this line of free choice. We have become slaves to our image, or the images that are repeatedly presented to us as the “American Dream.”