Steve Gianakos Messages to the Public: Say Cheese

Experience a day in the life of Flash, photographer of famous unknowns. Say Cheese by Steve Gianakos (b. 1938, New York City, NY) includes 10 portraits of “visiting un-luminaries” like Cool Dog, Ms. Nosey, and Dead Girl, as they are being photographed by Flash.

Throughout his career, Gianakos has employed a cartoon-derived narrative form in his work, which incorporates popular iconography and pictorial irony in order to disclose the banality of the American dream of easy life and death. While his work has progressed from line drawings to more complex compositions, it has retained some of Pop Art’s depersonalization of line and reductive tendencies.

Through his choice of subject matter and a detached, impersonal style, Gianakos makes even the most charged of human (and art) situations seem banal and ironic. Heart attacks, love, hate, relationships, sex, and even art world expressionistic angst all become subjects for burlesque and targets of ridicule.

Messages to the Public formed a key part of the Public Art Fund’s long-term commitment to media-based artworks. Running from 1982 to 1990, the show featured a series of artists’ projects created specifically for the Spectacolor board at Times Square.

As Russell Miller from Ohio newspaper The Toledo Blade explained in his article on February 19, 1984, “every month, a different artist presents a 30-second animation on the Spectacolor light board—an 800-square-foot array of 8,000 red, white, blue, and green 60-watt bulbs that dominates the Times Square vista. The spot is repeated more than 50 times a day for two weeks, wedged into a 20-minute loop of computer-animated commercials.

“Jane Dickson, a painter, was working for Spectacolor, Inc. as an ad designer and computer programmer when, three and a half years ago, she first thought to use the light board to display noncommercial art.

“‘I picked that title,’ she said of Messages to the Public, ‘because I thought the propaganda potential from this project was terrific.’ The board, she noted, was regularly used for ‘commercial propaganda.’

“Dickson sought help from the Public Art Fund, an organization based here and dedicated to taking art out of the galleries and placing it in the city’s streets and parks.”

Project Director of the Public Art Fund Jessica Cusick explained, “We’re trying to do art that’s timely, has a message, is visually potent and is trying to deal with the fine line dividing fine art and commercial art.”