Bruno Bischofberger's Non-Sequiter Approach to Marketing

Ever since I became acquainted with Artforum magazine, I've wondered why the Galerie Bruno Bischofberger always shows these bucolic photographs of alpine scenery, which includes cows, nuns, villagers in funny hats and farmers milking their cows on the back cover of the magazine. The photographs are rural and extremely odd.  What are these cows doing on the back cover of Artforum and why is he doing this?

Bischofberger knows what he is doing. A Swiss art dealer and gallerist, he started with collecting Appenzeller Folk Art, wrote a PhD thesis on it, and has been a major figure in the international art market for decades. He was the first to bring Pop-art to Europe; first to purchase whole series of Warhols and Lichtensteins at once, and first to deal in art on a large scale. He initiated the collaboration between Warhol, Clemente and Basquiat, and the list of his accomplishments goes on.

Back to these advertisements. There has to be some logic there somewhere.  Wikipedia defines Visual Marketing as "the relationship between an object, the context it is placed in and its relevant image".  The Bischofberger ads show strange, non sequiter (Latin for "it does not follow") images to engage and create mystery. The Surrealists did likewise. These images of Switzerland conform to our stereotype of that country, but there is a collision of meaning here: what is being shown in the advertisement (cows) and what is actually being represented (internationally renowned art) are two different things. This technique piques our interest and obscures the meaning at the same time, thereby rendering abstract what is in fact an extremely precise system of marketing of value and information exchange, of public relations, art and commerce.

The take home message for me is if its good enough for Bischofberger, maybe I should try a bit of non-sequiter in my own art, by engaging the viewer more in questioning what I paint and draw, tantalize them, keep them ever so slightly guessing, “Why did she do that?”