Rue Pierre Demours (Léger 1913)

Making Rue Pierre Demours (Léger 1913) involved a double act of vandalism. First, anonymous passersby ripped, peeled, and slashed posters glued to an advertising billboard on the Parisian street Rue Pierre Demours. Then, Jacques Villeglé stole the rectangle of torn posters, unaltered from its state as found on the city wall. It hangs in the gallery as evidence of the encroachment of advertising propaganda on public space. The nonsense of the scattered fragments of letters and images conjures the visual noise of ads bombarding urban centers. Yet the very fact that the posters were left to deteriorate and be defaced demonstrates that this type of advertising strategy was on the wane by the late 1950s in France, as in the United States. What was on the advance was even more worrisome to Villeglé—television and the electronic mass media.