Marc Tasman and Luke Farley’s Sporting Goods express a kind of truth‐in‐advertising with respect to gun violence in America. These are fine art pieces made from appropriating images of automatic weaponry from retail sporting goods ads, maniacally scrawled with the rhetoric of traditional sports campaign slogans, “just do it,” and “impossible is nothing.”
They don’t present the viewer with empirical data—the abhorrent statistics of a 365‐day calendar index of mass shootings. But they do connect the dots between the pumped‐up catchphrases from workout and self‐help lifestyle marketing, interleaved in the weekly ad circular with military grade weapons, and criminology factors to be found in the course of investigating the logic of perpetrators of mass‐shootings: rationalization, motivation, and opportunity.
If one needs evidence, the non‐profit organizations, Gun Violence Archive and Mass Shootings provides the “unbiased, raw statistics, all with verified sourcing to inform society of the number of Mass Shootings that occur in the United States each year,” at www.shootingtracker.com.
For a more gut‐based assessment by artists, Farley and Tasman recommend their Sporting Goods pieces.
MARC TASMAN 