THE PERFECT LIFE is a fictive advertising campaign consisting of a series of 12 pictures that were shown at various locations in the public space in the period August 1992 to September 1993: – illuminated montres at Copenhagen Central Station and Aarhus Central Station – streamers on Copenhagen buses – advertisements in the two newspapers Weekendavisen and Politiken. – three different post cards distributed free across the country. The pictures appear at first sight to be lifestyle advertising photographs with recognizable texts and motifs. Closer examination reveals that neither text nor picture reveal who the sender is. Formally they resemble adverts, but in order to achieve a full understanding it is necessary to carry out the kind of close reading usually reserved for works of art.

The statements made by the photographs in THE PERFECT LIFE function as the works message and place a spotlight on the lifesyle offered to us in advertising pictures and thereby on the state of Western culture – now in an easily accessible visual form.

THE PERFECT LIFE is a project that challenges the borderline between experimental visual art and advertising. Just as the visual arts reflect surrounding society and its modes of communication, many of the major advertising campaigns in recent years have clearly borrowed elements from the visual arts. Implicit messages and ambiguous pictures have become an important component of the more avant-garde advertising campaigns for the lifestyle products that advertisers are seeking to give a central place in modern patterns of consumption. Advertisements both reflect and create our dreams, and they therefore play a key role in shaping our lives.

THE PERFECT LIFE raises questions regarding the use of commercial visual effects in public space. The closing of the gap between the visual arts and advertising has created a situation in which pictures (whether they are art or advertising) derive from a symbiotic relationship between the two, as a result of which pictures are exchanged and assume meaning more in terms of who is presenting them and why than in terms of what they represent.