“What if our world was crowded with art instead of advertisements?” Marine Tanguy on switching off and the ‘soft’ power of visuals
Written by Divya Venkataraman
The founder of MTArt Agency, the first global agency dedicated to representing visual artists, and the author of The Visual Detox, sits down with The Everywoman.
It’s a heatwave in London and Marine Tanguy is sitting cross legged on the couch in her Marylebone townhouse, feet bare. Her hair is loose, and she is haloed by art. Many are goddess-like figures, or women imagined in ethereal forms. Most are by artists she represents through MTArt Agency, the global agency for visual artists she founded to put artists on the same footing as the way agents represent athletes or actors. But the eclecticism of the space is in the punctuation of the art with real life. Huddled on the coffee table, on the mantlepiece are photographs in frames, of herself, her partner and their children (Tanguy is pregnant, when we speak, with her third), and of career moments. “I mean, you know how I feel, that images are so important,” she says. “I love printing pictures. I find that life goes so fast, everyday is a kind of wonderful chaos… and I want to capture and remember everything. I need to have that around me.”
In Marine’s world, printing out photos and slotting them behind the glass of a frame is an act of care; a decision to turn a fleeting moment into something physical (outside of the clutter of fifteen versions of the same thing in our camera rolls). The “wonderful chaos” she describes has been speeding up since she was 21: it was at that age that she was appointed gallery manager to The Outsiders Gallery, under art titan Steve Lazarides (Banksy’s former agent) and opened up her own gallery in L.A. at age 23. In 2015, she founded MTArt. That’s also aside, of course, from having two children and building a life and home in London (she was raised in the Ile de Ré, a small island off the West Coast of France).
She recently commemorated her growing bump in plaster, another way to give a manifestation to a moment in time. “I think for me it’s always the act of recording. It’s less about whether or not this is pretty. I don’t want to miss how I was feeling. I don’t want to miss all the emotions I had, or the thoughts I had.”
For Marine, art is identity-constituting, and this philosophy extends to her life’s work. In her book The Visual Detox, she filters through reams of research to argue that the visual noise around us, of billboards, ads, screens, branding has long-lasting impacts on our sense of identity and community, and even our health. According to Marine’s work, regular exposure to chaotic and heavily commercial visual environments can increase anxiety, reduce cognitive clarity, and even start to chip away at our sense of who we are, and what we value. She differentiates commercial imagery to civic signage, or public art, which often reflect a shared identity or history. Advertising, on the other hand, fuels the fire of discontent and dissatisfaction. Its purpose is not to ground us, but to keep us reaching. It’s an incursion into our minds, she believes — and one that we didn’t consent to.
“We haven’t agreed to being polluted, one way or the other,” she says. “We’re all paying for it — emotionally, psychologically, and as taxpayers. The cost of visual pollution is a collective one.” However, she is quick to point out that her work isn’t anti-commercial, or anti-trade. “It’s about proportion,” she clarifies. “What we’re saying is that 99% of what we see in public is commercial. And that’s the problem.”
“We’re all paying for it — emotionally, psychologically, and as taxpayers. The cost of visual pollution is a collective one.”
The right to have a visual environment that isn’t “polluted”, in her terms, is inextricable from questions of equity, class, and visibility. “We know that the higher your social class, the more you interact with arts and culture,” she says. “And the worst visual pollution is in low-income areas, targeting the people who are often least aware they can even protest it. It’s the same with air pollution.”
That’s why, she believes, it’s our prerogative to consider visual space in the same vein as any other civic infrastructure, insisting on our shared standards, and carving out room for everyone. “There's a [growing] awareness on what are our shared resources. One out of two people live in cities. Our shared resources — our air, streets, public parks — shouldn’t just be commercial territory. That includes what we see.”
Already, the first legislative moves against visual pollution have passed in some cities. It’s a hopeful sign for Marine, who believes balance is the answer. “Imagine commuting through a city and seeing a thoughtful mix: commercial ads, yes, but also poetry, education, history, public art. That’s the ideal scenario.”
“Imagine commuting through a city and seeing a thoughtful mix: commercial ads, yes, but also poetry, education, history, public art. That’s the ideal scenario.”
Her latest project reflects this ethos: this September, MTArt will launch what she describes as the first public art installation about postpartum. Not pregnancy, which she believes has been “over-glorified,” but the raw, messy, rarely seen experience that comes after. The artist commissioned for the project, Rayvenn D’Clark, is a Black woman who hasn’t experienced motherhood herself. That, too, is deliberate. “She’s being asked to depict something she hasn’t lived,” Marine says. “And that’s the point. We need to break the expectation that only women, or only mothers, should tell these stories. Or that we should only be seen in one way.”
“If we rely only on commercial narratives, we’re always chasing what sells. But art should show the fullness of our lives. And currently, 97% of public sculptures still depict men. Most of the commercial imagery we see still objectifies women. That’s not balance. That’s not democracy.” For a generation raised on algorithms and with a relative level of comfort when it comes to the ad-saturated landscape of our cities, Marine’s vision feels radical. But, when the parallels are considered, it also feels achievable. “I always say, look, we’ve done it before. We’ve accepted that clean air is a right,” she says. “We should be able to advocate for ‘clean’ visual environments, too. Spaces that show us who we are, who you and I and the people we know, really are. Not just what someone wants us to buy.”