JINKOOK & WONHAO stan Seventeen. Bts. I ramble in my tags a lot. I’m 21. Pan. Female.Come yell at me about your feels! (Sideblog. Main is light-estheim)
okay, this post sent me INSANE. Not because of the cursed nonsense its saying, although that was pretty funny, but because of that image. I have seen it before, floating around the supposedly humorous corners of the internet, always captioned with something or rather.
But where did it come from? What was it?
So begins the bizarre rabbit hole that was finding the actual source for this fucking picture.
This image has been used in memes and gags since about 2011, but its source seemed to link back to a series of 2009 articles on Erwin Wurm’s Fat Cars series of sculptures.
Erwin Wurm is an austrian artist and sculptor who made a series of life sized “fat” cars from 2001 to 2005, along with a whole lot of other sculptures including a pickle, a van bent in half, a ute parked half up a wall, a truck who’s tray is bent up onto the wall, and a fat house. Check out his art gallery site, it’s pretty cool:
There’s just one problem. This particular image is NOT one of his sculptures.
The internet insisted that it was. But it wasn’t. Apart from appearing to be a photo-manipulation rather than a sculpture, it also didn’t fit the art style of the rest of his series. My search continued.
I was following dead link after dead link through the wayback machine, but everything led back to 2009 articles on Erwin Wurm’s sculptures, but the images themselves were from even older blogspot posts with no attribution.
I kept digging.
Pinterest, of all things, was to be my saviour.
The same image, again, but this time, something was different. You could see more of the driveway, more of the hedge, the image itself zoomed out. The meme image was a cropped version!
There was a caption: “Think about what it consumes before buying”, and a url too small to read. The pinterest post itself linked, again, to an article on Erwin Wurm.
I would not let this be a dead end, I had come too far. I opened up the page source on pinterest and grabbed the image url, and let google image search run a reverse image search on this new, uncropped image.
At last, like an angel rising from the ashes of a thousand ancient links to Erwin Wurm, was my saviour. The beginning. The source:
An ad campaign on energy efficiency by the Belgian Government from 2007.
Print Car for Belgian Government by Leo Burnett Brussels
It is part of a series of four ads, including a washing machine:
Magazine Washing machine for Belgian Government by Leo Burnett Brussels
a fridge:
Magazine Fridge for Belgian Government by Leo Burnett Brussels
and a radiator:
Magazine Washing Machine for Belgian Government by Leo Burnett Brussels
Don’t ask me why it thinks that radiator is another washing machine. I assume its a translator error.
Thank you for following me on this insane journey. The name Erwin Wurm will haunt my dreams.
I truly never thought I would see fatphobia in ads for appliances where the appliances themselves were fat. But I guess I shouldn’t really be all that surprised.
(ﾉ^ヮ^)ﾉ*:・ﾟ✧Happy Birthday to the boy with a smile brighter than the sun, the moon and all the stars. Wonwoo who’s more beautiful than the moonlight, happy birthday
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