The Consumerist Manifesto - Martin Davidson

RESEARCH ON THE CONSUMERIST MANIFESTO FOR 2000 WORD TEXT

Art and culture both express the extent to which the relationship between people, artefacts and society is born not of utility and rationality, but from a principle of creativity in excess of physical need. This is an anthropological view of life, for which cuture is the broad category, art and the apogee, and rubbish, the symptomatic anti-type. Culture is whatever it is that at any particuar time, most motivates us. It used to be religion; or going to war. Now, it's consumerism. Advertising is both a window on, and a product of, this new drive. 120

I think this is a very interesting comparison. It is in both of these things that we transcend our basic needs and start to answer questions of taste, style and induviduality, all of which obviously contribute to consumerism further as I have already read. However the act of creating is different to consuming. Through creating we distill a piece of our identity into physical form, be it painting, object, performance or poem, this act directly subverts the capitalist ideal, which insists contrastingly that we must use physical objects already created to define our identity for us.

'One does not need a doctorate in social anthropology to see that the purposeful transmutation of nature's primeval state occupies all people in all cultures and all societies in all stages of development. Everybody everywhere wants to modify, transform, embellish, enrich and reconstruct the world around him... Civilisation is man's attempt to transcend his ancient animality; this includes both art and advertising.' (John Treasure, Advertising Association paper, 1974) 120

I also liked this quote, I feel it relates to my art as I attempt to do the opposite, and resensitize people to their natural origins and attempt to rekindle a sense of responsibility and citizenship for the planet. Through our desire to distance ourselves from the wilderness we have instead blinded ourselves to our environment and our place within it. There were also similarities between these ideas and the ideas described by Mark Fisher in the 'centerlessness' of Capitalist culture, where no one person can be held responsible as the wrongfulness is disseminated in many many smaller corruptions, into every corner of the system and those who abide by it. As everybody wants to evolve their environment and better their circumstances, we constantly strive to fulfil new needs and wants, yet in doing so are all contributing further to the bad state of affairs.

 Social meaning of objects and the pleasure those meanings give are the two most obvious indications that consumerism is a deeply cultural thing, that is, a phenomenon that resists reductive description. Advertising is more than a marketing strategy. 121

This quote further reinforces the idea I discussed above that advertising and consumerism are so deeply ingrained in our day to day lives and culture that they have actually become one and the same.

 Marketing has found powerful new allies in these -ologies, and their preoccupation with the formal man-madeness of things. In this case, it is the mundane business of consuming which is shown to be the inner dynamic of cultural genesis - because we don't buy things, we buy values, brands not products. Branding taken to it's logical conclusion then, becomes the largest mythology of all - that our products are our culture, because it is in consumerism that we most express our sense of social belonging:

so that the answer to why people personify brands is the same as the answer to why people need symbols to help in structuring social relationships, domestic behaviour and other aspects of life. And if advertising contributes to the meaning of inanimate goods, then the study of these values and meanings is of prime importance. Page 123

I think these section gets to the root of how absorbed consumerism has become into human life. Where we once identified ourselves with other aims and features, now it is products not only express ourselves but also align ourselves in terms of wider factions in society. It also suggests effective parallels between our reliance on advertising and our reliance on symbols in other areas of life. Through these social cues we judge and react to our environment, and typically this was healthy however now that our social cues are built on manufactured concepts, this leaves us extremely open to manipulation, which sums up the current state of affairs.

The difference between a product and a brand has become a paradigm for this new way of understanding culture - and use of culture as a way of understanding people through their artefacts. Culture is the society we build with our brands.
Advertising becomes the expression of our consumerist being-in-the-world, by parodying the idea that our world is the world we choose to describe. It is created out of mythologies, forms and symbols into a type of communication that, in holistic microcosm, reflects how culture itself grows and evolves: '[this] communication metaphor [is] described as embodied in myth and ritual (that we call holistic and cultural), so that communication is seen as a process through which culture is created, modified and transformed. 124

 This quote summarises everything I have discussed in the previous quotes into a concise way. Our reliance

Our products have a communicative, performative role to play, and advertising highlights this. In other words advertising is commited to the fact that things embody ways of seeing, that they harbour within them a sense of the world outside, and that furthermore, it is precisely here, in their formal in-excess of physical need where (according to the new paradigm) they most express their cultural humanness. It used to be the work of art that stood of the archetype for this, now it is the commodity, the brand. And standing opposed to the work of art has traditionally been junk, or rubbish. Between them they gave us confidence in the validity of our value-judgements, a secure frame for discriminating the worthwhile from the tawdry. But anthropology - and it's more combative cousin, cultural politics, of which more later - hae in their 'ways of seeing' dismantled and unnerved this confidence. They both study how it is people are linked to society through their artefacts, but at the expense of aesthetic discriminations. And in so doing, have contrived to invert the metaphorical basis of art and the literal basis of rubbish. In other words, a culture's art is merely an indication of social values; and its material rubbish revealing evidence of relative world-views. The difference between them is thoroughness; the anthropologist learns about culture through ascertaining the patterns between people and their artefactst, and leaves it at that, while the student of cultural politics is on the hunt for evidence of hegemony and mystification. 125

 What sort of cultural object is a brand? Culturally speaking it is a hybrid between art and junk. In other words it is a disposable object laced with associations and powers normally accredited to works of art (i.e. endowed with enduring qualities and expressive of the world around it). A brand, then, is an object nestling rather uneasily between opposing extremes. 125

Hamilton wrote down [...] the desiderata of Pop Art in 1957, ... Pop, he declared, should be:

Popular (designed for a mass audience)
Transient (short-term solution)
Expendable (easily forgotten)
Low-cost
Mass-produced
Young (aimed at youth)
Witty
Sexy
Gimmicky
Glamorous
Big Business

Such art could not be made by the people; it was not folk art. It came out of... 'a new landscape of secondary, filtered material'... It was done to the people. It grew by analogy to what it admired, advertising and the media through which advertisement were replicated. 128 (Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New, BBC Books, London, 1980, p. 344.)

 I found this listing of Pop Art's qualities quite interesting, as I had never heard it's qualities distilled down to induvidual features before. The fact that pop had evolved from the modern state of mind, into something which was in equal parts witty, critical, expendable and saleable was quite an interesting critique of the times. It definitely makes me certain that I need to include atleast one example of pop art in my essay, to properly represent the way advertising has affected art.

I also find it interesting how certain words in the list could also be used to describe street art. Gimmicky, gimmick meaning; "a trick or device intended to attract attention, publicity, or trade" which, of course successful street art must do to attract the attention of people passing by; big business, because street art has proven time and time again to be hugely profitable, and has developed into a big money industry with many sales, international festivals and exposure happening constantly. Because of this it also fulfils the popular definition. Transient and expendable; lasting for a short time and able to be abandoned or destroyed. Of course this is a constant in street art, as at any point a piece could be buffed away by the council or covered by a fellow artist, therefore it is a given that eventually even the greatest works will be destroyed. My particular brand of art, wheatpasting, is also mass produced, as I hit many areas with the same image. I find it interesting to consider these parallels, as before I had not noticed many similarites between my own work and pop art.

Art, in other words, should be more like advertising than advertising itself, cannibalising advertising's own 'added values' and using them not to promote an absent product, but as consumer products themselves. But in a sense all that this anarchic levelling of high and mass culture did, apart from perhaps loosening the traditional 'apartheid' separating the enduring from the ephemeral, was make a fetish out of the museum in whose context (and only in whose context) this narcissistic alchemy could take place. But it did nevertheless succeed in making us reassess the significance of junk, endowing it with new formal status. 128

 This following paragraph also interested me. Firstly, because it suggests 'cannibalising advertising's own "added values" and using them' which is something I have intended to do with my screenprinted posters. However it goes on to suggest this should occur for introspective means, whereas my work seeks an outward reasoning, to counter an external force; our impact on the planet. Also the way it mentions fetishising the museum, as it is this environment which allows art to transmutate between from its own ground, into the realms of advertising and 'junk'.

The elision between cultural and commercial values... marks the transformation of culture into style. The manipulation of style turns thoughts, feeling and associations into commodities for circulation by the information industry. Control of a product's appearance and associational context - eroticism, class status, power - is a means of controlling the thoughts and feelings of their purchasers. The critic Rosemary Betterton points out that the possibilities held out to women by the fashion industry, of changing identity by adopting a new style, in fact channel and limit their potential identities, 'by substituting a series of products for a truly different self-image. Women are sold their own images in the form of commodites. ' ... Creativity is no longer what we make, but what we buy. (Robert Hewison, Future Shock: A New Art for the Nineties, Methuen, London, 1990, p. 59) 192

The final line of this quote held a lot of relevance to me; 'creativity is no longer what we make, but what we buy'. I think we have been sold the idea that it is our external appearence which denotes our qualities to such an extent that we can now be convincingly 'creative' without actually creating anything new at all. But as our societal model encourages us to be 'co-creators', suggested in 'Promotional Cultures' by Aern Davis, the mere act of rearranging already created products is enough to be accepted as creative. The wider implications of this are that less and less actual innovation is required to be considered innovative, just as standardisation of production sells us items which are more structurally similar and simplistic, yet dresses them up with brighter patterns and colour schemes to make us believe each product is more induvidual.