T1 Ways of Seeing Ep.4 John Berger
How does John Berger believe publicity will change our lives?
- We are surrounded by images of an alternative way of life
- Briefly take them
- Ineffective in that: even if we then forget these images, they stick with us
- Stimulate imagination either by memory or anticipation
- Words and Images calls out to us
- "We take them away in our minds. We see them in our dreams"
- Consumer society (baseline)
- We change ourselves by buying something that will make us richer, will make us perceive ourselves as ‘more’ somehow (even if we are poorer after having spent the money needed to consume it, buy it)
- State of being envied (glamour) is key of advertising and publicity
- Publicity is the process that manufactures glamour
- Works through the eye and mirrors
It changes our lives because it convinces us we need something in order to reach out and set a path of a certain lifestyle (even if it is just illusory)
Relationship between oil painting and colour photography
- Photography sets resemble places where once people portrayed idealised goddesses and nymphs
- Now the model has taken the place of the goddess
- Glamour is a new idea
- It didn’t exist for those who painted oil canvas
- Ideas of grace, elegance and authority amounted to something similar but at the same - time completely different than now
- When position in society was determined by birth almost in all cases, personal envy was a less familiar emotion
- Without social envy, glamour cannot exist
- Becomes more and more common emotion as time progresses
- Status is theoretically open to everyone but really enjoyed only by a few
- Oil painting and publicity have many things in common (only think of them differently: one is fine art and the other commerce)
- Models pose to match those of paintings
- At times they impersonate paintings and works of art
- Publicity echoes devices used in oil painting (atmosphere, settings, pleasures, objects, poses, symbols of prestige, gestures, signs of love)
- Art references are not direct
- Medium especially developed to render texture and tangibility of things, so does colour photography today
- Same references, celebrate same qualities in things
- All of them related to ‘you are what you have’
- Oil painting consolidated own sense of value (what someone already had) what was shown corresponded to his way of life
- Publicity appeals to an idea of life we aspire to but have not yet achieve
- If we buy what it is offering, our life will be different from what it is
- Relationships more radiant, home more beautiful etc.
- Oil paintings surrounded by gold frames that symbolise wealth of owner and around it
- What surrounds publicity images is us as we are
- Papered with dreams but exclude us as we now are
- Being paper are hidden our needs
- In many respects the images continue that tradition
Publicity works on our anxieties in two specific ways:
- About money
- Urging each of us to scramble competitively to gain more
- Making money itself appear as magical
- Promotes illusion that a man’s ability to consume is directly related to his sexual virility
- Those who lack glamour become faceless, almost invisible
- Publicity promises and threatens playing upon fear of not being desirable, unenviable
- Suggesting that you are inadequate but consoles you with a promise fo a dreams
- Behind which there are the working lives of the people it addresses
- The more monotonous the present is, the more alluring publicity and its imaginary future is
- Publicity works on the imagination
- But also pretends to explain the world around us in its own way
- Philosophical system
- Things it sells are neutral so they have to be made exotic and put in a context in which they are arresting but not close enough to be threatening
- Unreality and reality face each other
- Contrast becomes incomprehensible
- Propose and attitude
- Highest value is individual ego
- E.g. hard facts alongside adverts of an ideal life
- Inadequacy of appeals when confronted
- Between each page there is a disconnection, incoherence
- Mad culture
- Reality itself is unrecognisable
- Juxtaposition
- Any historic events is on the far side of the publicity dream
- What happens out there happens to strangers, what happens in the dream is meant to happen to us
- No communication between two worlds
- Eventually publicity images are bleak though
Three dreams that publicity offers us:
- Imagery is public but dreams are very intimate
- 1. The dream of later tonight
- You are part of the ‘good life’ they smile at
- Everyone is surrounded by what brings pleasure but it is you who will bring the greatest pleasure of all
- Next morning you will still feel the same about it
- 2. The skin dream
- Surface you can touch
- 3. The dream of a far away place
- Travel elsewhere
- Distances without horizons
- Full of unknown passions
- Innocence and purity
