LECTURE 1 // SURVEILLANCE & SOCIETY

Aims:
Understand the principles of the panopticon
Undertsand Foucaults concept of a disciplinary society
Consider the idea that disciplinary society is a way of making idividuals 'productive' and 'useful'
Understand Foucaults idea of techniques of the body and docile bodies

1791 - The panopticon. A prison designed by Jeremy Bentham  which metaphorically represents heirarchy and a symbol for society.

Michel Foucault (1926 - 1984)
Wrote:
            - Madness and Civilisation
            - Discipline & Punishment: The Birth of Prison

It was in the 1600's idea's of what madness was started to change, "The Great Confinement", this was where 'Socially unproductive' people locked away in confinement.
(Mental illness, criminals, single pregnant women etc)

There were soon Houses of correction - to curb unemplyment and idleness - People made to work in an attempt to teach them to be 'normal' amoungst society.

These houses also used to keep the socially unproductive from public view. The houses did not work, Instead residents would make each other 'worse', corrupting each other.

The disciplinary society at the time was not just these correction houses but had Pillary & execution - Deviance is publicly shown and punished.

The birth of the asylum

There was an emergence of forms of knowledge - biology, psychiatry, medicine, etc.
Foucault looks at how these can be forms of knowledge are being used to affect human beings in such a way to alter our consciousness.

Panopticism-
Disciplinary Society
and
Disciplinary Power, working to create a better society.

Discipline is a 'technology. 'How to keep someone under surveillance, how to control his conduct, his behaviour. Improve.


Panoptic prisons, circular design first proposed in 1791. Several still exist today, but not in use. Different to typical prisons at the time, where you would be locked away and forgotten about, like a dungeon, the Panopticon is the opposite.
-Panopticons make sure that people are always being watched, the physchological effect being that the prisoners end up Self Regulating themselves, completely aware of their actions.
It was so effective, guards would no longer even need to look, as the fear that they were being watched was enough.

Panopticons no longer exist as prisons - seen as psychological torture.

Panopticism is still used in contemporary society and seen in many things such as-
Open plan offices, boss can see, makes the employed have to work.
Bars/pubs, keep control.
Google maps (seen as panoptic in theory)

It is how modern society organises its knowledge, its power, its surveillance of bodies and its 'training' of bodies.

It is because of this constant surveillance, it forces us to self regulate behaviour which keeps the world under easy control.

Relationship between power, knowledge and the body:
Panoptic power/ surveillance physically affects the body not just mentally.

'Power relations have an immediate hold upon it [the body]; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremnies, to emit signs' (Foucault 1975)

Disciplinary society provides a "Docile Body" according to Foucault:
- Obedience
- Easy to control
- Self monitoring and self correcting.

It is how you conform to how people want to see you in society, 'how you should be in society'.

You can see the nazis used this idea of the 'perfect body' to make sure docile bodies were well kept.
Healthy, both physically and mentally, people means they can work and remain productive, remove useless people, keep only those to help the world progress and be perfect society.

"Institutional Gaze" - another description for panopticism in action

Key points

-Michel Foucault
-Panopticism
-Techniques of the body
-Docile bodies
-Recognition that institutions 'work' on us in a variety of ways.

LEVEL 05

SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS

The first text I have chosen is a poster for the exhibition ‘Sensation’ held at the Royal Academy of Arts, we can see the image is split by two different photos of similarly shaped objects – a tongue and an electric iron. Appearing to mirror each other, there is a central point in which the two meet. Sat directly below this middle ground is the word ‘Sensation’.

The front cover of the magazine, titled ‘Appetite’ is the second text I have chosen. What we can see is the models face of a woman with her tongue outstretched and very long. The word appetite floats above the tongue, followed by the translation of the the word in both French and Spanish, as they repeat they grow smaller. Adbusters issue number 44, called ‘Appetite’ was published in 2002.

What I immediately recognise as a Sign in the denotative sense is the stuck out tongue featuring in both images, ‘Sensation’ and ‘Appetite’. This signifier for this is infact the photographs of them and they inturn signify on a connative level, touch, taste, speech and are both sensual suggesting sexual representations. The two images with tongues outstretched, one from a side view whereas ‘Sensation’ heads the tongue facing the audience. The sign connotes as a myth to be of sexuality. This is all shown through a Social Code, what we see within culture.

The tongue itself connotes human interaction, part of the body it gives us taste and touch- two of five senses, and when any sense is stimulated gives sensation. The phrase mother tongue holds direct correlation to the tongue as language and therefore  a culutural viewpoint. In Adbusters, it is quite clear the focus of the tongue is to represent through the word itself appetite and seems to be primarily the only reason the tongue has been featured to denotative in this way. Whereas in ‘Sensation’ the direct purpose is touch.  

Contrasting to the two different pieces, each design has an opposing item to the personal perspective  of the tongue. In ‘Sensation’ the electric iron stands opposite the tongue in a similar shaped fashion but the iron connotes feelings of technology, temperature and danger. The iron has been chosen in the design to be directly inhuman, not sensual but  connotes potential danger. The iron as we know exceeds a high temperature and is possible to damage our senses and cause pain. Just as ‘Sensation’ juxtaposes with the personal, we see the same in ‘Appetite’ where there is a denotation of a side profile of a female model mannequin, this connotes the article to be fake and industrialised. This contradicts and detracts from the human side of how the tongue appeared sensual.

The textual codes in which the images can be seen are quite different. In ‘Sensation’ the type that has been used as main focus is simply ‘Sensation’. This is the signifier and signifies to us as th meaning of ‘perception associated with stimulation of a sense organ’, the denotation of the type includes the choice of Sans Serif and the colour of white to represent clean-cut and elegant. At the same time the font chosen is to once again mimic the shape of tongue and iron, and is pointed, this is made clear with the letter A situated in the middle, top of the iron, outlined in red.

In Adbusters, ‘Appetite’ the denotation of the type is handwritten and uses marker scrawled to connote and intended to address the mediocre, but always with intention for the type to connote good design. Black has been chosen for the typeface and it connotes the words to be able to sit strong and overpower what it is on top of.

Harrison, C. and Wood, P. (1997) 'Art in Theory: 1900-1990', Oxford, Blackwell, pp 125-9

At the turn of the 20th century, a new art was being formed to be as eminent as previous traditional art. Focussing on expression, avant-garde artists created authenticity and personal experience to be drawn into their work through a natural force. Through industrialisation and urbanisation, starting in Paris it internationalised throughout Europe. Cubism, Expressionism and Futurism individually showed different aspects of the reception to the modern. The modern consists of Modernisation, the rise and industrialisation of science and technology, Modernity, the social and cultural change of lifstyles, and finally Modernism as the relationship between the experience and development.

One side of the modern age was pessimistic, seeing human life starting to be controlled by the machine through urbanisation and industrialisation. Alternatively exhilaration was taking place, Italian poet Marinetti was creating a new response to the age, by break-through Symbolism, in turn Futurism. These two responses were due to the effects of modernisation, but a third relates, to seek the cause of the modern worlds condition. Social facts and relations of class, but also capitalist modernization. The working class both ‘feared and needed’ ideologies of social classes, as a shared nation created my capitalist production, known as Socialism.

Conflict started to arise within avant-garde art, Cubism in particular was attempted to be prised into two. This itself has created more tension and conflict between view points within art, art in respect to social factors and art as a practice. Artists have both striven to reconcile as well as affirming their argument – whether to translate and embrace the modern or art must therefore transform itself.

POSTMODERNISM

POSTMODERNISM

Modern

Modernity

Modernism -      Experimentation

                                Innovation

                                Individualism

                                Progress

                                Purity

                                Originality

                                Seriousness

Postmodern condition characterised by-

                                Exhaustion

                                Pluralism

                                Disillusionment with the idea of absoloute knowledge

Modernism –

Expression of:

 The modern life/ technology/ new materials/ communication

Post-modernism

Reaction to:

The modern life/ technology/ new materials/ communication

Origins of postmodernism

-          1917 German writer Rudolf Pannwitz

-          1964 Leslie Fielder

1960’s                   Beginning

1970’s                   Established as term

1980’s                   Recognised style

1980’s+90’s         Dominant theoretical discourse

Today                    Tired and Simmering

Postmodernism

-After modernism

-Historical era following the modern

-Contra modernism

-Equivalent to late capitalism

-Artistic and stylistic eclecticism

-Globalisation of cultures

Modernism died on the 15^th July 1972 at 3:32pm

Charles Jencks' joke-date

25^th  November

ADVERTISING, PUBLICITY AND THE MEDIA

Times Square, New York -Advertising is bombarding our contemporary world

1990’s estimate -11thousand new tv advertisements every year x4

-25million print adverts made every year

SLOGANS/ SIGNS/ MESSAGES, advertising is inescapable and invades our subconscious.

Karl Marx (1818 – 1883)

Wrote-

Communist Manifesto – 1848.

Das Kapital – 1867

Marxism/ Marxist

Critique of consumer/ commodity culture-

We construct our identities through the consumer products that inhibit our lives.

You shouldn’t define yourself with what you own, but who you are

Stewart Ewen terms ‘the commodity self’

Symbolic Associations

-Perfume adverts

-Sex Appeal

-Sophistication

Perpetuating false needs

-Aesthetic Innovation

-Planned Obsolescence – products designed to break

-Novelty

Commodity Fetisham-

Advertising conceals the background ‘history’ of products. In other words the content in which a product is produced is kept hidden.

Reification-

Products are given human association

They may be perceived as funny, sexy, romantic, cool

All to create a closer bond with the owner and the product, to become attatched

Advertising works in a fashion to trick people into consumption.

Herbert Marcuse, author of 'One Dimensional Man' (1964)

John  Berger (1972) "Publicity (advertising) persuades us by showing people whose lives have been transformed"

Advertising perpetuates stereotypes.

It seeks to make people unhappy with existing material possessions.

It potentially manipulates people into buying products that they don't really need/want.

It encourages addictive, obsessive and greedy behaviour.

It encourages unnecessary production and consumption therefore depleting the worlds resources and spoiling the environment.

BOOKS TO LOOK AT

Focussing on specific examples, describe the way that Modernist art & design was a response to the forces of modernity


1.

Barnard, M. [2008] ‘Graphic design as communication’. New York, Routledge.

2.

Ilyin, N, [2006] ‘Chasing the perfect: thoughts on modernist design in our time’. New York, Distributed Art Publishers, Inc and Metropolis Magazine.

(Library Reference - 745.4)

3.

Hellige, H. And Klanten R. [2009] ‘Naive: modernism & folklore in contemporary graphic design’. London, Die Gestalten Verlag.

(Library Reference - 741.06)

4.

Pare R. [2007] ‘The lost vanguard: Russian modernist architecture 1922-1932’. New York, Monacelli Press. 

(Library Reference - 720.947)

5.

Meyer, U. [2006], ‘Bauhaus’. Munich, Prestel Verlag.

GRAPHIC DESIGN: MEDIUM FOR THE MASSES

8^th November

GRAPHIC DESIGN: MEDIUM FOR THE MASSES

-Grotto and Bondone, Betrayal C. 1305.

Fine art- but symbolises, shows a graphic story. A media for the age.

1922, William Addison Dwiggins

‘In the matter of layout forget art at the start and use horse sense. The printing designers whole duty is to make a clear presentation of the message- to get the important statements forward and the minor parts placed so that they will never be overlooked. This calls for an exercise of common sense and a faculty of analysis rather than for art.’

Herbert Spencer

‘Mechanized Art’

Max Bill and Josef Muller-Brockman

‘Visual Communication’

Richard Hollis

‘Graphic Design is the business of making or choosing marks and arguing them on a surface to convey an idea’

Paul Rand

‘...graphic design, in the end, deals with the spectator, and because it is the goal of the designer to be persuasive or a least informative, it follows that the designer’s problems are twofold: to anticipate the spectators reactions and to meet his own aesthetic needs’

Josef Muller-Brockman

‘Whatever the information transmitted, it must, ethically and culturally, reflect  its responsibility to society’

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

-Arsistide Bruant, 1893

-La Goulue, 1890’s

For mass production- colour used if chosen but could look like fine art without type.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Peter Behrens, AEG, pre First World War technology

German – showing modernism.

Saville Lumley – ‘What did you do in the Great War?’

-Traditional as opposed to German poster

First World War posters

Britons, 1914

Uncle Sam, 1917

Kandinsky – Abstraction

Lissitsky – Geometric, triangles linked to Kandinsky.

‘Beat the whites with the red wedge’ -Cheap to print

Oskar Schlemmer – Bauhaus Logo, 1922

(German)

Firsts school to each Graphic Design. 1922- when Dwiggins first said the term Graphic Design.

Herbert Bayer, Kandinsky 60^th Birthday, exhibition.

Piet Zwart

Cassanare – French

1927 poster, stared to sign work. Being recognised as well known designers

Ludwig Hohlwein

Reich’s  sports day, 1933                               Traditional

                                                                                Shut down Bauhaus, go back to ‘real art’

Ludwig Vierthaler

Degernate art, 1936

Bauhaus techniques

Off set type, selected by Hitler as degenerate art, abomination of talent

G. Klusik Russian, colour used.

Book of VW adverts.

Paul Rand, 1962 abc                                        197 IBM- CORPORATE

Ken Garland       – Peace Logo

                                -First things first manifesto.

Desingers Republic- Sheffield Designers, take their own ground rules.

Primal Scream, Julian Hoss

2000, emulating Russian Constructivist style.

Oliviero Toscanni

Barbara Kruger – I think therefore I am

                                ---> I shop therefore I am. Selfridges. 

THE DOCUMENT

9^TH December

THE DOCUMENT

-Joseph Nicéphone Nicépce (1826)

                ‘View from a window of La Gras’

-Capture, record the world.

-James Nachtwey

‘I have been a witness, and these pictures are my testimony. The events I have recorded should not be forgotten as well as the historical and must not be repeated.’

Frances Firth (1857)  ‘Entrance to the Great Temple’

William Edward Kilburn ‘The Great Chart Meeting at the Common’ 1848

Neutral -distance from photo- recording historically

                -no one is looking- so it seens he’s not influencing anyone.

                -just historical

But the photographer always has a reason.

The decisive moment

-          Photography achieves its highest distinction – reflecting the universality of the human condition.

Henri Cartier                      Bresson, 1932.

The essence of recording the world in one second in just recording it as a document it is the art- one second later it wouldn’t be there.

Jacob Reiss – American Slunms

(1888)                   -not authentic, the compositions. The people are posing. Would have taken a while to put together, probably paid.

Louis Hine – Sociologist- actually records and analyses

1908- child labourers.

-Left wing- to expose the underclass.

FSA photographers (1935-44)

Farm Security Administration

Dorothea Lange – 1936

                Look of 3/4 distance – thinking ahead. Concerned about the future, as Presidents do.

Archive shows photographers way of thinking – kept by the FSA.

Magnum Group

Founded in 1947 by Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa.

Ethos of documenting the world and its social problems.

Internationalism and mobility – whenever there was something that needed recording, someone could be there.

Robert Capa – ‘Falling Soldier’. Spanish Civil war

Is it fact? But shown to be fact.

Nick Ut (1972) ‘Accidental Napalm Attack’

Exhaustion of the photographers ability to change the world.

Ron McCullin (1968) ‘Shell Shocked Soldier)

Banned from Falklands war, didn’t want to show the reality. Positivity.

Conceptual Art- failed,

Photography used to document art, and art was sold

Now Photography is Art, and conceptual art is no longer relevant.

Bertolt Brecht (1931)

By trying to reconstruct reality is the only time you get anything useful.

Gillian Wearing (1992-3)

‘Signs to say what you want them to say’

Jeremy Deller (2001) The Battle of Orgreave

Complete reconstruction.

Jeff Wall Dead Troops Talk

Construction of reality- with photos merged together.

Lukacs- ‘Theory of the Novel’

Narration vs. Description

MODERNITY & MODERNISM

11^th November

MODERNITY & MODERNISM

Modernist project - 1760 – 1960----------> postmodern world

Modernise- to improve

Forward thinking

(new labour)

(tate modern)

Artists in 1851- called the Moderns, but were not modernists. They had a traditional syle.

Paris 1900, the first modern city. Urbanisation – made it dense, quicker.

L’expositon in 1889, invited the world to see different exhibitions – to show off the new, including Eiffel Tower. All buildings just tryng to be new- in terms of industrial

Enlightenment = period in late 18^th century when scientific/ philosophical thiking made leaps and bounds--------> Secularism - A secular society

Urbanisation, the city is new for their lives, different from rural work to factory work, work in shifts

Communication networks, meet new people. -Railway

No standard world time, shift from the impact of the railway

Shopping, cinema- revelling in the new. Everyone who lives there is living in the new

Enlightenment – embrace new knowledge and science

New thinking and reject old views, including religion

Impressionist painting – ‘Paris on a rainy day’ 1877

For artistic movement, painting this new urbanisation – who love the city. The subject is less about the people , but experience of every day, the modern streets, umbrellas, lampposts , the floor.

Haussmanisation

Paris 1850’s on = new Paris

It was old, medieval- narrow streets and run down housing. Riffled with crime.

Napoleon hired Haussman to rebuild the city, knock it down and start afresh. New large boulevards, long streets - Easy to police, to control. It as a city can now house modernity. Shown in paintings, impressionist.

All people living the sums were kicked out, literally forced into the outskirts of the city.

Painting more subject of the city, not the people in the painting. But only showing them gazing at the city itself.

1893. Scientists worried the new fast life of modernity would send people crazy. They did tests, shows there was a real concern.

Class division of modernity. If rich just stroll around the city, showing your wealth. New Fashion started. People become a communicator, a status symbol- something important.

Lives revolve around work.

Degas 1876, L’absinthe. Drinking in a dive bar, social rejection. Left behind and hates her work. Modern style of painting - like photographs, idea of cropping style

Kaiserpanorma 1883 -Sit in seats, that is this round block, show slides- of the world, even erotica.

Technology becomes fetishised, watch the world rather than actual experience

Lumiere brothers

First films,

Eiffel tower

Trains going past.

Modernism in Design

Anti-historicism – not to look back, have to be new or showing new thinking or styles. –To replace.

-Truth to materials, all modernists like to let the materials of their trade speak for themselves.

Eiffel tower looks completely industrial because it is. They revel in it.

Form follows function. The beauty comes out just at the end of how the product works.

Technology is embraced.

Internationism – modernism a neutral language, everyone understands these new objects- skyscrapers, square chairs. Accessible to all.

Bauhaus cutlery- for follows function, no design. There is just truth to the materials.

Subjective experience- the experience of the individual in the modern world.

New York – Flatiron Building, 1903. Alfred Stieglitz

New York building on the system of grids. Its systematic, there is a science to it.

George Grosz and John Heartfield DADA, bombarded by information. Instructed – media becomes increasingly important.

Gacoma Balla, 1912 ‘speed of a motor car’. Abstract sense of a experience of the modern world.

Futurist Tpography, new systems

Onomatopoeia MARINETTI

‘Ornament is crime’ – Adolf Loos

Would be backward thinking. Simple geometric forms appropriate to materials

Bauhaus building- concrete, modern. Truth to materials. Whole wall is glass. New thinking and functional.

Interdisciplinary, everyone taught everyone. Futura, invented in the Bauhaus. Sans Serif.

New materials- concrete, new technologies of steel, plastics, aluminium, reinforced glass.

Products to be made quicker and need to be cheaper – Marcel Breuer – chair

Skyscrapers- the ultimate of the modernist- form following function – not decorative.

Le Corbusier LC2 chair.

Failed modernist buildings, estates- new slums.

As they ignore the human, the interaction.

Internationalism

A language of design that could be recognised and understood on an international basis. Utopian Aspect- should be international, anyone can use the objects.

Harry Beck, London Underground system 1933. Neutrality to its internationality.

Herbert Bayes – ditch capitals.

Times New Roman, Stanley Morrison 1932. Most definitely not modernist, but historicist. British empire and roman empire. Imagined version of the two. Nationalist.

Fraktur font, medieval and gothic. Reference to German superiority.

Modernity 1750- 1960. A social and cultural experience.

[ART] The Mass Media and Society

2^nd December

[ART] The Mass Media and Society

PRINT- at the age of around 1450 came the Gutenberg press

The Late age of print- term from media theorist Marshall McLuhan. This incorpoartes this expanded media, and concept of literature age which changed to Computer literacy

Government funded <--------Computerate as opposed to illiterate

Computers, electronic books/ e-books to replace the printed book?

Computer media -hyperlinks - hypertext -hypermedia

This new fluidity of using these links amongst virtually everyone.

Definition of mass media

‘modern systems of communication and distribution supplied by relativity. Small groups of cultural producers but directed towards large numbers of consumers.’

Thinking critically about the mass media

Negatives

Superficial, trvial

Viewing figures measures success

Popularity, won’t ever be experimental, or controversial not to upset the viewers- get stuck in a rut.

Audience is dispersed

Audience is disempowered

Thinks voting is empowering but with scams, and by actually voting what can change.

Encourages the status quo- the conservative popular consensus

Encourages apathy- can’t change the world

Power held by the few motivated by prodit of social control (propaganda)

Bland, escapist and standardised

Encourages escapism, seen as a drug which is anaesthetises us

Positives

Not all is low quality

Social problems and injustices are discussed by the media

Creativity can be a feature (Channel 4, trying new things)

Transmission of high art reaches a broader audience

Channel 4, showing turner prize, can watch the proms)

Democratic potential

Artists use of the mass media

-‘Art in the Age of the Mass Media’

John A Walker

Can art be autonomous? (exist on its own in a vacuum, be subject to its own laws)

Should it be? Some people think yes to keep its purity.

Richard Hamilton- Fine artist revelling in mass media- cinema

Lichtenstein- mocking artists elitists brush strokes

Warhol- Ambulance disaster, this apathy which has desentized us- things that could of shocked us.

Pollock standing above society, being elitist

-put on stone roses cover to bring him in to the masses.

Marcus Harvey

1963- mugshot of Mira Hindley

Childrens handprints to make up the face to represent the murders

With the title ‘Mira’, it implies an intimate relationship. But only knows her through the process

‘sick exploitation of dead children’

Not to glamorise her, but about press photographers. All desperate for a shot of her.

Meditation of medium- pixelated, using tones

Joke on newspaper style imagery.

Press attacking Harvey, but what they are guilty for.