Imagining our environment: Hiroshi Sugimoto
Research for my PhD took us last weekend to the Museum of Modern Art in Salzburg and an exhibition of the work of photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto. The Japanese-born New Yorker Sugimoto has been exhibiting since 1987 and is recognised as one of the outstanding contemporary photographers. Contemporary, but using almost archaic photographic equipment and practices, such as an old 19th century large-image camera, and an army of assistants touching up the black and white prints by hand.
It is this approach, along with the subject matter, that now draws me to Sugimoto as a case study of how we ‘talk’ about - in visual and verbal languages - and therefore represent the environment.
Why the environment?
Many of Sugimoto’s images are of, or relate to, how we experience the environment, both built and ‘natural’. Some of his most arresting images are of architecture in slow exposure (blurred) focus, teasing out how great design is strengthened by reconnecting with its more impressionistic, ‘yet to be realised’ image in the architect’s mind: what the design must have first ‘felt’ like. This urge to reconnect what we experience is the present with what we have experienced in the past, either internal or external to ourselves, is central to Sugimoto’s work, and is the kernal for perhaps his most emotive and powerful work, his Seascapes. Read more
Artemis ads hunting me down
That’s Artemis Investment Management, not the Greek goddess of of the hunt.
I’m thinking through the choice of cultural objects as case studies for my PhD that explores how we represent, talk about and communicate the environment. I’ll be looking at media, long form journalism, literature, poetry, and now, I think, a key contender has to be advertising. In particular, the long-term campaign and advertisements of Artemis Investment Management: The Profit Hunter.
The Profit Hunter Campaign
I’ve been incensed by these ads for a while. They’re all over the UK travel network (tube, train, bus) and, here’s a great example, on a London taxi.
The Artemis brand is moulded around this conceit of profit hunting as a mimetic analogy with profit as an animal in the natural wild, tracked down, hunted, by its investment specialists. Its advertising campaign uses a pastiche of 1930s Great Adventurers in hunting gear.
It’s not a metaphor, stupid
What astounds me is that the people behind this campaign, both client and ad agency, present the goal of capital profit gain at the metaphorical expense of the environment, when they must, surely, understand that what they are communicating is no longer, and never has been, simply a metaphor?
The animal itself, the profit, is a clever illustration that marries together a line graph profit and what looks like an extinct, or soon to be extinct, primitive bird that can’t outrun the smart investor/hunter.
I’ve been a reader of semiotics and deconstruction for some time now, and will develop the argument in detail, but in essence it’s not difficult to anticipate my position. The signification of these advertisements contributes to the cultural meaning-making that the environment is a resource for human endeavour, from which great profits will be plundered. Fair play to Artemis, they’re not exactly subtle about the evisceration of our planet by capitalism’s global financial racket, are they? In fact, any typical semiological analysis would be redundant faster than you could say “What’s that you smell boy, a profit up ahead?” But how can we address these ads as cultural objects? Read more
Baudrillard Pt2 for tonight
Got into a quick chat with a colleague after work tonight about the early days of the internet, and how people we now see as pioneers were at one point viewed as ‘computer criminals’. Somehow we got onto new media and capitalism and I talked about ‘capitalism as a code we can’t break’, thinking myself very original. Of course, Baudrillard was there first:
A revolution has occured in the capitalist world without our Marxists having wanted to comprehend it… This mutation concerns the passage from the form-commodity to the form-sign, from the abstraction of the exchange of material products under the law of general equivalance to the operationalization of all exchanges under the law of the code.
Quoted in ‘Baudrillard: A Critical Reader’, by Douglas Kellner, p.168. Tonight was obviously meant for a reflection on the hyperreal.
Baudrillard’s Postmodern Media Theory
Back in 2005 I wrote an article on hyperreality and arrogance for a website set up by some Masters-level peers at Oxford, where I used an old colleague’s arrogance as the example to explain Baudrillard’s theory of hyperreality, something I taught during Magazine Theory classes at Middlesex Uni. I was reminded of it tonight while reading Anais Nin’s diaries from 1935, when she meets her brother Thorvald off the boat at New York harbour. She interprets his hard outer shell as a cover for his sensitivity at meeting for the first time in ten years, but then says ‘but i always interpret people’s shells in this way, and many times I have been proved wrong’. She has got it wrong, she later admits. And I guess I’ve been wrong about this, too (whenever I say ‘I guess’ I know that I’m making it easier for myself to admit something), so I need to apologise to that old friend. Luckily he’s on Facebook. It is often the easiest way to interpret those who come across as offhand or not in tune with your own outward facing identity. I got it wrong over the last couple of days with a close friend, who I felt wasn’t giving me enough support over an issue. Sometimes picking up media theory and using it to analyse interpersonal relationships can be a tricky business. Read more
