Unit II Image Curation Project Overview F22 (1)

How does our society respond to war? Does that shallow bath only prepare us for the next conflict? The Western world’s cultural reliance on materialism often means that we react with our own curation of maximalism or minimalism. If our possessions are our most valuable representation of self, we delude ourselves into believing the reality of their power.

The selected procession of images is an exploration of the first half of the 20^th century. The West’s curation of materials is represented in vapid advertising and elucidative art. The exhibition opens with a Campbell’s Soup advertisement from 1905, a small slice of the decadent materialism that responded to industrialization and flourished in the first decade of the 20^th century. We then journey through the harrowing World Wars, the art that was borne from them, and the advertising that reemerged between them. The exhibition closes with a sculpture from Alberto Giacometti. His stark representation of the post-war human race is a frightening testament to the potential of our species.

Each image is chosen as a window into the contemporary human psyche, a response to the world around us. Along this path, it becomes evident that our responses to warfare are not enough to stop it. This exhibition invites the audience to consider our modern culture of materialist excess. We are alarmingly close to falling back into war, and disastrously unequipped to deal with, and resolve, combat as a society.

 

“Materialism and Militarism: The Toxic Role of Consumer Culture in War”

 

“I want my paintings to be able to defend themselves, to resist the invader, just as though there were razor blades on all surfaces so no one could touch them without cutting his hands.”

Pablo Picasso

 

The threat of global conflict has risen again, with Russia and Ukraine embroiled in a war that is already reverberating across the globe. This modern violence is situated in a modern world of luxury, availability, and frivolous desires. Humanity must once more reconcile our consumer culture, which adores excess, with the desolation that war brings. It is a journey we have repeated for decades. The early 20th century in the West was characterized by a rise in materialism, as industrialization continued to make more and different goods accessible to working- and middle-class people. One of these goods, the personal camera, facilitated the commodification of daily life and prompted the practice of curation of a lifestyle through certain material objects.

By 1904, the personal camera had been refined to emphasize ergonomics and accessibility. Kodak had also released the Kodak Developing Machine, which allowed photographers to develop their own photos without a formal darkroom. The personal camera heightened sentiments of individualism. Consumers could now document their lives in accordance with what they deemed important, inflating their sense of power as they could now curate an aesthetic that would, ideally, imbue their lives with greater symbolic meanings or overtones. Some criticize the barriers of photography, saying that “photographs can’t help but spectacularizing violence, given that a disinterested object, the camera, is interposed between the viewer and the viewed” (Shjeldahl). Combining curation and impersonality creates a dangerous disconnection from the true nature of tragedies. The crux of curation’s appeal focuses on the notion that people can radically transform their lives simply by consuming certain products that are completely inessential to living. Humanity has cycled through maximalism and minimalism in response to global violence. Curation also opens a can of worms, of sorts – if we can curate excess to make a statement, is the curation of minimalism just as significant?

Interacting with materialism is entrenched in our sociocultural agendas, including our relationships to war. The cultural manifestations of the war machine reveal themselves in art and advertising. Art strips down in times of war, exposing the bare bones of the human condition and criticizing the excess we surround ourselves with. The creation of wartime art is inextricable from combat, the total devastation of war, and the irreparable damage that follows victims of war. Advertising flourishes in peacetime, swinging towards the excess that wartime art critiques. Its undead presence after combat reveals our societal apathy towards the anti-war movement.

When we consider the words of Pablo Picasso, which opened this essay, the “invader” is translatable to the incessant culture of curation. Wartime art uses its imagery as “razor blades” to prevent war from being diluted, valorized, or forgotten. When the cuts on our hands bleed, everything we touch becomes soaked in the blood that stems from war – our materialism is connected to the erroneous belief that things can prevent, soothe, or end our suffering. As the newest, strongest technology explodes onto the battlefield, humanity’s desire to curate our own world manifests in our interactions with materialism, but fails to redress the societal ills that culminate in war.

This exhibition aims to explore the failure of this cycle to end or prevent war. Neither maximalism nor minimalism has proven to be an effective measure against the war machine, in part because both are fueled by senses of entitlement. Because our modern culture still prioritizes entitlement, we must examine the issues it generates. On the brink of yet another global conflict, we must discuss our past mistakes – and perhaps we will realize we are closer to World War III than we can stomach. The featured images are organized chronologically to emphasize the downward spiral the cycle of curation in response to warfare has placed humanity on. The naïveté of early-1900s advertising falls to unprecedented pain during World War I. The traumatized, but hopeful, pressure of the anti-war movement that immediately followed was eventually diminished until materialist advertising was once again marketing banal objects towards anyone who could dream of affording them. The onset of World War II caused humanity to again shrink back our excessive tendencies, but further reflection about ending the repetition of incomprehensible violence was largely constrained within contemporary art movements. To this day, the anti-war movement is an unfortunately low priority amongst most people in the global West.

 

This exhibition begins before World War I, but after the turn of the century. The first decade of the 1900s was marked by several developments in advertising. One such development was the creation of the Campbell’s Kids – these jovial cherubs happily took part in preparing and eating Campbell’s soups. They were featured in advertisements that touted Campbell’s soup as a superior choice for mothers to make on behalf of their children. Consumer culture was increasingly marked by the idea that purchasing a certain product imparted moral benefit to the buyer, or signified the buyer’s superior values. American consumers rallied behind materialism’s mystical properties and brought marketed characters to life. The aesthetic of Campbell’s Kids was so captivating that a line of dolls was manufactured as children’s toys.

A photo of two children and their Campbell’s dolls, taken just before the start of World War I, represents the hold of materialism on American culture. Consumers were clearly invited to spend their money on a “sudden whim,” but were immersed in the sentiment that material objects could impart morality, affect social standing, or otherwise fundamentally change one’s life.

When we believe we are in possession of certain powers, we are drawn to the opportunity to use our powers. This is truthful for both consumers and militaries. Scholars have interpreted this desire to prove ourselves as “war’s sick seductiveness” (Shjeldahl). In order to combat this attractiveness during and immediately following World War I, many artists eliminated the meticulous details of their earlier works in favor of stark, emotional compositions that echoed the grief of war.

Paul Nash exchanged his prettily-colored idylls for grim scenes of environmental decay following the outbreak of World War I. In this painting, he forms a criticism of mankind’s work on his environment, illuminating the fruitlessness of accumulating material goods in an effort to improve one’s life. Humanity’s efforts to curate ideals have not translated into a real-world impact – the “new world” that we are making is poisoned and lifeless. Nash’s ironic title is purposefully juxtaposed with the bare trees, the cold, white sun, and the pocked land. After years of maximalism in the West, Nash pulls back the curtain on minimalism. The idea that humanity put this new world together drives home the hopelessness of material curation. Our best efforts fall to ruin.

The dreary sentiment of Nash’s painting reappears in a 1919 lithograph. This colorless piece features Käthe Kollwitz embracing her sons with her eyes closed. The role of the mother has transformed – from a provider of material goods to a protector who tries to salvage life. The objects that populated pre-war living are now far less important. In a war zone, they simply become more rubble. Humanity makes an effort to hold onto more foundational needs by shedding active materialism and curating minimalism. The starkness of the design represents the depth of a war victim’s grief – this piece was not an exaggeration, an effort in surrealism, or a lie. Kollwitz helped her oldest son enlist in the war. He was killed in Belgium at age 18. World War I was a conflict unlike any the world had ever seen before. Kollwitz naively believed that her son would be fighting a glorious war to save his country; instead, she lost a child. As she depicts herself holding him close to his heart, it is hard to see this lithograph as anything other than an exercise in grief, a moment of regret, a mother’s undying guilt. The artists working during the Thirty Year’s War understood, “amid unprecedented violence, that the times had turned the excesses of Baroque into a mode of realism” (Farago). Kollwitz and Nash are two artists who recognized unprecedented violence and used their artistic form to depict the reality of the new world in a way that an impersonal, dim photograph could not.

A few years after the end of World War I, the Western world moves from recollection to reaction. Explicitly anti-war messaging in art and media experienced new growth and publicity.

Otto Dix’s piece reveals the failure of materialism not only during the war, but after it as well. The men who return from the war are battered; their humanity degraded by technology. One man has a metal jaw, one has stumps for legs, one rolls on in a wheelchair. This sad parade passes a shoemaker. What use is a shoemaker to men with no feet? Dix calls out the incompatibility of war and materialism. The materialism-imparted aspects of society, such as a man’s pair of shoes, fail once combat breaks out. The roles that materialism attempts to establish – that of motherhood, and of manhood – are rendered useless by warfare. Enjoy your excess, then, enjoy your things – when everything falls apart, you will never enjoy them again.

This snapshot from an anti-war publication depicted military-themed toys, and was captioned, “Do not give the children such toys.” This message may seem nitpicky or unimportant, but modern research continues to uncover the link between violence in one’s environment and a compacence with global violence. Scholars of the history of children’s culture regard toys “as a barometer of social values” (Goossen). Militaristic excess in toys, and certainly an excess of toys in general, eases children into an acceptance of violence as a way to solve your problems. Fighting opponnents and proving oneself can be accomplished through unrelenting devastation. The anti-war movement was placing an emphasis on exposing propagandist advertising and acknowledging the role of the consumer in the mounting excess of things and ideologies. The work of curation led to an echo chamber of sorts, a crucible in which similar ideas fueled one another’s development. Indeed, “the historian Kenneth D. Brown has studied boys’ play with toy soldiers in Edwardian England, suggesting that on the eve of the Great War, children’s access to such toys helped to stimulate the climate of militarism that young male Britons embraced in 1914” (Goossen). The effect of war toys on nationalism may boil down to a representation of the Country-of-Origin Effect. This theory is a way of using “symbolic capital…the reputational capital of the nation brand” (Rius-Ulldemolins). By branding toys with a nation, and making those toys appealing and socioculturally validating, toymakers are using the Country-of Origin Effect to establish “a hierarchy between countries and brands based on a banal nationalism that is largely invisible and based in preconscious cognitive categories” (Rius-Ulldemolins). Although the logical basis for the COO Effect is not necessarily truthful, the pathological results are profound. The anti-war movement recognized and rejected this manipulation, yet the proposed lack of material goods was a curation in itself. It was another form of interaction with materialism that, alone, could not stop the war machine.

By the second half of the 1930s, the opportunity for societal progress exhibited in anti-war reactions had been squandered. The momentum was lost. Material accrual ramped up again, and useless things like makeup dominated advertising spaces. Consumer culture once again thirsted for objects, symbols to prove their intelligence, beauty, or power.

Of course, rosy fingernails really mean absolutely nothing. Discussing consumer habits (particularly in America) as “important sociological puzzles” reveals the shift towards excess in the early 20^th century as people assessed more material goods to be vital to living. This consumer culture would rapidly integrate into the fabrics of societies around the globe (Navon). The regression to materialism and frivolous advertising was a cycle gaining recognition from the most powerful institutions in the Western world. United States President Herbert Hoover prefaced his 1929 report, Recent Economic Changes in the United States, by discussing “a ‘fundamental development’ (pp. xiv-xv) of the preceding years: ‘[an] increase in the consuming power of the American people demonstrated on a grand scale the expansibility of human wants and desires’” (Navon). The report’s first chapter goes on to posit that the “changing standards” of the American consumer are the key to economic/national progress (Navon). The American public was easily molded by advertising. People increased their consumption as long as it tapped into some desire they wanted fulfilled. If people felt represented in some way by a purchase, they could be counted on to fuel the economy.

The onset of the Second World War followed a predictable cycle, especially in hindsight. Halfway through World War II, art once again reflected the retraction of material excess. Contemporary art movements such as cubism, surrealism, and abstract expressionism were all marked by a lack of explicit luxury.

This work was created by a European artist who fled to the United States during the war, as the United States was somewhat distanced from the war (the nation joined relatively late, and was not facing the same threat to the landscape as the European continent). The state of American culture is represented by the retention of bright primary colors. Already, the minimalism that is expected of post-war art begins to develop. The lack of individualism in the art works, to some extent, to unify the viewers and the world around them. The rallying cries of wartime messaging still provide some hope to the public. Any unity shatters in the full-scale horror of World War II.

This is a representation of humanity after the Second World War. Something terrible has happened. Who could have less than this? Who could be less than this? The upswing in materialism following WWI destroyed the hopes of poignant anti-war efforts to infiltrate mainstream culture. The shrinkage of material excess during WWII was another vapid effort – more of a moral posturing than a means to end war. The curation of materialism and minimalism yield similar disappointing results. We cannot heal our world by acquiring or forgoing ‘things.’ Unfortunately, if we do not correct our culture, this sculpture’s desolate fate awaits us. Such a revelation is at the essence of exhibitory work. We can learn from the world around us, especially from our own artifacts. Scholars say that “one cultural commitment we can make, as the world of yesterday passes into mist, is to rediscover the full human cost of our perpetual battles” (Farago). The contemplation of works like Alberto Giacometti’s gives us an opportunity to remember the footsteps of the generations before us. His three-dimensional compositions inspire an especial self-consciousness.

Exploring the themes of materialism, decay, repetition, and normalized violence widens the limited scope that curation provides. A comprehensive picture of the human race’s complacence in warfare forms. Conquering war will take more than buying or not buying particular products – it will require concentrated, deliberate anti-war efforts that affect the way our society functions as a whole. We must reject the influence of material goods, stop pretending they imbue our lives with a higher meaning or purpose, and become relentless in our efforts to avert the global warfare that has – twice – destroyed countless lives and irreversibly impacted our environment. When we consider the trivial luxuries and excess present in modern advertisements and art, it becomes clear that society is – once again – set up for devastation. If we fail, it is only a matter of time before the Western world is once again plunged into ruin.

 

Bibliography

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