Archive for: Visual Art as a Mass Communication Medium

At the beginning of the 18th century the public sphere in Europe was a broader communication model different from the old representational public. It implied a more active audience participation. Tendencies such as “image building” of a ruler in public and “improving reputation” demanded well thought out propaganda campaign with clear goals, targeting specific audience and accomplished through specific media. The Habsburgs insisted on the universal dimension of combat between Christianity and Islam during Turkish wars. The Emperor Charles VI considered himself the protector of the Christian world and counted on general approval in that battle. To ensure support of European powers and states within the Empire for the new war against Turkey (1716-1718), the Viennese court employed all its propaganda capacities that included the use of printed visual media. Considerable production of maps, siege views, panoramas and engravings with battle scenes were part of the propaganda campaign. War events significant for the Emperor and the state politics were commemorated by various visual products meant to influence public through “media strategy”. The intention of the highest court officials was to “win” wider European public and public within the Empire for the Emperor’s crusade mission with prolific printed production and its distribution. Mass production of graphic sheets was relatively fast and cheap, its distribution was easy and that made it suitable for informing and propaganda. The media campaign targeted the public in the Empire, especially German principalities that had not provided Habsburgs’ military forces with arms. The campaign appealed to the German solidarity and dynastic patriotism. Propaganda that targeted wider European public was aimed to win universal approval and support. The Viennese court campaign was well received and became a practice of many European courts to commemorate their participation in “glorious victory of Christianity”, and independent publishers saw profit in their publishing.

After the Second World War and in the period of reconstruction, requests for artists and their art, as well as views of the Communist Party on the issue, were very present in the Yugoslav press. Art, as a property of the people had to be adapted to the demands of time and should reflect, explain and document reality, in the form accessible and easily comprehensible to the ordinary man. Only in this way art was considered to be a fairly and influencable actor in the raise of socio-political and ideological consciousness. Press as a mass medium, which includes narrative and visual content, was an ideal carrier of ideological messages. Artists and cultural workers and their art were presented in the press in accordance with the cultural policy of the period of reconstruction and tasks the First Five-Year Plan set to the artists. Tours of Russian artists followed the publication of photo-reportage in the press, and cover pages often presented paintings of the Soviet artists representing the themes from the October Revolution. In the early postwar years, showing of the local actors was conditioned by their film and educational role according to the current cultural policy. The conflict with the Cominform declined the Soviet cultural influence, which then dominated. Motives for presentation of the artist as deserving individuals were their successes abroad and matching of their artistic choices in a climate of socialist realism. The panoramic photo of the Louvre on the cover page of Duga magazine in 1950th symbolically marks the beginning of cultural and artistic cooperation with the countries of the Western Europe and the U.S., announcing a new cultural policy. 

The text refers to specific forms of representation of visuality and visual works of art in new social media, or more precisely on Facebook, currently the most popular net of the type. Refering to characteristic examples from the actual media practice, the author demonstrates two types of conditionality connected to “transfer” of visual information from the classic media and institutional environment of museum and gallery exhibitions to the domains of syber space and social net communications.The first conditionality is defined by the technology as such, i.e. the structure and specific forms of communication or the expected users behaviour on the Facebook; the other is marked by digital and multimedia approach to aesthetics and, more often than not, by the aesthetic dilettantism of users’ expression on the net. In this sense, the technology eases and democratizes the aesthetic expression of the Facebook users, but in the same time threats to impoverish the aesthetic dimension of transfer and exchange of visual messages in this media, and reduce it to “obsolescence” of expression, kitsch and trash aesthetics, with final result in general degradation of aesthetic taste visible on the Facebook social network.

Shaping the national identity in the 19th century led to the constitution of the national pantheon where, in addition to the heroes of the past, were also the heroes of a new era. In the formation, upkeep and expansion of the cult of national heroes, the roles of art and visual culture were very important. The heroes were made known all over the nation through artistic representation. Mass audience did not require a representative art and therefore the possibility of serial and industrial duplication of images of national heroes and important historical events were of particular importance in the construction of a private national identity. As the hero of letters, who distinguished himself in fighting for the Serbian language, Branko Radičević became one of the most celebrated Serbian poets. As Radičević died in Vienna, an essential moment in the process of heroization of this poet was the transfer of his body to Stražilovo, where he was buried and his tomb became a place of memory and pilgrimage. A big public ceremony was organized during the transfer of the body and the funeral, accompanied by the inevitable artistic production of his portraits in various media, intended for mass audiences. Among these works, the greatest popularity came with the painting Branko and the Fairy from 1878, which became a patriotic icon and part of the decoration of many houses in Vojvodina. Although it does not belong to representative art in which one can simultaneously monitor the cultivation of the cult of national heroes, Branko and the Fairy and its replicas and variants present in the mass media were part of the art and visual culture of the 19th century nationalism. They were in the service of building national consciousness and creation of national entity that was organized and shaped by a set of images of the glorious past, heroes, people and territory. Visually shaped messages of such works reach general public in order to permanently store the hero in the collective consciousness.

Semiotic theory explores the generation, transfer, operation and transformation of visual signs in social life, thus pointing at the cultural and contextual and not the „natural“ origin of interpretation. The semiotic reading does not seek to produce a separate interpretation of a work of art in the first place, but to explore the conditions of such an interpretation according to the referential field of cultural construction of the work itself. Instead of the esentially erroneous traditional understanding of the image as a perception record, semiotics suggests to treat the image as a visual sign system that is present in the inter-individual territory of recognition, and the meaning of which may not be separated from the context it belongs to at a specific moment. Recognition of the context as the text is one of significant contributions of the semiotic theory, the very context being produced as the text that consists of signs requiring interpretation. The visual text, as an open space for transfiguration, reinterpretation, production and exchange of meaning between the visual object and the observer, is produced only in the process of communication and cannot be conceived beyond the grand whole that we call culture. The nature of the visual text is to look at its recepient and to produce its meanings only in an encounter with him. In the process of reading no reader will appreciate a separate work, but will interprete that work on the basis of an entire social context in force in a given historic moment. By locating the visual phenomena in the realm of textuality, the semiotic theory showed that each observation understood as reading is in fact writing down a new text in the process of interpretation.