Abstract
I shouldn’t have been surprised. They understood it perfectly: oil paintings are things and they can be bought and sold. But they can also show us the look of everyday stuff and 17th-century Dutch still-life paintings did this particularly well.
Chapter 5 of Ways of Seeing – where this simple but necessary insight came from – had been a revelation to me and I was keen to impart it to my small group of art and design students. They liked looking at pictures but they also liked stuff – thinking about how much it was worth, getting hold of it, selling it on. This was Harlow, of course: a modernist New Town built in the Essex countryside after the war to re-house a swathe of the East End of London. These teenagers – not much younger than myself – carried the trace of their past generations of London dockworkers, market stallholders, wheelers and dealers. Their families were used to seeing goods come and go, to polishing them up for sale or keeping them for a while until demand for them rose and value increased.
This was also 1986. Margaret Thatcher’s government had successfully deregulated the banking and finance system and a new era of trade was upon us all. As in the US, commercial and investment banks were allowed to merge; minimum scales for stock market commissions were abolished and share trading was transferred from the stock exchange floor to the electronic screen. Money was moving fast and loose. This was the year of the financial Big Bang and new, pomo architecture began to spring all along the former East End docklands as London established itself at the centre of global banking. The ancestoral landscape of these students was changing.
Berger told us that oil painting ‘reduced everything to the equality of objects’ and that all reality ‘was measured by its materiality’ (p. 87). Seventeenth-century still-life painting showed the texture, weight and colour of things, intensifying their visual affect. These works drew out the thingness of objects whilst flattening the field in which they existed. As domestic possessions, they were captured and celebrated in their depiction. As commodities, they could be moved through the marketplace as could the paintings themselves. This way of seeing coincides with the Dutch Republic’s rise as a mercantile nation: the Golden Age saw it produce one of the world’s largest merchant navy fleets, the Dutch East India Company – itself the first to sell its stocks – capital accumulation and technological innovations.
In Harlow, 1986, there seemed to be an easy coincidence of what Berger was telling us and the times we were living. The shopping centre had been recently renovated to harbour the new consumer boom. More and more Essex ‘wide boys’ – including one or two of my former students – were taking the train into London to work on the stock exchange.
Ways of Seeing was originally authored just as a key economic policy feature of neoliberalism was put into place that would lead to greater prominence of the global money and commodity markets. In 1971, President Nixon unilaterally pulled the US out of the Bretton Woods agreement by ending the convertibility of dollars to gold. The costs of the Vietnam War and public spending programmes were producing America’s biggest deficit of the 20th century and the ‘Nixon Shock’ performed a fiscal shuffle to stabilize the national economy. In short, this meant that international currency exchange rates could no longer be pegged against reserves and ceased to be subject to internationally agreed controls. Currencies could now be traded more openly and flexibly in the financial markets which, in turn, would determine their value. That John Berger talked about oil paintings as both representations of the power of the marketplace and as commodities in themselves at this moment in economic history is a wondrous coincidence.
But Berger was not alone in considering the relationship of value, aesthetics and things at this time. Victor Papanek’s Design for the Real World (1971) took a down-to-earth approach to the design of ordinary things, revealing how their form and price manipulation were often linked. Papanek stridently recommended a return to understanding real needs and his text went on to be the most successful design book ever published. In 1972, New York’s Museum of Modern Art exhibited ‘Italy: the New Domestic Landscape’. Curated by Emilio Ambasz, and through installations by Superstudio, Archizoom, UFO, Joe Colombo and others, this show proposed a turn in design away from fashioning things to the creation of networks. Through a critique of consumer culture and capitalist exchange, it imagined a future artificial world as a frictionless space, denuded of the objectoidal clutter that consumer culture had produced. Here the designer’s job was in devising infrastructures that supported low environmental impact nomadic living, free of objects but nonetheless affective.
These publications and exhibitions were responding to the environmental and economic crises of their time. By 1970, petroleum production amongst the world’s top producers was peaking. It became increasingly clear that the world’s natural resources were finite when set against economic growth, something that was forcefully argued in the 1972 publication of The Limits to Growth.
By 1986, the oil and labour crises of the 1970s that Berger’s and others’ radical appraisals were steeped in seemed to have receded. Popular capitalism was showing its rewards. However, Berger’s eloquent argument as to how aesthetics functioned in an economic sense was still apposite to the lives of these Essex boys and girls who sat through my classes. They followed the critique and were impressed by it. It resonated with their ideas about exchange and value. They were fascinated by the idea that oil painting could deliver an intensified version of reality, similar to their experience of the new shopping centres or on the pages of style magazines.
We were all enjoying the return of low energy prices, significant wage increases for the lower classes, the arrival of historically cheap consumer goods from the Far East and windfall injections of cash into our bank accounts as public utilities privatized and floated on the stock exchange. And in that year, retail design specialists Fitch reconceived the interiors of banks to look more like slick real estate agents than guardians of our cash. New financial products – endowment mortgages and tracker loans – could now be sold across a coffee table by a nice man in a suit. Thatcher had launched the ‘Design for Profit’ campaign so that retail design, packaging, product styling and corporate identity had found their ascendance. The 1970s had been full of social promise, as design schools had embraced ergonomics, ecology, nomadism and alternative living systems. Contrastingly, design – like the stock exchange or objects in a still-life painting – was now about the possibility of future value, polished up and made to look as if dripping with the promise of use. And this was also the year that the English translations of F.W. Haug’s Critique of Commodity Aesthetics: Appearance, Sexuality, and Advertising in Capitalist Society and Umberto Eco’s Travels in Hyperreality were published, drawing our interest further into the seduction of artifice.
We all thought that Berger had been, back in 1972, right and was still very relevant. But my class also saw that, by the mid-1980s, the world and its art, design and advertising were shifting into another gear. The visual–material world of commodities and their mediation was layering up, becoming ever more sophisticated and increasingly embedded into our everyday functionings.
This was where, for me, a concept of design culture – involving the analysis of the complex relationships of economic practices, consumption (including looking), creative work and the role of artefacts therein – was instigated. Ways of Seeing provided an important starting point for understanding these processes. However, if neoliberalism as we’ve known it for the past 40 years really is in its twilight, his text might also mark an endpoint as we get to grips with new modes of being that were foreshadowed by his contemporaries.